Why I Am A (Sometimes) Populist

Daniel Pipes published an opinion piece in the Washington Times recently entitled Why I Am Not a Populist (www.danielpipes.org/19157/why-I-am-not-a-populist).  In his article, Pipes takes issue with the populist movement.  He opens his essay with, “Populism has made great strides in the West.  But it is misguided, and I greatly hope it fails.”  Pipes goes on to discredit populism and instead places the lion’s share of the blame on the Left.  Indeed, his closing line in his essay is, “So, be smart and oppose the Left, not the elite.”

When the State gets too remote and unaccountable to the people, populism bubbles up.  Brexit was a populist reaction to the unaccounatability of rule makers in Brussels.  In the U.S., it was regulators accountable to no one prescribing rules about toilet tanks, mortgages, microwave wattage, vaping and such.  For a time, the hottest job in America was “Chief Compliance Officer.”  When COMPLIANCE is the goal of a corporation, you know that things need to be shaken up.  Part of populism is hacking back on the thicket of regulations and spending more time answering to customers rather than bossy, self-important government bureaucrats.  What Dr. Pipes misses is that in certain industries, the corporate elite on the right actually LOVE bureaucrats.   The bureaucrats keep the small, agile competitors pinned down and smothered with rules and regulations.

Populism seeks to address fundamental imbalance in the economic system.  Even uber-capitalist Cliff Asness observed that the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street had a great deal of overlap in the things they were complaining about, even though one movement was from the right, the other from the Left.  This became more pronounced when the government backstopped Wall Street, preserved the net worths and bonuses of the bankers, but let Main Street get foreclosed out. 

One of the most striking memes was one that said:  We send our kids to fight wars in the Middle East. They (John Kerry, Joe Biden) send their kids to Ukraine.  It gains the most traction when children of the elite skirt consequences of bad behavior or gains unfair advantage and is especially operative when those that gain advantage do so solely out of political connections.  Barack Obama piously announced that “at a certain point, you’ve made enough money,” then a few years later bought an $11.7 million home on Martha’s Vineyard.  Hunter Biden, by all accounts is a ne’er do well, yet was able to raise a $1.5 billion fund from the Chinese and land a board seat on a Ukrainian energy company.  Outside the government elite cashing in,  populism also gains momentum when we learn that the rich were buying their kids’ way into elite schools, and when the captain of a failed business like We Work walks away with $1.7 billion package as thousands of employees are laid off.

No discussion of populism would  be complete without mentioning China.  The conventional wisdom among conservatives was that once China got richer, a middle class would bubble up and demand more freedom and more democratic structures in China.   As recently as two years ago, Nobel Prize winner Eugene Fama was still asserting such things.  The opposite occurred.  China has become more totalitarian and more militarily assertive.  China has stolen our intellectual property, killed our youth by flooding our streets with fentanyl, hacked our government personnel files, enabled North Korea’s nuclear program, manipulated its currency, and became militarily assertive.  Meanwhile, private equity bought up companies, stripped them and shipped the jobs to China.  As I often say, “free traders don’t steal each others’ stuff.”  The populist movement allowed us to stiffen our backs vis-à-vis China.  Traditional conservatives were content to wait patiently until China changed its behavior, which grew worse.

Populism pushes back against social norms that are being violated.  While the U.S. was ready to accept marriage equality, it was not ready to accept transgender people in the military, in women’s locker rooms, competing athletically with women and girls and “drag queen story hours” for children.  It is a reaction to schools banning Christmas cards, daddy-daughter dances, and Halloween celebrations.  It rejects safe spaces, trigger warning and blaming all ills on the “patriarchy” or “colonialism” or “white privilege.”  For it is middle aged white males that have suffered an increase in mortality rates after years of decline, mostly due to alcoholism, drug abuse and suicides.  Populists lets P.C. criticism bounce off and object to objectionable things (like unfettered abortion until the moment of birth) while conservatives tiptoe around these issues.

Populism defends national sovereignty and opposes open borders.  Populists are willing to challenge conventional wisdom about immigration and ask hard questions traditional conservatives will not ask.  Globalists, like London mayor Sadiq Khan assert that terrorism is “part and parcel” of urban life.  Angela Merkel recently asserted that limits on free speech would be needed to ensure a cohesive society.  Populists, after events like the London Bridge attacks and Pensacola attacks last week whether Islam is fundamentally compatible with the West, and whether training Saudi pilots is a good idea.  Likewise, working people take umbrage with handing out free education and health care to people that came here illegally.  Why should I have to work overtime and delay my retirement so I can pay for the education of kids from Guatemala and pay for their health care?  What about me and my kids?  Populists will at least ask these questions.  Populists intuitively understand that the globalists are working diligently to erode the nation-state, and thereby make their voices irrelevant, and are willing to oppose the “abolish ICE” crowd.

In my view, the two most pivotal moment of the 2016 campaign came when Hillary wrote off Trump supporters as “deplorables” and when Trump declared at the 2016 Republican National Convention, “I am your voice.”  The Democratic party had not only forgotten them, but held them in contempt.  The Republican establishment had protected its wealthy base with the bailouts following the Great Recession.  This left a wide opening for the somewhat semi-populist Donald Trump. 

Is populism guilty of being ham-fisted and  of offering simplistic responses to complex problems as Dr. Pipes asserts?  Sure.   Does the leftist elite bear a disproportionate share of the blame for general discontent among our citizens?  Absolutely. Populists do oversimplify and misdiagnose.  Donald Trump’s views on the coal industry and manufacturing are simply not borne out by the facts.  But I believe that Dr. Pipes has underestimated some of the forces involved in the rise of populism.  I do not believe it is simply a left/right problem.  It must be seen in light of economic forces, social norms and our identity as a nation and as a people.  

I don’t think Dr. Pipes needs to worry about populism “succeeding.”  It will burn itself out in time. He is correct in that it is brash and cloddy and grows tiresome like the loud drunk at a party.  In the meantime, however, populism is serving a very useful function, especially in this time when the Left has gotten bolder and more ferocious (e.g. the Squad), populists stand up to them in ways that traditional conservatives could never bring themselves to do.  Populists should be viewed as offensive linemen in football.  They do some of the inglorious blocking and work that others don’t have the stomach for so that conservatives and libertarians aren’t overwhelmed by the Left.

Dr. Pipes, I think,  underestimates the wrath of common folks against the political elite.  In Great Britain and in the U.S., the political elite have become distant and unresponsive to the will of the electorate, and, indeed, sometimes openly contemptuous of it.  In the U.K., years of wrangling and calls for a second referendum have ground Brexit to a halt.  Here, the political elite have worked frantically for 3 years to unwind an election.  With traditional watchdogs like the press and the ACLU safely turned into propaganda arms for the Left, the vast majority of common working people begin to feel that there is no one advocating for them. Populists move in to that empty space.

Fear not, Dr. Pipes.  Populism won’t be permanent.  It simply pops up at certain times when it is needed.  And that time is now.  Then its inherent flaws will be its undoing and it will go away.