Forums

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

https://www.amazon.com/People-No-Pop.../dp/1250220114

https://www.amazon.com/Evil-Geniuses.../dp/1984801341

I've listened to a couple excellent podcasts with these two authors recently and read a couple reviews of their above-linked most recent works. Their messages are essential, but will probably be drowned out because they offend powerful, monied interests.

Frank argues that anti-populism is predicated on a lie. That populism is largely a movement of the powerless versus the powerful. The right and left dismissal of it as movements of nativist morons, racists, and unwashed fools is largely propaganda running back to the time of William Jennings Bryan. He admits those types are present in populist movements to an extent, but a small one. He argues that neoliberals run with these false arguments because they don't like populist policies because those policies would harm their economic interests. He claims both traditional republicans and democrats swallow the line that populism = racism because it's a twofer: (1) it confers moral basis to ignore populists; and, (2) it feeds into their insecurity and ego (most upper middle class sorts with some education like the idea of feeling they're part of a class above someone else, and populists provide a perfect "other" to compare yourself to).

Frank is an interesting guy. Does he think Trump is essentially populist? Bernie? Who in the current landscape is a populist, according to Frank?

Anderson argues roughly the same thing, but aims the gun a bit more directly at the professional classes. He calls us capitalism's useful idiots, intentionally and unintentionally talking our books and feeding our egos. Again, his opprobrium is aimed squarely at neoliberal democrats and republicans:

Although very few people I knew voted for Reagan, affluent college-educated people, liberals and otherwise, tended not to disagree ferociously about politics in the 1980s and ’90s, and certainly not about economics. In retrospect, the rough consensus about economics looks like the beginning of an unspoken decades-long class solidarity among the bourgeoisie. Affluent college-educated people, Democrats as well as Republicans, began using the phrase socially liberal but fiscally conservative to describe their politics, which meant low taxes for higher-net-worth individuals (another new term) in return for tolerance of . . . whatever, as long as it didn’t involve big new social programs that affluent people would have to pay for. It was a libertarianism lite that kept everything nice and clubbable and it did at least have the virtue of ideological consistency.

When Gary Hart ran a second time for president, in 1988, one of his tax-policy advisers was Arthur Laffer, Reagan’s inventor of supply-side economics. When Jerry Brown ran for the 1992 Democratic nomination, he too sought Laffer’s help, to devise some kind of tax scheme “that was clear and easy to articulate,” and Laffer himself says he voted for Bill Clinton. (He’s now a Trump adviser.) The Democratic Leadership Council, co-founded by Clinton in 1985, became a think-tankish anchor for Democrats who didn’t disagree with Republicans that pretty much the only acceptable new solutions to any social problem were market based.*

For the remainder of the century, no candidate from the Democratic left became a plausible finalist for the nomination. In 1992, when Clinton won the nomination, his only serious competitors were two fellow New Democrats, Brown and Tsongas. Democrats had settled into their role as America’s economically centrist party. There was no organized, viable national economic left in the vicinity of serious power. The collapse of the Soviet Union and Communism at the beginning of the 1990s was very good news, but it had the unfortunate effect of making almost any left critique of America’s new hypercapitalism seem not just quixotic but also kind of corny and quaint.

Ouch. This explains, perhaps, why my much older republican parents sang Bill Clinton's praises through the 90s.

It's crazy to talk about Democratic positioning in the 80's and 90's as if it's just a matter of policy preferences, and not an effort about how to win power back after Reagan and the losses by Mondale and Dukakis. If Democrats backed centrists, it was because that was the path to getting elected. That has held until recently, with neoliberalism getting discredited by the financial crisis and Republican intransigence.

Effectively, Anderson argues that almost everyone is talking their book to one extent or another. Even populists, who are mad they've been left out of the gains the rest of us enjoyed from neoliberal policies.

It might also shed unique light on the fissures between people which the super-wealthy have exploited. Race is the current one, of course. But then there's party. And then there's culture, in which they pit insecure upper middle class wanna be elites against the equally insecure less coastal/less enlightened middle class. (Frank touched on this in What's the Matter with Kansas.)

So, either people vote their economic interests, or they don't (and vote on race, party or culture). That doesn't really narrow it down.

You see a picture emerging (or at least I do), where everybody is either a cynic or a dupe, all serving a system that exacerbates inequality.

This sentence is where you transition to the Sebby worldview -- everybody is a cynic or a dupe, and inequality comes from the "system," not from the political efforts and successes of individuals or groups.

It also draws a picture where a truly small cadre of obscenely influential interests control policy and the fools beneath argue amongst each other. Instead of a class ladder where any of us are significantly above or below others, it's a ladder to nowhere, where 99% of us are tiny increments above and below each other in relation to the enormous wealth of the true and only elite people who sit at the very top, separated from the rest of us by an expanse of ladder in which the rungs have been removed.

Anderson's book excerpt was passed to me by a professional, and I've in turn passed it on to many professionals. I don't expect anyone to admit he's a useful idiot, but what I read describes almost all professionals I know, including me.

Since you often describe yourself as a cynic, it's hard to tell how Frank and Anderson affect your view of the world.