Category Archives: populism

a pluralistic 250th

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As the 250th year of the republic begins, I am not in a celebratory mood. Our current political crisis is the worst since 1877, the end of Reconstruction. The government is violating core republican principles; and to some extent, this is happening because of flaws in American culture and civil society.

Still, the United States is a community, and communities can mark auspicious dates. America’s 250th anniversary events need not celebrate our national leaders or claim any kind of superiority for our political history and system. The year can be a celebration of our people, by our people, in all our diversity. We can mark the 250th in a pluralistic way, with many local communities, groups, and institutions expressing how they understand the moment–not in a centralized way determined by the White House. In that case, the 250th will be an opportunity to contest the meaning of America, and such contestation is the best of our tradition.

My friend Rev. Dr. Willis Johnson writes: “Personally, I’m drawn to the notion of bearing witness, not just to what is, but to what ought to be. Independence Day, in its best form, should be an act of collective remembrance and recommitment, not just a party. We need to remember that freedom is not static, nor is it evenly distributed. We need to recommit to the labor of making liberty real for everyone, especially those for whom the promise of independence still rings hollow.”

I am old enough to remember the Bicentennial, albeit dimly. The official American Revolution Bicentennial Administration organized some of the events. President Ford presided over a nationally televised fireworks display and reviewed the sailing ships that had gathered in New York Harbor from aboard a naval vessel.

But there were also many local and nongovernmental events, including some protests. The image with this post illustrates an environmental protest in the Boston Harbor that marked the 200th anniversary of the Tea Party. Even the Tall Ships were organized by a nonprofit.

To the extent that the celebrations appeared unified, it was mainly because of the political context. Two centrist presidential candidates, Ford and Carter, were competing to unite the country after the traumas of the previous decade. Nixon had resigned in 1974; Saigon had fallen in 1975. This meant that Watergate and the war were now definitively over, and Americans could hope that a less contentious period was starting. The national government did not create a unifying moment, but the country was in a relatively unified mood.

Such is not the case today. The official national effort, America250, has “announce[d] a monumental celebration, kicking off a new era of American greatness, featuring special remarks by President Donald J. Trump. This kick-off event will take place at the Iowa State Fairgrounds, offering patriotism, excitement, inspiration, and a glimpse into the grand festivities planned for America’s 250th anniversary.”

Even people who support Trump need to recognize that many fellow citizens oppose him, and any kind of ceremony that focuses on him and invokes MAGA concepts will provoke opposition. In my view, such conflict is the most appropriate celebration of a free people, born in rebellion and accustomed to free speech and debate.

Rev. Johnson concludes, “In my heart, I still love my country. I love its messiness, its stubborn hope, its capacity to surprise. To love America means abstaining from turning a blind eye to its wounds. Loving our dear republic means asking hard questions at the cookout. Above all, love of country requires telling the truth—about the people still locked out of the celebration, about the freedoms that remain unfulfilled, about the dangers of settling for easy myths.”

There is little hope that America250 will tell these truths, but it doesn’t own the anniversary. The American people have an opportunity to celebrate our diverse community and to recommit to self-government.

Paul Shambroom, "Maurice, Louisiana (Population 642) Village Council, May 15, 2002."© 2002 Paul Shambroom.

the dignity of democracy

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My favorite object in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts’ exhibition “Power of the People: Art and Democracy” is Paul Shambroom’s Maurice, Louisiana (Population 642) Village Council, May 15, 2002 (shown above).

This large exhibition presents works from ancient Athens to contemporary America, including some famous and powerful objects. In this context, Shambroom dignifies democracy as the rule of regular people. (His photograph is also the favorite of Boston Globe critic Mark Feeney.)

Shambroom’s village councilors are middle-aged Americans in mostly casual clothes, including polo shirts for the two men. They all seem to be listening to the speaker at the right–three of them watching her face, one staring attentively into the distance.

The flags and seal behind them convey authority. These people represent the state, which ultimately wields the power of life and death. (Compare the empty juror chairs in Jim Dow’s eloquent photo, “Grady County Courthouse, Jury Box, Cairo, Georgia, 1976,” also in the exhibition.) But the councilors are not evidently bossing anyone around. They are probably trying to decide whether a proposed building conforms to the city plan.

The councilors occupy a dais that sets them apart from any constituents who might attend, whether to petition them or to oversee their work. The woman at the center, presumably the council chair, is raised higher, and she seems to be listening with mild amusement.

The large scale of the photograph (33 x 66 in) makes it monumental, in the tradition of public history painting. In fact, the exhibition invites a comparison to “The Magnanimity of Lycurgus” (1791), a large and histrionic oil painting by Jean-Jacques François Le Barbier, which was made for the Paris Salon at the height of the Revolution. Shambroom’s photo suggests that representative Americans deserve the same kind of recognition as the Lawgiver of Sparta.

Shamboom has made many such images. Compare Wadley, Georgia (population 2,468), City Council, August 13, 2001, which is in the Whitney.

The word “populism” is being used today mainly to criticize political ideologies that posit that the true people of any given country form a homogeneous and intolerant bloc. The people have enemies–domestic and foreign–and can be led by a single, charismatic figure. For me, Shambroom’s city council images are quiet statements of a different form of populism. Here, the people are diverse and deliberative, and they merit the right to do the unglamorous and endless work of self-government.

why “liberal” can sound like “upper-class”

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In an article reporting The New York Times‘ recent battleground state polls, Lisa Lerer and Ruth Igielnik quote Jonathan Ball, a Michigan floor-installer:

[He] said he believed Mr. Trump would do more to help working Americans than Ms. Harris. “I think she’s more liberal. I just don’t think she’s all for the middle class,” said Mr. Ball, 46, who plans to support Mr. Trump for a third time this fall. “I just see her one-sided. You know, for the rich.”

I don’t know how many people associate being liberal with being from (or for) the rich. I would like to see survey data specifically on that question, which would allow us to measure the prevalence of this view in various parts of the electorate. But we know that Mr. Ball’s view is not unique. In her book American Made: What Happens to People When Work Disappears, Farah Stockman discusses an Indiana industrial worker who divides the world between workers (such as himself) and capitalists, urges his union to fight the company, and votes for Trump. His wife is more favorable to management. On that basis, he categorizes her as a “liberal.” I’ve heard real people say the same kind of thing myself.

I grew up believing the opposite: that liberals were more favorable to workers than conservatives were. I acknowledge that this assumption is debatable. Libertarians argue that liberal policies are especially costly to working people. Socialists may distinguish bourgeois liberalism from more radical reform and sometimes see liberals as the main obstacles to social justice. But I doubt either framework is driving these workers’ interpretation of liberalism as favorable to the upper class.

Here is an alternative theory. If you are a worker and a consumer, you are always being notified of rules and policies that constrain and modify your behavior. Some of these rules result from governmental policies that I would code as “liberal.” For instance, the state might pass a law that results in your HR department warning you against sexual harassment. Some of the rules come from government but are not especially liberal, e.g., Don’t use marijuana. And many are not due to the government at all. For example, the same HR department that warns you not to sexually harass your colleagues also warns you not to take unauthorized breaks and not to use the company’s equipment for private purposes.

The tone, format, and consequences of all these rules are similar. The same people deliver and enforce them. These people are managers: white-collar workers with college degrees, sometimes from the corporate HQ in a big coastal city.

They talk and act rather like the most prominent advocates of liberal policies. First of all, politicians in general come from the same professions that set and enforce rules in the workplace. Nicholas Carnes notes that 75% of members of Congress were lawyers or business owners before they ran for office, compared to less than 2% who “came [directly] from working class occupations. … Even districts where working-class people make up disproportionate shares of voters seldom elect working-class politicians” (Carnes 2011). And, among politicians, Democrats are perhaps especially likely to sound like upper management. For instance, Democrats now represent the 17 richest congressional districts.

You’d have to be very politically sophisticated to separate the directives that result from liberal (or progressive, or leftist) governmental policies from those that are meant to profit the company. They all sound like the wishes of highly-educated and well-paid people at corporate headquarters. And the national leaders who advocate for the policies that are liberal sound just the same as your corporate managers.

Regulations can be beneficial and even necessary, but they are not very transparent. It is hard for the recipients to understand who is responsible for a given regulation; and legislators can’t be sure who will be affected, or how. Laws must go through regulatory agencies, courts, and private offices (like a corporation’s HR department) before they reach the people who are regulated, by which time the legislators who voted for them may not recognize the results. And workers and consumers receive a constant stream of directives that reflect companies’ wishes rather than legal mandates.

I am more enthusiastic about taxing and spending as tools of public policy. And I prefer direct, transparent taxes, especially taxes on personal income, rather than sales taxes, tariffs, or corporate income taxes, which have opaque and unpredictable costs for various people. We should be able to say: We compelled these people to pay this proportion of their incomes to buy these goods, which include new jobs for working people.

As long as we deputize private actors to regulate behavior, we must try to mitigate the resulting confusions. Small steps may be worth taking, like nominating Tim Walz instead of yet another big-city lawyer to be a face of the Democratic Party. But the problem may be endemic to the administrative state, in which case it requires more than cosmetic changes.

See also a conversation with Farah Stockman about American Made: What Happens to People When Work Disappears; class inversion as an alternative to the polarization thesis; beyond Chevron

the New Institutionalism, deliberative democracy, and the rise of the New Right

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In public debates about issues and problems, we typically consider institutions in two ways. On the one hand, we discuss their explicit purposes and missions, as reflected in the laws that create and govern them or (if they are autonomous) their mission statements and express goals. We ask whether these purposes are good and, if not, how we should change them. On the other hand, we discuss the institutions’ outcomes: what they actually achieve.

For instance, in public debates about public schools, we debate what they explicitly strive for (producing citizens? boosting the economy?) and what they really accomplish in terms of outcomes for students.

We are then frustrated because institutions do not seem to produce their intended outcomes, nor do reforms move them in the intended directions. This may be because of a set of well-known phenomena:

  • Path-dependence: Once an institution has developed in a certain way, shifting it is expensive and difficult.
  • Principal/agent problems: People in institutions have their own interests and agendas (which need not always be selfish); and there is a gap between their assigned roles and their actual goals.
  • Institutional isomorphism: Even when institutions are set up to be self-governing, they come to resemble each other. Witness the striking similarities among America’s 50 state governments or more than 5,000 colleges and universities.
  • Rent-seeking: People within existing institutions often extract goods from others just by virtue of their positions. Economists call these payments “rents.”
  • Bounded rationality: The individuals who operate within institutions have limited information about relevant topics, including the rest of their own institution. Information is costly, and it’s rational not to collect too much.
  • Voting paradoxes: No system for aggregating individual choices by voting yields consistently defensible results.
  • The Iron Law of Oligarchy: Even in organizations explicitly devoted to egalitarian democracy (the classic examples are socialist parties), a few highly-committed and tightly networked leaders almost always rule.
  • Epistemic Injustice: Knowledge is produced by institutions–not (for the most part) by individuals–and institutions favor knowledge that is in their own interests.

New Institutionalists emphasize and explore these phenomena. Their findings suggest either that citizens (meaning everyone who deliberates about how to improve the social world) should become much more attentive to these features of institutions, or else that we are incapable of social analysis because it is just too hard for millions of people to deconstruct millions of institutions. In the latter case, we should abandon ambitious theories of public deliberation and democracy.

New Institutionalism is heterogeneous. For one thing, it is ideologically diverse. Scholars who write about rent-seeking and voting paradoxes are often coded as right-wing, and sometimes they attribute rents mainly to governmental entities as opposed to markets. (Still, those of us on the left should take this issue seriously if we want to design governments that work for people). Scholars who write about Epistemic Injustice are often coded as left-wing; this idea emerged in feminism. The Iron Law of Oligarchy originated on the left, too, with Robert Michels.

New Institutionalism is diverse in other ways apart from ideology. For instance, the version that emerged from Rational Choice Theory is methodologically individualist. It models institutions as the result of interactions among individuals who have distinct goals and limited information. Some other versions of New Institutionalism are explicitly critical of methodological individualism. They attribute causal roles to institutions as opposed to individuals.

There is also a debate about determinism versus chance and choice. Historical institutionalists often emphasize the contingency of outcomes. Due to a random confluence of circumstances at a pivotal moment, an institution gets on a “path” that persists. In contrast, institutionalists who use rational-choice analysis often try to demonstrate that a given institution is in equilibrium, which implies that it almost had to take the form that it does.

Given this heterogeneity, we might begin to wonder whether New Institutionalism is a thing at all. Here is an alternative view: Institutions matter, but so do ideas, values, climates of opinion, identities, technologies, demographic changes, and biophysical feedback (e.g., climate change). Because many factors are relevant, there is often a moment when someone needs to say, “We have been neglecting institutions!” This person usually fails to find adequate resources in the “old” institutionalist authors: Weber, Veblen, Michels, et al. So she naturally calls herself a “New Institutionalist.”

In that case, New Institutionalism is not a movement or a phase in intellectual history. It is a recurrent stance or trope in debates since ca. 1900. As Elizabeth Sanders writes:

Attention to the development of institutions has fluctuated widely across disciplines, and over time. Its popularity has waxed and waned in response to events in the social/economic/political world and to the normal intradisciplinary conflicts of ideas and career paths. … Some classic works that analyze institutions in historical perspective have enjoyed a more or less continuous life on political science syllabi. Books by Max Weber, Maurice Duverger, Alexis de Tocqueville, John Locke, Woodrow Wilson, Robert McCloskey, and Samuel Beer are prominent examples.

Elizabeth Sanders, “Historical Institutionalism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Political Institutions (2008)

Still, a case can be made that we are in the midst (or perhaps the wake) of a New Institutionalist Movement. Sanders observes that classic theories of institutions were “increasingly sidelined … with the rise of behaviorism after the Second World War, particularly with the emergence of survey research and computer technology. …. However, after a hiatus of several decades, the study of institutions in historical perspective reemerged in political science in the 1970s, took on new, more analytical, epistemological characteristics, and flowered in the 1980s and 1990s. Why this reemergence?”

I’d give a slightly different answer from hers. I would note that several ideologies were influential from ca. 1945-1980. Here I don’t define an “ideology” as a form of invidious bias, nor as a mere basket of ideals. It is a more-or-less harmonious combination of ideals, causal theories, grand narratives, exemplary cases and models, and favored institutions. It makes sense of the world and motivates change, including positive change.

By that definition, liberalism, wealth-maximizing utilitarianism, democratic socialism, deliberative or participatory democracy, and Leninism were all ideologies. But none took sufficient account of the phenomena listed above. None was Institutionalist, in that sense. And all have been set back on their heels by the increasing strength and plausibility of Institutionalist research.

This my basis for claiming that New Institutionalism is a movement with consequences. Almost all of the ideological options available in 1968 or 1980 are less confident, less coherent, and less prominent today, thanks in significant measure to Institutionalist analysis conducted since then.

This account applies strongly to the stance that I grew up with: deliberative democracy. It originated in normative political philosophy plus small-scale voluntary experiments that succeeded in their own terms. It never attended enough to Institutionalism, and it now looks increasingly naive.

The main exception is classical liberalism/libertarianism. In the political domain, this ideology faces at least as much trouble as the others do. The libertarian-leaning (but never consistent) Republican Party has been taken over by authoritarian nationalists. However, in the intellectual domain–in the classroom–libertarianism has offered a coherent answer to New Institutionalism. It holds that all the flaws of institutions are worse in monopolistic state organizations than in markets. It can even explain why this insight is not more broadly understood: state schools and nonprofit colleges are run by rent-seekers who oppose libertarian ideas.

I dissent on several grounds (as do thoughtful classical liberals), but I’d still venture that classical liberals weathered New Institutionalism better than their rivals did, which explains a certain confidence in their ranks from ca. 1980-2008.

But now classical liberalism faces the same threat as all the other ideologies. The movement that is being called Populism (although I’d apply that word to other traditions, too) is perfectly calibrated for a world explained by New Institutionalism. Populism begins by denouncing all the institutions around us as corrupt because they unaccountably fail to generate their promised outcomes. It attributes this failure to the treason of elites: people well situated within existing institutions. It describes a homogeneous “us” (usually a racial or national group) that has been betrayed by “them,” the elites and foreigners. And it endorses a strong leader who fights for us against them. It dismisses specific institutional analyses as mere excuses and envisions a simple system that avoids all such Institutionalist problems. In this system, the authentic citizens constitute a unified majority; they select a leader in an occasional vote; and the leader rules.

In the face of this challenge, what are our options?

  • We could embrace the right-wing authoritarian populism. That is morally repugnant. Also, it won’t actually work over the long run.
  • We could ignore the findings of New Institutionalism and barrel ahead with an ideology like deliberative democracy or social democracy. I don’t think that’s smart.
  • We could count on elites to address the flaws of the institutions they lead. I don’t think that will happen, not only because elites are untrustworthy but also because these flaws are hard to fix.
  • We could beat the right-wing populists in other ways: by revealing their corruption, seizing on their missteps, or just running better candidates. This is important, but what happens after a Putin, an Orban, or a Trump?
  • We could re-engineer the institutions we care about by giving more attention to New Institutionalist insights. I think European social democrats have done so, to a degree. Social welfare programs in the Eurozone reflect concerns about path-dependence, feedback loops, principal/agent issues, etc. Deliberative democrats could, likewise, build deliberative institutions that take more account of such problems. This is a worthy approach but it requires compromises. For instance, social democratic systems may have to be less egalitarian to enlist the support of wealthy constituencies. And deliberative democratic forums may have to be made less democratic, for similar reasons.
  • We could enlist a wider range of people than just “elites” to work on the problems of specific institutions. We could make the solutions democratic. That is valuable but a long and slow process.
  • We could educate the public about the inner workings of institutions, their pathologies and solutions. That is important but hard.

I see our work in Civic Studies as a combination of the last two responses.

See also: teaching about institutions, in a prison; a template for analyzing an institution; decoding institutions; a different approach to human problems; fighting Trump’s populism with pluralist populism; separating populism from anti-intellectualism; against methodological individualism.

we are lucky with our right-wing authoritarian

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(Washington, DC) At today’s Deliberative Democracy Consortium’s Research & Practice Meeting on “Deliberative Democracy and Human Cognition,” Shawn W. Rosenberg made a point that I have often considered but never expressed.

Here is the background to the point: A broad range of people in many advanced democracies are potential supporters of ethno-nationalism (which means racism in the United States), autocratic leadership, and hostility to opposition parties, a free press, and intellectual critics. In a contest with liberal democratic values, this combination has built-in advantages. It is simpler, less cognitively and emotionally demanding, and more affirming of the people who belong to the ethn0-nationalist in-group.

In the United States, the chief representative of that combination is Donald J. Trump. But he lost the popular vote in 2016 and has never surpassed 45.5% popularity in the polling average. I think this is because he combines the globally ascendant right-wing authoritarian package with: personal indiscipline and frequent incompetence, laziness, blatant small-bore corruption and nepotism, a failure to retain the loyalty of his lieutenants, ignorance of the structures of power, a superficial grasp of his own ideology, and a rhetorical style that impresses only a small minority of Americans (a subset of his own voters).

If and when we face a right-wing authoritarian “populist” who moderates his (or her?) rhetoric skillfully, deploys resources efficiently, develops and implements strategies, sacrifices some personal needs and interests for his ideology, and manages the White House competently, we will be in deep trouble.

On the other hand, we might prove lastingly fortunate if this special moment of opportunity for white nationalism in America (while the national majority is still white but perceives status threat*) is dominated by a man who happens to be very bad at his job.

See also: Trump at the confluence of populism, chauvinism, and celebrity; fighting Trump’s populism with pluralist populism; pluralist populism; is Trumpism akin to the European right? etc.

*Whether status anxiety explains the 2016 election is controversial; but even if it doesn’t, the anxiety still seems palpable.