The strategy of centrist elitism was criticized back in 2016 by London Guardian<\/b> reporter Jason Wilson (2\/23\/16<\/a>), based in Portland, Oregon:<\/p>\n There\u2019s an easy confidence here in the persistence of liberal democracy as an institutionally robust fact that can only be undone by the decisive triumph of extremists. There\u2019s a sense that politics is a binary\u200a\u2014\u200aan on-off switch between democracy and tyranny\u200a\u2014\u200aand not a complex, moving, historical system\u2026. I don\u2019t share these sentiments. I would even go so far as to say that they are complacent and potentially dangerous.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n (Boston Globe<\/strong> Magazine<\/b>, 10\/5\/17<\/a>)<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n An example of the tendency is a major opinion essay by Neil Swidey, a featured story in the Boston Globe Magazine<\/b> (10\/5\/17<\/a>) under the headline: \u201cIf the Elites Go Down, We\u2019re All in Trouble.\u201d The lengthy subhead explains:<\/p>\n Self-Proclaimed Populists Love to Blame \u2018Over-Educated Know-It-Alls\u2019 for the Government\u2019s Ills. Now the Scapegoating Has Taken a Dangerous Turn.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n While the focus was \u201canti-elitism,\u201d the essay was built around the race for the presidency by Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders\u2014both seen by centrists as political outsiders who use populist rhetoric and are threatening to the stability of democracy. As long as the Republicans field candidates who use nativist and exclusionist populist rhetoric, this issue needs some depth-charging.<\/p>\n Swidey\u2019s core theme was that the anti-elitism of populist political movements poses a threat to civil society in the United States: \u201cThere are enormous consequences for us all when we can\u2019t, or don\u2019t, lean on tested people steeped in knowledge to guide the government.\u201d<\/p>\n Wilson explains that to \u201c\u201dsee that danger, you need to ditch the \u201ccentrist\/extremist\u201d political model that is still common sense among liberals, and which arises from pessimistic liberal accounts of populism from the likes of Daniel Bell and Seymour Martin Lipset. According to Wilson:<\/p>\n This model errs by taking it for granted that the existing political order delivers on its promises by embodying reason and democracy. It errs further by erasing the legitimate grievances that \u201cfringe\u201d groups co-opt [and] ignores the way in which a formal liberal democracy can be pushed and prodded into scapegoating particular groups, into illiberalism, and into reversing progressive gains.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Wilson notes that back in 2000, Matthew N. Lyons and I based our book Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort<\/i> on this argument:<\/p>\n A standard premise is that the US political system has an essence of democracy and freedom\u2014a vital center of pragmatism, rationality, and tolerance\u2014but that this essence is threatened by extremists from the left and right. This centrist\/extremist model, as we call it, obscures the rational choices and partially legitimate grievances that help to fuel right-wing populist movements, and hides the fact that right-wing bigotry and scapegoating are firmly rooted in the mainstream social and political order.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Richard Hofstadter<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n In his essay, the Globe<\/strong>\u2019s Swidey cites as his expert the late Richard Hofstadter, a respected historian who wrote the 1962 book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life<\/i> and the famous essay \u201cThe Paranoid Style in American Politics<\/a>.\u201d Hofstadter, Swidey writes, \u201cargued…that resentment against elites was an important driver behind the years of support that Senator Joe McCarthy enjoyed for his red-baiting witch hunts.\u201d<\/p>\n Hofstadter had much of value to say, but he and his political-center cohorts of the 1960s made some assumptions that have been disputed or displaced by more recent research and a pile of critical analysis. Swidey\u2019s discussion, however, pays no attention to most contemporary social science which dismisses the claim that it was populists who created the McCarthyist witch hunts.<\/p>\n That critique includes books like Michael Paul Rogin’s 1967 The Intellectuals and McCarthy: The Radical Specter<\/i>, Margaret Canovan\u2019s Populism<\/i> in 1980, and Rogin’s 1987 Ronald Reagan, the Movie: and Other Episodes in Political Demonology<\/i>. These and other books and studies argue that elites and political centrists’ focus on demonizing challenges from the left and right draws a false equivalence that serves to bolster the establishment.<\/p>\n In his lengthy treatise defending elitism, Swidey spends few words on the populism of Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders, focusing overwhelmingly on Trump, as candidate and president. Swidey is offended that:<\/p>\n Trump managed to ride his rowdy, anti-elite rallies into the White House, despite being an Ivy League-educated son of privilege whose home bathroom has 24-karat-gold fixtures and who, as a child, sometimes relied on his chauffeur to drive him along his paper route.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Great imagery: There often is an aspect of anti-elitism in populist rhetoric on both left and right.<\/i> We clearly heard calls to \u201cthrow the bums out\u201d in the shouts of Trump supporters, sparked in part by Trump\u2019s promise to \u201cdrain the swamp\u201d that harbored DC\u2019s career bureaucrats. But this promise from right-wing populists, including Trump, is a hypocritical dodge. As we have seen, Trump is replacing liberal \u201celites\u201d and career government employees with right-wing elites and ideologues favored by his billionaire backers. This isn\u2019t anti-elitism\u2014it is a political purge.<\/p>\n Swidey does hit the mark when he writes:<\/p>\n Of course, the establishment elites are not blameless. Over the years, many of them made confident predictions, about everything from free trade agreements to Middle East strategy, that turned out to be disastrously wrong.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n But Swidey pivots from noting legitimate critiques of elites to drawing a dubious equivalence between Trump and Sanders:<\/p>\n After all, it wasn\u2019t just Trump who brilliantly tapped into anti-elite sentiment in the 2016 campaign and turned it into electoral success. So did Bernie Sanders, a septuagenarian socialist who managed to win 23 primaries and caucuses and 13.2 million votes.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n President Andrew Jackson: not educated, but a member of the elite nonetheless.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n What Trump and Sanders have in common\u2014as was widely reported in the news media\u2014was not anti-intellectualism, but the use of populist rhetoric. Swidey acknowledges this when he reports that President-Elect Trump (1\/18\/17<\/a>) compared himself to the historic populist President Andrew Jackson at a dinner held \u201cnot long after [Trump\u2019s] own populist-fueled win.\u201d<\/p>\n Anti-intellectualism, however, is not necessarily a core component of all types of populism. Swidey, describing the 1828 presidential race, identifies Jackson as \u201ca coarse, uneducated war hero (and Indian tormenter) able to tar the incumbent president as an out-of-touch elite.\u201d Jackson is better described as a pro-slavery white nationalist who got elected through the use of \u201cnativist\u201d populist rhetoric aimed at white voters.<\/p>\n John Nichols in The Nation<\/b> (5\/1\/17<\/a>) noted Jackson\u2019s genocidal \u201cIndian Removal Act\u201d that targeted the \u201cCherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw and Seminole nations.\u201d Referring to Jackson as \u201ccoarse\u201d and \u201cuneducated\u201d glosses over the fact that Jackson was a member of the South\u2019s slavocracy elite. As Nichols reports, \u201cAt the time of his death in 1845, Jackson owned approximately 150 people who lived and worked on the property.\u201d<\/p>\n Somehow in the course of Swidey\u2019s article, the concepts of \u201celite\u201d and \u201cexpert\u201d and \u201cpopulism\u201d and \u201canti-intellectualism\u201d are commingled in an inappropriate suggestive tangle. This is a rhetorical bait-and-switch. He observes that \u201cTrump appointed the richest Cabinet in history, featuring many [Cabinet] secretaries who have absolutely no experience with the departments he has asked them to run.\u201d This would make them privileged \u201celites\u201d by common standards, but acknowledging them as such wouldn\u2019t serve Swidey\u2019s purposes.<\/p>\n Swidey swipes at Trump\u2019 early appointees, arguing that \u201cwhile the word elite had once connoted wealth and breeding, the right-leaning agitators behind this crusade \u2014 many of whom were wealthy themselves \u2014 worked to redefine it.”<\/p>\n True again, but Swidey joins in the redefinition by treating the term \u201celite\u201d as if it had the same meaning as people with \u201cexpertise.\u201d And experts are good for governance, therefore appointing elites is good. Nowhere does Swidey mention that in the real world, \u201celites\u201d generally have wealth and power\u2014but do not necessarily have any expertise. But in Swidey\u2019s view, experts are good for the nation (often true), therefore elites are good for the nation (often false). Trump and his appointees prove the latter is a ludicrous claim.<\/p>\n Swidey then complains:<\/p>\n While most of us were ignoring the long anti-elite crusade that began as a cynical attempt to paint opposing politicians as arrogant East Coast dilettantes, it morphed into a far more dangerous jihad against expertise at any level of government.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n I\u2019m no fan of the Trump administration purging federal agencies of experienced staff, but similar purges were carried out during the administrations of Ronald Reagan, George Herbert Walker Bush and George W. Bush. Administrators and staff were squeezed out, replaced with ideologically conservative and libertarian appointees. Why is it now \u201cdangerous\u201d under Trump? Is it because Trump is an \u201coutsider\u201d and not part of what Bostonians recognize as the \u201cproper\u201d elites trained in prestigious ivory towers and being groomed for centrist political power?<\/p>\n Swidey suggests:<\/p>\n None of this would have been cause for alarm if these [Trump] appointees had followed the lead of inexperienced Cabinet secretaries in previous administrations and leaned heavily on the deep bench of experts within their departments. Administrations come and go, but the government has always relied on career people with expertise in their subject areas, thanks to their extensive education, training, and hands-on experience.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n The problem for Swidey, apparently, is that Trump is appointing Cabinet secretaries and agency administrators and staff who do not come from the ranks of elite universities\u2014as the \u201cnew proxies for elitism\u201d established by the right \u201cnotably\u201d included \u201ceducation at liberal Ivy League colleges\u201d\u2014and who fall outside the ideological boundaries established by centrist Democrats and centrist Republicans. Furthermore, the subtext of the entire article is that only centrist elites preserve \u201cexpertise\u201d in government and defend democracy from the rabble.<\/p>\n This self-aggrandizing claim favored by political centrists was the main motif of a series of books and essays appearing in the late 1950s and early 1960s, analyzing the growth of social and political movements on the left and right. Many of these explorations took a position critical of the progressive People\u2019s Party populist movement of the late 1800s. Others analyzed the failed 1964 presidential campaign of uber-conservative Sen. Barry Goldwater and his supporters in the John Birch Society. Hofstadter was the best of the lot, yet coming out of this research overall was the idea that American democracy was besieged by \u201cextremists of the left and right,\u201d who were incapable of working within civil society in a democracy that was best guarded by educated elites in the political center.<\/p>\n Martin Luther King<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n The thesis of the ideal political center gave a veil of legitimacy to federal, state and local law enforcement agencies that spied on, infiltrated and disrupted groups labeled as \u201cextremist.\u201d Just as the Ku Klux Klan of the 1960s was labelled an \u201cextremist\u201d group, so were the more militant civil rights groups, such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Martin Luther King responded to the charge that he was an \u201cextremist\u201d in his famous \u201cLetter from Birmingham Jail\u201d (4\/16\/63<\/a>), chastising other religious leaders who cautioned him to not be so confrontational.<\/p>\n The concept of \u201cextremism\u201d was a construct of scholars comfortable in their self-perception as being in an idealized political center (Huffington Post<\/b>, 5\/25\/17<\/a>). Where is the political center in the United States today? The political center is a moveable beast.<\/p>\n Jerome L. Himmelstein, an Amherst sociology professor and author of To the Right: The Transformation of American Conservatism<\/i> (1992), argues the term \u201cextremism\u201d is at best a characterization that \u201ctells us nothing substantive about the people it labels,\u201d and at worst \u201cpaints a false picture.\u201d<\/p>\n So there are two intertwined assertions in Swidey\u2019s unstated reliance on centrist\/extremist theory. One is that anti-intellectualism is a key aspect of populism; and the second is that populism inherently disrupts civil society in a \u201cdangerous\u201d way. Cas Mudde, a leading contemporary scholar of populism in the United States and Europe, challenges the claims of Hofstadter and his colleagues that characterize populism as a \u201cpathology of democracy,\u201d especially Hofstadter\u2019s characterization of populism as a \u201cparanoid style\u201d of politics.<\/p>\n Too much current journalism on Trump and populism is just lazy, and doesn’t reflect evolving understandings of the phenomenon. Michael Kazin\u2019s The Populist Persuasion<\/i> (1995) reframed populism as a rhetorical style. Hans Georg Betz (1994) explored the growth of populism in Europe. Roger Griffin included populist aspects in his highly regarded redefinition of fascism<\/a>.<\/p>\n The University of Georgia\u2019s Mudde, now the leading scholar of populism, defines it (Guardian<\/b>, 2\/17\/15<\/a>) as a Manichean ideology that divides society into \u201ctwo homogeneous and antagonistic groups: \u2018the pure people\u2019 and \u2018the corrupt elite,\u2019 and argues that politics should represent the general will of \u2018the people\u2019\u201d:<\/p>\n The relationship between populism and liberal democracy is complex and includes the good, the bad and the ugly. The main good is that populism brings to the fore issues that large parts of the population care about, but that the political elites want to avoid discussing; think about immigration for the populist right or austerity for the populist left. The main bad is that populism is a\u2026moralist ideology, which denies the existence of divisions of interests and opinions within \u201cthe people\u201d and rejects the legitimacy of political opponents.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Mudde (Huffington Post<\/b>, 3\/20\/17<\/a>) notes that the term populism is \u201cused in many different ways, mostly devoid of any clear definition.\u201d He suggests that it today the term \u201cpopulism\u201d is generally used to refer to irresponsible or untraditional politics, such as promising everything to everyone or speaking in a folksy way. Neither is specific to populism, and both are in fact rather widespread in political campaigning more generally.<\/p>\n Nativist populism (or exclusionary populism, as it is sometimes called) is promoting white and Christian ethnic states in Europe, and is the reigning theory of some of President Trump\u2019s early team of advisors, such as Steve Bannon and his allies in the alt-right networks (Political Research Associates, 1\/20\/17<\/a>).<\/p>\n As Lyons and I warned in our book, the \u201cdanger associated with right-wing populism comes not from its real or potential bids for power, or even from its day-to-day violence and bigotry, but from its interactions with other political forces and the government.\u201d Our current dangerous political crisis was crafted by the wealthy neoliberal elites controlling both major political parties. They designed the current tax system to be their personal cash machine. Swidey wants to blame the grassroots victims of this theft for their anger, which Trump exploited with his right-wing populist rhetoric that shifts the blame away from the centers of power to traditionally scapegoated groups in the United States, including blacks, immigrants, Jews, leftists and feminists\u2014and now add Muslims and Mexicans.<\/p>\n The solution is not to flock toward elites who defend the political center against needed reforms. Mudde puts it like this:<\/p>\n If we want to truly understand contemporary politics, and protect liberal democracy, it is time we focus on all aspects of the populist radical right challenge, including from inside the political establishment, not just on the populism of the outsiders. Because under the cover of fighting off the \u201cpopulists,\u201d the political establishment is slowly but steadily hollowing out the liberal democratic system.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Swidey is on target when noting Trump is undermining the need for expertise in our nation\u2019s capital, especially inside government agencies. But the problem is neither anti-elitism nor populism. The problem is the elite \u201cexperts\u201d project to gut government regulatory and tax powers in pursuit of greedster free-market profits.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/span> Both the leadership of the Democratic Party and the \u201cmoderate\u201d wing of the Republican Party seem obsessed with challenging Trumpism by calling for a return to a mythical political “center\u201d and by elevating \u201celitism\u201d as an antidote to \u201cpopulism.\u201d This while the political \u201ccenter\u201d under Trump means scapegoating our nation\u2019s problems to Muslims, Mexicans and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2521,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-337374","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/337374","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2521"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=337374"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/337374\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=337374"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=337374"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=337374"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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\nThis piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News<\/a> with permission from FAIR<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"