Entertaining an Alternative View

Jan-Werner Müller, writing in the New Statesman ,would like you to consider that the elite/populist division is actually, secretly a means for the elite to retain power by dividing the working class. This is a standard Marxist way of understanding many conflicts -- and it sometimes proves true. For example, the intense encouragement of racist views and actions in the Jim Crow South really was at least partly about hiding from poorer white Southerners the fact that the richer Southerners and Northern banks were the real oppressors in their lives; in fact, they shared intense common interests with poorer black Southerners. The mythology they were offered, which they often bought, really was about keeping the elite in power by hiding the commonality of class interests.

Nevertheless, this has not been my view of the populist rejection of things like Hillary Clinton or Remain in Europe. They begin with a noteworthy observation:

Half a decade on, “Brexit and Trump” remain shorthand for the rise of right-wing populism and a profound unsettling of liberal democracies. One curious fact is rarely mentioned: the campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Remain in 2016 had similar-sounding slogans, which spectacularly failed to resonate with large parts of the electorate: “Stronger Together” and “Stronger in Europe”. Evidently, a significant number of citizens felt that they might actually be stronger, or in some other sense better off, by separating. What does that tell us about the fault lines of politics today?

That similarity was not accidental; it is of a piece with how "Build Back Better" became a slogan on the tongue of every Western leader. Observe this montage of, well, all of them saying exactly this phrase.

This strongly suggests that in fact there is an international class who think alike, and find the same language persuasive -- who are learning from each other, at least, if not in fact designing together a common program to govern all of our various societies from a stratum above us (and separated from us). The NS piece is going to talk a lot about the ability to build such strata within societies, but still wants to assert that this is really about wealth and not culture. 

So let's consider that, after the jump.

Democracies today face a double secession. One is that of the most privileged. They are often lumped together under the category of “liberal cosmopolitan elites”, which is an invective thrown around by populist leaders, but also a term employed by a growing number of pundits and social scientists. This designation is misleading in many ways. While it is true that certain elites are mobile, they are not necessarily cosmopolitan or liberal in any strong moral sense – if by cosmopolitan we do not mean folks with the highest frequent flyer status but those committed to the idea that all humans stand in the same moral relation to each other, regardless of borders.

This is an argument about the proper meaning of the terms "liberal" and "cosmopolitan." Such arguments are important. As per "liberal," there's a very good argument that the ideology being used is not either classical liberalism nor even the reform liberalism characteristic of FDR or LBJ. It is a kind of fascism, properly understood: the alignment of corporate power and the power of the state to enforce an increasing degree of control over ordinary people. This is most evident in Xi's China, where he is using the power of the state to break billionaires who deviate from the state's line. Yet it is increasingly obvious here, too, where the tech giants are censoring Americans at the request of the Biden administration. Our courts may eventually restrain that, but it is the impulse we must worry about.

As re: 'cosmopolitan,' I'll grant his technical sense of being 'like Immanuel Kant' for the sake of argument. But there is a sense in which they really are cosmopolitan, which is the sense that they would like 'all the cities' (polis) in the universe ('cosmos') to enjoy the same order. It is an order with their class at the top, and the rest of us serving the universal order of themselves. It is different from Kant's politics in that it does sever by class, but even Kant ultimately has sovereigns who are not bound by the laws of their nations. Kant regards at least this much class inequality as logically necessary.

He goes on to make a point that the elites do follow nationally-determined routes to power. This is mostly true, for now. You might say that he himself is a counter-example, a German-born political philosopher who is now teaching at Princeton and influencing our own political discussions as a member of America's elite. But America, in fairness, has always been exceptional in allowing for that kind of transition; his point that American elites are not free to join the French elite is fair. 

Yet he intends something stronger than that. He wants to distinguish that the truly international, cosmopolitans like himself are not actually part of the power elite. They may be 'cultural elites,' and it may be true of the cultural elites that they are free to 'go anywhere.' But the power elites are those who rise through the cursus honorum of their nation to positions of power -- and these courses are in fact national by nature. You cannot become the American Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff without going through the US military; you cannot become the French much-of-anything without being French, speaking French. "The point is that simplistic divisions of society into 'anywheres' and 'somewheres'... systematically obscure that actual decision-making elites remain far more national and far less liberal than is commonly thought."

So when he talks about 'secession' by this elite, he does not mean that they intend to depart from being Americans or Frenchmen or Germans and join a global elite. He means they intend to remain in their nations, and to dominate them. They are seceding from us, but only to create a barrier from above which they shall each rule in their separate nations.

Globalisation has not brought the end of nationalism but opportunities to retreat selectively from society – something from which economic and financial elites (again, not particularly liberal in their views) have especially benefited. They appear to be able to dispense with any real dependence on the rest of society (though of course they still rely on police, halfway-usable roads, and so on). With the globalisation of supply chains and trade regimes, workers and consumers do not have to be in the same country, and, as a consequence of the shift away from mass conscript armies, one also does not depend on one’s fellow citizens to serve as soldiers.

This is an observation more obvious to a German than to an American. We still mostly do depend on our fellow citizens to serve as soldiers and fight 'our' wars -- the wars for the global economic order. Germany does not. There are German soldiers, and they do deploy (as does the German navy). But they generally take support roles; sometimes in Afghanistan they would not go outside the wire in their whole deployment, and that was true in Iraq as well. The navy more often takes leadership positions, say in anti-pirate patrols off Africa, but this is a kind of honor bestowed upon them rather than an essential function. The German elites can rely on American soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines to do their fighting for them. As such, what do they care if the German people much approve of the wars?

So too the money:

As two distinguished economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman observe, “US firms have in 2016… booked more than 20 per cent of their non-US profits in ‘stateless entities’ – shell companies that are incorporated nowhere, and nowhere taxed. In effect, they have found a way to make $100bn in profits on what is essentially another planet.”

These kinds of secessions are not undertaken by “citizens of nowhere” (the money does not really end up nowhere); nor does any of this have anything to do with cultural or moral cosmopolitanism, even if right-wing populists, ever ready to wage culture wars, portray things that way.

So, here we are finally ready to see what part of this is the fault of 'the right wing' in his view. Until now I think he has had some pretty good points. And indeed, his first discussion of the populist view is to grant that it is partly true.

[T]he populists’ critique does contain a kernel of truth: some citizens do take themselves out of anything resembling a decent social contract, for instance relying on private tutors and private security for their gated communities. In France, an astonishing 35 per cent of people claim that they have nothing in common with their fellow citizens.

Such a dynamic is not entirely new: writing about French aristocrats, the 18th-century political theorist the Abbé Sieyes observed that “the privileged actually come to see themselves as another species of man”. In 1789, they discovered that they were not[.]

Weirdly this granting of our point obscures our point; most of us would prefer to shift from public education to public funding for students to seek private education. Mostly here in the reddest parts of America we provide our own security, with police a distant afterthought who might be called chiefly for record-keeping purposes (because they certainly won't get here in time to stop any crimes). What he's thinking of as a 'decent social contract' is already water under the bridge for many of us, though perhaps our parents might have agreed to it. Cities may still need heavier policing (thus 'cosmopolitan'?), but cities are already undesirable. 

The other secession is even less visible. An increasing number of citizens at the lower end of the income spectrum no longer vote or participate in politics in any other way.... such a secession becomes self-reinforcing: political parties, for the most part, have no reason to care for those who don’t care to vote; this in turn strengthens the impression of the poor that there’s nothing in it for them when it comes to politics.

So here is where I would expect Trump to come into the discussion, and indeed he now turns to right-wing populism. Many of my friends who occupy that space were excited by Trump, who for the first time was a candidate from outside the power elite -- though he was of course very wealthy, he was obviously aligned with themselves in at least some cultural ways (some of it genuine, some of it a pose he perfected, I think, from his time with the World Wrestling Federation).  

How does all this relate to the rise of right-wing populism and today’s threats to democracy? Like all parties, populist ones offer what the social theorist Pierre Bourdieu once called a “vision of divisions”: they provide, and promote, an interpretation of society’s major political fault lines – and then seek to mobilise citizens accordingly. That is not in itself dangerous. Democracy, after all, is about conflict, not consensus, or what James Mattis, Donald Trump’s ill-fated secretary of defence, called “fundamental friendliness” (which, lamenting the lack of “political unity” in his country, he was sorely missing in the second decade of the 21st century).

The promise of democracy is not that we shall all agree, and it does not require “uniformity of principles and habits”, as Alexander Hamilton had it. Rather, it is the guarantee that we have a fair chance of fighting for our side politically and then can live with the outcome of the struggle, because we will have another chance in a future election. It is not enough to complain that populists are divisive, for democratic politics is divisive by definition.

Indeed, much of the current divisiveness is over the fact that 'we shall have another chance' is becoming dubious to both sides of our polity. You have probably observed that the Biden administration is swinging for the fences, as if this is the last chance its side shall ever have to effect its agenda -- now swollen to $3.5 Trillion plus the bipartisan infrastructure bill. There is still talk about packing the Supreme Court, and other steps as necessary. They are not acting like a confident group who expects continual power. 

Likewise on the right, there is real (and I think partly quite justified) suspicion that the election process has been successfully hijacked on a replicable basis. We have reason to believe that most of the politicians 'on our side' are playing us off in favor of being part of the power elite; that we are offered the illusion of a choice, at best. This was true in the UK as well, where the difference between Labor and Tory was the difference between 'faster' and 'slower,' with the momentum nevertheless always in the same direction. The offer of genuine reforms -- such as Trumpian energy independence, rollbacks of illegal migration such that labor wages might actually rise (as they did begin to do), a renewal of American values and an order that appreciates the natural rights of independence instead of the 'positive rights' that require welfare transfers -- was not on the table. It was rhetorical at most. The 2020 election, as Time Magazine told us, was a bipartisan "conspiracy" (their chosen word) to put that genie back in the bottle. 

The rest of the current divisiveness stems from a genuine difference in values -- or so I think. He thinks otherwise.

The problem is that right-wing populists reduce all conflicts to questions of belonging, and then consider disagreement with their view automatically illegitimate (those who disagree must be traitors; Trump’s critics were not so much wrong on merit as, according to his fans, “un-American”).

That view misses that, from 2017-2021, the word "traitor" was pointed at Trump himself more often than anyone else -- and not just from the hard left, but from his own 'academics and journalists.' Trump and his supporters were also painted as un-American, both in terms of being outright "Putin stooges" to having allegedly missed important American values on immigration and anti-racism. I don't recall anyone from the cultural elite granting that his views might be legitimate; the power elite, meanwhile, arrested his National Security Adviser and his personal lawyer on its way to a Special Counsel investigation, two impeachments, and the 'secret history of the 2020 election' just mentioned.

Again, though, let's entertain the argument. He sees Trump as being more-of-the-same.

In this world-view, instead of being characterised by cross-cutting identities and interests, politics is simplified and rendered as a picture of one central conflict of existential importance (along the lines of “if the wrong side wins, we shall perish”). Thus, disquiet about the double secession is channelled [sic] by right-wing populists into collective fear or even a moral panic that “the country is being taken away from us”. In the US in particular, that fear helps to distract from questions of material distribution; what the political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson have called “plutocratic populism” combines relentless culture war with economic positions that are actually deeply unpopular even with conservative voters, but which are continuously obscured by conjuring up threats to the real – that is, white, Christian – America (or white Christian England, for that matter). While some Republicans speak out for a kind of “working-class conservatism” – just as the Conservative Party has its advocates of “red Toryism” – there is no way that the Republican Party in its present form will implement any such agenda. In this respect, Trump was typical: stoking the feelings of socio-economic-cum-cultural victimhood of his supporters, and then passing a tax cut of which 80 per cent went to the upper 1 per cent. While the jury is still out on Boris Johnson’s “levelling up” agenda, the fact is that One Nation Toryism has also often remained mere talk.

So, this almost sounds like his view is that populists really do have a point -- only that it is getting lost in the worries about American culture. The real point is that Trump should have cut taxes more on the middle class, perhaps. I tend to think he is misunderstanding what Trump did for ordinary people, in terms of rising wages and a booming economy (until the COVID shutdowns, which were an unprecedented artificial economic disaster whatever else they were). Things really were getting better for working people: my friends of that sort saw their small businesses booming, as rising wages meant people had money to spend on (say) custom motorcycles. This is perhaps the characteristic academics' myopia on how economics really works.

Here, then, lies the gravest danger to democracy: in the face of what they perceive as an existential threat, citizens are more willing to condone breaches of democratic principles and the rule of law (it is easier, for instance, to portray judges as “enemies of the people”). The Yale political scientist Milan Svolik cites a revealing “natural experiment” in social science to make the point: on the eve of an election in Montana in 2017, the Republican candidate Greg Gianforte “body-slammed” a Guardian reporter. Plenty of people had already voted by absentee ballot; only those going to the polls on election day – by which time three major Montana newspapers had withdrawn their endorsement of Gianforte – could directly punish the GOP politician for his behaviour. And what happened? In highly partisan precincts, party loyalty trumped respect for democratic norms. Populists seek to deepen a central division in society and simplify it into a question of whether you are for or against the leader. 

OK, so, here I agree that 'for or against the leader' is a bad model. I also note, though, that all this talk about fundamentally altering the American system -- packing the Supreme Court, new Senators, new states, etc. -- is coming from the other side. Democratic norms are collapsing across the board, and perhaps it is because of the fear of an existential threat. Yet this threat is clearly felt on both sides, and perhaps it is for good reason. 

Now this is one reason I've suggested we consider re-drawing political lines, so that perhaps it would make sense if we weren't all one nation any more. I think we could lower the threat by removing the power structure that each side fears falling into the other hands. This could be done peacefully, perhaps, if in fact we all (all of us not in the power elite) do in fact feel gravely threatened by it. It would enable people then to pursue effective solutions in smaller communities that share values and ideas about how to proceed. 

He has another idea.

So how should liberals and the left fight back? For one thing, they should resist an uncritical adoption of the anywheres-versus-somewheres frame. What’s more, they should resist the mainstreaming of the far right, or racism lite...

He is referring here to European parties that are considered 'far right,' some of whom really are intensely racist. It's not clear to me how much of the American right he considers here, but probably more than you or I would do. 

Getting people to re-engage in politics is fiendishly difficult.... There is Trump’s talk of “finding votes” in the sense of election subversion, but there is also the genuinely democratic practice of finding votes by seeking out those who consider themselves abandoned. And, once again, there is nothing undemocratic about drawing clear lines of conflict: criticising other parties is not the same as calling them illegitimate, populist-style.

This is blinkered, frankly. First of all it misstates Trump's phone call as election subversion rather than an attempt to get a critical eye cast on what is proving to have been a very dodgy election in Georgia. It also commits again the same error of treating 'calling them illegitimate' as an essentially populist strategy, when in fact it was the strategy of his own cultural elites throughout Trump's term -- which he apparently did not notice, in the way the fish is said not to notice the water. 

Any social democratic programme that seeks to re-engage voters must not be neoliberalism lite, in which deregulation is the default, along with low taxation and disciplining of workers through harsh incentives to accept more or less any job (all policies adopted by Gerhard Schröder, for instance). It must also involve a serious effort to explain which basic interests are shared by those who ceased participating altogether and those who abandoned social democratic parties for Green parties, or even the centre right (in some countries such as Germany).

It is not a mystery what these interests might be: most obviously, functioning national infrastructure and an education system that puts serious resources into helping the worst-off...

So, what we really need is a big infrastructure bill and more funding for public education. Well... 

It is not naive to think that Joe Biden might be providing the right model here.... he is making a surprisingly serious effort to address the secession at the top of society, going after tax avoidance. He is even trying to drag countries along which have made tax avoidance a national business model, and, for good measure, he might be able to drag the Thiels, Musks, Bezoses and Bransons of this world back down to earth.

That's an alternative view, all right, but again: let's entertain it. How different is what Biden is doing from what Xi is doing to Chinese billionaires? Is the point to drag them back into the service of the state, both through intensified taxation as well as by making escape impossible? Does this make it easier or harder to convince Facebook to censor the requested posts, or for Amazon or Apple to turn over to the FBI the requested customer records?

It is weird, in a way, that this issue does not even come up. The billionaires have an enviable lot in many respects, and it's hard to feel sorry for them. Yet a state that can break Jack Ma can certainly break you; and so too Jeff Bezos. A state that breaks Ma and/or Bezos into its service is even more dangerous yet, especially where -- as here -- the corporation's powers allow the state to act freely in areas where the Constitution intends to restrain it. 

It would be wrong, though, to conclude that liberals must disavow so-called identity politics and leave minorities to their fate (or at least their own devices). The most prominent movements of our time – Black Lives Matter and #MeToo – are not really about identity in any substantive sense; they are about claiming basic rights which others have long taken for granted.

I'll grant that one partially. Black Lives Matter certainly is about identity in a substantive sense, but there are also basic rights in play. Militarized policing is inappropriate in a democratic form of government, though the defunded anti-policing has proven even more dangerous to basic rights. 

He goes on about identity for some time, which I will leave for you to read if you like.

[I]t is far from obvious that conflicts over material interests can always be resolved in a rational, amiable manner. We have forgotten to what lengths the owners of concentrated wealth might go to defend themselves from claims to redistribution...  One reason why we have forgotten this is that no political leader has seriously tried to take anything from secessionists at the very top; Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and Barack Obama were part of a long historical arc of neoliberalism in which some progressive change was possible but the basics of the Reagan-Thatcher revolutions were never seriously questioned. 

I don't think that's quite right, but I see where he's going with it. I would say that George H. W. Bush basically betrayed the Reagan revolution, and that his own policies are the ones you can see at work in Clinton (NAFTA) and Obama (TPP/T-TIP) and Blair (T-TIP, European Union). Reagan and Thatcher both had a stronger sense that their nation was sacred and its interests must be defended, though neither fought major wars: peace through strength. Starting with Bush I, we deployed everywhere all the time. 

In the United States, the Republican Party has been radicalised in recent years and is bent on undermining democracy through voter suppression and election subversion – even though, economically, there hasn’t been much of a threat to its backers yet. That is an ominous sign of what reaction a genuine liberal commitment to addressing the double secession might provoke.

Obviously we disagree about the plausibility of this closing paragraph. I definitely do not think that Republican moves on election security are remotely forms of 'voter suppression and election subversion.' Just the opposite: one can suppress votes a lot more effectively by introducing fake votes than by stopping voters from casting votes, as I can only stop you from voting once but I can cancel out your vote and then add as many more as I need to do if I can fake votes. Obtaining elections that we can actually have confidence in is one of the most important issues of our time; without that confidence, collapse in the faith that 'you'll have another chance' is certain (and indeed proper under those circumstances). 

Nevertheless, I think it's been an interesting journey. He does identify some areas where divisions are otherwise than we often speak of them; for example, his own cultural elite is clearly in the service of the power elite, and often without recognizing it, but he does make a good case for considering them separately. 

The division between the power elite and the ultra-wealthy (and the case for them as sort-of seceding, and the power elite trying to recapture them at least for tax purposes) is also useful. We might say of his secession model that the rich have decided that they do not owe the rest of us any loyalty. On his view, it is the job of the state to enforce the loyalties upon them as he believes Biden is doing. Yet he misses, I think, that the power elite are not loyal to us either. The alternative power center represented by the billionaires are potentially a locus of resistance to an all-powerful state; or, if broken to the saddle by the state, their corporations offer a whole array of powers that may be used to totalize the control the state can exercise over ordinary people. This is clearly what China intends, but it is also what Australia is currently attempting to effect in New South Wales (whether or not you think they are justified in doing so). This is a perilous trend whose danger I do not think he appreciates. 

What loyalties do we owe each other, us and the billionaires, us and the power elite, us and the cultural elite? We can begin by saying that loyalty is a two-way street. Even Feudal loyalties are owed both upwards and downwards. The knight defends his lord's position, but in return is upheld in his rights. The peasant must work the lord's land a certain number of days a year, but in return the lord and his knights protect the peasant's property. A refusal of the duties in either direction breaks the bond. 

If there has in fact been a 'double secession,' then, it makes a kind of sense. If the rich have seceded from loyalty to fellow Americans, the poor might also. If the power elite do not intend to respect the limits of the Constitution here in America, as by convincing or compelling corporate cooperation in exceeding those limits, no wonder the poorer Americans disengage from the political process and try to go their own way with as little government in their lives as possible. There's a kind of basic sense to that, for the violation of loyalty from above means that no loyalty is really owed from below. 

That leaves us in a place where the bonds are already broken, and we are already free to leave -- morally at least. The power of the state may compel obedience, but it cannot compel loyalty. 

Müller wants to say that a new social democratic program might renew our bonds of loyalty. What if Biden were able to take from the rich, and give us better infrastructure and public education? By making Bezos perform his duties of loyalty, he might encourage us to feel anew the bonds of loyalty through repaired roads and bridges, and children who can do higher math and are ready for the world of work or of college. 

That program may make more sense in Europe than here. Here it misses the breakdown in faith in our systems of education and construction. I think most people on the right believe that the best thing that could happen to our ability to educate our children is the end of public school, not its reform (and certainly not more money for it). Likewise we could easily build bridges and roads if it weren't for the onion-layers of government standing between us and any sort of public works project. Even imagining the program he offers in the best possible light, it is hard to imagine most poorer Americans going for it, especially on the right but not only there. Black America is rightly suspicious of public schools, and supportive of school choice voucher programs, given their experience.

Still, there were numerous points worth considering, and I think the piece was enriching. We may yet disagree, but perhaps we understand more clearly all the same.