Friday, May 24, 2019

Populism

I am not qualified to try to define or analyze populism, and other people who are much more qualified have written about it, but I nevertheless want to think about it, and I think there's a chance, however small, that I might end up saying something worthwhile that hasn't already been said. So here goes.

I think that, at least roughly (and technological advances aside), what a lot of people want is the kind of world portrayed in the Asterix books. There, people live in villages or small towns in which there is one blacksmith, one fishmonger, and so on, or perhaps a small number who, to the amusement of others, are rivals. Employment is basically self-employment, and the secrets to success are hard work, skill, and competitive pricing. So it's fair, and everyone benefits (with possible exceptions: see below). Each village in a given province is similar, but every province or country has its own peculiar culture. The British drink a lot of tea, the Spanish take siestas, etc. People everywhere are basically the same, but there is an entertaining assortment of cultures.

I'm sure things were never quite so rosy as this picture suggests. There have always been wars and plagues and serious inequalities of wealth and freedom. But it seems to be roughly what life was like before the industrial revolution, at least when times were good. The big disruptor of the Asterix model was industrialization, which means the end of cottage industry and leads more people to move into cities. This means there is greater efficiency and profit, but less equality. And if family and local charity were ever enough to take care of old, sick, disabled, and otherwise unlucky people (which is doubtful), they aren't any more.

Another disruptor is feminism (and, in the United States, the civil rights movement). The women in Asterix are much less likely than men to have their own businesses. This is still true, but less so (it seems to me, as I should add to every sentence here). This progress in terms of opportunities for women is good, but it means there is more competition for the fishmonger, etc., and a less cushy life at home as well. So women have more options and are, presumably, happier (which could also benefit men), but life is basically worse for men than it was. Justly, but people don't always care as much about justice as they do about their own comfort.

Thirdly there is globalization or free trade. Like industrialization and feminism, this is good overall, but it has its losers. If goods, including jobs, can easily move from one country to another then this is good for the world's poor (who need it most) as well as for business owners (who don't), but at least potentially bad for those in between, who perhaps find that they can buy cars more cheaply but no longer have as good a job as they once did. Globalization also means that each place comes to seem less unique and more like anywhere else (even if this appearance is combined with persistent deep differences of some kind).

Populism is unhappy about these trends. Hardly anyone opposes the industrial revolution, but plenty of people are unhappy about at least some of its effects. The left-wing version of populism, if there really is such a thing, opposes globalization and, especially, inequality. The right-wing version (which is much more noticeable) opposes feminism and globalization. But there is often more to it than this. Here's a list of other features:
  • Fight response (as in fight or flight). People on the right, and especially on the far right, like military stuff, but they especially seem to think of it as a necessary response to a perceived threat. Hence the 'response' part. I suppose this is part of why such people are called reactionaries.
  • Racism. The Asterix books are not exactly free of racism, even if it is intended to be friendly or at least inoffensive. And populism is always likely to involve stereotypes and caricature. But the right-wing version embraces this aspect of populism and digs its heels in (and mixes its metaphors). Cultures are not (regarded as) just different: some are (regarded as) better than others. And the (supposedly) better ones just happen to be those that come from around here, wherever here is in any particular case.
  • Social Darwinism. A major reason why cultures cannot be thought of as simply different is because they are conceived as being in competition with one another. This relates also to the fight response feature of this kind of mindset. Others are (perceived as) a threat. Their appearance requires a defensive response. So globalization, increased openness to interaction with strangers, just as such, is scary. 
  • Tribalism. This is related to racism but prior to it. A tribalist, in my sense, need not think of his or her tribe as better than any other. But they will think of themselves as a member of this or that tribe (rather than as simply an individual). Jonathan Haidt, if I'm remembering correctly, has found that conservative people tend to be sports fans, affiliating themselves with groups, such as sports teams. This is an aspect of Aristotle's idea of the political animal: we are naturally social beings. It relates also to the idea of justice found in Book I of Plato's Republic (but rejected by Socrates) that justice is a matter of helping one's friends and hurting one's enemies.
  • Relativism. Tribalism is also part of Devlin's idea that people need a society, which in turn depends on shared morals, and that these morals need not be particularly good. We just need to have some sort of code, and serious threats to this code cannot be permitted. The conventions matter much less than that we conform to them. This is hard to take seriously unless we abandon the idea that one set of conventions can be better than another. And (so?) one kind of right-wing person is a relativist about ethics. We are better than them, but not in a particularly ethical way. Betterness is more a matter of mere feeling. This is likely to be expressed in more concrete terms--we are more intelligent than them, more ethical, and so on--but if any specific claim to superiority is disproved it will be met with an "Ah, well, nevertheless..." What matters is not so much being better, or even good, as expressing and believing in the superiority of one's own tribe.
  • Irrationality, by which I mean positive hostility to reason (and science, expertise, etc.). Loyalty to the code of one's tribe means rejecting the very idea of objective or dispassionate assessment of norms. (Which is why I think it's questionable to link objectivity with white supremacy culture.) Passion must trump reason. And one's own tribe, and those like it, must be preferred to others, so there can be no respect for the "global community" or humanity in general. The Enlightenment can be championed as a feather in the hat of one's own tribe (if one happens to be European or white or more or less plausibly related in some such way to the Enlightenment), but actual Enlightenment ideals such as human rights or the value of reason (except as understood in tribal terms) are to be rejected. (Which all makes it unsurprising that populists are more likely to believe conspiracy theories.)
  • Anti-individualism. The group and its conventions come first, and assertions of one's own identity or ethics are a threat to this. They ought not to be argued against (although there might be some show of 'arguing', especially if one regards the Enlightenment as a badge of honor as described above) but should be suppressed in other ways, such as mockery and violence. So being trans or vegan, or different in many other ways, is not allowed. Once a kind of difference is conventionally accepted, though, then it's OK. So being gay might be accepted, but any kind of difference is always likely to be (regarded as) dangerous.
  • Immorality, i.e., positive opposition to (some) ethical behavior. The conscience, so far as it is the voice of reason or individual belief, is not to be trusted. It must be overcome. This takes "strength." And strength is already considered a virtue because of the importance of fight response, social Darwinism, and manliness.    
  • Manliness. The ideal person is a not-too-rational team player who is willing to fight, a manly man. This is likely to be an especially popular view among anti-feminists. There's been a lot of attention paid to young incels, but there are also a lot of bitter, divorced, older men out there. 
I don't mean that every populist has all of these features. But they do seem to go together, in practice as well as in theory, and perhaps thinking them through like this helps to bring the connections out.

OK, that's about all I have. If you're disappointed, try this instead: "What We Know Now About Bias". 

7 comments:

  1. Three considerations:

    1)

    In the developed Western world, only a tiny minority of people has ever held a political worldview that is anything like internally coherent or clearly articulated. Based on empirical survey data from the United States of the 1950s, Philip Converse estimated the figure at something like 10% in his classic 1964 paper "The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics" (which you have probably never heard of, but which is a huge classic of the "On Denoting" or "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" type in political science). Other research from other times and places has had quite similar results.

    Among other things, this means that political self-identification by individuals is as good as nothing in indicating the political views the individuals really hold. For instance, people who would call themselves right-wing if asked may in reality be prepared to support a degree of redistribution of income that would put them to the left of even Marx (as empirical research done in the contemporary United States indicates). And the same goes for people calling themselves left-wing. Or "conservative" or "liberal" or "socialist" or whatnot. There is a close analogy here to D. Z. Phillips's philosophy of religion, which similarly warned ceaselessly against taking self-identification as a reliable indicator of the real religious convictions of individuals.

    2)

    In the Western world prior to the industrial revolution, and even well into the industrial revolution, most people had only the flimsiest Plato's-cave-like impressions of anything beyond their own immediate sphere of experience. The "entertaining assortment of cultures", as you call it, of the Asterix books was not part of their world. For a hint of what was, read the reports of the English factory inspectors of the 1860s quoted by Marx in Capital (Vol. 1, Ch. 10):

    "Jeremiah Haynes, age 12 – 'Four times four is 8; 4 fours are 16. A king is him that has all the money and gold. We have a king (told it is a Queen), they call her the Princess Alexandra. Told that she married the Queen's son. The Queen's son is the Princess Alexandra. A Princess is a man.' William Turner, age 12 – 'Don't live in England. Think it is a country, but didn't know before.' John Morris, age 14 – 'Have heard say that God made the world, and that all the people was drowned but one, heard say that one was a little bird.' William Smith, age 15 – 'God made man, man made woman.' Edward Taylor, age 15 – 'Do not know of London.' Henry Matthewman, age 17 – '[...] The devil is a good person. I don't know where he lives. Christ was a wicked man.'"

    "Don't live in England. Think it is a country." "Do not know of London." The point being that most people did not know even what nation they themselves were supposed to belong to. If asked where they were from, they would either be at a loss for words, or give the name of their own home village at most. (Note that the Asterix village does not even have a name!) For people to be able to stereotype and caricature foreign nations or cultures, they will first have to have some idea of belonging to some particular culture or nation themselves. But this idea is itself a quite shockingly late development.

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  2. 3)

    The Asterix metaphor is an excellent one, but only provided that we constantly keep in mind that the Asterix books were primarily a comical allegory for late-20th-century France, and were of course consciously intended to be such. And indeed, the most important statistical predictor of being attracted by the type of populism which clearly inspired this blog post of yours here, is not financial situation (as the globalisation-related hypothesis would have it), or gender (as the feminism-related hypothesis would have it), but age. One might say that it is a populism of those who have a partly true, partly false, but above all vague autobiographical memory of how closely their own country used to resemble the Asterix village at some point during the 20th century. Which point exactly is almost always left unspecified.

    (You write at the end that "[t]here's been a lot of attention paid to young incels, but there are also a lot of bitter, divorced, older men out there": not only that, but there are more of them many times over.)

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    1. Thanks, Tommi.

      Yes, I'm sure most people's political views, such as they are, are not coherent. Most people know very little and have not thought through many, if any, issues. They might have strong allegiances to certain people or parties or ideas, but they are far from being political scientists or philosophers. (And political philosophers, being human beings, are quite likely to have some inconsistencies in their views.)

      The entertaining assortment of cultures is a picture of the world that might never have been true and might well be very recent. But I think it's an influential, and not inherently very racist, ideal. It easily becomes very racist in practice, though, as foreigners are treated as suitable butts of jokes.

      Anyway, I'm rambling when I really just mean that I agree with you. Thanks for bringing up the point about age, too. That's very important.

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  3. It puzzles me that social commentators as a whole have not worked up an analysis of the relationship between populism and anti-intellectualism.

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    1. I can't point you to one, I'm afraid, but I'd be very surprised if they hadn't.

      One other point that I meant to make in response to Tommi but forgot is that I think people's financial situation does make a difference. The people who seem most right-wing on Facebook (I don't know any far-right people who I see regularly in real life) are young white men whose careers don't seem to be very successful. I don't mean that this makes being very right-wing inevitable or excusable, but it is surely likely to create frustration that they might then direct towards people they see as rivals for good jobs. Matt Yglesias tends to mock the idea that economic insecurity has driven the right-wing surge (seeming to think that racism is the obvious root cause), but the two seem connected to me. Economically successful people can certainly be racist (perhaps especially if they attribute their success to some inherent trait such as IQ or work ethic rather than luck and privilege), but those who do badly, or just worse than they had expected growing up, are likely to look for someone to blame.

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    2. Yes, the financial thing is certainly a significant contributing cause, only not the single most important one. Your Facebook experience reminded me of the subsection "Libertarians" in Mark Rosenfelder's essay "The last century: What the heck was that?".

      As far as the United States go, I'm in the dark as to what sort of analysis of the relation between anti-intellectualism and populism is being called for. The relation has been discussed again and again, and another piece of social scientific writing from 1964, Richard Hofstadter's "The Paranoid Style in American Politics", is one of the most dissected, referred-to and reprinted texts on American politics ever to be published. If there is currently a perceived absence of analysis of the relation between anti-intellectualism and populism, it is probably due to a recoiling from what has arguably been an overemphasis on the subject (for which view the historian Leo Ribuffo is the Yglesias-type go-to guy; see e.g. here, and I have written on this myself as well, although once again sadly not in English).

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