The man doing the curdling is, of course, Donald Trump. The real estate mogul is an embodiment of the paradoxes that define vulgar American populism: decadently wealthy but claiming solidarity with workers, deafening but representing the voiceless, an Armani suit with sharp elbows, a media personality capitalizing on disdain for the media.
And like all good populists, Trump attributes his country’s woes to big-city elites and small-town immigrants. To compare Trump to William Jennings Bryan, Andrew Jackson, and even Sarah Palin has reached the point of cliché. His campaign, more than anything, has become a fascinating case study into what populism looks like in the twenty-first century.
Still, while Trump may be buffoonish, that doesn’t mean the forces behind his candidacy are. Populism isn’t like communism; it’s not a scarlet letter that automatically discredits anything to which it’s attached. Rather it’s one of many forces in American politics that’s at times taken good forms and bad forms, and sometimes a little of both. Andrew Jackson’s presidency engendered demagoguery and Indian removals, but also substantive ethics reforms that cleaned up government. Populism, like most things, is complex.
Despite the recent criticism of Goldberg and Will, the right has benefited significantly from populism over the past six years in the form of the tea party, which elected a formidable congressional and gubernatorial class, and cleared a path for the bewildered post-Bush GOP. The tea party had its share of rough edges, but it was also determined to do more than just scream through a bullhorn at the Capitol building. The sequester, Paul Ryan’s budget, robust Republican opposition to Obamacare—none of this would have happened without the right’s foray into populism.
A couple years ago, some of the right’s brightest thinkers coined a new term: libertarian populism. As writer Tim Carney defined it, libertarian populism was the acknowledgment that the little guy is indeed getting shafted, by a collaboration between big government and big business that slants the rules towards the powerful. Carney’s manifesto included some conservative prescriptions, like cleaning up the tax code and eliminating anti-competitive regulations, and some liberal solutions, like ending corporate welfare and breaking up the big banks. The shuttering of the Export-Import Bank was, in many ways, libertarian populism’s first victory.
What set Carney’s brain child apart from other populisms was that it established Washington as the middle class’ enemy rather than its salvation. Government, through a libertarian populist lens, was not a Bull Moose crusader against corporate excess, but a pliable partner in big business’ mischief.
Many liberals contended that there was nothing populist about libertarian populism. The truth is more intricate. Libertarian populism works because its two competing philosophical strains balance each other out.
Without libertarianism, populism descends into demagoguery and recklessly expands government with little regard for results. And without populism, libertarianism has a habit of secluding itself, publishing white papers and sneering Facebook comments without ever adapting itself to an electoral process that requires popular support. Only together do the two achieve equilibrium.
To the extent that the tea party had an implicit philosophy, it was libertarian populism. Yet lately the same energy that once spawned spontaneous Obamacare protests is now being spent in the service of Donald Trump, a pro-universal health care, pro-tax increase mountebank extraordinaire. What happened? Trump slammed down on the populism end of the seesaw, sending libertarianism careening into the air.
Thus have we reverted to ethnic scapegoating and promises of an activist government and the garish spectacle of yet another imperial presidency.
The federal government is out of control, the playing field is tilted, Millennials are getting buried, entitlements are bleeding, and the past 15 years of a technocratically managed public sphere has resulted in economic and foreign policy calamity.
The solution, then, is not to write off populism completely, but to rebalance it with a healthy dose of libertarianism
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