A Reading Guide to Piketty's "Capital and Ideology" (Part 1): Introduction, Overview and Impressions

“Capital and Ideology” (2020) is the long-awaited sequel to French economist Thomas Piketty’s 2013 opus, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”. Whereas the first volume was a fairly dry text, heavily informed by Piketty’s lifetime of data collection and research on the true extent and causes of economic inequality, this second volume aspires to something more like history, sociology or even political philosophy. Piketty is a polymath and, for better and worse, he has opinions on everything and wants to share them with you. Nevertheless, this is another 1,000+ page tome, so to save y’all the trouble of reading it I’ve attempted to distill the key lessons of each part of the book into this five-part reading guide, which I’ll be posting weekly over the course of March 2021. Today’s blog will provide a general review and introduction to Piketty’s core arguments.

When I began this project, I wanted to take the time and give “Capital and Ideology” proper consideration. Piketty is a serious contributor to economic policy debates, with robust data backing him up and a strong, central message. He was an invaluable influence on my thinking when I was writing my first book, “Politics for the New Dark Age: Staying Positive Amidst Disorder”, and the role of ideology in social order is a foundational leftist question. I regret to report, however, that “Capital and Ideology” does not reach the same heights as its predecessor. A much shorter book [300 pages] making the same arguments would not have gone unnoticed in the broader left-utopian publishing sphere - there’s genuine insights in the text that are worth engaging with. But as an editor myself, let me just say this book is many hundreds of pages too long - there are very many lengthy digressions and repetitive historical examples that add little of value. It’s too long for a polemic and too disorganised to treat as a a serious work of scholarship.

Theodicy and the construction of inequality regimes

I’ve noted before on this blog that liberalism has a theodicy problem: if all men [sic] are created equal, then why is inequality everywhere? Piketty’s book, if it had to be summed up as addressing one central problem, generalises this observation to construct a theory of inequality regimes. Here, ‘regime’ is being used in the same sense as in my second book, a social order that proscribes a specified set of benefits to a specified set of beneficiaries. Inequality is everywhere, Piketty begins, so “every human society must justify its inequalities". Inequality regimes are ideologies that legitimise the inequality that exists in the material world, and upon the basis of which people develop rules, norms and institutions that make sense of their social order.

“[Every] inequality regime is associated with a corresponding theory of justice. Inequalities need to be justified; they must rest on a plausible, coherent vision of an ideal political and social organisation. Every society therefore needs to answer a series of conceptual and practical questions about the boundaries of the community [the political regime], the organisation of property relations [the property regime], access to education [the education regime] and the apportionment of taxes [the fiscal regime].“

Note that the ‘truth-value’ or hegemonic nature of any given inequality regime is irrelevant; every justification of inequality “contains its share of truth and exaggeration, boldness and cowardice, idealism and self-interest”. What matters is whether a regime successfully legitimises and stabilises a particular social order - at least for a little while. Piketty is not explicit in doing so, but his approach to ideology fits [as mine does] within the broader field of Cultural Evolutionary Studies. For Piketty, ideologies are in constant dialogue with the need to solve social problems, and evolve and change overtime in haphazard and uncontrolled ways until they are replaced by something more fit. Piketty’s historical method is admirably historically contingent - ideologies are experiments enacted by stressed politicians and bureaucrats in times of crisis who often have little sense of the social changes they’re making.

“Each nation’s political and ideological trajectory can be seen as a vast process of collective learning and historical experimentation. Conflict is inherent in this process because different social and political groups have not only different interests and aspirations but also different memories. Hence they interpret past events differently and draw different implications regarding the future.”

Nevertheless, the book would have benefitted from a more serious engagement with evolutionary sociological literature. This is something of a theme in Piketty’s work - he’s more likely to invent his own term or concept than engage in debates with existing academic disciplines.

What kind of leftist is Piketty anyway?

For Piketty, inequality is neither economic nor technological - it is political and ideological, the result of conscious and unconscious social choices which are enacted by people and could have been enacted differently. The inequalities that exist today (which, Piketty’s data constantly reminds us, is worse today that at any time since the Gilded Age) and the institutions that maintain it are not the only ones possible - change is permanent and inevitable, and we do not live in the best of all possible worlds. It bears mentioning here that both orthodox Marxists [e.g. Gramsci] and leftists working in the broader Marxian tradition [e.g. Habermas etc.] have already problematised the classical deterministic understanding of the relationship between economic base and ideological superstructure. Dialectical materialism, correctly understood, is a philosophical practice that emphasises social change as a process, a dynamic, and a movement.

Nevertheless, Piketty himself is often contemptuous when writing about mainstream socialism, and treats Marxism as synonymous with narrow economism - in which the structure of society is purely materalistic, deterministic and decidedly Newtonian in outlook and character. This may be something of straw man, but Piketty himself sometimes hints that he’s veering in precisely the opposite direction. The ideological sphere is “truly autonomous”, we are told and “given an economy and a set of productive forces at a certain stage of development, a range of possible ideological, political and inequality regimes always exist". The truth lies somewhere between these two strawmen - some ideological variation is always possible, but which variations are stable is a question that only a dialectical or evolutionary sociology can tell us. Piketty is too sensible to outright endorse pure idealism, and the vast bulk of the text is finely graduated story of the historical contingencies and accidents that led to the emergence of each inequality regime in each particular time and place. But a strain of idealism underpins both his analysis and the kinds of solutions he thinks should be pursued, as if solving the greatest social, economic and political questions of our age were just a matter of finding the right policy mix.

Despite the sheer radicalism of Piketty’s policy proposals, the book itself embodies an almost instinctual dismissal of revolutionary change. Piketty, a tenured economic professor at one of France’s most prestigious institutions of learning, disdains the so-called populist left, most varieties of localism and mass movements in general. As a confirmed liberal of the self-described Rawlsian variety, his eyes are fixed firmly on the multinational and institutional - good policy is an end result of good institutional design. No one should have any doubts about Piketty’s genuine commitment to popular democracy or to a radical redistribution of wealth but like most utopians he’s unwilling or unable to outright acknowledge that the true barrier to the kind of reform he wants isn’t bad ideas or bad values but the entrenched social power of institutions with vastly more social and political influence than any reformer.

So what *does* Piketty want to do about all this inequality?

Like any good utopian book, “Capital and Ideology” is replete with ideas and schemes to remedy the injustices and inequalities it identifies. Piketty describes his outlook as ‘participatory socialism’ and he’s more or less explicit that this is little more than re-branding of the currently de rigueur current of democratic socialism. In this sense, in policy terms it’s not too different from the sorts of proposals you’d hear from Paul Mason, Rutger Bremen, Stephanie Kelton, or even myself - though I will give Piketty credit for dreaming big. The core element of Piketty’s programme are social and temporary ownership of the means of production, an universal capital endowment [universal basic inheritance], strongly progressive taxes on property, inheritance and income, educational justice and more participatory democracy.

I’ll say a few things about these specific programs in a moment, but the details aren’t really that important. None have any chance of being implemented, nor does Piketty offer even the hints of a work program that would bring them closer to fruition. Like a disaster capitalist, Piketty is putting his plans on a shelf in the hope that they’ll be be dusted off by harried bureaucrats the next time a crisis rolls around. But from the perspective of the middle stages of the worst economic crises in a century caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s clear that no one with real power is reading “Capital and Ideology” in search of a way out.

Co-determination in workplace management - a corporate structure whereby workers in a firm have a permanent right to representation on management boards - is of course an idea that is long overdue. It’s proved highly successful in those countries that have adopted it, and democracy at work has been a core demand of socialists for a hundred years. Piketty also remains a strong advocate of a hefty wealth tax, on all forms of capital (not just real property), that would return 1 per cent or more of capital wealth to society each year and act as a strong incentive against hoarding. His central concept, ‘temporary ownership’, aims to emphasise that ownership is not seen as exclusive and legitimate right of any one individual, but rather as a stewardship of a society’s surplus value on behalf of future generations. In fact, Piketty’s full-throated embrace of heavily progressive taxes on almost all forms of wealth and income is fucking admirable in this day and age. One of the core things a wealth tax would fund would be a universal capital endowment [a sort of universal basic inheritance] for all citizens, a sort of permanent land reform or rolling libertarian ‘year zero’. Although as Piketty points out later on educational justice means that most states could also spend about the same order of magnitude educating a child from birth through to tertiary degree, so the question of how best to allocate that inheritance, I think, remains an open one.

So, what’s next?

There are good ideas in “Capital and Ideology” - the concept of inequality regimes, the ‘Brahmin Left’, ‘propertarianism’, trifunctional societies etc. - that will be picked up and discussed for years to come, but you shouldn’t have to slog through 1040 pages just to get to the good stuff. So I’ve done that for you! Future parts of this reading guide will be published weekly, every Monday. Links to each part are provided below for future reference:

Part 2: The French Revolution and Propertarian Liberalism [published 8 March]

Part 3: Liberal Imperialism and the Globalisation of Inequality [published 15 March]

Part 4: The Great Transformation, or How to Destroy Capital in Three Easy Steps [published 22 March]

Part 5: The Brahmin Left and the Nazbol Vortex [published 29 March]

Review: "The Ministry for the Future" by Kim Stanley Robinson

This is my first fiction book review for this blog, and fittingly enough it’s the new book by Kim Stanley Robinson, “The Ministry for the Future”. It would be fair to say that Robinson’s works - especially the Mars Trilogy and the earlier Three Californias trilogy - had a formative effect on me and my politics growing up. In recognition of his influence, the epigraph of my second book, “Evolutionary Politics: Socialism for Social Species”, is a quote by Robinson. That said, I absolutely loathed his last novel, “Red Moon” (2018) - which was not a very good book about China, nor a good book about the moon, nor a good book about a revolution. I am pleased to report, however, that “Ministry for the Future” is a return to form: well written, hopeful, and grounded - if not without its own flaws.

Whereas “Red Moon” was something of a narrative divergence for Robinson, focusing on two [intensely unlikeable] characters who were little more than bystanders to great events, “Ministry for the Future” takes the opposite approach: it’s a loose, almost epistolary, alternative future about how the world was saved from climate change. Its main character - Mary Murphy, an ex-Irish Foreign Minister tapped to head a new UN agency set up to save the world - is almost a stock liberal archetype, but over the course of the book’s 560 pages Robinson paints an affecting portrait of her as a human being. There are other characters who pop in and out of the narrative, but the bulk of the novel mixes lectures, short stories, records of meetings and tone poems to such a degree that it reads more as literature than genre fiction.

“Ministry for the Future” owes a lot to Robinson’s earlier works. Certain plot devices are events are so similar to those in “Red Moon” that a few times I thought they were taking place in the same universe. The influence of Robinson’s Antarctica novels is clear, as are the democratic and utopian politics of the Mars trilogy. Thematically, this book is closest to “2312” - whereas in that book, the climate apocalypse had already happened, in this one we’re to learn how it might be prevented. But for me, in style and composition “Ministry for the Future” is closest to perhaps my favourite of Robinson’s standalone novels, “The Years of Rice and Salt” - his alternative history of a world without Europe. Robinson loves writing about non-Anglo-Saxon cultures, and while “Ministry for the Future” is overloaded with reverence for the Swiss [a portrait that, as someone who’s lived in Switzerland, I find a tad obsequious], like “Year of Rice and Salt” it’s the Indians who by-and-large save the world.

An airport book for the Davos set

Robinson is often hard to pin down politically. His writing often reveals a strongly anti-capitalist bent, albeit shot through with a dose of California Ideology techno-libertarianism and environmentalism. “Ministry for the Future” is about a revolution - the revolution necessary to save the world from climate apocalypse - but a revolution that is gradual, incrementalist and implemented by international institutions, banks and scientists. The liberal elite, in other words. This is a book that Ezra Klein would love, and which that seems written specifically with that audience in mind. Realist but progressive. Intriguingly, though, a core component of the transformation this book imagines is brought about by terror - by terrorist groups, and [spoilers] by state terror conducted by the Ministry itself - but we learn almost nothing about this shadowy war taking place in the background of the story.

The politics of the book are also very contemporary - targeting the interests and prejudices makers of policy-makers here in 2020. Its timeline is often hazy - Robinson often describes issues and events that are supposed to be happening decades in the future in terms indistinguishable from what’s happening now. In terms of his socio-economic solutions, Robinson is also very of the moment: digital currencies and blockchain feature heavily - as they did, unfortunately, in “Red Moon” - as does MMT. In large part, it’s ‘carbon quantitative easing’ that prevents climate change, the creation by central banks of digital ‘carbon coins’ that replace the world’s major currencies. The book is almost a paeon to central bankers, mirroring the obsessive search by some on the left for a magic policy solution that can be designed, implemented and measured by technocrats.

Socialism: Utopian and Science Fiction

Big moments in “Ministry for the Future”, the inflection points that shift the course of history away from disaster, take place in board rooms in Switzerland and Silicon Valley. Change happens when well-meaning bureaucrats deliver knock-out powerpoint presentations for an audience of other bureaucrats. A large amount of the first half of the book takes place over ridiculously priced cocktails in Swiss bars [accurate]. In other words, this is book explicitly in the Utopian - rather than Marxist - socialist tradition. If Robinson’s aversion to discussing revolutionary violence doesn’t give it away, Charles Fourier is explicitly name checked in the latter parts of the book. Power doesn’t drive history - ideas do. And in this sort of world the best ideas from all cultures and places rise to the top to build the global hegemony of the future.

Chapter 99 is worth discussing in detail because it lays the thesis statement of this book out in detail. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if Chapter 99 was the first chapter Robinson wrote, reading as it does like an author exercise. The book - without putting these words in the voice of any particular character - rejects the idea that there are “totalizing solutions” to the world’s problems. There are no single solutions adequate to the task - success is made from failures, “the cobbling together from less-than-satisfactory parts. a slurry, a broclage. An unholy mess.” People working together to solve the same problems fight with one another, not because their values are mutually unintelligible, but because of the “narcissism of small differences”. Revolutions are "invisible, technical, legal” - one can have the benefits of revolution without actually going through one. Power is an illusion - but laws are everything.

This is not a capitalist realist book - Robinson does envisage the end of capitalism, and he does it better than anyone else writing today. But it is a sober, realist take. Some reviews describe it as hard science fiction but this book - like the Mars trilogy before it - is more sociological than that. It’s for that reason that I’m hankering for Robinson to write a book about political violence. Hell, write a sequel to this book that tells the story of the Ministry’s black ops wing - show us what it means to blow up aircraft, assassinate the heads of corporations and steal the wealth of billionaires. Robinson’s eco-socialist utopia is incomplete because he hand waves all that away - even while acknowledging that it’s necessary [in the world of the book] to get the outcome ultimately arrived at.

Recommended Reading

In the end, I offer “Ministry for the Future” a strong recommendation. If you’re a young reader, the same age I was when first reading Robinson’s works, it’s a great introduction to post-capitalist ideas. If you’re a contemporary of mine, someone who works in government and finance and still dreams of saving the world, then this is also the book for you. But if you’ve already been radicalised - either by Robinson’s earlier works, by any serious reading of left-wing theory, or by the sheer reality of living in 2020 - then the politics of the “Ministry for the Future” will have little to teach you. It’s stunningly well written, and surprisingly affecting. Robinson has a lot of say about life, death, the planet and what it all means. He’s written the most optimistic vision of the contemporary world he could have. What does it say that I’m still unconvinced anything will change for the better?

On the use and abuse of Social Darwinism: Sam Ashworth-Hayes in Quillette

There was an article published on 17 November in Quillette by UK-based writer Sam Ashworth-Hayes that highlights once again the ways that a little evolutionary knowledge can be dangerous. For the record, and being extremely charitable, Quillette is a Social Darwinist newsletter that publishes Social Darwinist articles by Social Darwinist writers. And I’m not familiar with Sam’s broader output but I have serious questions about his seemingly obsessive focus on Western fertility and whether a “culture which combines high migration alongside low integration and fertility will be replaced”.

That caveat made, however, I’ve elected to wade in because Sam’s writing combines familiarity with the key concepts of cultural evolution with a blatant and ignorant portrayal of both how it works and how political progressives might make use of it. To do a little shameless self-promotion, my second book, “Evolutionary Politics: Socialism for Social Species” [which will be available worldwide November 30th!] aims to dispel once and for all the notion that there is no left-wing theory of human nature that is compatible with Darwin. And it makes the point that darwinian socialism is a venerable left-wing tradition - with roots going back to Bakunin, Engels and Kropotkin - which is not only embedded in a dialectical understanding of human societies but is ‘more scientific’ than the mainstream rational-actor model.

Use and Abuse

To begin, Sam’s reading of how evolution works is too teleological. Like Spencer, Huxley and the other Victorian scientists who interpreted Darwin, he’s wrong to portray cultural selection as an engine of inevitable progress, rather than a quasi-random walk though history, with side-branches, dead-ends and backsliding aplenty.

“From a Darwinian perspective, the point of a culture is to replicate itself. From this, all else follows. The rules and rites that govern a society fall into shape as systems for maximising the fitness of a culture for surviving its environment”.

Cultures of course, do not have a ‘point’. Cultures may act as if they were maximising fitness, but this is only because cultures which failed to be competitive no longer survive. But Sam is broadly correct when he paraphrases that tradition embodies “a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems”.

As I explain in Chapters 16 & 17 of my new book, conservative writers and thinkers are often prone to a naturalistic fallacy, where they presume that any behaviour or tradition which presently exists must do so because it is adaptive. And that traditions or behaviours which are adaptive must, in naturalistic ethics, be therefore considered good. Sam has done his reading, and does not fall easily into this trap. In fact, his summary of this is quite accurate:

“Not all behaviours are adaptive; some are vestigial, remnants of a tradition previously of great importance. Some are not harmful enough to be shed, inefficiencies in a world full of such things, or covered for by other habits. Some were useful and are rendered obsolete by changes in technology, or the capability of society to organise itself. Some are maladaptive, and in the process of being selected against, or sustained in a bad equilibrium.”

But here’s where things start to go off the rails a little bit. It’s of course an extremely difficult question to determine which social behaviours are adaptive and which are not. Sam’s list of adaptive traditions, focused primarily on sexual behaviour, is questionable. Taboos on sexual promiscuity and abortion, as well as social valuation of monogamy, are all debatable points. I would suspect Sam has been reading a bit too much of the evopsych literature, which is heavily focused on these questions of gender relations. I would note for example, that fear of disease becomes of less adaptive relevance in societies with modern medicine and good quality healthcare. And that social and religious attitudes towards abortion have varied widely across different time periods and cultures. I think both Silvia Federici and Jo Henrich might agree that the Western anxiety over abortion has as much to do with the relationship between the family and capital as it has to do with fertility. Indeed, the very debate over the ‘personhood’ of a fetus relies on the modern, liberal ontological framework that grants rights only to philosophical ‘persons’.

Bad philosophy, bad science

I won’t take too much issue with Sam’s characterisation of liberalism. Chapters 13 & 18 my book discuss a couple of ways in which liberalism, as an evolving cultural complex, is uniquely vulnerable. But I’m more appreciative of just how successful and sustainable liberalism has been, since it first emerged as a distinct set of cultural strategies in 17ths and 18th-century Europe. In that time period, it has spread to become the default philosophical position in Westernised nations, converted hundreds of millions of other people to its way of seeing the world, fought off multiple challenger ideologies (including during multiple periods of total war) and delivered astounding advances in material and social progress. Like Marx, I’m an admirer of liberalism, but as socialist, I recognise that it “points beyond itself”.

Sam’s advocacy of higher fertility ultimately fails because he does not understand how cultural replication works - a fault of most Social Darwinists, and incidentially a point on which many sociologists and constructivists have useful things to say. Any evolutionary system is defined by three key processes - variation, selection and replication. Because many Social Darwinists are genetic essentialists, they assume wrongly that the only way a behaviour can be transmitted is through descent. i.e. that liberal cultures reproduces themselves by having more children, who are somehow biologically predisposed to being more liberal. Sam, to his credit, recognises that liberalism may spread through the ‘conversion’ of others, and hey, he’s completely right on that. Culture spreads through teaching and imitation and comparatively little of the behaviour of modern humans is encoded genetically - a much greater proportion of our strategies are learned in childhood, either from our parents or absorbed from our teachers, peers and other members of our culture.

John Maynard-Smith, the biologist and mathematician who laid much of the groundwork for evolutionary game theory, originally rejected the concept of group selection precisely because genetic inheritance was a poor mechanism to maintain inter-group differences. When breeding-age individuals migrate between groups, they contribute half of their DNA to any offspring. Very quickly, this extinguishes the genetic diversity between groups that is mathematically necessary for group selection to function - and humans are certainly a migratory and promiscuous species! But when humans migrate between social groups they also inherit behaviours culturally and tend to more-or-less conform to the culture of their new home. A human who left their home tribe to migrate to a new one might contribute half their DNA to their offspring, but much less of their cultural complex. As a result, cultural evolution maintains sufficient intra-group cohesion for group selection to operate.

Sam writes that “those raised by parents of other cultures may not always turn out to be liberals.” This is of course, true. A small minority may in fact violently reject their new culture. But in the vast, vast majority of cases migrants successfully accommodate themselves to the culture of their new home, especially ones that ask relatively little of them in return. It’s a tired cliché, but by the third generation migrant communities are often largely culturally indistinguishable from other inhabitants of a place.

In defense of liberalism

But of course the question of migration is only relevant insofar as Sam defines the terms of the debate in terms of liberalism’s consequences for population size and fertility. I hate to be the one to tell the readers of Quillette this, but smaller family sizes are both a consequence of and a contributor to higher levels of parental and societal investment in children, such that individuals in liberal societies are astoundingly more productive than their forebears who had more children. I would note that many of the countries with the lowest fertility in the world - South Korea, Singapore, Japan - have only a recent historical association with liberalism, and those in Europe with the lowest fertility - Spain, Italy, Portugal - are largely Catholic and only recently democracies. Sam also ignores the extensive sociological and economic literature that correlates below-replacement birth rates with economic inequality and low social mobility, as well as the strong leftist support for ‘pro-natalist’ policy proposals such as universal childcare and worker control over their terms of their labour.

I’m uninterested in having a debate with any writer for Quillette of their critique of ‘progressivism’, which is childish and irrelevant. But I will engage with alt-centrist writers who argue their critique in terms of evolutionary science. The debate between Social Darwinism and darwinian socialism has been going on now for more than 150 years. It would be fair to say that for much of the twentieth century the Social Darwinists won that debate. There is an ongoing and serious risk that racial supremacist arguments are being repackaged and recycled in terms of cultural supremacy. By understanding how genes and culture co-evolve, and work together to generate complex social behaviour, progressives can make a stronger case that social change and experimentation has been, is and will continue to be both ‘adaptive’ and ‘good’.

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.

Book Release Announcement: "Evolutionary Politics: Socialism for Social Species"

Hello everyone,

I’m very pleased and excited to announce that my second book, “Evolutionary Politics: Socialism for Social Species”, will be published worldwide in late November 2020. The ebook version is already available for pre-order via Amazon and Apple Books - and the paperback will be available soon as well.

So what’s the book about?

The foundational myth of contemporary capitalism – the individual alone, in a state of nature – is just that: a myth. Both Darwin and early anarchists like Piotr Kropotkin understood that mutual aid lay at the heart of nature’s conquest of the earth. A rich tradition of evolutionary socialism and left-wing Darwinism has been forgotten and disparaged.

"Evolutionary Politics: Socialism for Social Species" applies the new science of cultural evolution to the modern world, showing that the rise of fascism, political extremism and tribalism can be best understood through an evolutionary lens. By demonstrating that humans are adapted for group life in symbolic communities, we can show how the myth of the rational actor has led economists, political scientists and policymakers to fundamentally misunderstand the human social world.

As we become ever more fractured and isolated from one another, "Evolutionary Politics: Socialism for Social Species" argues that not only is a better, more solidaristic world possible – it’s necessary if we are to survive as a species.

Contact me!

If you work in media, as a book reviewer, or if you’re an academic or activist working with game theory or cultural evolution, please reach out to me on Twitter at @ASkews2000 and I’d be happy to provide you a review copy in advance of the formal release.

And if you read the book and like it, why not drop a review on Amazon or on the book’s page on Goodreads? Every bit of feedback helps!