Do the Populists Have a Point?
I have a new piece up at Discourse Magazine asking, “Do the Populists Have a Point?” A lot of the people who endorse the current, conservative version of populism do so because they are incandescently outraged at real or imagined failures of “the elites”—however they interpret that term—which therefore justifies a resort to a populist strongman as the answer.
In practice, I think this is less a coherent piece of reasoning than it is an excuse to build your politics around who you hate rather than what you stand for. But I wanted to take seriously this issue of the failures, biases, and yes, sometimes the outright corruption of “the elites,” because it is certainly true. People in positions of power and authority are prone to abuse that position.
The problem I have with the populists is that this is not a new and unprecedented problem that they just discovered, which is often how they treat it. Instead, it is the normal condition of human life, and the liberal system the populists usually want to tear down was developed over centuries as a solution to that problem.
If the elites are prone to groupthink, blind spots and partisanship—so, dear reader, are you.
The folly of the populists is that they rebel against the real and imagined corruption of “the elites” and “the Establishment”—and then seek to replace them with a new elite that is usually worse. They dismiss the “so-called experts,” but lacking any genuine expertise of their own, they fill the vacuum by embracing crackpot notions and conspiracy theories.
After all, a belief in conspiracies is implicit in the populist worldview. The experts are not merely fallible, not merely self-dealing or even sometimes dishonest, they are actively and constantly lying to you. It’s all a big cover-up, and everyone is in on it. In this view, the universal rejection of an idea by the mainstream—by experts, by fact-checkers, by the media—is the greatest recommendation for it….
Hence the populist appeal of the insane Q-Anon conspiracy theory, which stops just shy of claiming that the elites are secretly lizard people and merely claims that they are secretly pedophiles. This evidence-free theory simulates a form of skepticism, urging you to distrust the mainstream narratives, while actually inculcating a habit of credulity: a willingness to believe whatever fanciful notion some random person on YouTube has pieced together from cryptic, anonymous clues.
I go on to explain how the institutions of a liberal society were designed to protect against fads and delusions, whether they come from “the elites” or from “the people.”
Takedown
There are two links buried in that piece that I would like to bring to special attention. One issue I deal with briefly is a complaint about a federal public health official asking privately for a “takedown” of a manifesto in favor of a “herd immunity” approach to covid. Some of the outrage about this case comes from the linguistic ambiguity of the word “takedown.” It can mean taking something down, i.e., removing it from press reports or the Internet, as a form of censorship. But that was never even tried in this case, so it is clear what was intended was the second meaning of “takedown”: a comprehensive debunking. In this second meaning, the request was not a crackdown on free speech but an exercise of it.
But this does bring up the issue of government “jawboning,” a kind of grey area in which government does not actually censor something but simply lets it be known that it would like private companies to discourage the dissemination of certain ideas. This can amount to indirect censorship through government pressure. But like I said, it is a grey area, because government officials are also entitled to exercise their own right to speech, particularly those in public health whose jobs is to deliver a message to the public. If you are the head of the National Institutes for Health, isn’t it your responsibility to refute medical claims that you regard as nonsense?
I found this article helpful in untangling the legal and constitutional issues around “jawboning.” Basically, there are two existing cases that establish different standards for what would be considered indirect coercion of speech—one standard that is looser and one that is much narrower—and litigation on specific cases is going to be necessary to establish more consistent standards for what constitutes a “takedown” in the coercive sense and what counts as a “takedown” in the persuasive sense.
The System Worked, and Everyone Hates It
The other link is to the apparent results of the Durham investigation, the Trump administration’s answer to the Mueller investigation. The Mueller investigation was launched to look into evidence that the Russians were attempting to interfere with the 2016 presidential election, including by colluding with the Trump campaign. The Durham investigation was launched to look into the origins of the Mueller investigation, seeking evidence of a “deep state” conspiracy to smear Trump.
Well, the Durham investigate is winding down, and the results are predictably underwhelming.
When John H. Durham was assigned by the Justice Department in 2019 to examine the origins of the investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, President Donald J. Trump and his supporters expressed a belief that the inquiry would prove that a “deep state” conspiracy including top Obama-era officials had worked to sabotage him.
Now Mr. Durham appears to be winding down his three-year inquiry without anything close to the results Mr. Trump was seeking. The grand jury that Mr. Durham has recently used to hear evidence has expired, and while he could convene another, there are currently no plans to do so, three people familiar with the matter said….
Over the course of his inquiry, Mr. Durham has developed cases against two people accused of lying to the F.B.I. in relation to outside efforts to investigate purported Trump-Russia ties, but he has not charged any conspiracy or put any high-level officials on trial. The recent developments suggest that the chances of any more indictments are remote.
Durham is supposed to produce a report that will come out after the midterm election, at which point people will argue about it on Twitter for about five hours, and then it will disappear.
So there’s a certain symmetry to the Mueller and Durham investigations. The Mueller report contained some worthwhile information on Russian attempts at election interference, which nobody cared about, and it yielded a successful prosecution against Trump crony Paul Manafort for unrelated financial fraud. But it never showed direct collusion between Trump and Russia and never yielded a high-level indictment. The Durham investigation is going to yield a fewer minor charges against small fry but no uncovering of a vast conspiracy.
This is going to be one of those cases where the system worked. The FBI investigated two big and important stories, but despite the potential bias of the investigators, the rules of evidence prevented them from merely persecuting their enemies. (And if you think just being investigated is a form of persecution, I would rather err in the direction of more scrutiny of political leaders rather than less.) And yet everyone is disappointed in the results.
So the system worked, and everyone hates it.
I say that the Durham results are predictably underwhelming because I predicted it.
The shadow of Watergate lures political partisans with the prospect of winning their political battles by making an end run around ordinary politics. The scandal will break open, they fantasize, there will be BOMBSHELL REVELATIONS, it will lead ALL THE WAY TO THE TOP, and their political opponents will be suddenly and catastrophically discredited. But people have tried this with every president since Nixon, in a series of overblown and underwhelming scandals. They tried it with Reagan, with Clinton, with Bush, with Obama, and now with Trump. It has not turned out to be the most rewarding political or psychological investment to make.
Want to check the power of a president you despise? Try focusing on midterm congressional elections and maybe not being dismissive and condescending toward ordinary voters for a few months….
But stop wasting our time and energy trying to make Watergate happen.
That last part is particularly timely advice. More on the midterm elections in the coming weeks.
In the meantime, I will be out in California on Thursday for the Atlas Society Gala. You can see me there in the morning in a panel on “Objectivism and Technological Trends,” which is an opportunity for me to go back and revisit my interest in “futurism.”
Then the following week, on October 15, I’ll be in Miami, speaking at Students for Liberty’s LibertyCon, where my topic will be “Philosophy: Who Needs It,” in which I talk about how to strengthen the ideological foundations of a free society. Interestingly, while this will be delivered to a more libertarian audience, I will be using material I’ve been preparing for a center-left “liberal” audience. It all applies universally.
Hopefully, I will see some of you at these events.
Finally, I want to mention again the next run of my writing course, “Secrets of Effective Writing.”
An intellectual contest isn't necessarily won by the side that has the best ideas. It is won by the side that is best at presenting and arguing for its ideas. Learn how to become more effective at presenting your ideas.
This is a ten-week course that teaches the secrets of becoming an effective writer. I teach you how to structure your writing to make it clearer and more powerful, how to manage the writing process to make it smoother, faster, and less painful, how to break the editing process into manageable stages, and how to master the basics of style and make your writing more colorful and engaging. The course is based on what I have learned from thirty years as a successful professional writer.
This course requires no specialized knowledge or previous experience, just a sense that you have something to say and a desire to get better at saying it. There will be a 90-minute class via Zoom once a week and, since writing has to be learned by doing, there will be brief assignments in between that we will analyze in class. Students will also receive one-on-one feedback on their submissions.
Join us and learn how to become a more persuasive advocate for reason and liberty.
The live lectures will be on Tuesday nights, from 7:00 to 8:30, starting October 25. You can attend live, but I have a few people in faraway time zones, so I will be making recordings of the class available to them. The price is $750 per person, and there are a still a few spots left, so drop me a line at rwt@tracinski.com if you’re interested.
Also, it looks like I have a few people who can’t afford the full price, so I am looking for donors who are willing to help cover the cost for young writers and students. If you’re willing to do that, please also contact me at rwt@tracinski.com.
"During the pandemic, their messaging was sometimes confused and contradictory, often portraying a false confidence in the face of real uncertainty, which caused some policies, such as school closings, to continue way too long." - school closing was never justified at all. There, your absurd claim destroyed in one sentence.
"The liberal institution of a free press serves to subject political leaders to scrutiny and require them to justify their views in answer to their critics. Much of the crying about “free speech” among the populists, however, is a demand that they be shielded from criticism. Take the complaint about Francis Collins, the head of the National Institutes of Health, asking about a “quick and devastating” rejoinder to the Great Barrington Declaration, a manifesto by COVID skeptics demanding that we adopt a strategy of “herd immunity” (which amounts to just doing nothing and letting everyone get the disease). This request was touted as “collusion” in government censorship, but the real story is the exact opposite.
Collins’ request was answered by Anthony Fauci—who did what? Did he send a government agency to censor wrong ideas? No, Fauci replied by sending links to several articles already published independently—in Wired, The Nation and elsewhere—challenging the premises behind the herd immunity claims. (And they were right. More than a million deaths later, we still have not achieved this supposed herd immunity.)"
No, they were not right at all, Fauci was never right, the Great Barrington Declaration was both correct and scientific, Fauci was as wrong as it was possible to be in this whole affair.
Stop pretending there is a scientific justification for lockdown because there isn't one, it is mediaeval balderdash, correctly abandoned centuries ago as policy and revived by the adoption of mediaevalist philosophy.
You're supposed to be an Objectivist so stop pretending the post of Doctator, the post held by the likes of Anthony Fauci, Chris Whitty and every other fake science hack across the world, is rationally justifiable. The post should not exist, just as the post of Chairman of the Federal Reserve should not exist.
"One of the authors of the declaration went on to complain that he was “the subject of a propaganda attack by my own government,” as opposed to “discussion and engagement.” But what he got was discussion and engagement—in the form of criticism in the media. That is what the populists, experts at playing the victim, find to be unacceptable. Government scientific officials, particularly in public health, must not merely refrain from censorship. They must refrain from holding or expressing their own views."
No, what he got was bullying and censorship by proxy, by propaganda because all that Anthony Fauci ever presented was propaganda.
“In court, these claims evaporate one by one when they are required to meet well-established rules of evidence and when—unlike in the media—there are distinct penalties for flagrant lying.”
Too bad this was not the case for the guy who perjured himself saying, “I did not have sex with that woman.”