What is Populism?

“Christopher Lasch once famously declared that the professions ‘came into being by reducing the layman to incompetence.’ [Emanuel] Haldeman-Julius’s idea was to do the opposite—to undermine elites by making ordinary people capable.” I don’t know how “famous” Lasch’s declaration can really be said to be, but it is certainly provocative.

Haldeman-Julius was apparently a publisher of classic literature in inexpensive editions for ordinary working people, including the early “populists,” who Thomas Frank, the author of this quotation, casts as engaged in a project of “multi-racial economic democracy.”

Frank shows that since its inception the term has been mobilized by its (mostly liberal, centrist) opponents as a pejorative—so-called “right-wing populism”—and this is the sense that predominates today. A lot hinges on what you believe about ordinary people, as opposed to elites. Right populism, as it is employed in that pejorative sense, implies that the average person is racist, sexist, xenophobic, ignorant, and dumb. A mob of them is dangerous. “Leftwing populism,” by contrast, has a greater faith in humanity and is generally not employed in any pejorative sense meant to demean and dehumanize its proponents. Left populism supposedly unites people across differences by a shared concern for “economic democracy,” i.e., a more just distribution of wealth and resources. I’ll cast this distinction below in terms of the quality and possibility of the social bond, in light of some remarks from Eric Voegelin.

But the question of resources brings me back to Haldeman-Julius. His project was to give ordinary farmers and other laborers access to the Great Books, but this perhaps worked so well because there was an eager audience that didn’t need to be persuaded as to the worth of pursuing an education for its own sake and more or less by oneself or together in reading groups. Today, access can more or less be taken for granted, but an eager audience cannot. “The professions came into being by reducing the layman to incompetence,” we’re told. The hyper-formalization of education is perhaps a part of this, or rather the monopolization of education by schools, whereas the latter, in order to function at all, can only support and supplement a prior practice of book-learning that occurs outside school, as I heard the poet Fred Moten more or less claim in a lecture many years ago.

My contention is that if book-learning doesn’t occur habitually outside of school, it can hardly get off the ground inside of school. I also believe that the schools themselves may function as obstacles to serious book-learning—“despite themselves” unless we think the phenomenon Lasch described is consciously and cynically intended. More likely, professionals may unconsciously prop themselves up on the shoulders of non-professionals, whom they are paradoxically tasked with lifting up, and thus may sincerely wonder that their pupils are perhaps incapable of being lifted. As Martin Heidegger has shown, there is a form of solicitude that dominates, as opposed to liberates, the recipient of this “concern.”

Voegelin, interpreting Aristotle, wrote that “a well-functioning society must provide institutions not only for the inculcation of excellences in the educable but also for the management of the ineducable mass.” As always, Voegelin is making a serious and thoughtful contention here. It needs to be interpreted with care. He thought, with Plato and Aristotle, that a society exclusively of philosophers was, if not altogether impossible, nevertheless unrealistic, such that “management” techniques need to be preserved in order to preserve society. But what is it that truly preserves society? What constitutes the social bond? Voegelin distinguishes heuristically between the approach to this question of the classical philosophers and that of Thomas Hobbes. For Hobbes, what binds people together is fear of the worst evil, namely death, the threat of which keeps them more or less obediently in line. For Plato, on the other hand, it was love of the highest good, namely “nous,” or thoughtful wonder.

Classically, then, it seems that “order” was emphatically irreducible to what we call nowadays “law and order.” The latter was a supplemental last resort to the former, for if and when people proved “ineducable” in the sense of incapable of loving the highest good. That love of the highest good spontaneously produces “order” is implied in Voegelin’s famous definition of philosophy: “Love of being through love of Divine Being as the source of its order.” Order thus has more to do with love, that is, philosophy, than with law. Not so for Hobbes, who dispensed with philosophy not just in the last resort and regretfully but rather as a kind of first principal.

I suggested above that left-wing populism attempts to unite people across differences (racial, gender, etc.) by emphasizing their similar economic interests. My detour through Voegelin was intended to cast doubt on whether economic self-interest is really enough to bring people together. Frank himself, warning against the recurring presumption of left-wing pundits to know what’s in someone else’s interest—and to belittle right-wing working people for “voting against their interests”—offers that there are other valid motivations underlying political allegiance, like self-respect, for instance. I can respect myself only to the extent that I support policies that appear to me to be good and just, as opposed to those which would enhance my personal economic situation. This is noble. Concern for the good and the just is no simple matter, however. What has historically been called “liberal education” cultivates this concern, but there is scarcely any trace of it in contemporary schools. Coincident with this, and facilitating this, is what appears to be a decline in liberal informal education, self-education, etc. 

I think that schools can and should play a part in the renewal of philosophy as love of the highest good and thus the renewal and cultivation of the social bond, and should perhaps be abandoned if they don’t. One would abandon the schools, however, precisely not to reject liberal education but to free oneself up to pursue it informally. To pursue it informally, though, management techniques like “marketing and the media,” which, as Bernard Stiegler says, tend to “stupefy” people, myself included, need to be relaxed. One of Stiegler’s fundamental contributions is in showing that the left-wing focus on combatting the proletarianization of laborers is, though probably necessary, insufficient. Equally relevant, or perhaps more so, for any serious engagement with the question of justice, is the proletarianization of consumers, which Stiegler casts in terms of a loss of knowledge. Stiegler distinguishes the passive, proletarianizing consumption of media (to which we are all more or less condemned) to the active practice of philosophy, to which we should aspire.

In terms of economics, the most we can perhaps affirm is that it shouldn’t get in the way of any ordinary person’s capacity to pursue their philosophical development, and thus to contribute to the preservation of the social bond. To that end, populism, if it has any legitimacy, works to universally secure a living wage, humane working conditions, and so on—but this is no end itself. It doesn’t amount to justice, but only to the precondition for the philosophical pursuit of the latter. But then this is perhaps precisely the legacy of Haldeman-Julius, as Thomas Frank appears to suggest.

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