“Despotism, suspicious by its very nature, views the separation of men as the best guarantee of its own permanence and usually does all it can to keep them in isolation … a tyrant is relaxed enough to forgive his subjects for failing to love him, provided that they do not love one another” - Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
There’s a ‘joke’ I’ve heard people employ a few times over the years that goes something like this: “Think of the average British person. Now remember that half the people in the country are dumber than that.” I didn’t always hate this joke. In fact, there might have been a time I laughed at it. But the last time I heard it, it was used as humorous evidence that basically the average Brit shouldn’t have a say in the direction of the country and that Brexit wasn’t legitimate just because it had been chosen by the majority of people. The joke only works because when asked to picture the average Brit (or American or whoever), most people pick the dumbest fucking person they’ve ever come across. I ask you to picture the average Brit, they think of the dickhead at the local pub running his mouth about how Corbyn is a Marxist and it ain’t fair that he has to pay so much taxes while immigrants are getting handouts from the government, living in mansions. You say ‘think of the average American’ and the first thing people think of is a knuckle-dragging troglodyte who thinks that Hillary Clinton and John Podesta run a child sex trafficking ring out of a pizza parlor basement.
This association of the ‘average’ with the worst of a group is a dangerous one, and one that explains how ‘populist’ has become such a dirty word.
There is no accepted definition of what a populist movement is, so I’m just going to give you my take on it. A populist movement is a political movement that extols the virtue of the common or average person in a society, challenging the control elites have over institutions and positions of power. Populist leaders will claim to both speak for and identify with the common man, and will emphasize a lack of continuity between themselves and those who have previously been in charge, running as outsiders. Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, Jeremy Corbyn, Nigel Farage are all to some degree populist leaders. Historical examples include Andrew Jackson and William Jennings Bryan. Trying to support Hillary Clinton’s 2016 run for president, Obama said “I don't think that there's ever been someone so qualified to hold this office." Trump, on the other hand, turned his lack of qualification into a strength; because he was not a part of the system of elites that, by his telling, were failing the American people, he was beat suited to fix the country's problems. While a technocrat will appeal through reference to their understanding of the system, through their familiarity with the levers of power, the pressure points within the system, a populist will emphasise their understanding of the plights of the common man.
This insider/outsider, populist/anti-populist divide has come to be one of the fundamental cleavages in politics today, and where you come down on the divide has to do with how you answer the central question of politics: who do you blame for society’s current woes? Do you blame the moronic masses or the corrupt elite?
I would argue that you should blame the elite. I am not an ideological populist – I believe in the possibility of expertise, and I don’t believe being the masses are in a position of inherent epistemic privilege – but if you look at the problems ailing society, you should blame the elites for them.
Who’s flying the plane?
There’s this New Yorker cartoon I must have seen a dozen times in the Brexit/Trump years that liberals share because they think it’s awfully clever, which was published sometime right before Trump took office.
The joke is that dumb-as-nails populists think they are smarter than those with the training and know-how when it comes to matters of flight and statecraft. But the real butt of the joke is democracy, I guess. If we let the people choose who gets to sit in the cockpit of government, they will pick some yahoo who will fly the plane into the side of a mountain. Apparently, what makes a good politician is someone who has spent years mastering the technical skills necessary to steer the ship, and even thinking it matters if they are out of touch is a sign of misaligned priorities. According to this mindset, the ideal rulers are mandarins, not politicians.
But this cartoon gets one thing totally wrong. The plane is not flying smoothly through the sky, heading to our destination. It is wildly off course and we have to decide what to do next.
It may feel good to blame the passengers of the plane for its deviations, but it’s totally the fault of the pilots. The 2008 financial crisis was not caused by greedy Americans trying to live beyond their means, it was caused by a predatory financial system and corrupt rating agencies coupled with a government that was all too happy to deregulate the banks. The foreign policy failures of the Middle East were not the fault of a bloodthirsty public out to destroy Muslims out of bigotry, they were the result of lies and hubris, with the government even going so far as to reject an offer of surrender from the Taliban in 2001. The Opioid Crisis is not the fault of morally weak people, it is the fault of big pharma and a desolation people feel in their lives, often caused by their job getting shipped overseas or automated away by corporations who care more about dollars and cents than their employees.
The instinct to blame the average person for things that are either beyond their control or the result of decisions made by those with far more power than them is one we see all too often.
Why Cambridge Analytica Didn’t Get Trump Elected
The election of Donald Trump caused a crisis among elites. The ‘most qualified candidate in history’, who had attracted the support of elites from across the political spectrum (it was impossible not to hear about how Clinton was drawing support from people who had previously been Republicans), couldn’t beat one of the dumbest and least qualified candidates to ever make it to the top of a ticket. Suddenly, the impulse to blame the public merged with derision for the average American. Trump won because the average voter is sexist, the typical America is racist, and because of they were too stupid to tell reality from fiction.
Ask a good liberal pundit why Trump won the 2016 election and there’s a good chance they’ll bring up one of these topics (which are in essence the same explanation): Cambridge Analytica, Facebook or Russian trolls (or some amalgamation of the three). I say these are in essence the same explanation because they all boil down to the same thing: dumb, impressionable Americans, who would have otherwise voted for the great, ultra-qualified Hillary Clinton, saw one too many memes about her eating babies. They try to make their point by raising the huge numbers of impressions: didn’t you see, Russian disinformation reached 126 million people, writes liberal Michelle Goldberg. But this just means something might have popped up on your feed for half a second, and you probably just scrolled past it (I’ve had Tweets reach the five-digit mark in impressions without cracking three-digit likes). Arguments claiming Cambridge Analytica won Trump the election always rely on their ‘psychometric targeting’, where people are supposedly targeted based on some algorithm’s profile. These voters are simple, easy to pigeonhole, and because the algorithm is so much smarter than them, it can reach deep into their psyche with a single post.
Present in both these explanations is the image of a gullible voter who’s four memes and a fake news article away from fascism. Whether it be through brute informational force or through algorithmic sophistication, the bad guys poisoned the weak mind of voters into pulling the lever for Trump. They can hardly be said to have ‘chosen’ Trump because their feeble minds were no match for the propaganda thrown at them. Conspicuously not present in this explanation is anything that reflects badly on the elites. There is no talk of deindustrialisation brought on by NAFTA and trade with China. Nothing about Obama’s decision not to prosecute the banks for their illegal actions during and after the 2008 financial crisis. Silence on Clinton’s hawkish support of war and intervention. When the DNC hack and the release of Clinton’s emails comes up, Russia and Wikileaks are blamed for making the public aware of the emails, but Podesta and Clinton are never blamed for writing them.
The idea that Facebook memes won Trump the election only makes sense if you simultaneously equate ‘the average America’ with the dumbest person you’ve ever come across and believe than none of society’s ills are the fault of people in Hillary Clinton’s orbit.
I don’t hate elites, I hate our elites
One of the best books I’ve read in the last two years is Christopher Lasch’s 1994 work Revolt of the Elites. It’s a particularly interesting read because of its prescience; far from becoming irrelevant through the passage of time, instead it has become an ever more pressing assessment of a ruling class that only cares about themselves. Someone like Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, one of the most powerful politicians in the US who is worth nearly $200 million, balks at the idea that maybe members of Congress shouldn’t trade stocks while in office.
The idea that members of Congress should have to sacrifice anything at all is so preposterous to Pelosi she barely knows how to answer the question. Noblesse oblige has given way to an elite who claim the only obligation present in society is that of the masses to obey them without question. Elites who once justified their rule through respect now justify their position to themselves through their contempt for those over whose lives they hold so much sway. And in turn, this has created a population who hate their elites right back.
There’s a lot of talk about how the riff raff have used social media to share false information, causing the masses to enter a form of mass psychosis. I must confess, I used to believe this myself, but that was back when Facebook was the main social media platform I used. After Facebook got worse and worse I eventually jumped ship to Twitter, where I realised something else was afoot. Twitter is the preferred social media platform of media and political elites, and being on it allows you to witness the online social interactions of New York Times writers, campaign chairs, chiefs of staff, high-profile academics. And, after watching them for a while, my main observation is that they are petty and banal. I’m not a radical egalitarian, so I believe in the existence of elites, but elites need to justify their elevated status somehow. The current rationale is the notion of merit, but one needs only spend 15 minutes of Twitter to see that we do not live in a meritocracy.
I’m open to a number of ways for the elite to come to prominence, but one that I’ve been partial to is the idea of mutual admiration. The elites are not those who have proven their merit by running through some gauntlet that proves their worth, but those who can command genuine admiration from the public. Instead of accreditation, intellectuals distinguish themselves through their ability to demonstrate their love of knowledge and wisdom to the public. Politicians prove themselves by being exemplars of the values that the populace holds; not some hokey pandering, but actually living according to those values. Scientists who don’t hide behind claims that science is complicated, but show genuine enthusiasm for explaining what they know and how they know it to anyone who shows enough interest to listen.
By this standard, almost all of our elite class fails. Can you really say you admire a liar like Boris Johnson, an imbecile like Joe Biden, or a fool like Justin Trudeau? We deserve better.
Republic Redux
I’ve never liked how Plato’s Republic became the text in Western philosophy. A huge portion of the text involves Socrates (or more accurately Plato) arguing that it is good for a city to be run by its rational components rather than its appetitive parts (the parts that involve desire). Plato’s suggestion is that society should be organized so that the people who are most rational are in total control. The philosopher kings will rule us according to reason, and so we should bow down at their feet.
There is some truth to what Plato said: it is better for society’s decision to be made by our ‘better selves’ rather than our basest instincts. But what he gets wrong is that he attributes rationality to a select group of philosophers instead of understanding rationality as something all people are capable of, in the right circumstances. What he should have tried to figure out was not “how do we create people so rational that everything they choose will be right?” but rather, “how do we ensure that our leaders make decisions in a way that is rational?”
My favourite leaders have always been the FDRs and the JFKs, not because of what they did themselves (JFK didn’t really do anything all that impressive as President if I’m being honest), but because of what they brought out of others. True leadership does not just involve knowing the correct course of action. If it did we could just grab the smartest person out of the top colleges, stick them into politics, and all our problems would be solved (I think they tried this actually, his name is Pete Buttigieg). True leadership involves bringing out the best of the common man. But that’s not possible if you think the common man is an irredeemable moron.
The Wisdom of the Common Man Revisited
I must admit it’s a strange strategy to wait till I’m a couple thousand words deep to defend my central claim, so if you’ve read this far despite the fact you disagree with my belief that regular Joes aren’t dumb as dirt, thank you. I can think of a number of criticisms to my claim that I will try to address here.
The Lizardman’s Constant
If you are inclined to speak to random people, you’ve almost certainly had the experience of talking to someone at a pub, and, after about 18 seconds of speaking to them, you find yourself wondering how someone so fucking stupid could actually survive. They might be a flat earther, or they think that there are microchips in COVID vaccines, some even believe that Amy Schumer is funny. There is no belief so asinine, so insane, so impossible, that something like 4% of the population won’t express belief in it. This phenomenon has been dubbed the Lizardman’s Constant.
I can’t prove this, but I suspect that those crazy 4% opinions are concentrated in the same 4% of the population. Showing that 4% of the population is batshit isn’t the same as showing the majority or the average person has lost the plot. But even if the crazy answers aren’t all coming from the same people, in a way that diminishes the effect of those crazy beliefs. You may not realise it, but you could easily hold some belief that sounds crazy to 96% of the population.
Everyone is Stupid Except Me
Everybody feels like everyone else is an idiot at some point. Even dumb people. Just cause everyone else feels dumb, doesn’t make it so.
The Information Gap
I remember in undergrad when I was learning about surveys, a prof mentioned that the metric used for determining whether an American respondent was considered an ‘informed’ voter was typically either if they could name the Speaker of the House or the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. I remember asking why they used such easy metrics, “isn’t the first too easy if you follow day-to-day government affairs, and the second hasn’t changed for a decade so you could be totally checked out and still know it, so who doesn’t get either of those?” I asked. I received a well-deserved scoff from my prof, because the number of people who got either question right was far lower than my question implied. (I don’t remember the specific percentage, but it was low enough that I was embarrassed by my question. Something like 35%.)
People are disconnected from the day-to-day going on of parliament and Congress to a point where I can see why people don’t think regular folks should have much input into the political process. But people don’t know much about the day-to-day activities of politics because in our system the average person has so little input that knowing anything at all about what is happening is a waste of time. Your vote is a single tally drowning in a sea of other tallies and ultimately almost never makes a difference, and anyways you don’t need that much information to make your impactless decision of who you’re going to vote for. We can’t write off people intellectually for not possessing knowledge that ultimately serves no purpose.
Popular Participation
While this polemic has mostly focused on rhetorical concerns and the way people discuss people, there are actually policy implications that one can draw from its conclusions. One of them is that letting the average person be more involved in the political process would actually be good. To really involve the populace you’d need to go beyond just more referendums; it’s not enough just to be able to vote yes or no on questions decided by political elites. If one really trusts regular people, you need to actually get them involved. Citizens assemblies can bring people face to face with the issues that matter to them and actually allow the concerns of regular people to be discussed and worked out, not by proxy, but by the people who are most affected. Much has been made about trying to have a legislative body that ‘looks like the population’, and efforts to achieve this goal will recruit women and minority candidates. But if you want a Congress that ‘looks like the country’ you’d do far better by just picking legislators by lot.
All this isn’t to say ‘to hell with experts’ (I’ll leave that to the fish-faced minister Michael Gove).
Whatever you think of Gove, he is right that people have had enough of experts. But that doesn’t mean experts need to be shipped off to some island to live out the rest of their days in exile, but rather that people and experts must work together. The experts still write the law, but the people decide what it’s trying to accomplish. Experts will be evaluated by the public, not by other experts, meaning they won’t be able to use intentionally obfuscating language, they will have to speak in a way so as to be understood by the population at large.
The tensions that brought us Donald Trump, Farage, Sanders, Corbyn, Le Pen, Zemmour, Salvini, and all other manner of populists aroused by the unruly masses will not go away until the people feel they actually have a say. And truthfully, none of those leaders will solve the tension either.
What we need is a government of the people, for the people, and - most importantly - by the people.
The Barbarians at the Gate
I was in Toronto a few weeks ago, and as I often do, I went for a walk through Queen’s Park, the location of Ontario’s provincial legislature. As I approached it, there were barriers on the roads in order to prevent the return of truckers from the Freedom Convoy from resuming the protests which they had deployed new extraordinary powers to quash. The end of most pandemic restrictions had been announced, with one key exception: the requirement that people crossing the border who are unvaccinated quarantine on arrival in Canada. The very policy that caused the protests among truckers, a relatively small policy in the grand scheme of things, is among the only policies they don’t seem to be phasing out. To me, the message is clear: it’s important that we don’t allow the participants of the freedom convoy to feel like they’ve won.
I had seen similar barricades the week before in Ottawa. One week, Parliament Hill was packed with people furious at the government. The next week, the seat of power was literally gated off. It’s rare that the literal and the metaphorical are in such perfect harmony, but the symbolic nature of the gates surrounding the parliament were unmistakable. But yet, it wasn’t the first time I had seen this. Joe Biden’s inauguration took place in a locked-down Washington D.C., and his White House has had similar barriers erected, those even blocking the view between those in the executive seat of power and the people to whom they serve and over whom they rule.
These are deeply sad images. They represent a failure in our democracies. Ultimately, Trump’s legacy is not a wall with Mexico but a wall around the White House. Our plan going forward cannot be to build more walls to keep the people out of the halls of power. Such a plan is an admission that we no longer believe in or desire democracy.
At this point, it feels like populism is an unstoppable force. Will elitism continue to be an immovable object?