Monthly Archives: October 2017

Op-Eds

Will the Real Populism Please Stand Up?

Leave a comment

Eugène Delacroix - Le 28 Juillet. La Liberté guidant le peuple
Liberty Leading the People by Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863). Source: Wikipedia
Writing at The American Conservative, Mike Lofgren tears into the guts of Billionaire at the Barricades: The Populist Revolution from Reagan to Trump, the latest book by Republican political commentator Laura Ingraham.

Lofgren’s two key points — that Donald Trump is no populist, and that conservatism is not populism  — are well-made. “A cynic,” he writes, “would conclude that the term populism, when applied to Republican politics in 2017, means this: keep the rich up, the poor down, foreigners out, and everybody else distracted by scapegoats. Meanwhile, line your pockets at the public trough … and fill your top posts with enough billionaires to make George W. Bush’s cabinet look like a Soviet Workers’ Council.” The piece is a rewarding read.

Despite his best efforts, however, Lofgren misfires on the most basic question involved. What is populism? He surrenders — it’s “hard to define” — citing various figures left and right to whom the label has been applied but whose ideologies are wildly incompatible one with another.

In fact, populism is quite easy to define. It is the separation of people into two warring classes. Let’s call them “the righteous masses” and “the power elites.” The populist, of course, sides with the righteous masses. It’s as simple as that. But the devil is in the details of defining those two classes.

“Right-wing populism” defines the classes mendaciously. It attempts to split the righteous masses against themselves by defining (as per Lofgren above) civic, ethnic, sexual and gender minorities out of the group and the politically connected wealthy in. It’s the righteous white working class and Donald Trump versus immigrants, blacks, Latinos, and the LGBTQ community.

Since it’s difficult to make a case that traditionally oppressed out groups are the “power elite,” they’re instead portrayed as mere pawns, robots in harness to the real villains. The media. Academia. And, although the message is usually offered in dog whistle code (“the bankers,” “Wall Street”), Jews.

It’s a jalopy held together with intellectual baling wire and running on fear and bigotry, but Trump’s presidency is far from the first time it’s carried a right-wing “populist” where he wants to go.

What would a real populism look like? French writers Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer answered that question in the 19th century. The two classes that matter are the productive class (the “righteous masses” who earn their livings through voluntary labor and exchange) and the political class (the “power elites” who steal their livings through control of, or favors from, the organization of plunder, aka the state).

Race, national origin, language, sexual orientation, gender identity — none of these personal characteristics are relevant to a true populist orientation. The only truly meaningful class distinction is the state and its hangers-on versus the rest of us. Even Karl Marx (who stole class theory from Comte and Dunoyer then mutilated it into a form that murdered millions) understood that the state is “the executive committee of the ruling class.”

Real populism is two things: It is left-wing, and it is libertarian. Trump is neither.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Op-Eds

What Difference at This Point Does the Trump Dossier Make? None.

5 Comments

Trump Dossier from RGBStock

‘Twixt and ‘tween daily news on Russiagate (the investigation into alleged “Russian meddling” in the 2016 election on behalf of Donald Trump) and Uraniumgate (the investigation into Russian bribes paid to a number of people, quite likely including Hillary Clinton, to smooth US government approvals for buying a good deal of, you guessed it, uranium) comes new information on Dossiergate (the question of who paid a British inteligence operative a trove of dirt on then presidential candidate Donald Trump).

Dossiergate first reared its ugly head during the general election campaign in 2016, then more or less disappeared for more than a year until late October. Now we’ve learned that several organizations paid Christopher Steele to get the goods on Trump. Of the three we know of, one was a Republican newspaper (the Washington Free Beacon, during the GOP primaries) and two were Democratic Party organizations (the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign).

Breathless updates notwithstanding, Dossiergate is what Democrat politico Van Jones got caught calling the Russiagate investigation: “A big nothing burger.”

All political campaigns — or at least all political campaigns worth their salt — do what’s called “opposition research.” They dig as deeply as possible (or as they can afford to) into their opponents’ political, business, and personal lives looking for dirt that can be used to win elections. The better campaigns do opposition research on their own candidates as well, because nobody likes surprises and because politicians lie, even to their friends and supporters.

If this sounds like a bad thing to you, think again. The more you know about the candidates asking for your vote, the better equipped you are to make decisions about how to cast that vote. Does it get ugly? Yes, it does. The truth isn’t always pretty, but it’s the truth and more truth is always better than less truth.

Naturally, you don’t want to just take one candidate’s word that another candidate did something bad. In addition to finding the dirt, the opposition researcher’s job is to substantiate that dirt, giving you real evidence to chew on so that you can be confident in your own conclusions.

I’m no fan of Hillary Clinton, or for that matter of Donald Trump. But she and her campaign staff would have been doing a disservice to the public as well as to themselves if they hadn’t looked for the dirt on Donald Trump, and then aired any dirt they could authenticate. To the extent that democracy works, its fuel is information. And information is opposition research’s finished product.

Dossiergate is not and never has been a scandal per se. However titillating the details, it’s merely been the story of presidential campaigns and candidates doing their jobs.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Op-Eds

Twitter versus RT: Which One is State Media Again?

Leave a comment
English: An article clipping of the New York T...
English: An article clipping of the New York Times publishing of the Overman Committee report. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

America’s New Red Scare escalated in mid-October as the US Department of Justice demanded that the US division of television network RT (formerly known as Russia Today) register as a “foreign agent” under the aptly named Foreign Agents Registration Act.

The obvious purpose of DoJ’s demand is to keep the guttering flame of panic over “Russian election meddling” from going completely out. It’s a publicity stunt and that’s pretty much all it is  (no word of similar registration demands to personnel working in the US for the British Broadcasting Corporation, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Kol Yisrael, et al.). But yes, RT is in fact an enterprise owned and operated by the Russian government, so fair enough, I guess.

Enter social media giant Twitter with two announcements.

First, while it has been accidentally over-counting its user base for some time, there are in fact more than 300 million Twitter users,the majority of them in countries other than the United States.

Second, Twitter won’t be selling advertising to RT (or to Sputnik, a Russian state news agency and radio broadcaster) any more.

Whether Twitter really buys into the “Russian election meddling” theatrics or not, it’s pretending to. It’s appeasing to the US government in the same way American film producers did with their post-World War Two “blacklists,”  and with respect not just to RT and Sputnik, but to anything and everything its masters in DC deem unacceptable (for example, accounts linked to Islamic and other alleged “extremists”).

Twitter is fast becoming a branch of US state media itself. For a company with such a large international user base, that seems like a bad business plan. And it’s certainly a bad thing from the perspective of achieving the not quite realized, but clearly to be pursued, promise that the Internet holds out to humanity — connecting people around the globe without  kowtowing to the increasingly obsolete and disintegrating concept of national borders.

Of course, Twitter and other tech firms relying on ad revenues are in both an enticing and difficult position. Uncle Sugar can be very generous with, say, military recruitment advertising dollars when he gets his way. When he doesn’t, he can get downright abusive and start looking for legislative hooks — sanctions violations, for example — to hang the offenders from.

All the more reason for tech companies whose clienteles sprawl across national borders to find more freedom-friendly countries to locate their offices in.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY