POLISHED POPULISM.

In the fall of 2019, before the China plague, the trashing of major cities in the name of police reform, and the patriot militia becoming a scarier force than the Russian army, American Mind contributor Peter Spiliakos contemplated a new Republican (for lack of a better umbrella organization) coalition.

Tucker Carlson’s now-infamous January 2^nd television monologue pointed in the direction of a post-Trump conservative populism that recognizes the bankruptcy of Zombie Reaganism—a much-needed reckoning. But Carlson himself admits that populism currently lacks realistic answers to the problems of America’s wage-earners.  Conveniently, a group of intellectuals called reform conservatives or “reformocons” have spent more than a decade developing some potential answers. For good or ill, these reformocons have spent the past decade plying their trade before a corrupt and smug Republican establishment. Reform conservatives need to break free of their dependence on the Republican lobbyist-class blob, and populism needs an agenda that goes beyond complaints, however well-founded.

The reformers and the populists need each other, and America needs them both.

It's a long article that will reward careful study.   It's also provoking a long post, which will continue below the jump.

 The part of the argument I wish to highlight follows.

Populism is most likely to work to the extent that it goes with the grain of public desires—or at least avoids unnecessary conflicts. Some (not all) affluent and educated women like prioritizing their careers and they don’t have to be enemies of populist conservatism.  If you want to make sure that your agenda goes nowhere, gratuitously shame salaried women for dropping their kids off at daycare. There is a better way.

A populist agenda should be able to realistically encourage people to achieve their own personal goals and balance parental work and childcare responsibilities as best fits their family. For some families that might mean dropping the kids off with the grandparents. For others, it might mean that one of the parents shifts to less paid labor while the children are very young, and for some it will mean sending children to commercial daycare providers.

A conservative working-class agenda is far less likely to be implemented if it is seen as culturally hostile to professional women. The best chance is for something like Ross Douthat’s suggestion of a socially conservative feminism that seeks to make use of women’s talents in the marketplace or at home as the women themselves want to use them, while also supporting marriage and parenthood.

The final element missing from Carlson’s populism is the understanding that a successful conservative populism (rather than just a doomed rearguard action) will require a cross-ethnic coalition. That means it would involve recruiting, in large numbers, the children and grandchildren of the post-1965 wave of immigration.

Thanks to the lockdowns and the urban carnage, the correlation of forces is currently more favorable to the populists than to the technocrats.  A long essay by Morgan Marietta and David C. Barker lays the foundation.

Populist conservatism accepts [traditionally conservative] views but adds something different: the interests and perceptions of “ordinary” people against “elites.” So populism rejects the notion of a natural aristocracy of wealth and education, replacing it with the idea that people it considers elites, including career politicians, bureaucrats, journalists and academics, have been promoting their own interests at the expense of regular folk.

The recent rise of populism in America has been driven in part by a clear economic reality: The expansion of wealth over the last 40 years has gone almost entirely to the upper reaches of society. At the same time, the middle has stagnated or declined economically.

The populist interpretation is that elites benefited from the globalization and technological advancements they encouraged, while the advantages of those trends bypassed ordinary working people. Calls for trade protections and national borders appeal to Americans who feel left behind.

Populism also has a cultural aspect: rejection of the perceived condescension and smugness of the “highly educated elite.”

In that sense, populism is driven by identity (who someone believes they are like, and perhaps more importantly, who they are not like). For populists, the like-minded are ordinary folk – middle income, middle-brow educations at public high schools and state universities, often middle-of-the-country – and the dissimilar are the products of expensive educations and urban lifestyles.

Under ordinary circumstances, perhaps the Highly Credentialed can get away with being stupid about being smart; after a year of self-serving corona tyranny that has blighted the lives of ordinary folk and woke posturing in which the neighborhoods being made uninhabitable by a reimagined police are not the neighborhoods where the Ruling Class live.  "Support for Republicans even grew somewhat among traditionally Democratic African American and Hispanic voters, despite the GOP’s anti-Black Lives Matter and anti-immigrant rhetoric." That reads like something a person whose neighborhood is not at risk thanks to the policies of reimagined police and woke district attorneys.

The corona tyranny, and the trashing of the cities, make it possible for people to identify with a side, and take it.  Jeffrey Tucker sees history rhyming.

Think of the big historical events that echoed for generations in American politics. The struggle over slavery. World War I. Prohibition. The New Deal. World War II. The Cold War. The last one I know well, having come of age in the latter years. In retrospect, the long episode of the Cold War was packed with mythology. Still, the struggle was expressed in ideological terms of freedom vs. communism. The alliances that lined up remained for decades and impacted cycle after cycle of political controversy at home and abroad.

It also became deeply personal and people chose tight and enduring alliances. The struggle with the Soviet Union shaped the politics of nearly everyone for decades. It had all the right themes: liberty vs. authoritarianism, individualism vs. communism, nationalization vs. private property, freedom of movement and ownership vs. central planning. On which side do you stand? This question was the overriding political question from 1948 until 1989.

The Cold War era might have been more fraught, with the limited wars in Korea and Vietnam, and the civil rights legislation, giving some of those binaries more complexity.  The corona tyranny and the looted cities, not so much.

For strange reasons of timing and loss of principle, the “woke” left found itself mixed up in lockdown politics. By the spring of 2020, many of them lined up with policies that violate the very rights they had spent decades defending. So much for the Bill of Rights, the freedom of movement, the appreciation for the classless society, and so on. The left lost its soul during 2020, and thereby alienated multitudes of sane lefties who watched in horror as their own tribe abandoned them in favor of the authoritarianism they had long decried.

Lockdown vs not: this has the capacity to be a theme that will resonate far into the future. It also unites people on the political “right” again with small business, genuine civil libertarians, and champions of religious liberty. It permits the “left” to again find its voice for human rights and freedoms. For that matter, they do not have to be activists; they only need to be people who do not want their houses of worship padlocked, their business closed and bankrupted, or their speech curtailed.

It also put the emphasis on the correct point: the protection of American libertarians [c.q.] not from some shadowy foreign enemy but from our own governments. It also draws in the left that has long been suspicious of the place of big business, and, in this case, rightfully so. The largest corporations such as Google, Amazon, and Facebook, for all the good that they achieve in this world, have leaned decisively in favor of lockdowns. Same with large media. The reason is not just that they are harmed less by lockdowns and, in many cases, actually benefited from them. It’s because the people ruling these companies enjoy ruling-class lives, and they see the world through them. Lockdowns were the favored policy for cultural and political reasons, which is itself a scandal.

There is another group of powerful people in a position to dedicate themselves to the anti-lockdown cause: parents. In an astonishing act of despotic ignorance, governors closed schools down all over the country, with zero medical benefit and grotesque levels of abuse for children and parents. These are schools for which people pay heavily in property taxes, while parents using private schools pay twice. Governments shut them down, robbing parents of their money and smashing their settled lives. Many children in this country have lost a full year of education. Many people with two incomes had to drop one of them in order to babysit their children at home as they pretended to learn on Zoom while being denied access to peers.

As much as I’ve researched this, I still cannot understand how this came to be. Public schools are the crown jewel legacy of the Progressive Era. One might expect that they would be protected against all attacks, and certainly never be shut down. For decades, intellectuals and activists have urged market-based reform of public schools but the administrators and unions resisted any change, even while suppressing and smearing those who choose to educate their children at home. In the blink of an eye, people were not only entitled to homeschool but forced to. What was truancy one day was compliance the next.

The common schools are a casualty of corona tyranny that will require a separate post.  For now, focus, dear reader, on the possible populist movement that will last in memory the way the Civil War did, or the combined experience of Depression and War that hung over my youth.

You mean all this suffering and horror was for naught? Once that realization dawns, fear turns to anger, and anger to action. If you understand that dynamic, you can see why the architects of lockdowns from Dr. Fauci to the CDC are doing their best to delay that dawning, with daily doses of alarmism designed to keep people hiding in their homes.

The fear cannot last. When it breaks, we are going to see multitudes of people – small business owners and workers, parents of kids in school, patients who couldn’t see their families while in the hospital, adults with parents in long-term care facilities from which they’ve been locked down, families who canceled one vacation after another, people of faith whose religious communities were shattered, and all those people who were forced for the better part of a year to live life with zero fun or entertainment outside the confines of their homes – lash out at those who did this to us. And they will be inspired to understand why and make sure nothing like this happens again.

Thus will a new values regime implant, and perhaps that values regime will be a new birth of freedom; the technocratic values regime of Depression and War having spent itself in globalism for its own sake, and social distancing.

The true beauty of the anti-lockdown movement is that it understands profoundly that the real enemy is not a shadowy foreign power plotting to take away our freedoms, as during the Cold War, but rather it is much closer to home. It is all around us. While the virus is invisible, the people who dreamed up and enforced lockdowns that wrecked the country are highly visible. They have names and careers, and they are right to be very worried about their futures.

Anti-lockdownism need not be partisan. The victims of these policies are all over the political map. They are united only in their general belief in human rights, constitutional restraints on government, and the need to keep society functioning in the midst of a health crisis. This opinion is not and should not be controversial. There is never a good excuse to turn on basic Enlightenment values in favor of feudal forms of political organization and coerced social management. Never.

A commitment to that principle, as a first principle, could dramatically realign American intellectual and political life.

Mitch "Shot in the Dark" Berg continues the argument, with some first principles.

Remember last year? When some public health authorities were treating Covid like World War 2, with massive sacrifices, a potential (and, a year later, realized) horrific cost, and a goal for us all to pull toward – victory?

That went by the boards. Pushing to get back to normal – a “normal” that for the vast majority of Americans was as good as it’d been in a loooong time, last February – got replaced by telling people to hunker down for, well, the War on Terror. An endless, endemic, dreary plod.

Which has had terrible effects – skyrocketing addiction and suicide, rampant crime, and crushing depression among school-age kids and adults. The pandemic has brought out the best in some Americans – and forced the rest into the most dehumanizing humdrum imaginable to a First Worlder.

It appears, though, as if the current situation is one that might be advantageous to that polished populism. Three contributors to American Conservative summarize.

Both in word and deed, our ruling class regularly commits violence against the treasured building blocks of civilization, all while enriching itself and augmenting its own power. While the American left is apparently eager to be led by a ruinous cadre of aloof management consultants, race-hustlers, and literal anarchists, the right is overseen by tired nostalgics, corporate shills, and bow-tie clad “intellectuals” who fiddle while our cities burn. This “conservative” elite class is clamoring to restore its agenda, which proved time and time again to be an electoral disaster and a civilizational dead-end.

If we don’t form our own elite, one that is patriotic and acts as a champion for the great middle of our nation, the old regime will continue to win, and America will continue to lose. Across time, every society has had an elite—the select group of people whose actions, words, and decisions decisively impact the common good. Yet over the last half-century in America, every institution of elite formation, from higher education to electoral politics to corporate culture, has either been corrupted or atrophied to the point of ossifying, with dire consequences for all of us.

It's unusual to see Kurt Schlichter style rhetoric in an American Conservative essay, and perhaps had they written it after this year's Conservative Political Action Conference wrapped up, their "The people are ready for something different" might have had a more optimistic cast to it.