A NEW DIG SITE!
PART 1, FURTHER ARCHEOLOGY OF EARLY FEDERAL POPULIST SCHOLARSHIP
Sometimes you must take a couple steps back to get a running start at your target. So, let’s do that for a bit. Not leaving federalism behind, just laying out another fertile path for getting there. I’d mentioned, almost in passing, in an earlier post, that the current wave of populism in the U.S. is not of recent origin, and certainly has no intrinsic connection to Donald Trump. To reprise what I said there, in response to the consolidation of the managerial liberal regime in the 1960s (after decades of growing strength through the New Deal and the military-industrial complex that emerged from WWII), in the late 60s and 70s the new populist movement emerged in the form of what Richard Nixon called “the silent majority.”
Becoming somewhat less silent, most famously it manifested early in the hard hat brawls with hippies and anti-Vietnam war protestors, as well as the condemnation of affirmative action, and most dramatically fueled the anti-bussing protests of the 70s. However, in the 1980s, populism was coopted by the rhetoric of the Reagan Revolution. As Christopher Caldwell has observed, Reaganomics used massive deficit spending to buy off a decade of relative peace between the conflicting ambitions of the managerial class and the populist insurgents. Perhaps perceiving that the Reagan era truce was decaying under George H. W. Bush – as consumer confidence crashed and unemployment soared – that insurgency burst out again in the 90s, fueling the presidential campaigns of Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot.
Again though, it was coopted, this time under the banner of patriotism, following the 9/11 attacks. However, as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq stretched on – and loved ones of the very people who filled the ranks of the populist movement kept returning home in body bags – skepticism over how the early patriotic outpouring had been manipulated began to grow. Following the financial crisis of 2008, with the massive transfer of wealth it incurred, and the absence of criminal accountability on the part of those responsible, that growing discontent about how the 9/11 attacks had been leveraged for the war machine, gave rise to a new eruption of this decades-long (now, also, widely anti-war) populist insurgency. Many had believed that they’d found a champion in the hope and change rhetoric of Obama. When that turned out to be untrue, and then Bernie Sanders proved incapable of providing the champion they sought, the populists finally turned to the unlikely champion of Donald Trump.
To my reading of history, that’s how we find ourselves here. And regular readers will know that I’ve been engaged in an unearthing of earlier thinkers who experienced and anticipated much of this, as long as thirty years ago. Paul Piccone, Christopher Lasch, Sam Francis, and Lawrence Goodwyn, among others, are examples of this theoretical archeology – mostly centred on the 90s, though certainly reaching back into the 80s on occasion. These thinkers have recognized both the emergence of such a multi-decade populist insurgency, as well as it’s communitarian (possibly even pluralist) tendencies, even in some of their cases acknowledging that the success of such a populism would require an embrace of that organic communitarianism, as the existential challenge to the hegemony of managerial liberalism. Some even recognized that the revival and success of such a communitarian populism required the revitalization of the long suppressed American tradition of genuine, bottom-up federalism.
While the main motive of such a theoretical archeology, of course, was to learn from these thinkers’ theoretical and historical insights and experiences, I was also happy to give them the credit they deserved for – what from our vantage point – was often impressive foresight. With this understanding of that vein of the current substack’s mission, for those of you unfamiliar with him, I’m exceptionally pleased to introduce a theorist who well-preceded those others in seeing the outlines of what was coming. While he (at least based on the four-plus books of his I’ve recently read) virtually never uses the word populism1, the entire dynamic described in the prior paragraph is all there. He saw it all coming; understood the causes and implications; and even grasped what would become necessary for a change of direction. And he began unpacking so much of this in his first book, published in 1953.
The thinker to whom I’m referring was Robert Nisbet. Honestly, now that I’ve familiarized myself with his work, I’m a bit embarrassed that it’s taken me this long to hit upon him. And, frankly, I’m not even sure exactly now how I did so. I recall that I’d been doing some reading on the European pluralists. And that’s an interesting stream of thought, which I’ll be getting back to, perhaps even during my deep dive on Nisbet. Probably somewhere thereabouts I was prodded to have a look at his ideas. I was familiar with his name, but somehow, somewhere back there in the latter decades of the 20th century I think I associated him with the neoconservatives.
In any event, I’d never felt any need or special interest to investigate him. His was just another of those many names from that era – like Michael Novak, Nathan Glazer, or James Q. Wilson – which just were bouncing around, but I didn’t feel compelled in any way to explore. (I know; I probably should look at them, too, I guess. But one revelation at a time.) It is striking, even a little disturbing, with hindsight to realize how much further ahead I could have been intellectually if I had read Nisbet much earlier in life. But I guess that’s the whole thing about hindsight. You can only get wherever you’re going by way of the path that you’re on.
So, I’m dedicating a brief series to Nisbet. I am unclear how many posts this will take. Maybe just a couple. In any event, in the next post I’ll unpack his core ideas from The Quest for Community, that 1953 book mentioned above, which anticipated so much of what I’ve been thinking through about the nature of what Piccone identified as the objective objective of the new populism. Though, my favorite Nisbet book, so far at least, has been The Social Philosophers, which provides an intellectual history of both the rise of the universalist and progressivist ideology that has assaulted human community, as well as the intellectual movements that have pushed back against those pressures and have recognized the institutional and organizational means to recover organic human community – including federalism. As we’ll see, an important part of this intellectual resistance included those who, following insights from Jean-Claude Michéa, I’ve come to call the right-wing socialists (see here and here.)
However, in addition to providing impressive prescience on what laid ahead for the rest of us (Nisbet died in 1996), he offers some fascinating arguments which I’ve never encountered before about the exact dynamics of what got us here. Indeed, weaving his insights through the lens of Harold Innis: we could say he demonstrates how the spatials managed to gain ascendency over the temporals, not once, but twice in European history. While there is more to the story, the key influence in all this was the role of Roman Law. Plus, while understanding his analysis there provides intriguing insights into the concrete historical processes in the long struggle between spatials and temporals, that analysis also opens upon a fascinating question about how to incorporate the role of ideas into the kind of materialist analyses which I’m always engaged in here. I’ll definitely have something to say about that topic: catnip for the epistemology nerds out there.
All that remains to be unpacked in the posts ahead. (It doesn’t really sound like just a couple of posts, does it?) So, if this seems like the sort of thing that would interest you, but you haven’t yet, please do…
And if you know anyone else who might be interested in these topics, please…
In fact, in one of his later books, Conservatism: Dream and Reality, he uses the “populism” in something pretty much approaching a derogatory way. While some of these contexts make sense within a very narrow register, they’re overall misguided. For instance, I understand his concern over populists resisting the Supreme Court, especially in the context where he is nodding to independent courts as a cherished vestige of feudal autonomy. But this is an excessively limited perspective. Historically, going back a hundred years from when he was writing, populism has focused on creating just the kind of intermediary institutions, sheltering people from direct exposure to state or market, that is central to his pluralism. So, this may be in part an expression of an unfamiliarity with the actual history of populism. We can hardly fault him on that front. He had one heck of a lot of history crammed into that head of his.