The good populism by Victor Davis Hanson
June 2018
Populism is today seen both as a pejorative and positive noun. In fact, in the present age, there are two sorts of populism. Both strains originated in classical times and persisted in the West until today.
One in antiquity was known as the base populism. It involved the unfettered urban “mob,†or what the Athenians disapprovingly dubbed the ochlos and the Romans disparagingly called the turba. Such popular movements were spearheaded by the so-called demagogoi (“leaders of the peopleâ€) or in Roman times the more radical popular tribunes.
These were largely urban movements. Protesters focused on the redistribution of property, radical democratization, taxes on the wealthy, the cancellation of debts, vast increases in public entitlements, and civic employment. The French Revolution and European upheavals of 1848 reflect some of the same themes. Today, Occupy Wall Street, Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and the Bernie Sanders phenomenon all stand in the same current. Often, urban intellectuals, aristocrats, and elites—from the patrician Roman Republican street agitator Publius Clodius Pulcher and the Jacobin Maximilien Robespierre, to present-day billionaires like George Soros and Tom Steyer—have sought to assist the urban protesters. Perhaps these gentleman- agitators thought they could offer money, prestige, or greater wisdom, thereby channeling and elevating shared populist agendas. The antithesis to such radical populism was likely thought by ancient conservative historians to be the “good†populism of the past—and what the contemporary media might call the “bad†populism of the present: the push-back of small property owners and the middle classes against the power of oppressive government, steep taxation, and internationalism, coupled with unhappiness over imperialism and foreign wars and a preference for liberty rather than mandated equality. Think of the second century B.C. Gracchi brothers rather than Juvenal’s “bread-and-circuses†imperial Roman underclass, the American rather than the French Revolution, or the Tea Party versus Occupy Wall Street. The mesoi, or “middle guys,†both predated and remained somewhat at odds with contemporary radical Athenian democracy. Yet these agrarian property-owning classes were also originally responsible for the Greek city-state and thus for Western civilization itself.
The Jeffersonian idea of preserving ownership of a family plot, and passing on farms through codified inheritance laws and property rights, were the themes of the constitutions of the early polis. The citizen—neither a peasant nor a subject—remained rooted to a particular plot of ground, and thereby enjoyed the tripartite rights of citizenship: military service, voting rights in the assembly, and the ability to be self-supporting and autonomous. The mesoi, then, lent stability to otherwise often volatile consensual politics. Edmund Burke is often referenced as the archetypical sober and judicious conservative. Despite the difficulty of finding a systematic political orthodoxy in Burke’s vast body of largely forensic speeches and pamphlets, we are told that Burke serves as a model of modern conservatism in our own uncertain age. Burke, of course, saw through the French Revolution, while earlier having appreciated elements of the American cause. It is also understandable that Burke can be sourced to refute the current dangerous relativism of the radical Left, while defending classical liberalismfrom the excesses of populist nationalists and mindless mobs on the right.
But Burke often emphasized the stability of the property-owning middle classes and their custodianship of custom and tradition: the “unchanging constancy†that Burke argued ensures that “in what we improve we are never wholly new; in what we retain we are never wholly obsolete.†An ample property-owning class serves as a bulwark against confiscatory anarchy and revolutionary nihilism, as well as the excesses of monarchial and aristocratic insider and client autocracy. Likewise, that keen observer of early-nineteenth-century Americanism, the French nobleman Alexis de Tocqueville, in his Democracy in America, saw America’s unique strength in the populist influence of a nation of small agrarians. Such property owners were suspicious of both hereditary aristocracy and monarchy, and yet were economically autonomous enough to resist radical calls for government-enforced equality.Yet somehow the contemporary conservative movement and the Republican Party have confused a traditionally destabilizing populism with the ancient restorative populism, or clumsily feared both equally.Obviously, we are no longer, as was true at our founding, a nation largely composed of yeomen farmers. But in modern terms, the ownership of a house, a business, or perhaps even a retirement savings plan is the equivalent of Burke’s stewardship of property and tradition. Ancient American ideas like the right to bear arms and an end to inheritance taxes still reflect Tocqueville’s interest in maintaining the viability of a large middle class suspicious of both rich and poor. But in our modern context, the trajectory of contemporary Republicanism has been largely to downplay culture, especially the effects of globalization and de-industrialization on traditional small communities of property-owning citizens. That neglect led to startling political repercussions in 2016.
Illegal immigration and open borders were accepted as an unpreventable—or even an almost natural occurrence, with largely positive results for both the Left and Right. In collective fashion liberals championed the poor arriving on their own terms from Central America and Mexico in expectation of their permanent political support. They sought and received the changing of the Electoral College demography of the American Southwest. Many Republicans, foolishly, either wished for cheap labor or deluded themselves into thinking that amnestied impoverished illegal immigrants would soon vote for family-values conservatives. Neither party worried much about the insidious destruction of immigration law, much less how federal laws that were otherwise applicable to most Americans could be arbitrarily ignored by a select few or how wages of entry-level workers were driven down by imported labor. Few conservatives raised the objection that mass influxes of illegal aliens, mostly non-diverse, poorly educated, and without skills, were difficult enough to assimilate quickly under the old culture of the melting pot, but even more so now, given the current paradigm of the tribal salad bowl.
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https://www.newcriterion.com/issues/2018/6/the-good-populism-9842
