What Is to Be Done?

CrowdSource 9.9.2024

Welcome to CrowdSource, your weekly guided tour of the latest intellectual disputes, ideological disagreements, and national debates that piqued our interest (or inflamed our passions). This week: populism!

Join us! CrowdSource features the best comments from The Crowd — our cherished readers and subscribers who, with their comments and emails, help make Wisdom of Crowds what it is.

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What is Populism?

“Populism has not only been demoted: it has also been denigrated.” So wrote the Argentine philosopher Ernesto Laclau. As we approach a third election pitting a so-called American populist against the Establishment, we can be sure of one thing: populism must be understood.

What is populism? And how should our society respond to its rise?

Here’s a sampling of some of the more worthy recent attempts to wrestle with these perennial political questions.

Noah Millman in the New York Times:

• Definition: An Immune Reaction. “Populism is better understood as a kind of immune reaction within a democracy, a warning to more institutionally oriented parties that they have lost an essential connection with their electorate — culturally, economically or both.”

• Response: Co-option. “The more institutional parties must co-opt populism’s most potent policy prescriptions and its most popular cultural positions in order to restore trust in the system itself and stand against the kind of routine elite self-dealing that populism feeds on.”

Shikha Dalmia in The UnPopulist:

• Definition: Populism is Stealth Authoritarianism. “Populism, the rule of many, and authoritarianism … are intimately related because wherever populism appears, so do various forms of illiberalism that if allowed to run their course result in strongman politics with its contempt for dispersed power, checks and balances, freedom of the press, and other similar constraints on one-man (or woman) rule.”

• Response: Resist and Double-Down. “If these movements aren’t nipped, it is hardly alarmism to suggest things could turn much nastier in some of these countries than they did in the Latin American nations under the sway of left-wing populism. That is why The UnPopulist seeks to highlight, address, and resist these movements.”

Michael Brendan Dougherty in the National Review:

• Definition: Populism is a Challenge to the Elite. “Populism has worked, in its way: It challenged the elite, and exposed them. That’s the good side of populism, clearing out the corrupt. The bad side of populism is when it empowers a new demagogic strongman, or anti-elite.”

• Response: Help American Men. “We need a serious education agenda that forms our brightest to have virtues beyond workaholism and good taste. They need an ethic of service, even to those who are unlike themselves. … If I had one suggestion for where to start, it would be with an agenda for young boys, who continue to fall behind in achievement, whose skills are increasingly devalued, and who are too often formed to live a life of passivity.”

Regardless of your views on populism, there’s some sound advice in this 2018 article by our own

Damir Marusic

. Populists might be authoritarians or demagogues, Damir argues, but they raise real issues that must be confronted politically, in the democratic arena of debate and elections. These issues can’t be wished away, swept under the rug, declared taboo, or banished from the realm.

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From the Crowd

• Renowned author and critic George Scialabba entered into a very interesting debate with David Polansky over Polansky’s essay, “Pundit Don’t Preach.” Here’s George’s opening salvo, but read be sure to read the whole thing.

I respectfully disagree. To begin with, no one who knows anything about the history of American foreign policy can find it the least bit plausible that concern for legality and morality has played even the smallest part in it, whatever George Kennan says. To see how ridiculous this claim is, have a look at any of Noam Chomsky's many books, especially his new one, The Myth of American Idealism.

It’s also absurd to suggest that the obstacle to a Middle Eastern settlement is too much moral sentiment. On the contrary, the near-complete lack of Israeli recognition of the profound harm they have occasioned the Palestinians in 1948 and since is the primary cause of the conflict. Are you seriously suggesting that the development of a moral conscience among the rabidly chauvinistic Israeli right would not be the first step toward peace?

More fundamentally, any attempt to radically separate the moral and the prudential is incoherent. It is impossible to frame an argument — any argument — without knowing what one wants or what, in the most general sense, is desirable. Of course, as a matter of logic, one can say: “If X, then Y.” But as a matter of politics, the next question is always: “Why Y?”

David Hume made this point long ago: “Reason is always, and ought to be, a servant of the passions.” Richard Rorty in Consequences of Pragmatism and Michael Walzer in several books have shown how to apply Hume’s insight to contemporary moral reasoning.

See you next week!

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