HAPPY ANNIVERSARY REMINISCENCE!

AND A PROVISIONAL RESEARCH PLAN FOR STUDYING THE NEW POPULISM

It was one year ago today, while still living in Albania, that I posted my first entry to this substack. Much has happened in the world, my life, and the intellectual development of this substack over the course of that year. So, I thought it might be appropriate to take a few moments to reflect — at least on the latter.

Those small few who have been with me from the start will recall that when initially begun this substack had a very different focus. It’s creation was inspired by an interest in publicizing the importance of considering the role and potential impact of political pathocracy. That initial focus is evident to anyone who has gone back to look at the maiden post. However, things happened. First, Harrison Koehli, editor of the newest edition of Andrew M. Lobaczewski’s landmark book on the topic, Political Ponerology, began a substack of his own. And frankly, Harrison was a heck of a lot more qualified to cover those areas than I was.

So, I began to re-evaluate whether my contribution might lie elsewhere — in areas where I might have more to offer. As I pointed out in some of my earlier posts, the managerial class turned out to be a fertile breeding ground for the camouflage and promotion of political pathocracy, given the modus operandi that they shared (see, here and here). Now, managerial class theory was a topic that I did indeed know something about. So, I decided to start pressing more my comparative advantage in that area. I also thought that fleshing out the biopolitics dimension of managerial class rule, given the COVID situation, would provide an additional relevant angle.

However, I’d hardly gotten started on this transition when my plans, like much of the world, was shaken up by the spontaneous rise of the mass trucker-initiated protest movement back home in Canada. My early response was to try to understand these interesting, indeed surprising, developments exclusively from within a managerial class theory framework (see here, here and here). However, it quickly became clear to me that to really make sense of what was going on — among the truckers and indeed across much of the western world — it was necessary to bring in another dimension of analysis. This was to view what was happening through the lens of populist history and theory (see here and here).

Populism too was something that I knew quite a bit about (see here). I’d written my doctoral thesis, way back there in the dawning mist of time, on an early 20th century instance of populism. So, I entered into a thorough refresher course on populist history and theory. As I dove deeper down that rabbit hole, though, I (re)discovered an insight that I’d completely forgotten about, from a thinker I’d long admired: Paul Piccone. He’d made the observation — one of those observations that seem so obvious once someone else points it out — that populism today had a new theoretical setting (see here).

While populism has always been a protest against the abuse of regular people by their elites and ruling class, in the current context, faced with the distinctive qualities of the managerial class as ruling elite, the path to success of populism now rested on an existential challenge to that managerial class. It was no longer enough, as it had been at least presumed to be by some past populists, to re-invigorate democracy with more grassroot institutions. Now, the very survival of something that could be considered a people — as opposed to a set of deracinated individuals — required the rejuvenation of the kind of organic community which could produce, root, and shelter a non-abstract people: a people rooted in an organic community of values and norms: a concrete order, in Schmitt’s terms.

The project of such a rejuvenation, though, flies directly in the face of the institutional reality and moral raison d'être of managerial class rule. Such rule assumed the moral and technical superiority of the managerial class and its consequence legitimacy in administering everyone else’s lives toward the achievement of that class’s vision of the progressive society. That managerial class vision logically required its bureaucratic paternalism and justified its ethos of relentless, invasive social engineering. Managerial class rule was inconceivable without this utter colonization of both public and private life: civil society, family, and personal identity.

As such, the logic of managerial class rule was inevitably upon a collision course with the “objective objective” of the new populism. This was a Schmittian, existential friend-enemy conflict: a zero-sum game. To the degree one succeeded, the other must fail.

In a recent post, I challenged certain Gramscian assumptions that have been influential among some in the new populism. I emphasized the importance of not relying exclusively upon cultural change, but illustrated (I hope) the importance of a two pronged approach, including an awareness of the importance of politics. This involved attention to the political action that might hobble the administrative state, opening up room for the cultural project of rejuvenating organic community.

But it also involved the need to look more seriously at the conditions of a governance structure that would complement, nurture, and protect organic communities and their concrete institutions. In other words, the political side of the challenge was not merely defensive — rolling back the administrative state — but it also had to be offensive: generating conducive governance structures for the sustainability of organic community, since the managerial class can hardly be assumed to merely disappear even under a major populist victory.

So, on this one year anniversary of the Circulation of Elites substack, I thought I’d offer some thoughts on what to expect going forward. Though I’ve always been open to being waylaid by events of the day — e.g., trucker convoys, deceased monarchs, and naked displays of super-legality — this is my plan going forward.

In addition to continuing basic research on populism as the only native North American movement challenging ruling class dominance and abuse¹, considering its organizational and intellectual history, three further avenues of research and reflection have presented themselves to me as areas I need to explore more.

1. Federalism. This entails consideration of the governance structures that could create the space for the recovery and maintaining of organic community, rooted in concrete order. Federalism is a political solution that has an intriguing history, but in its practical implementation has largely fallen short of its ambitious projections. Sometimes these shortcomings have been a failure of a proper understanding of the theory and its implications, in other cases it has been a result of deliberate sabotage, effectively a revolution within the form, that pretended to be something it was never sincerely intended to be because of the benefits that accrued from such a delusion to the ruling class. I’ll need to unpack all this.

2. Producerism. This term captures a range of related ideas; it’s hard to come up with a fully efficient single word. In the context of the discussion here, it could also be characterized as something like: a federal populist economy. The core idea here is that the mass production economy we have cultivates the organizational assumptions and mental attitudes that flow into mass society, eroding intermediary institutions, giving rise to deracinated individuals, playing into the hands of managerial liberalism. In a mass production economy, in which most people work as waged employees, neither the psychological nor material conditions of a free and independent people are possible. But are these developments —as so many free marketers and socialists alike would claim — the natural logic of economic progress or were they the result of paths chosen for reasons of power rather than economic necessity? In fact other paths, rooted in humanly scaled production and organic communities, always were (and remain) open to us. A wide range of alternate traditions can be drawn upon for insights into how re-imagining economic relations might provide a sounder footing for the populist alternative to managerial liberalism. These include, though are not restricted to, the work of Karl Polanyi: the neo-Marxist literature on post-Fordism; the “flexible specialization” research associated to scholars such as Charles Sabel; possibly guild socialism; and the Catholic tradition of Distributism.

3. Communitarianism. This area of research seeks to throw light upon what we know about what conditions make organic community possible and what resources remain available for pursuing those ends. This involves digging into what exactly it means to speak of an individual rooted in community. After all, if we’re to call populism the movement for a recovery of such relationships, it is no more insightful or constructive to use — as so many do — an abstract people than had been useful to use an abstract individual under liberalism (or managerial liberalism). A deeper understanding of what it means to speak of the people, as individuals rooted in community, needs to be fleshed out. At a more foundational level there may be roots to this insight from phenomenological philosophy (e.g., Husserl, Heidegger, Schultz, Dugin?). However that pans out, there is much to be learned about such things from the conservative and civic republican traditions — among others.

So, in addition to continuing fundamental theoretical and historical work on populism, these three paths — federalism, producerism, and communitarianism — have struck me as especially important ones for fleshing out a fuller picture of how the new populism might constitute a genuine challenge to managerial liberalism and the rule of the managerial class. Needless to say, any one of these paths could constitute (and indeed has constituted) a lifelong research project. And in my case, lifelong isn’t likely really all that much longer. So, my strategy going forward is to dip my toes into each of these. They’re listed above in the order of which I already have some substantive past research experience. So, they’ll get more challenging as we go. Perhaps each will get several months, half a year? It’s really hard to be certain at this point.

If all goes well, though, by this substack’s next anniversary, I will have gotten considerably deeper into these questions. Perhaps at some point I’ll double back and choose to concentrate a deeper dive down one path. Or maybe the prize will seem to be more along the line of some kind of synthesis between them all. (That sounds more like me.) But we’ll see.

For now, I just wanted to share my reminiscence on the last year and anticipation for the next. As well of course to thank you for sharing your valuable and scarce time by reading these musings of mine and joining me in this intellectual journey. I hope you have found — and will continue to find — value in what I do here. So, that’s the state of things for now. Onward and upward. See you in the next one.

And of course, if you haven’t yet…please…

And if you know someone you think may find value in all this, also please…

1. Though I am trying to expand my horizons even there; the next couple books on my reading list are examinations of the populist tradition and legacy in France and Italy respectively. We’ll see if they generate any future posts.