Two Types of Populism

Ross's response to Rod's and my reactions to his take on Matt Taibbi is up, and so is Rod's follow-on reaction. Rod is quite right to disavow up front "that we're going to see a left-right fusion of any sort." And indeed what I'm driving at is less a diagnosis that, as Ross puts it, "smart young lefties" are seeking "some grand convergence with disillusioned populist-conservatives" than that such a convergence is simply, well, happening, whether anyone wants it or not, and that it's all the more happening precisely because nobody is working, on either side, to engineer it. Maybe Karl Rove, among other Things, has gotten us subcutaneously convinced that realignments are made, not born....

At any rate the source of that convergence strikes me as a divergence away from that aspect which holds establishment Republicans and Democrats so close together: national populism. What bears smart young counterestablishmentarian lefties and righties toward each other is a different kind of populism, which, for now at least, I might term platoon populism. Webb's version, or whatever we've all decided Webb's version is (Ross calls it 'office park populism') seems a deeply ambivalent combination of national and platoon populism at the very least, leaning markedly, to my eye, toward the latter at the specific expense of the former. But I should be clear about what I mean by 'national populism.'

Simply put, in its left variant natpop means what Ross says it means -- "the old-time religion (a higher minimum wage, strong unions, government jobs programs, etc.)," or "a smarter, more growth-friendly form of social democracy (think Denmark, rather than France)," but generally, "for most, it means some combination thereof." In its right variant, natpop is plain old screamin' eagle patriotism -- supporting the nation's warriors regardless of the legality or illegality of the war, opposing high-volume immigration regardless of the legality or illegality of the immigrants, etc. In both cases natpop is an expressly American complex of duties, prides, hopes, and attributes. Most natpoppers, like Bill O'Reilly, love Abraham Lincoln and think Confederate apologists are ingrates, hicks, racists, uneducated fools -- but, worst of all, aren't really American patriots. Most natpoppers actually respond to the call of the question in "right track/wrong track" polls, think of themselves as Americans first before members of a state, region, ethnic group, city, suburb, or interest group, and want Presidents to embody National Greatness one because American greatness is good but more importantly because American greatness is national. America is not a loose confederacy of ideals. America is not a patchwork experiment in human freedom. For natpoppers, the most important American document (not 'United Statesian,' and that should explain everything right there) is the Declaration of Independence, a non-legal document for which non-natpoppers often feel a vague embarassment, either as imprudently and misleadingly purple prose (on the right) or as a rap sheet of tauntingly unkept promises (on the left).

Platpop, on the other hand, is starkly different both in its left and right variants. For the new breed of left platpoppers, it's the little Burkean band of local fellow travelers alone that can function as a unit of both working solidarity and freedom. Sure, we're all human beings, and we all suffer from the same illegal and unjust monopolization of the basic goods of life and the callous appropriation of even our sexual, emotional, and cultural goods, but Worldwide Revolution is beside the point and a misleading metaphor because there is no Global Proletariat as such -- rather a multivariate universe of local groups, cultures, affinities, traditions, loves, families, co-conspirators, identities, interests, tribes, and so on, who all might suffer from the same imposed problems but for whom real solutions must be tailored specifically to their own situation, to satisfy their own selves, by their own selves. Cooperation amongst groups is useful but pragmatic. Anti-globalization protests and riots capture the fleeting, sometimes spontaneous, but target-specifc and platoon-specific quality I'm talking about. So do locally-made green sneakers, adaptable, bottom-up guerilla culture-jamming campaigns, and the like.

On the right, it's probably clear how platpoppers embody the small-is-beautiful element, the crunchy con element, the postmodern conservative element, and so forth. Or really I should say elements of those elements, because as Ross is right to intuit, these boundaries are still fairly fluid and the contents within them mottled, and very unplatpopperish people can often times wind up postmodern conservatives or even crunchy cons with a particularly universalist-activist approach to, say, missionary religion. But generally it's safe to say that for many right platpoppers, American nationalism is still a combination failed experiment/hoax/lemon/menace; Presidential campaigns are occasions for mild depression, heavy sighing, and a winsome casting of ballots for one or another doomed, minor candidate; National Greatness Presidents are to a man hucksters, casual butchers, warmongers, blunt instruments, calamities; regional loyalties make sense not just intuitively in the blood but pragmatically within the prudent brain; no political organization larger than Montana is to be trusted or, in partial result, capable of commanding real allegiance. The United States are loved for the onuses and outrages they allow us to escape, not the rights and duties they require us to celebrate through enaction.

It seems to me plain how right and left platpop would converge naturally, without anyone trying too hard to make them, especially when the going alternative is one or another twin version of natpop, and particularly as right platpoppers are disposed to let San Francisco, LA, New York, and Key West remain the sorts of places they are, and left platpoppers grow increasingly ambivalent about the great rebellious value of sexual nomadism and its attendant cultural nihilism (as that practice is mainstreamed into just another option presented by the System). In a way the distinction between natpop and platpop cashes out as a running battle over federalism, which -- in further proof of what I'm claiming -- now appears to enjoy as its most popular standard bearers two possible defectors from natpop: Arnold Schwarzenegger and Michael Bloomberg. Could we dare to think of eventually national leaders willing to let states and cities run their own shows they way they once ran theirs, under conditions of frankly benign neglect?

Comments

[Russell Arben Fox]

I posted this over at Rod's cite (with a few changes) but I thought it might work here as well:

Your natpop vs. platpop is an interesting way to distinguish between various strains of nationalism, but it's much too neat. If modernity has done anything, it has made us conscious of the constructedness of boundaries, even those boundaries made from deeply rooted and/or arguably permanent religious or historical or natural concepts. It's not so much that boundaries have become porous (though they have), but rather that we are always conscious of our own involvement in the making and maintenance of them. And so things shift: we understand ourselves as belonging to our little platoon, and then we see ourselves as belonging to our nation, and then to the world community, and then we're back to the platoon again. Context matters. Sometimes the proper site for "platoon thinking" is the nation (certainly immigration is one such case), as opposed to the neighborhood. A genuine populism of any stripe is going to have to admit to a little bit of nationalist thinking on occasion, just as a truly populist nationalism isn't simply old-school fascist or socialist statism (though it will appear to parallel it sometimes). Which is one explanation of why those who see nationalism and statism as the greatest of all possible political evils (as is the case for many paleocons) are deeply suspicious of populism, however much they may sound like them sometimes.