Review: "People Without Power" a.k.a. "The People, No" by Thomas Frank

There are three essential traits I look for in a political book: the author must choose interesting subject matter; they must present a coherent theory of events; and they must write clearly and succinctly in support of their narrative. Thomas Frank’s new book, “People Without Power: The War on Populism and the Fight for Democracy” - or as it is known in the US market, “The People, No” - is a hit on all three fronts. Rarely do I encounter progressive tracts that I enjoy reading as much as I enjoyed this book.

I have a semi-regular series on my blog I call “Myths of the Old Order”, where I take aim at one of the cherished myths of liberal ideology and examine how liberalism’s failures have exposed the tenuous underpinnings of the old order. Frank - previously famous for his cutting and insightful work in “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” and “Listen, Liberal!” - performs a similar task in taking aim at the myth of “populism”: “Populism is the word that comes to the lips of the respected and the highly educated when they see the global order going haywire . . .the political face-off of today . . .pits the center against the periphery, the competent insider against the disgruntled”. We might also call this out as radical centrism, or horseshoe theory-as-praxis. Frank calls it the ‘Democracy Scare’. In the writings of think tanks and government agencies, in the books of centre-rightists like William Galston or centre-leftists like Yasha Mounk, democracy is supposedly under threat from authoritarians and extremists on both the left and right that share more in common with one another than either does with the sensible centre.

In response, Frank has written a history of ‘actual existing populism’ to show that left-wing populism is nothing like the centrist caricature. But he has also written a matching history of ‘anti-populism’ - how the rhetoric and tropes of the ‘Democracy Scare’ have evolved, and remained the same, throughout recent history and how the liberal sneering of today against the likes of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn is in truth little removed from the reactionary ravings against FDR’s New Deal. Frank is able to tackle this daunting task because he has the most sophisticated analysis of what elites mean when they say ‘democracy’ that I’ve encountered outside a graduate-level classroom. Elites don’t really believe in democracy as it is popularly or even philosophically understood: the notion that individuals should have a say in decisions that might affect their rights and legitimate interests. Instead, elites operate under a consensus model of governance or what Galston (and Frank) call ‘pluralistic democracy’ - in which elites representing diverse constituencies meet in closed rooms to hash out solutions that serve the interests of the communities those elites supposedly represent. Barack Obama, famously, holds to this vision of liberal undemocracy, as does the NGO industrial complex. But what it amounts to, whether in the 19th century or the 21st, is a vision of society in which the majority of the population is deemed unfit to govern themselves.

Agrarian Populism

The core of Frank’s thesis is an in-depth account of the US People’s Party of the late 19th-century - the movement that was the first to explicitly call itself populist and the only indigenous American political movement to be praised by the first general of European communists. Frank demonstrates how - contrary to the assessment of later historiography - the first populists represented a multi-racial, working-class movement overwhelmingly focused on collective solutions to questions of economic justice. The People’s Party prospered when it teamed up with local political institutions (Democrats in most states, Republicans in others) to overthrow the status quo, but failed when it threw its weight behind the national Democratic Party (in the personage if Williams Jenning Bryant) and when it was culturally wedged on the grounds of race and culture. Frank notes that most of the macroeconomic principles the centre now takes for granted - the welfare state, fiat currency and free trade - were originally the ‘fringe’ ideas of radicals, and that there was nothing reactionary or anti-scientific about the first Populists - quite the contrary. Populists believed then and believe now - contrary to the self-congratulatory smugness of elites - that ordinary men and women are more than capable of governing themselves.

Frank matches his history of the People’s Party with an equally incisive account of the first wave of anti-populism, told largely through the story of the US presidential election of 1892 and the machinations of one Mark Hanna, campaign manager of the genteel Gilded Age president William McKinley. Hanna, the political hero of modern day conservative propagandists such as Karl Rove, invented the myth of populism out of almost whole cloth: that populists were ‘lunatics in rag’, that they posed a threat to democracy and rule of law, motivated by demogoguery and jealousy of the wealthy rather than a sober assessment of their real material conditions and those responsible for it. Frank points out that almost all of the tropes of modern anti-populism can be traced back in their genealogy to the mad hysteria of Gilded Age elites - with one notable exception. And that is that early anti-populisms did not accuse their opponents of racism (and anti-semitism), misogyny and xenophobia (if only because the establishment of the time was thoroughly soaking in such beliefs itself). That element, so common in anti-populist rhetoric now, came much later.

Rise of the PMC

The remainder of Frank’s history examines the recurrence of these patterns from the 1890s in three subsequent historical eras: the triumph of social-democratic populism in FDR’s New Deal, largely told through the story of FDR’s triumph in the presidential election of 1936; the ‘New Left’ era of the 1960s and the catastrophic failure of George McGovern, and finally the conservative counter-revolution represented by Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump. The key question Frank asks us to consider is how the populist triumphs of the New Deal gave way to an era in which anti-populism came to be seen as a not a fringe reactionary opinion, but a mainstream centre-left belief, and how latter-day conservatives came to portray themselves as populist insurgents against a corrupt liberal establishment.

This, sadly, is well-trodden ground for the contemporary left. The New Deal era was so successful that it produced a generation of administrators who believed that political problems were essentially technical in nature; a protest culture among students which came to see academic credentials and schooling (something inaccessible to their own parents) as granting moral virtue; and a union movement that was focused above all on defending the gains of the 1930s, even if it meant selling out their radical comrades at every opportunity. The self-satisfied Keynesian consensus of the 1950s and 60s was the first time that elites could claim to have ended history - and the first time that their abject failure to deal with overlapping economic and social crisis led to their ideology being completely discredited. The 2010s are in some respect, merely a neoliberal echo of this earlier failure; Trumpism a farcical repetition of the Reagan Revolution.

As early as the 1950s, the imagined opponent of this liberal consensus was the conservative firebrands exemplified by McCarthy and Goldwater. Their crusades against the liberal establishment failed, only to be picked up in later generations. But how the centre-left translated anti-populism into opposition to their own left flank [which had defended them again McCarthy and Goldwater] is the central mystery of the twentieth century: how did well-meaning technocrats “retrieve pieces of long-forgotten conservative stereotype, fit them out with fashionable academic jargon of their era, and launch the result as a shiny new diagnosis handed down by the well-adjusted administrative mind”? Franks blames particular academics and writers - Daniel Bell, Richard Hofstader, Michael Rogin, Edward Shils and Seymour Lipset - but these men were representative of a particular materialist transformation: the rising influence of the professional-managerial class. These elitist academics from Ivy League institutions only had influence because a generation of social movement and union leaders had come to believe in the moral value of their credentials - the same credentials that gave them, as children of the working class, access to the halls of economic and political power.

The Disciplining of the Working Class

Thomas Frank has once again written an important book, that leftists everywhere should read in order or understand the moment in which they live. The increasing movement towards managerial liberalism on the liberal lift - the idea that the working class (who are inherently racist, misogynist and xenophobia) need to be educated and disciplined by their social betters - is a political disaster in waiting. Social democratic parties that have embraced the sensibility of liberal undemocracy have seen their vote whither and their popular support die. On the contrary, right-wing populists have once again discovered that elites will tolerate proletarian manners so long as the give capital complete freedom of action. This is a uniquely dangerous moment for liberalism - it has rarely been as a weak as it is right now. Socialists are once again called upon to defend the liberal order against itself. Because liberals no longer have the good sense to recognise that popular democracy provides the legitimacy that keeps their social order running.

Myths of the Old Order: The Tyranny of the Majority

Chapter VI of my book, "Politics for the New Dark Age: Staying Positive Amidst Disorder" puts forward the leftist case for the central and radical importance of democracy. Democratic socialism is neither a reforming variety of socialist, nor merely a particularly progressive-minded liberal, but rather an ideology that treats both democracy and socialism as equally serious modes of analysis. "Liberal democracy", I write, "is the best set of institutions we've yet created to facilitate cooperative solutions to social problems. . . . If they didn't exist, the left would have to invent them." Liberal democracy represents a stable, if far from ideal, quasi-equilibrium which has proven successful in delivering growth, basic egalitarianism and military security in a diverse range of cultural and strategic environments. 

Yet the association between the philosophy of liberalism and democracy, as a form and structure of government, is neither unproblematic nor automatic. Democracies pre-date liberalism by several millennia, and have employed diverse legitimising belief systems (c.f. for example, the Islamic Republic of Iran). Totalitarian autocracies, including Nazi Germany, the USSR and North Korea, hold elections and elect parliaments. And even if we enforce a stricter definition of democracy focusing on the peaceful transfer of power between competing elites, then the slave-holding and imperialist European limited monarchies of the 18th and 19th century would qualify as democracies despite restricting the franchise to a tiny fraction of property-holding males. The People's Republic of China is no democracy, but upholds the rule of law and market institutions with a fervour that would make American conservatives blush. 

As the 19th century oligarchies (and the hypocrisy of the liberal philosophers who supported them) demonstrate, there is an underlying tension between liberals and the expectations of universal, participatory democracy. I've written before about elites' irrational fear of 'populism', unleashed by the rising tide of right-wring authoritarians and the return of socialists who seek to roll fascism back. Across the world, self-identified liberal centrists are more sceptical of democracy, less likely to support elections, and more supportive of authoritarianism than either the self-identified left or right. Centrist politics - often self-avowedly liberal - has an underlying distrust of public opinion in a way that is only being amplified by the ever-increasing popularity of behavioural economics, evolutionary psychology and social media. This blog is about the myth(s) which undergirds that scepticism: the 'tyranny of the majority'. Why do liberals mistrust democracy, what does it lead to, and should we be concerned?

Two origins, two myths

There are essentially two variants of the 'tyranny of the majority' myth (one individualist, one group-centred or utilitarian), which serve different purposes in the overall canon of liberalism depending on the outlook of the audience. Each represents a point where liberals limit their enthusiasm for popular, nationalist or revolutionary projects: yes, emancipation from feudalism and empire is great, but popular democracy cannot be allowed to go too far, else we end up in Revolutionary France or the Soviet Union. The mythological tyranny of the majority *is* for all intents and purposes the Terror: the repression of individuals and minorities by 'democratic' governments that embody the will of the people. This potential for abuse existed in classical liberalism because neither Hobbes' Leviathan state, Locke's universal 'human nature', nor Rousseau's 'general will' conceived of the diversity of the modern democratic electorate. 

For John Stuart Mill, the tyranny of the majority was "tendency of society to impose  . . . its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own." In order to limit this threat, it is necessary that the only "the only purpose for which [democratic] power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others." Mill, in other words, was advancing a social theory of individual rights (rather than a natural or divine law theory like many of his predecessors): liberal rights are necessary when individuals contract with a democratic government because that government poses a threat to their interests which does not exist in a state of nature. In order to protect the freedom of individuals, the entire liberal democratic apparatus of the separations of powers, the independence of the judiciary and human rights necessarily follows.

Chapter VII of my book essentially endorses Mills' individualist viewpoint. But there is a second (chronologically older) take on the tyranny of majority, which is more utilitarian and consequentialist in character. In Federalist No. 10, future US President James Madison wrote about the origins of inequality as arising "[f]rom the  . . .different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, [such that] the possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results." Since inequality is the "most common and durable" driver of class conflict, a democratic majority might give in to the temptations of a "a rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project." Liberal institutions, therefore, are a necessary check on democracy in order to preserve the 'exacting impartiality' required of proper economic governance, the priorities of which are [obviously?] the solvency of the national debt and the protection of private wealth. 

The pro-market consequentialism inherent in Madison's argument - that the contentious nature of democracy impairs good governance and that liberal institutions are a necessary check on the passion and self-interest of the mob - is found in almost all utilitarian and capitalist screeds against democracy. It underlies the appeal of authoritarian governance to centrist politicians and big business alike. Democracy, in this view, is unnecessary in a liberal society so long as it's well governed and protects property rights. It is this Madisonian fear of majority rule, particularly influential among the American right, that lies at the faultline between liberals and democracy. It is why independent, technocratic institutions - at both the national and international level - are seen as an ideal bulwark in defense of the status quo order. 

Illiberal Democracies and Liberal Undemocracies

The partnership between liberalism and democracy, therefore, is dynamic and potentially vulnerable to changing environmental circumstances. Under pressure from anaemic global growth and authoritarian challenger states, we start to see slippage, the tectonic plates on which our governments rest sliding past one another. Whereas we’re used to thinking of liberal democracy as a unitary concept, now there are mutations: illiberal democracy and liberal undemocracy (which we'll just call liberal oligarchy for the sake of clarity). As the inheritor of the Madisonian argument, neoliberalism served as the handmaiden of the current crisis of democracy: self-avowedly apolitical and technocratic, liberal oligarchy aimed to place the levers of economic and social power beyond the reach of the mob. Expanding the reach and privilege of property rights was seen as the keystone unlocking economic growth. 

The neoliberals were wrong. Not only were they incapable of sustaining economic growth for more than a few years at a time without recurrent financial crises, but their indifference towards the interests of those in the electorate who missed out on the boom times bred a crisis of legitimacy in government itself that we are now seeing play out all over the capitalist world. In response, social movements on both the right and left are arguing that a more democracy would be a necessary corrective: more accountability, more responsiveness and a greater willingness to get our hands dirty to bring the market back into line. These movements differ *vastly* and significantly in what democracy means to them: for the left, democracy means fulfilment of the liberal promise of the equal dignity of all humanity, for the right, more democracy means satisfaction of conservative and nationalist grievances. But both are committed to the position that liberal oligarchy is neither desirable nor sustainable. 

Left-wing populism demonstrates that there is no necessary conflict between liberalism and more democracy - depending, of course, on what variant of liberalism we want. But Cas Mudde, amongst others, has made the argument that more populism means a society *must* move in an illiberal direction. But this oppositional understanding is only true if either a) liberalism means, in the strictly Madisonian sense, capitalist economic governance, or b) more democracy threatens individual rights and the corrosion of liberal institutions that protect those rights. All 'populisms' are not the same: it is right-wing populism that threatens the rights of individuals and minorities, that seeks to weaken the independence of the judiciary and other checks on the power of the executive (sense (b)). Anyone (right or left) who supports of Mills' account of individual liberty can see how right wing populism can lead to illiberal politics. However, in order to see an equivalent threat from the left, your understanding of liberalism must be strictly (sense (a)) Madisonian, pro-capitalist and utilitarian. 

Fascism - right-wing populism - is a form of cancer that preys on the body of liberal oligarchies which face a crisis of legitimacy and loss of faith in democratic institutions. In seeking a more authentic nationalist democracy, fascists are more than happy to sweep away the 'decadent' liberal order; all too often, liberal oligarchies facilitate this process by deliberately courting illiberal politics in order to enhance their legitimacy and stave off decline. Elites falsely believe that in order to make their rule more democratic, it needs to become more illiberal. It's straightforward to indulge in the chauvinistic tyrannies of the majority for an election cycle or two, particularly if those tyrannies can be directed at migrants, non-citizens, minorities and other marginalised groups. Why not pay that price in order to preserve the liberal economic order? 

Looking to the future by working with the past

As a democratic or libertarian socialist, I see no fatal conflict between the institutions of liberal governance and the quest for a more just social and economic order. But historically, I must admit, left wing populism is not immune to an illiberal impulse. Marx & Engels were famously dismissive of 'bourgeois' democracy, and the temptation to 'cheat' the system and press for faster, more radical change is always present. Modern monetary theory, I suspect, gains much of its appeal from seeming like an end-run around the existing economic order. But the revolutionary appeal of doing away with liberal institutions at will is illusory and dangerous: change must be made, and rules and norms can be bent to do so. But we would break them at our peril. Globally, the Left has been down that road and did not like where it took us. I would encourage, therefore, populists of the left-wing variety to be willing and able to argue the case why more equality and more democracy is consistent with (and in fact, reinforces and defends) a free and open liberal society. That, more than any other, is the central theme of my book. 

Myths of the Old Order: Who’s afraid of “populism” anyway?

This series of posts will continue to examine myths or tropes that I hear repeated by those trying to make sense of the "New Dark Age" that is our fragmented social reality. If you have an idea for a trope to address, contact me on Twitter @Askews2000.

The neoliberal consensus is dead. What will arise from its ashes, however, remains open for debate. Centrists, lacking the vision discipline historically imposed by a strong left, are being storm-tossed by electorates from Washington to Vienna.  We are told that the charismatic elitism of Macron or Obama is the only thing protecting democracy from a rising tide of populist nationalism. In this narrative, the far right and ‘far’ left (if you can call democratic socialism far left) are riding a wave of anger and disillusionment into political power, and tearing up cultural norms and evidence-based policies along the way.

This blog will attempt to understand and thereby partially allay these fears. Off the bat, let me say that right-wing populism is in fact dangerous -  but because it’s right-wing, not because it’s 'populist'. Right-wing values of hierarchy and social stasis are inimical to individual rights when left unchecked. Stalinists are a political joke in a democracy; modern-day Nazis are not. 

Clutch the pearls

To label someone a populist in elite political discourse is to employ a slur. To argue that Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are somehow the same is to impugn one with the perceived flaws of the other. Australian political commentators love this kind of lazy rhetorical shorthand: when Labour Party policy on trade or immigration, for instance, is described as ‘populist’, it is to imply that such policies are somehow illegitimate, inconsistent or poorly justified. Back in the day, “protectionist” would have sufficed but that epithet has lost much of its power with the demise of the neoliberal consensus. Better now to infer a parallel with the xenophobia and chauvinism of a Bernardi, Hanson or Abbott.

Centrist elites have convinced themselves that policy-making is a matter of rational calculus: assessing costs and benefits and employing policy tools to deliver the most efficient outcome for the largest number of people. Invariably, elite interests are taken to represent the interests of the whole community. Such a worldview must appear natural for individuals unburdened by ideological aesthetics and for whom bargaining and compromise are the [sole] essence of politics. By contrast, when presented with policies they don’t understand in these terms, the centrist’s first instinct is to attribute to those advancing them traits of stupidity, self-interest or malice. Populists, in their reading, are merely selfish entrepreneurs who exploit irrational public grievances for private gain; in Trump’s case, as idiot-savant.

A better view

This, of course, is not true. Populists voters, and their leaders, articulate political vision[s] centered around perspectives and interests that are not part of elite discourse but rational all the same. Those visions simply aren’t intelligible from the perspective of those socialised with a different set of norms. The elite are like the aristocrats who cry “let them eat cake” at a mob of torch-wielding revolutionaries shouting about democracy and liberty. For the establishment, there are both correct ways to articulate political causes (“tone”) and only a narrow range of acceptable claims. To articulate an ‘unacceptable’ political argument or an acceptable one in the ‘wrong way’ is to violate norms. Moreover, to be ignorant of those norms is display unsuitability as part of the 'ruling' class. 

Backlash bias is one of the most important tools in the human psychological toolkit, but its social role is poorly appreciated. Confirmation bias is better appreciated: we tend to weight more highly information and behaviour that agrees with our expectations, and reward those who act in expected ways. Backlash bias is the inverse of this: we experience something akin to shock when confronted with information or behaviour we didn’t expect, and are often willing to call out or punish those who express such behaviours. The backlash we feel is our cognitive way of coding and implementing ‘meta-norms’ – a built-in programme for punishing deviance that ensures the ongoing cohesiveness of a shared set of social expectations or ‘culture’. 

Within both right and left, those who have risen to political and economic influence are socialised with just such a set of political expectations either prior to or as part of the process of acquiring power. The longer they’ve been in power, the less likely it is that those beliefs will tolerate perceived variation. So when the establishment reacts to populist leaders and policies, they are exhibiting a [genuinely felt] moral belief that those leaders and policies are disruptive for the cohesiveness of the community (or in the case of politics, ‘their side’) of which they are of course the self-appointed representatives.

This is made more potent by elites’ presumption of authority over their own ‘team’: elites don’t just embody political norms, but set, control and enforce them through the use of both hard and soft influence. Their understanding of their own community is stratified in such a way as to place them at the top. US Republicans, for example, long presumed that they could set a free-market agenda for an electoral coalition comprised of a lower class of Christian conservatives nd racialized nationalists. Their contemporary hand-wringing isn’t only an emotional reaction to ideological arguments they don’t understand, but a genuine anger and fear at losing control of the political destiny of their own political team to a group of people they see as lesser. 

Getting back in touch with our roots

The return of populism, for that is what it truly is, does not need to cause us such anxieties.

By necessity, political movements specialise as they increase in complexity: delegating authority higher and higher as power becomes centralised and remote from supporters; creating self-perpetuating institutions to manage and exercise that power on their behalf. Every organisation, including political parties and states, must balance the effectiveness of its governance (attaining and exercising power) against its responsiveness to those whose tacit consent it relies on to legitimise its own authority. There may be real limits about how big a democratic state can get, and states are uniquely powerful institutions. Political parties and movements are orders of magnitude weaker than states, with limited resources, poor institutions, and low levels of individual loyalty and commitment.

When an existing group of elites has been in power for too long, they necessarily lose touch with their base, unless active measures are employed to keep the party leaders responsive and accountable. That is the reason why political victories come in alternating waves: each wave brings in fresh blood and fresh ideas. But if complacent enough, elites often try to rig their own institutions to limit the very accountability they need to continue doing their job effectively. So if neoliberalism (on both left and right) had been challenged effectively over the last forty years, perhaps it could have evolved into something acceptable to the voting public. Instead, it assumed a position of ideological hegemony and closed itself to all criticism; now it is overthrown amidst crisis and disorder.

So when a politician becomes a 'populist' in the elite imagination, what he or she is really doing is speaking to marginalised voters about issues they care about in language they understand. I take comfort from the fact the left-wing populists speak of noble concerns: fair work, a decent standard of living, and universal access to health and education. That is the progressive core. Those on the centre-right might want to reconsider which side they’re really on, when their populist id exploits the lowest forms of bigotry and fear.