Controlling the Masses

Second-hand bookshops do not get enough credit – first for their shelter from the juggernaut marketing of fashionable titles and then with the delight of a text found which has languished unappreciated after a decade or so…..

Two titles caught my eye this week in a new downtown outlet opposite Bucuresti University – the first Who Runs this place? The Anatomy of Britain in the 21^st Century (2004) was the final contribution of a famous journalist, Anthony Sampson, who was of south African origin and had started in 1962 what became a series of efforts to capture the anatomy of the UK power structure. ….Extracts can be read here. Sampson himself became so ensconced in his role as voyeur that he almost became one of the institutions of which he wrote – as can be seen in this tribute. New Labour was half-way through its 13 years as he was drafting the book and the impact of its media manipulation was already in evidence. But a quick skim suggested that it might suffer from being a tad incestuous – with the references consisting of either newspaper articles or political biographies. Not a solitary academic reference

The Triumph of the Political Class by journalist Peter Oborne (2007)  was the other (smaller) bargain which I swept up – first read and blogged about in 2014. It has a much more powerful tale to tell - of the destruction by Thatcher in the 1980s of the traditional power of trade unions, universities, local government, the judiciary and the civil service. And of the huge rise under Blair et al since 1997 of the power of the political class and media – and the further emasculation of parliament, the Cabinet and the civil service. Interestingly, he coins the phrase “manipulative populism” – and identifies the significance of Peter Mair’s writing to the fate of the Western political party

The nature and location of power fascinated me from an early age – I had studied Elite theorists in the early 1960s on my political sociology course at University. Although Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923) and Gaetano Mosca (1858-1941) had led the way, it was Robert Michels’ (1876-1936) Political Parties (1911) which made the lasting impression on me - with his close study of trade unionists and social democrat politicians and derivation of “the iron law of oligarchy”.

For more than a century, one of the central issues of our time has been that of how “the masses” might be “controlled” in an age of democracy….These authors, thoroughly “Real” in their “Politik”, hardly suggested that the political and commercial elites had much to worry about – but this did not prevent writers such as Walter Lippmann (Public Opinion 1922) and Ortego y Gasset (Revolt of the Masses 1930) from conjuring up frightening narratives about the dangers of the great unwashed masses. Lippmann’s full book can be read here…

The scintillating prose of Joseph Schumpeter’s (1883-1950) Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1943) was also a favourite of mine – with his theory of the “circulation of the elites” reassuring the elites that all would be well….

But the populism evident since the start of the new millennium has sparked new anxieties on this count amongst the liberal elites – and indeed raised the question anew as to whether capitalism is consistent with democracy…

One guy whose words are worth reading on that question is SM Wolin – whose book on the history of political thought - Politics and Vision - held me spellbound in the 1960s. In his 90s he produced this great critique of the US system – Democracy Inc – managed democracy and the specter of inverted totalitarianism (2008) – reviewed here. And this is an interesting recent article, Why Elites always Rule which reminds the new generation of the significance of Pareto’s work…..

Since starting this post, I’ve noticed quite a few new books on this topic and will do an annotated reading list shortly of the dozen or so more interesting of these….

We, the people?

I almost threw a book at the television screen at the start of Trump’s inaugural address last month when he said that this “is the day power transfers..... to you, the people”. How could that be? He didn’t talk during the campaign about strengthening democracy; and, in any event, any serious programme would involve things like citizen juries, participatory budgets etc and would take time to implement properly….

On Inauguration Day power passed only to...... Trump – and we are therefore left with the clear conclusion that he confuses “the people” with himself – as did a certain French monarch when he was famously reported as saying “L’Etat, c’est moi!!” 

Or was it perhaps more of a promise that the “real” America he addresses (and assured in that same speech “never to let down”) could be confident that theirs were the only voices/votes he would bother about?? The rest – particularly journalists, judges, civil servants, politicians, experts, academics, protestors – he would simply ignore and bypass. One article this week put it thus - 

Trump’s inaugural address carried the stamp of hot ambition even in its (opening) salutation: ‘Chief Justice Roberts, President Carter, President Clinton, President Bush, President Obama, fellow Americans and people of the world, thank you.’
What were the people of the world doing here? It has been conjectured that Trump was greeting a blood-brotherhood ..that encompassed the followers of Farage, Le Pen, Orban, Wilders and others. Just as likely, given the grandiosity of the man, he meant to suggest that the fate of the world was so implicated in his ascension that it was only polite to say hello.

 The next section, however, seemed to see the American people as deciders for the world: ‘We, the citizens of America, are now joined in a great national effort to rebuild our country and restore its promise for all of our people. Together, we will determine the course of America and the world for many, many years to come.’ This was immediately followed by an attempt to divide friend from enemy within the US.

 “Against me, the establishment (‘Washington’); with me, the people – or rather the people who matter. In the new era of globalisation, ‘politicians prospered but the jobs left and the factories closed. The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country. Their victories have not been your victories. Their triumphs have not been your triumphs.’ For the people, for once, this inauguration day would be a day of celebration, and Trump would rejoice with them: ‘January 20th 2017 will be remembered as the day the people became the rulers of this nation again. The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer.’

 “People power” a la Suisse is all very well – if a bit tiring. But the Swiss have an active citizenry - who can afford to give their time to debate and referenda. Letting a “demagogic kleptocrat” loose who has declared war on those who occupy “the public space” which is the crucial link between the people and rulers.... is something else.....

I have never been a fan of the word “populism”.– on the grounds that it is clearly a derogatory term which is used to cut off discussion…..In a post before the Trump victory I offered some of the elements which I think might reasonably be attributed to the term. Jan Werner-Mueller’s recent little What is Populism? is one of the few books which have so far been written about it and builds on this earlier pamphlet.

But this short video (from last summer) manages to punch home the key elements and, in so doing, to persuade me that almost all the conditions are now in place in the USA for a significant breach in the democratic process…..See also Umbert Eco's classic 1995 article on "Ur-fascism" which identifies 14 elements of the condition......

And the LRB article I quoted from above then goes on to spell out very dramatically how the much-vaunted Obama legacy could so easily be used to muzzle dissidence and protest - 

The national security state that Obama inherited and broadened, and has now passed on to Trump, is so thoroughly protected by secrecy that on most occasions concealment will be an available alternative to lying. Components of the Obama legacy that Trump will draw on include
- the curtailment of the habeas corpus rights of prisoners in the War on Terror;
- the creation of a legal category of permanent detainees who are judged at once impossible to put on trial and too dangerous to release;
- the expanded use of the state secrets privilege to deny legal process to abused prisoners;
the denial of legal standing to American citizens who contest warrantless searches and seizures;
- the allocation of billions of dollars by the Department of Homeland Security to supply state and local police with helicopters, heavy artillery, state-of-the-art surveillance equipment and armoured vehicles; precedent for the violent overthrow of a sovereign government without consultation and approval by Congress (as in Libya);- precedent for the subsidy, training and provision of arms to foreign rebel forces to procure the overthrow of a sovereign government without consultation and approval by Congress (as in Syria);
- the prosecution of domestic whistleblowers as enemy agents under the Foreign Espionage Act of 1917;
- the use of executive authority to order the assassination of persons – including US citizens – who by secret process have been determined to pose an imminent threat to American interests at home or abroad;
- the executive approval given to a nuclear modernisation programme, at an estimated cost of $1 trillion, to streamline, adapt and miniaturise nuclear weapons for up to date practical use;
- the increased availability – when requested of the NSA by any of the other 16 US intelligence agencies – of private internet and phone data on foreign persons or US citizens under suspicion.
 The last of these is the latest iteration of Executive Order 12333, originally issued by Ronald Reagan in 1981. It had made its way through the Obama administration over many deliberate months, and was announced only on 12 January. As with the nuclear modernisation programme in the realm of foreign policy, Executive Order 12333 will have an impact on the experience of civil society which Americans have hardly begun to contemplate. Obama’s awareness of this frightening legacy accounts for the unpredictable urgency with which he campaigned for Hillary Clinton – an almost unseemly display of partisan energy by a sitting president. All along, he was expecting a chosen successor to ‘dial back’ the security state Cheney and Bush had created and he himself normalised.

The Revenge of History?

We have become fat, lazy and careless…..taking the levels of financial and institutional security enjoyed from the 1950s through to the 1990s too much for granted ("we" being the citizens of the core European states and the US) 

And whatever lessons the post-war generation learned about the killing fields of Europe in the first half of the 20^th century have clearly not been properly absorbed by their descendants….Nuclear war was a real and evident threat until the late 70s and seemed to have disappeared with the demise of the Soviet Union.

For many, therefore, the last 6 months have been a rude awakening - as the final vestiges of public trust in (government) leadership came crashing down and we found our attention being directed to the last time we confronted such uncertainty - the 1930s. But at last a sense of history is beginning to develop again. A couple of articles crystallised this for me – first one by Tobias Stone which actually appeared last summer - 

During the Centenary of the Battle of the Somme I was struck that it was a direct outcome of the assassination of an Austrian Arch Duke in Bosnia. I very much doubt anyone at the time thought the killing of a minor European royal would lead to the death of 17 million people.My point is that this is a cycle. It happens again and again, but as most people only have a 50-100 year historical perspective (from parents and school) they don’t see that it’s happening again.

As the events that led to the First World War unfolded, there were a few brilliant minds who started to warn that something big was wrong, that the web of treaties across Europe could lead to a war, but they were dismissed as hysterical, mad, or fools, as is always the way, and as people who worry about Putin, Brexit and Trump are dismissed now.

The other article Why Elites always Rule took me back to my university days in the early 1960s when I first encountered (and was impressed by) the work of the elite theorists Robert Michels, Mosca and Pareto; and of other central Europeans such as Schumpeter (of “circulation of the elites” fame) who had been writing a few decades earlier – on the central issue of how the masses might be controlled in an age of democracy……

I also remember Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power making a big impact on me when its English translation was published in 1962.

By the 1960s, however, far from fearing the masses a lot of us in Europe and America were celebrating them – whether through the fashion for “participation” let alone community action, direct action or community development    

Major political and economic events in the 1970s punctured that optimism and ushered in a celebration not of mutuality but of egocentricity, greed and commodification. Adam Curtis’ The Century of the Self captures the process superbly…….

(each section in the 2 tables represents a decade - starting with the 1930s - with what I take to have been the key themes eg "deindustrialisation" is the first of the themes of the 1980s...)  

I don’t like conspiracy theories but it does seem fairly clear now that a lot of very big money started in the late 1940s to fund a large number of new think-tanks devoted to pushing this new neo-liberal agenda. I remember when I first encountered in the 1970s the pamphlets from the British Institute for Economic Affairs. Their ideas (such as road pricing) were presented with quite ruthless elegance and were quite shocking - but had a coherent logic which allowed me to present them to my surveyor students as examples of the usefulness of economic thinking and principles…

Philip Morkowski’s 2009 study The Road from Mont Pelerin details (in its 480 pages!) how exactly the think tanks managed to achieve this ideological turnaround and to capture most powerful international bodies such as The World Bank, The International Monetary Fund, OECD and the EC. 

The Financial crash of 2008 should have been the catalyst to a rethink but, despite the valiant efforts of people such as Joseph Stiglitz and Mark Blyth, it has taken Brexit and Trump to challenge the assumptions of the neo-liberal machine……  

I don’t think it helps to throw labels around – whether "populist", "racist" or "fascist". (I try not to use any word which ends in “ist” since objecting a few years ago to being called a leftist)

Populist parties started to worry some people around the year 2000 – as you will see from this academic article but intellectual, political and business elites were so trapped in their bubbles that they didn’t spot it coming. Jan Werner-Mueller’s recent little What is Populism? is one of the few books which have so far been written about it and builds on this earlier pamphlet

We do not necessarily have to accept that "what goes around, comes around" ie that history is cyclical. But I suspect that it is a more fruitful approach than the one which has been prevailing in recent decades - namely that it's linear and takes us through innovative change to a better world......

I was impressed that some academics have tried to remedy our myopia and have put together a Trump Syllabus with a fairly extensive reading list -

http://www.chronicle.com/article/Trump-Syllabus/236824

http://www.publicbooks.org/trump-syllabus-2-0/

http://www.publicbooks.org/trump-syllabus-3-0/

In that same spirit I offer these hyperlinks -

Key reading

How to Build an Autocracy

Age of Kakistocracy,

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/06/22/ur-fascism/

https://gerryco23.wordpress.com/2017/01/25/drifting-towards-great-catastrophes-premonitions-from-the-1930s/

Others

https://almostrational.wordpress.com/2015/12/08/read-canetti-stop-trump/

http://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2011/08/crowds-power-canetti-book-eyes

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/11/14/1598974/-Listen-to-Trump-voters-Listen-to-Gessen-Eco-and-Canetti-first-learning-the-lessons-of-history

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2017/01/31/populistauthoritarian_strains_worry_koch_network_132949.html

http://washingtonmonthly.com/2017/01/31/the-12-early-warning-signs-of-fascism/

https://www.onfocus.com/2016/11/6845/anti-authoritarian-immune-system

https://www.opendemocracy.net/robert-borosage/trumps-perverse-populism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Revolt_of_the_Masses

http://pinkmonkey.com/dl/library1/revolt.pdf

https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/freedom-world-2017

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/04/america-tyranny-donald-trump.html

The title of this post I now see is one quite frequently used - eg 2 contemporary books by leftists (Seamus Milne and Alex Callicos) and also of this useful article    

The real watershed of the modern era

1979 is the year people point to as the critical date when the certainties of the immediate post-war period ended – with the election of Margaret Thatcher (and her ally Ronald Reagan a year later); and the overthrow of the Iranian Shah and arrival of theocracy…But it was, arguably, a few years earlier that the tectonic plates moved when Nixon (in 1971) renounced dollar convertibility; and when (in 1973) the oil crisis shook the developed world   

The significance of my last post is the story it tells of a world collapsing in the mid 1970s and the arrival in Washington in 1975 of a new generation of politicians – “the Watergate Babes”….who considered those who had borne the Democrat’s flag for the previous decades as “old-fogies” who no longer deserved a place in power…..

I was part of that same generation – my first taste of power was indeed 1968 (as a town councillor and very soon a committee chairman) – although I was also holding down a position as an academic (until 1985) which gave me the opportunity to absorb the new thinking about political economy and public economics which was then being articulated in the States. Social science was still new then – and economists still few in number. We had, sadly, a certain arrogance about the new tools at our disposal and toward our elders…….Tony Crosland had been my hero - "The Future of Socialism" which followed James Burnham in arguing that management rather then ownership was the issue had been published in 1956....... 
I vividly remember the words which came from my mouth at my inaugural meeting as Chairman in 1971 with an experienced Director – suggesting I could bring to our partnership a managerial experience which was at that stage entirely theoretical!!! 

The Atlantic article gives a wonderful sense of the intellectual mood which was around then - it starts with the newly-elected young Democrats targeting in 1975/76 one of the great stalwarts of the Democrat part,. Wright Patman, who represented the proud tradition of American populism- 

In 1974, young liberals did not perceive financial power as a threat, having grown up in a world where banks and big business were largely kept under control. It was the government—through Vietnam, Nixon, and executive power—that organized the political spectrum. …. suspicion of finance as a part of liberalism had vanished.

Over the next 40 years, this Democratic generation fundamentally altered American politics. They restructured “campaign finance, party nominations, government transparency, and congressional organization.” They took on domestic violence, homophobia, discrimination against the disabled, and sexual harassment. They jettisoned many racially and culturally authoritarian traditions. They produced Bill Clinton’s presidency directly, and in many ways, they shaped President Barack Obama’s.                   
 The result today is a paradox. At the same time that the nation has achieved perhaps the most tolerant culture in U.S. history, the destruction of the anti-monopoly and anti-bank tradition in the Democratic Party has also cleared the way for the greatest concentration of economic power in a century. This is not what the Watergate Babies intended when they dethroned Patman as chairman of the Banking Committee. But it helped lead them down that path.

The story of Patman’s ousting is part of the larger story of how the Democratic Party helped to create today’s shockingly disillusioned and sullen public, a large chunk of whom is now marching for Donald Trump……….
 In 1936, Wright Patman authored the Robinson-Patman Act, a pricing and antitrust law that prohibited price discrimination and manipulation, and that finally constrained the A&P chain store—the Walmart of its day—from gobbling up the retail industry. He would go on to write the Bank Secrecy Act, which stops money-laundering; defend Glass-Steagall, which separates banks from securities dealers; write the Employment Act of 1946, which created the Council of Economic Advisors; and initiate the first investigation into the Nixon administration over Watergate.

Far from being the longwinded octogenarian the Watergate Babies saw, Patman’s career reads as downright passionate, often marked by a vitality you might see today in an Elizabeth Warren—as when, for example, he asked Fed Chairman Arthur Burns, “Can you give me any reason why you should not be in the penitentiary?” 

……..Patman was also the beneficiary of the acumen of one of the most influential American lawyers of the 20th century, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis. In the 1930s, when Patman first arrived in Washington, he and Brandeis became friends. While on the Court, Brandeis even secretly wrote legislation about chain stores for Patman. Chain stores, like most attempts at monopoly, could concentrate wealth and power, block equality of opportunity, destroy smaller cities and towns, and turn “independent tradesmen into clerks.”

In 1933, Brandeis wrote that Americans should use their democracy to keep that power in check. Patman was the workers’ and farmers’ legislative hero; Brandeis, their judicial champion. ….Brandeis did for many New Dealers what he did for Patman, drafting legislation and essentially formalizing the populist social sentiment of the late 19th century into a rigorous set of legally actionable ideas. This philosophy then guided the 20th-century Democratic Party. Brandeis’s basic contention, built up over a lifetime of lawyering from the Gilded Age onward, was that big business and democracy were rivals. “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few,” he said, “but we can’t have both.” Economics, identity, and politics could not be divorced, because financial power—bankers and monopolists—threatened local communities and self-government.

This use of legal tools to constrain big business and protect democracy is known as anti-monopoly or pro-competition policy.…..

J.P. Morgan’s and John D. Rockefeller’s encroaching industrial monopolies were part of the Gilded Age elite that extorted farmers with sky-high interest rates, crushed workers seeking decent working conditions and good pay, and threatened small-business independence—which sparked a populist uprising of farmers, and, in parallel, sparked protest from miners and workers confronting newfound industrial behemoths. 

In the 20th century, Woodrow Wilson authored the Federal Trade Commission Act, the Federal Reserve Act, and the anti-merger Clayton Act, and, just before World War I intervened, he put Brandeis on the Supreme Court. Franklin Delano Roosevelt completed what Wilson could not, restructuring the banking system and launching antitrust investigations into “housing, construction, tire, newsprint, steel, potash, sulphur, retail, fertilizer, tobacco, shoe, and various agricultural industries.”

Modern liberals tend to confuse a broad social-welfare state and redistribution of resources in the form of tax-and-spend policies with the New Deal. In fact, the central tenet of New Deal competition policy was not big or small government; it was distrust of concentrations of power and conflicts of interest in the economy.

…….Underpinning the political transformation of the New Deal was an intellectual revolution, a new understanding of property rights. In a 1932 campaign speech known as the Commonwealth Club Address, FDR defined private property as the savings of a family, a Jeffersonian yeoman-farmer notion updated for the 20th century.

By contrast, the corporation was not property. Concentrated private economic power was “a public trust,” with public obligations, and the continued “enjoyment of that power by any individual or group must depend upon the fulfillment of that trust.” The titans of the day were not businessmen but “princes of property,” and they had to accept responsibility for their power or be restrained by democratic forces. The corporation had to be fit into the constitutional order. ….

New Deal fears of bigness and private concentrations of power were given further ideological ammunition later in the 1930s by fascists abroad. As Roosevelt put it to Congress when announcing a far-reaching assault on monopolies in 1938: “The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism.” In 1947, Patman even commissioned experts to publish a book titled Fascism in Action, noting that fascism as a political system was the combination of extreme nationalism and monopoly power, a “dictatorship of big business.”

This basic understanding of property formed the industrial structure of mid-20th-century America and then, through its trading arrangements, much of the rest of the world. Using this framework, the Democrats broke the power of bankers over America’s great industrial commons.

To constrain big business and protect democracy, Democrats used a raft of anti-monopoly, or pro-competition, policy to great effect, leading to vast changes: The Securities and Exchange Commission was created, the stock exchanges were regulated, the big banks were broken up, the giant utility holding companies were broken up, farmers gained government support for stable agricultural prices free from speculation, and the chain stores were restrained by laws that blocked them from using predatory pricing to undermine local competition (including, for instance, competition from a local camera store in San Francisco run by a shopkeeper named Harvey Milk).

The Democrats then extended this globally, through the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and NATO—even as the United Stated simultaneously used that decentralization to mobilize local communities around the world against the Soviet threat. For example, when General Douglas MacArthur led the Allied occupation of Japan at the end of World War II, key parts of his economic plan included importing the Glass-Steagall Act and antitrust laws into Japan. Back home, Democrats poured government financing into science, and they forced AT&T, RCA, and DuPont to license their treasure troves of patents so that small businesses could compete and so that the scientific discoveries of the corporate world couldn’t be locked away. Eventually, strong competition policy gained a bipartisan consensus, and the idea that anyone would allow concentrations of private power to dominate U.S. politics seemed utterly foolish.

I will continue the summary tomorrow - 
in the meantime, the photo is one taken at the glorious exhibition here in Sofia about the "Russian Impressionists" - "Gust of Wind" (1960ss) by Grishchenko

A Fatal Detachment

Last Sunday’s blogpost – before the Trump victory which was so obvious for those with eyes to see – focussed on populism and on the rage which one finds in Europe and northern America. Bernie Sanders was a self-confessed socialist but such was the people’s rage and need for a champion that they were somehow able (even with America’s visceral hatred for the word) to take that in their stride……

The same was true of Trump – the precariat and the left-behind whites forgave him his offensiveness (even relishing his political un-correctness) since he shared and championed their revulsion of free trade and movement of labour

Scales are beginning to fall from some eyes as the bubble in which the media lives (in their own company and that of the elites) is exposed – with few journalists having bothered to survey life in small-town America. John Harris, with Gary Younge, one of the few who bothered, used a wonderful phrase about “a fatal detachment from the place where politics is actually played out”

We know about the trivialisation of politics but have not quite fathomed perhaps the extent to which even the “higher” journalism indulges in it, with its fixation on personalities rather than issues. Citizens may not be policy geeks but they are experts in the problems/issues they see and feel around them….. 

There are two articles I would urge people to read who wish to have a depth understanding of what is currently going on – first Glenn Greenwald’s piece of 9 November - 

The parallels between the U.K.’s shocking approval of the Brexit referendum in June and the U.S.’s even more shocking election of Donald Trump as president Tuesday night are overwhelming. Elites (outside of populist right-wing circles) aggressively unified across ideological lines in opposition to both. Supporters of Brexit and Trump were continually maligned by the dominant media narrative (validly or otherwise) as primitive, stupid, racist, xenophobic, and irrational.

In each case, journalists who spend all day chatting with one another on Twitter and congregating in exclusive social circles in national capitals — constantly re-affirming their own wisdom in an endless feedback loop — were certain of victory.

Afterward, the elites whose entitlement to prevail was crushed devoted their energies to blaming everyone they could find except for themselves, while doubling down on their unbridled contempt for those who defied them, steadfastly refusing to examine what drove their insubordination.

But the article which really helped connect the dots for me was this long one a few weeks ago in The Atlantic titled How Democrats killed their Populist soul.  I’ve read a lot about the “neo-liberal capture” of our political and government institutions but this is the single article that helped me understand (a) how crucial in the post-war period was the continuing commitment to anti-monopoly policies; (b) how the “Watergate babies” broke that in 1975 in the post-Vietnam and Nixon eras; and (c) the role played in that break by such writers as Lester Thurow and even the great JK Galbraith…

Basically that’s when the pass was sold on globalisation and equality; that’s when my generation lost whatever commitment it had retained to small-town civilisation….

Ina future post, I hope to expand on that…….
in the meantime the painting which heads the post is one from Tony Todoroff's latest exhibition in Vihra's superb Astry Gallery

Populism - what is it?

A common theme of current journalism is the “populist” rage tearing through the fabric of western politics…...as expressed. for example, in Brexit and in the scale and nature of support for both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. 
I’ve always had a problem with this epithet  - not least for its patronising tone about citizens and its assumption that our modern elites were incapable of being mistaken about globalisation.......
 A couple of years ago, I extracted this "deconstruction" from the volume of scribblings on the subject- 

- First, the ‘people’ is of paramount importance. Here, a feeling of community is stressed, and horizontal cleavages (such as left-right) are played down while vertical ones are played up for the purpose of excluding particular groups, e.g. elites and immigrants.

- Second, populists claim that the ‘people’ has been betrayed by the elites through their abuse of power, corruption etc.

- Third, populists demand that the “primacy of the people” has to be restored. In short: the current elites would have to be replaced and in their place the new leaders (the populists) would act for the good of the ‘people’.

An earlier post referred to a paper which gave more detail -

1. Populism is the substitute for the eroded Left/Right divide in politics. It replaces it through the populist cleavage of ‘the establishment’ versus ‘the people’. They are perceived as false unities and indeed pose a potential threat to the pluralist and constitutional dimensions of democracy.  

2. Populism is a revolt against (the narrative of) globalisation.  

3. Populism is a revolt against what the Germans call the Second Modernity, or late modernity: that is the modernity of individualisation, de-traditionalisation, cosmopolitanism, neoliberal capitalism and the global network society.  

4. Populism is a revolt against expert-driven, technocratic policy-making.  

5. Populism is the revolt of the working class and the squeezed lower middle class against the dominance of academic professionals in society and public discourse.  

6. Populism is the revenge of the working class after the neoliberal betrayal (permanent welfare state austerity reforms) of socialist and social-democratic parties.  

7. Populism is a dangerous, xenophobic revolt against ill-managed mass migration which negatively affected the lower end of society much more so than the upper end.  

8. Populism is a revolt against a world that is changing too rapidly and where traditions, identities, and securities are no longer respected.  

9. Where socialism and Christianity no longer act as moral and cultural restraints or breaks to the disrupting process of globalisation, populism has filled the vacuum: populism is a romantic, irrational, emotional revolt against the inhuman philosophy of efficiency in both the market and the state. 

10. Populism is a revolt against the powerlessness of the political class who have seemingly lost all grip after handing control over to the anonymous forces of globalisation, the financial markets, and the logics of EU technocracy.

 I would ask my readers to bear these definitions in mind as British and American events unravel in the next few weeks........

What is Populism?

The obvious question after yesterday’s post is - What is “populism”?

One academic, in a useful overview is quoted as claiming there were essential aspects.

• First, the ‘people’ is of paramount importance. Here, a feeling of community is stressed, and horizontal cleavages (such as left-right) are played down while vertical ones are played up for the purpose of excluding particular groups, e.g. elites and immigrants.

• Second, populists claim that the ‘people’ has been betrayed by the elites through their abuse of power, corruption etc.

• Third, populists demand that the “primacy of the people” (p. 13) has to be restored. In short: the current elites would have to be replaced and in their place the new leaders (the populists) would act for the good of the ‘people’.

 This, for me is where things get interesting. My blog has referred several time to Robert Michels whose Political Parties – a sociological study of the oligarchical tendencies of modern democracy reminded us 100 years ago of the verity of Lord Acton’s words – “power corrupts – but absolute power corrupts absolutely”. The power of Michels’s words still comes back to me from my first reading of him as part of my University degree all of 50 years ago! (The entire book can be downloaded here - and a useful assessment is available here) 

Later in my course, however, I came across Schumpeter whose Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy persuaded me that democracy was actually - and not unreasonably - “a competitive circulation of the elites”. A few years later the global mood in 1968 took a more critical turn and encouraged a more active and participative role for citizens. Coincidentally that was the year I was first elected – hardly surprisingly I encouraged what was called “neighbourhood mobilisation” which was indeed institutionalised in a strategy which owed a lot to the American War on Poverty (and its milder UK equivalent).

Of course active citizens are no more representative than politicians – but they should, we innocently thought, at least keep politicians on their toes. That may have been true at a local level (although in too many countries, municipal systems have been denuded of power) – nationally the media were supposed to keep a bright torch shining on the misdeeds of those in authority – but, in the past couple of decades, have been almost totally bought out.

So where does that leave us? Disillusioned – and powerless? 
Not quite – rather talking of replacing the political elites – and random selection of citizens for limited terms in office.

But two questions -

• why should those in power be willing to surrender that power by, for example, amending the electoral laws to allow that to happen – let alone to cut off their political funding?
• And what have we learned from other efforts (eg the German Greens) to ensure that leaders (and other strange animals) do not emerge and corrupt the “general will”?

Future posts will try to explore some of the more anarchistic (perhaps better "fatalistic") ideas which have surfaced since the “Occupy” movement first started

In the meantime I couldn’t resist inserting this flier for an academic association specialising in ./…the study of elites

Bulgarian populism and the protests

Globalism has failed. Monetarism has failed. The liberal politics of “less government, the market has the final say” has failed. The worldwide financial crisis, caused by the US, is a clear sign of this. Market fundamentalism, transformed into a religion by the financial and political establishment of the US, has suffered an abysmal defeat…. We say no to the world’s speculative capital, no to supranational corporations, which destroy market economies, no to Wall Street, and we say yes to more common sense, balance, and equity

What could be more sensible than that? And yet the words are taken from the right-wing Bulgarian Аtaka party’s 2013 manifesto. I found them a few days ago in an excellent overview of Bulgarian populism on Anna Krasteva’s blog. The article, written, in English, by a Bulgarian academic who lives in Sofia, continues

The populist rage is targeted mostly at international capital, which “drains” the national wealth: Ataka have estimated that 28 billion 257 million levs have been diverted from the pockets of Bulgarian tax payers into the treasuries of foreign companies selling food, clothes, electricity, banking services etc.“All institutions, all ministries, the fields of culture, healthcare, and education altogether receive 10 billion levs less than the foreign colonizers!“  (Аtaka 2013, 8).Anti-Europeanism is the other topic which attracts the critical pathos of populist negation. It strikes out in three directions.

• The first one concerns the accusations of neo-colonialism: the EU “is becoming a new Soviet Union, functioning by force and against the constitution” (Аtaka 2013). The full version of the program bears the arrogant title Siderov’s Plan against the Colonial Yoke; the text begins with the story of “how we were enslaved after the fall of the Berlin Wall”.

• The second criticism is institutional and is leveled at Europe’s institutional structure: “the fake figure of EU president has been imposed, which contradicts both national and international law”; this claim also targets the consequences of Bulgaria’s political strategy: “The Euro Pact invalidates the Parliament and the government, the elections, and democracy at large.”

• The third direction has to do with Europeanization as a form of globalization: “The Euro Pact reinforces the power of the supranational and corporate oligarchy“. All of these criticisms converge in a cluster whose core conveys the message, “the EU is a threat to the national identity, sovereignty, and dignity”: “Bulgaria is threatened with a loss of identity and with extinction”; “Bulgaria is losing its sovereignty“.

Of course, the Ataka style is highly aggressive and intolerant – but I see no reason to fault this sort of the discourse which you will find in all current European “populist” parties. The romantic pull of the village and its traditions does seem stronger in Bulgaria than (say) in Romania - and the Romanian peasantry (unlike the Bulgarian) does seem to retain its loyalty to socialist/communist elements of political organisation......

In a long post just a couple of weeks ago, the same author has a rare and useful analysis of the protests which have now lasted here in Bulgaria for one year now.

I would identify three waves and three types of protests:

• the anti-monopoly protests of winter/spring 2013;

• the anti-oligarchy protests of summer 2013;

• the anti-government student protests of autumn 2013.

The political geography of the winter protests was decentralized. Sofia did not win first place, but neither did it vie for it. I have called those protests ‘Varna Spring’ because the protesters in Varna outnumbered those in Sofia, as well as because their outrage was well-targeted – against the mayor and a business group. Not against business in general, but against criminal groups suffocating business; not against the elite in general, but against a mayor who had brought the city to its knees before behind-the-scenes interests; not against government in general, but against that which was devouring Varna’s Sea Garden and stifling the vitality and enterprising spirit of Bulgaria’s seaside capital (Krasteva 2013c). 

Just days after the winter protests, the government of Boyko Borisov resigned although the protesters had not demanded – nor even thought of demanding – its resignation. After six months of protests against the Oresharski government, protesters were still demanding its resignation but the government, Parliament, and even the opposition were now saying that the incumbents were likely to remain in power for some time to come. The political effect of the winter and the post-winter protests was opposite, but they were similar in that, paradoxically, both led to the opposite of the desired results.In terms of duration, the protest year 2013 is unprecedented in Bulgarian democratic history.

We remember from history how a trivial occasion – an African American woman’s refusal to surrender her seat to a white man – led to the abolition of racial segregation and a profound transformation of American society. The Bulgarian protests also started from a concrete occasion – the exorbitant electricity bills and the appointment of Delyan Peevski, a controversial media mogul, as chief of the State Agency for National Security (DANS) – but the protest wave outlived the occasion (Peevski did not remain in office for more than a day), rightly interpreting it not as an exception but as an inevitable consequence of the whole political system which became the target of its outrage.

This is a most useful update of a rather more general 2008 article on Bulgarian populism entitled Radical Demophilia by Conservative MEP Svetoslav Malinov  and should be put in the wider context of the collection of articles I referred to a few days ago on European populism, the general tone of the articles being (typically) elitist and disapproving. 
What, I have to wonder, is wrong with being in tune with popular opinion these days - let alone picking out the corporate and political elite for denigration?????

The painting is one of the favourite Socialist Realist ones I have in my collection. Of partisans, it gives a sense of the village against the enemy.......

Collapse of an honourable profession

Politicians are – and have long been – a good scapegoat for a society’s problems. 

Spineless and avaricious…So what’s new?

Well, quite a lot actually. Fifty years ago, politics was important in Europe at any rate – ideas and choices mattered. 

It was actually almost an honourable profession – people like Bernard Crick argued thus in 1962 in a classic and highly eloquent “In Defence of Politics” which probably played some part in my own decision to go into (local, then regional) politics in 1968. (Daumier clearly had a different view of politicians in the early 19th century - which is why I've been using his caricatures to head this series of posts)

After a couple of years of community initiatives and three years of chairing an innovative social work committee, I found myself playing for 16 years a rather fascinating but unusual role – nominally the Secretary of a ruling group of politicians (responsible for some 100,000 local government professionals), I was actually trying to create a system of countervailing power - of advisory groups of councillors and junior officials challenging various conventional policy wisdoms; and of community groups in the huge swathe of poor neighbourhoods of the West of Scotland -  trying to demonstrate what “community enterprise” had to offer. 
Political studies had been one of the key parts of my Master's Degree - so I was aware of the literature about democracy (such as it was then) - and, more particularly, elites (Mosca; Pareto; Schumpeter; Lipset; Dahrendorf; Michels - interestingly none of it british!). 
But it was the experience of representing a low-income neighbourhood in a shipbuilding town which showed me the deficiencies of actual democracy and the reality of bureaucratic power. The local, working- class politicians who were my colleagues were pawns in the hands of the educated, middle class professionals who ran the local services. As a young middle class graduate, I saw an opportunity to challenge things - using my social science words and concepts - if not knowledge! 
I had been inspired by the community activism of people like Saul Alinsky (and also by the early years of the American War on Poverty) and indeed wrote in 1978 two 5,000 word articles for Social Work Today (on multiple deprivation; and community development). The latter critiqued the operation of democracy and appeared in a major book on community development.

Straddling power systems was not easy (part of the important balancing process I have spoken about) – but, because I was seen as honest (if eccentric), no one could unseat me from the post (for which I competed every two years - from 1974-1990) as Secretary of the ruling Cabinet and Group of 78 Regional Councillors.

I was also lucky also to have access in the 1980s to various European working groups – and get a sense of how politicians and officials interacted there. And, most of the time, still an academic. I was in the middle of a complex of diverse groups – political, professional, local, national and European. It was the best education I ever had!

But by the late 1980s I was beginning to see the writing on the wall – Thatcher was privatising and contracting out local government functions – and abolishing any elected agency which tried to stand up to her. Greed was beginning to be evident. Thereafter I have watched events from a distance. I left British shores in late 1990 and became a bit of a political exile! 

Despite my unease with Blair and the New Labour thing, I was still excited by their arrival in government in 1997. And able to draft, even in the early 2000s, papers which extolled the apparent openness and creativity of British policy systems. 

But most of it, I now realise, was sheer verbiage and spin. Yesterday's post summarised the key points of the 1995 paper which superbly analysed the various phases political parties have gone through to reach their present impasse.

George Monbiot’s 2001 book “The Corporate State – the corporate takeover of Britain” - exposing the extent of new Labour’s involvement with big business - was my first real warning that things were falling apart; that the neo—liberal agenda of market rather than state power was in total control. And a wave of urbane, smooth-suited and well-connected young wannabe technocrats powering through the selection procedures.

The scale and nature of political spin – not least that surrounding the Iraq war - destroyed government credibility like a slow poison. 

The global debt crisis and bank bail-outs shattered the myth of progress. 

And then the media made sure to rub politicians’ noses in the petty excesses of expenditure claims. 

Both political parties haemorraged members – and then electoral support.

There are still some lone voices prepared to defend the political class - but it is a pointless task.

The political party as we know it has exhausted its capital – but still controls the rules of the game. They decide the laws; who is allowed to run; what qualifies as a party – with how many nominees or voter threshold; with what sort of budget; and with sort of (if any) television and radio coverage…

Parties should be abolished – but it is almost impossible to do so because they will always come back in a different form…….

I’m just looking at a book which focuses on the fringes of the European party system – the populist parties – and which does a good job of setting them in the wider context.

We have governments that no longer know how to govern; regulators who no longer know how to regulate; leaders who no longer lead; and an international press in thrall to all those hapless powers. Political parties no longer represent, banks no longer lend……Current political and social conditions are paradoxical: as citizens and individuals we live lives that reflect the fact that we have more information and more access to information than ever before – while at the same time we have a great deal less certainty about our futures, both individual and collective. We are, some would argue, increasingly living in conditions of ‘radical uncertainty’. …..

Uncertainty returns and proliferates everywhere.’ As a result, one of the key variables that needs to be factored into how we understand both demands and mobilisation on the one hand and policies and institutions on the other is anxiety.Not the niggles and worries of everyday life, but rather the surfacing of deep turmoil in the face of an uncertain future whose contours are barely perceptible and thus increasingly frightening.

And, though the condition of radical uncertainty might have existed, objectively, in the past, it existed at times when there had been no experience or expectation of the predictability of the future beyond that imagined in the context of religious or magical beliefs. No experience of the desirability and possibility of controlling our fate. Radical uncertainty in a world in which everyone has come to prize autonomy and control is a different proposition all together 

The digital revolution provides an impetus for the transformation of populism from a set of disparate movements with some shared themes and characteristics into something that has the force of a political ideology. The accelerated quality of political time and social media’s capacity to broadcast failure and dissent mean that the digital revolution gives populist movements a steady supply of political opportunity that reinforces its coherence. ...

And in the face of the rather colossal set of forces and transformations that fuel populism’s growth, curbing its destructive potential is about more than fiddling with an electoral manifesto here and changing an electoral strategy there. Those things need to be done, but they are minimum survival tactics rather solutions. The problem is the manner in which populism as an ideology is capable of marshalling the uncertainties and anxieties that characterise our era and responding in ways that provide the illusion of reassurance. Illusory though it may be, it fills that gap between the expectations of redemptive democracy on the one hand and the lacklustre manoeuvring of panicked policy-makers on  the other. A gap otherwise filled with uncertainty and anxiety becomes  filled with populist reassurance.