THE POPULIST DELUSION?

WITH AND AGAINST PARVINI

Understandably, many people have been urging me to read and respond to Neema Parvini’s book, The Populist Delusion. The title does seem to suggest that the topics which have preoccupied this substack since the rise of the trucker’s convoy have constituted, at best, a colossal waste of time. So, I’ve finally kept my word to get around to looking at the book.¹ These remarks are an initial response, based on a first review. With more time I might have further to offer. But for now…

The thing most immediately obvious I’m sure to those who urged me to read the book was that Parvini and I seem to share much in our theoretical foundations. The many sources he draws upon — e.g., Mosca, Pareto (even advertising the title of my substack with one of his chapters), Michels, Jouvenel, Schmitt, Burnham, Francis, Gottfried, and even Foucault — are the same ones that I’ve expanded upon on many occasions both on this substack and in my books: i.e., The [must read!] Managerial Class on Trial and Biological Realism. And yet, clearly, we’ve come to very different conclusions about the prospects of populism. So, how could that be?

There are several reasons for this. First, I could certainly quibble with some of his interpretations of our shared influences. Though some of these misinterpretations are definitely more egregious than others. In this regard, I’ll focus on his interpretation of Schmitt — as this difference in interpretation has been an important part of my own thinking through of the new populism. More central to our differences though is that Parvini seems to operate with a rather cartoonish caricature of populism. He doesn’t really even define the term, beyond the idea of popular sovereignty, much less put it into its historical or theoretical context. In fact, it seems at times that he believes that populism only popped up around 2015. And telling in all of this misapprehension of populism is a striking absence from that long list of our common influences.

So, I’ll begin with his treatment of Schmitt, which is a good entry into the larger problem I have with his analysis. In the chapter dedicated to him, Parvini discusses Schmitt without detailed reference to populism at all. Presumably he expects the reader to still be referencing his brief gloss that populism is somehow about the Panglossian dream of popular sovereignty. Toward disabusing us of this idea he unpacks Schmitt’s notions of the concept of the political and political theology. That’s all fine and good. And it certainly would make for a case against a simplistic idea of popular sovereignty. However, as recent readers of this substack may recognize, there’s a fairly major oversight involved here. This exclusive focus on Schmitt’s decisionism elides attention to the fact that within a decade Schmitt had begun a specific revision of his decisionism.

As I’ve discussed at greater length (here), Schmitt came to recognize that to provide his concept of the political any real grounding he had to move beyond decisionism. He recognized that the political — being based upon existential differences — required an actual people to exist. So, ultimately, his decisionism came to be based upon an institutionalism, which made reference to the values and norms of a preceding concrete order. For one trying to tease out the relevance of Schmitt for an analysis of populism, this is a pretty major oversight. Parvini falls victim to this oversight because, again, he doesn’t seem to have any clear idea about the history or theory of populism.

There’s no evidence in this book that he’s done any of the research work of actually studying the voluminous literature on populism. No references to Woodward, Pollack, Morton, Viguerie, Goodwyn, Laycock, or Canovan, nor even Reno, Goodhart, Mouffe, or Eatwell and Goodwin, etc. He does cite Christopher Lasch’s True and Only Heaven in his bibliography, though the only textual reference is in a quotation of Paul Gottfried, discussing Lasch’s critique of Adorno’s Authoritarian Personality project. Perhaps if he’d looked a little more closely at Lasch’s book itself he’d have discovered it was largely a expansive exegesis — of intellectual, cultural and political history — on the theoretical foundations for a sustainable communitarian populism. Presumably these oversights explain why he has so little to say definitionally about populism. He’s conjured up some skimpy strawman as a foil for his exegesis on the political realist school. And, don’t misunderstand me: it is a very nice, concise primer on that school. It has close to nothing useful to say on populism and its tradition, though.

Illustrative of his lack of interest in the actual tradition’s history and theory is Parvini’s blind spot when it comes to support for populism within the very circles he draws upon for his analysis. While he provides an extended discussion of Sam Francis’ work on the managerial class, with its significance for an Italian realist political analysis, one would be hard pressed from that discussion to know that Francis was an enthusiastic supporter of middle American populism. And specifically as an antidote to the regime of the managerial class. Consider a couple passages from his Beautiful Losers essay collection.

Neoconservatives undertook the defense of the very structures that the Old Right had sought to dismantle and in fact resisted every effort to develop a radical New Right populism that could construct a mass political and cultural base for a challenge to the managerial apparatus.

—

McCarthy’s appeal to small businessmen, union members, and northern ethnics thus foreshadows the more explicit antimanagerial and antiestablishment appeals later expressed by George Wallace, the New Right, and the Middle American revolt of 1992, and the continuing strength of this populism of the Right suggests that its national political role is far from over.

Even toward the end of Leviathan and Its Enemies, Francis’ major work on the managerial class, he returns to reflection upon the possible role of populism in pushing back against this new ruling class, discussing the “potentially revolutionary” prospect of a “nationalist and populist movement.” So, it’s a little odd that Parvini didn’t address this apparent contradiction head-on. If Francis — Parvini exemplar of the Italian realist school — does not regard this theoretical commitment as inconsistent with an enthusiasm for populism as an antidote to the managerial regime, either Parvini is wrong in his basic premise or Francis is. Shouldn’t Parvini be explaining this apparent inconsistency? But, from my perspective, this points to an even greater oversight.

A close colleague of Francis and Paul Gottfried, both who are frequently cited by Parvini — and strikingly absent from that long list of his and my shared intellectual influences — was a theorist well known to regular readers of this substack: Paul Piccone. Parvini’s sole reference to Piccone is an article he co-authored introducing Carl Schmitt to the readers of Telos. Interestingly, Parvini does acknowledge Telos, emphasizing its important role in (re-)introducing Schmitt to English readers. And that characterization is accurate. So, it’s not like he’s unfamiliar with the journal. It is strange then that he doesn’t address the extensive set of discussions on the history and theory of populism that preoccupied that journal, and its chief editor, Paul Piccone, for many years across the 80s and 90s.²

And of course, as regular readers here will know, if he had done so he would have appreciated that there was considerably more to say on behalf of populism than that it was some vague idealistic yearning for Panglossian aspirations of popular sovereignty. Much of what I’ve been writing here for months would be required reading for Parvini if his apparent aspiration to refute populism as a delusion was intended as a serious project. Needless to say, I’m not going to reiterate it all in this post. I’ll just touch upon some of the key points.

First, Parvini’s emphatic reiteration that all power exchanges are top-down, and none ever bottom-up, is overdrawn. As this substack has been dedicated to exploring, and Francis apparently understood, there’s no intrinsic incompatibility with Italian political realism and populism. Certainly, one could sort through populist history and cherry-pick thinkers with chiliastic rhetoric and beliefs about the triumph of the people. At least in the North American tradition, the one I’ve focused on here, though, this has not been the logic of either populist theory or practice. It has usually been conceived of as protest movement, demanding practical, systemic solutions to institutional problems.

This gets at my central focus. I’ve acknowledged that without some kind of class alliance – either with a rebel faction of the managerial class or some part of the bourgeoisie – populist insurgencies are unlikely to succeed (see, here and here). The argument can be made the other way around, too, though. Rebel factions or alternate ruling classes are at a great disadvantage for overthrowing the entrenched faction of the ruling class in the absence of a mass movement that threatens to disrupt the entrenched faction’s hegemony and system control. Even if one believes – as do I and have constantly emphasized – that all regime change is ultimately a circulation of elites, that hardly discounts the fact that mass movements like populism can provide rebel factions of the ruling class invaluable motivation, incentive, legitimacy, and manpower to catalyze such a circulation in any specific, historical instance.

Yes, the aspiring new elite would be using the populists toward its own goals; but so would the populists be using the aspiring new elite toward their goals. So, Parvini’s emphatic dichotomy between top-down and bottom-up is simplistically overdrawn. This simplification is likewise manifest in his truncated reading of Schmitt, mentioned above. Schmitt shifted from simple decisionism to institutionalism because he recognized that claims to sovereignty had to be rooted in a pre-existing, historical, organic people of a concrete order. Again, considering vectors of political influence, there’s no simple dichotomy between top-down and bottom-up.

And, on this point, I’d add one last thought. Though I haven’t yet had occasion to address the matter on this substack, one of the foremost historians and theorists of populism, Lawrence Goodwyn, in his analysis of both the agrarian radicals of the late 19th century U.S., and the Polish Solidarity movement, has provided arguments and evidence to refute Parvini’s simplistic dichotomy. Goodwyn rejected managerial class ventriloquism, which claimed to have led and even caused these populist movements, enjoying credit for their successes. Goodwyn claims instead that these populist successes were rooted in political, organizational, and strategic innovations that emerged organically out of the very historical and communitarian experience of those populists’ experiential reality. (Perhaps a manifestation of what Dugin, invoking Heidegger, would identify as the Dasein of a narod?)

I’m not yet prepared to offer my assessment of Goodwyn’s claims – hence my not yet writing a post on the topic. But if Parvini presumes himself as the shatterer of the book’s eponymous “populist delusion,” based on emphatic insistence of this top-down vs bottom-up dichotomy, it would seem he should be taking on the arguments and evidence marshalled by Goodwyn for his claims. But, again, Parvini doesn’t seem to have troubled himself with a serious engagement of the populist tradition or literature.

Another interesting dimension of Parvini’s approach, related to matters I’ve discussed here, is the odd fact that in both his introduction and conclusion he makes a great deal of what he calls four myths of liberalism. I’m not even sure I’d entirely agree with all that he purports to refute in these myths, but the more relevant point for the current discussion is, so what? What does critiquing liberal myths have to do with revealing populism as a delusion? It seems that the problem for Parvini is that populism is merely an expression of liberal revanchism. I may have to reread the book to be entirely clear about this, but the impression I took from my first pass was that Parvini’s logic goes something like:

Populism = being pro-democracy = liberalism

Ergo: populism = liberalism

There is all manner of problem with such a syllogism.

To start, while it is true that populists have been advocates of democracy, Parvini doesn’t seem to understand that their advocacy of “democracy” has been in fact a harsh critique of the very “representative” democracy that Schmitt criticized, contributing to Parvini’s own dismissal of the idea. Representative democracy isn’t the only possible version of democracy – even Schmitt provides consideration of an identity democracy (for discussion, see here). Certainly, the managerial regime’s version of representative democracy is, as I’ve worded it frequently, a veil for the sneaky operations of managerial class ventriloquism. Populists, though, as for instance I revealed in my doctoral thesis, have agitated for reform – more often radical reform – of such “representative” democracy-as-usual. Though sometimes such radical reform was restricted to initiation and plebiscite, it often went to recall, bound delegates, and participatory democratic subsidiarity. Again, something that to know, and avoid the erroneous syllogism, would require treating populism as more than a strawman foil.

Second, as I’ve pointed out in an earlier post, populism and liberalism trace their theoretical roots to different – and often, on numerous key points, antagonistic – strains of the enlightenment. I won’t repeat those arguments in this post; they can be read here. But to have appreciated this distinction, and its importance, Parvini would have to have confronted the lengthy discussion of populism that animated Telos for all those years and provided the milieu for Piccone’s distinctive insights, rather than merely eliding it.

Again, I’ve discussed Piccone’s insights at length in other posts (see here and here), so in the present discussion I’ll only offer brief recapitulations. Far from being warmed-over liberalism, particularly since the rise to dominance of the managerial class, since the late 19th century, populism has come to constitute the primary existential threat to liberalism, and its administrative state elaboration: managerial liberalism. Managerial liberalism – expressed through bureaucratic paternalism, social engineering, and the culture industry – is premised upon the thorough dissolution of identities and institutions that provide intermediary shelter against the total dependence of deracinated individuals upon the psychological and material promises of the managerial class’s administrative state.

In contrast, the only hope populism has, for Piccone, to achieve its goal of resisting the current regime is the rejuvenation of organic community, rooted in the Schmittian institutions of a concrete order. This makes populism today not merely an alternative – but an existential threat – to managerial liberalism: its logic, values, and methods. Thus, populism today finds itself the Schmittian enemy to the regime of managerial liberalism, which explains the escalating, massive, fanatical displays of super-legality unleashed by the regime recently (see here and here).

Parvini can understand none of this as long as he insists on caricaturing populism as liberal revanchism. Obviously, he may not accept any of the theoretical and historical evidence or arguments that I’ve so briefly rehearsed, here. But if he was to avoid the accusation of straw-manning populism, with a simplistic dichotomy and erroneous syllogism, he’d have to minimally confront that long political tradition and its rich historical and theoretical literature.

Again, as a primer on the Italian political realist school, Parvini’s book is a solid piece of work. If it wasn’t for its rather wobbly conceptual anchor, I’d have no problem recommending it as an introduction to that school. However, as a refutation of populism – ostensibly its primary purpose – it’s a sorry showing, indeed. In fact, I’m reluctant to even call it a failure. Failing at least implies trying. Parvini didn’t even seriously try to refute populism. I have no idea what Parvini would offer as a critique if he’d actually confronted the real history and theory of populism – rather than employing it as a strawman foil in a book pretty much devoid of such confrontation.

In closing, in case I haven’t annoyed enough people, I’ll mention parenthetically: the gushing I’ve seen/heard over this book in certain dissident right circles doesn’t speak well for the apparent echo chamber that so many such people seem to inhabit. Of course, the majority of such people are fully managerial class members – as am I and Parvini, and for that matter, so too the theorists of the Italian political realism school (for clarification of my use of that term, see here). For managerial class luminaries such as Mosca, Pareto, and Michels, the notion that only their class can initiate or drive political change risks self-flattery: indeed, the hallmark vanity of the class.

Obviously, such an observation doesn’t automatically refute their arguments. It does suggest, though, the wisdom in exercising a little caution against an enthusiasm so unconstrained that it simply ignores contrary interpretations or evidence. Perhaps then there’s value and virtue for us in not being quite so fast to dismiss the radical potential of political and social movements embraced by what some of our circle would characterize as normies. It just may be that they’re not all quite as apathetic, stupid, brainwashed, or insentient as so many managerial class dissidents seem prone to assume.

Indeed, it could well prove to be that the belief in exclusively bottom-up political change may not be any more naïve or Panglossian than the managerial class dissidents’ belief in exclusively top-down political change is simplistic and narcissistic.

1. Spoiler alert! I don’t think much of his book. However, I have endeavored to be restrained as, after all, I too gave populism short shrift in a recent book. For which I have offered my mea culpa (see here). In fairness, though, my intervention was a rushed cri de guerre, in the heat of the moment, which errored in precipitously bushing off populism. It’s quite another thing to emphatically declare a presumably considered, axiomatic refutation of the very core of populism.

2. To be clear, we’re not just talking about the occasional article here and there. During the late 80s and especially the first half of the 90s, it was uncommon for a Telos issue to not have at least one article addressing some dimension of populism. And there were numerous symposia and dedicated theme issues over those years hashing out the history and current theoretical relevance of populism as a contemporary political movement.