We left off the last edition with this:
A warning
And here we get, in a way, to where we are now.
Conservatives in the modern West, and always in the English-speaking West, have democracy as a primary virtue, in spite of being aware that they're never in the majority, although the National Conservative movement, which is reactionary in the true sense of the word (it's reacting to something) is weakening that and looking to a pre Second World War model of European conservatism.
Liberals are always in favor of democracy.
Progressives and Populists really aren't quite often. Sometimes they are, but often they are not.
And Progressives and Populists only are in the forefront of politics in odd, and dangerous, times.
We are in odd and dangerous times.
To put it another way, like Ralphie's dad in A Christmas Story asks about Ralphie's imagined blindness, how did we reach such a lowly state?
Do we have soap poisoning?
Well, sort of.
A little history
We've gone into this before, so we won't belabor it too much, but in large part what we're seeing now is the combined effect of ignoring what was going on in the country on a political and social level.
As we already noted, populism only rises in strength during times of severe stress. The mere fact that its strong now, and has taken over one of the two parties, means something extremely stressful is going on. Progressivism is always there in some form, but it rarely takes over either. The fact that it too is so strong right now indicates something has occured that is fueling it.
The fact that the two of them are vying for the country right now, and this is going on in other country's as well, means that we are really at some massive tipping point for global politics.
What happened?
Well, we should know. We've been here before. More than that, Europe has been here before, and gone further down the road than we have.
An American Tale
If we go back to 1900 or so we'll see that Progressives, Populists, Conservatives and Liberals were all significant forces in the US, and in Europe as well.
The 1890s had been extremely strained economically in the 1890s. Added to that, the late stages of the industrial revolution were taking people off of fields everywhere and putting them in factories, under grim conditions. Agriculture, which had been the economic backbone of the US, was under severe strain. Conservatives chalked everything up to the business cycle, which they did not believe should be tinkered with.
This gave rise to the first real liberal movement in the US since the Civil War, although there had been liberals all along. Calling themselves "Progressives", even though they were not that as we've defined the term, they sought government intervention in the economy to address these ills. Theodore Roosevelt, in his campaign of 1912, proposed something like Social Security for the first time. He also proposed treating large corporations as public utilities, a radical, but liberal, proposition.
Progressives of that era were really basically the Socialists. We have a pretty good idea of what they stood for, so we probably don't need to dwell on it. Of note, Progressives of the GOP and Progressive Party, which we've defined as being liberal, campaigned partially on the concept that if they didn't prevail, the Socialist ultimately would.
The Populists, whom as we have noted had their own party at the time, campaigned in 1892 on graduated income tax, a radical proposition in a country that didn't have an established one, direct election of Senators, a shorter workweek, restrictions on immigration to the United States, and public ownership of railroads and communication lines. As the country fell into a depression, "free silver" became a bid deal with them. Some of them fell into radical Anti Catholicism, and some became virulently Anti-Semitic. . . sound familiar?
In 1896 the Populist Party united with the Democratic Party, giving us an example of a movement co-opting an established party which had sympathies with it. The Democrats indeed had a strong populist base in the American South, which had seen populist sympathies from before the Civil War and which retains them to this day. Populist William Jennings Bryan ran as the candidate for both parties, and lost. He did so again in 1900, although by that time the Populist Party as an independent party was declining both because it had captured the Democratic Party, as because the economic crisis seemed to be passing.
Both parties had learned their lesson from two election in a row. The GOP lurched to the left in 1904 and ran Theodore Roosevelt, a liberal. Alton Parker's campaign went nowhere. By 1912, however, the Democrats were running a liberal of their own, Woodrow Wilson. Populism, except in the South, disappeared in the US as a political force, the stress gone. Progressivism remained, but very much on the back burner.
Both would be back during the Great Depression. Populists rose up with figures like Huey P. Long and Fr. Charles Coughlin, both of whom posed a serious threat to Franklin Roosevelt's administration. Long was ultimately assassinated and Coughlin was silenced by the Catholic Church, but the fact is that populist radicalism was alive and well in the 1930s.
So was Progressivism.
Radical progressives found roles in Roosevelt's Administration, demonstrating one of the weaknesses of both parties in believing that fellow travelers are pretty much just like you. Mainline Communists, Trotskyites and Socialist all found homes in the numerous agencies created in the 1930s. Attempts to warn the administration fell on deaf ears until really very late, when at least worried Democrats were able to remove Henry Wallace from FDR's final Presidential ticket. It wasn't really until the late 1940s when it became clear how deep this had gone, at which time the Democratic Party undertook a monumental effort to hide it, something that they were so successful at that it remains largely unappreciated to this day.
Coming out of World War Two the US had the only industrial economy that hadn't been bombed, and accordingly the country had an extremely good economy from the end of the war into really the very early 1970. It's interesting that in this period the liberals and conservatives moved very much towards a consensus on things, giving us pretty much what might be regarded as a second Era of Good Feelings. It would be difficult, really, to hold that Eisenhower's administration was much at odds with Truman's, or Kennedy's. There were difference, but in that era, which was one of low economic stress, the differences weren't large enough to cause severe distractions, in spite of the dangers of the Cold War. Populism remained in the American South, but without much influence. Progressives existed, but not until 1968 did they really start to emerge back to the forefront.
And then things fell apart.
It really started with the Courts, although it was not obvious at first.
American society, and politics, following 1945 moved towards the center, but it was a center left where it moved to. The two Republican Presidents fo the era, Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon, would be regarded as being quite liberal today. Interventions in the economy were accepted. And brining civil rights to the South, and elsewhere, became a dominant feature of both parties. Populists, mostly located in the South, were squashed. Progressives were largely satisfied with the direction of things. But it all took a lot of court intervention to get things done.
Conservatives and Liberals were fine with this throughout the 1950s and 1960s, and for good reason. Progress on long dormant things they both agreed upon, such as Civil Rights, was really being made. But the Courts were, without it really being noticed, drifting increasingly to the left. At the same time the number of lawyers in the country exploded as the revolution in education following World War Two vastly increased the number of people with university degrees. Courts, without people really noticing it, began to become effectively a second legislative and second executive branch, without being elected.
Thing began to really fly apart in 1968, as a result of the Vietnam War. But they came off the rails in 1973 with the Roe v. Wade decision. Conservatives suddenly realized that they couldn't be heard on social issues that really mattered anymore. Liberals went asleep to a large degree because now the Courts were achieving for them tasks that they wanted to, without having to do any work for them. The political consensus that had dominated the 1945 to 1973 era collapsed. By 1976 Conservatives were moving steadily to the right, and railing against the courts.
At the same time, Southern Populists were a force in the South, but an ineffective one, throughout the 50s and 60s. Southern Populism being part of the Democratic Party had initially made sense in the 19th Century, and even as late as Woodrow Wilson's Presidency, but it stopped being natural during the Liberal administration of Theodore Roosevelt. It was kept together as a marriage of convenience as the Republican Party remained associated with the Southern defeat in the Civil War and the GOP, for its part, remained the party of civil rights into the 50s and 60s. By 1968 Southern Populists were seething over desegregation and busing.
Rust Belt populism was just beginning to rise. Solidly Democratic in the 40s, 50s and early 60s, as the economy became more strained in the late 60s and the Democrats moved increasingly to the left, they began to rebel against their party. It'd grow much worse in the 1970s as the Great Recession started to change American heavy industry forever.
The now more conservative Republican Party was well aware that conservatism in and of itself, while increasingly popular to sections of the electorate, remained in the background enough not to be able to come into power on its own. People were unhappy with the economy and the distress brought about by inflation, the loss of the Vietnam War and social changes brought about by court action, but they weren't so unhappy that they were willing to take a radically new direction, or they didn't' think they were. The election of Jimmy Carter over Gerald Ford was as much about competence, which Carter proved not to have, as anything else. Conservative Ronald Reagan, however, saw an opportunity to recruit Rust Belt and Southern Populists into the Republican Party, and did so for his 1980 campaign.
Reagan had the first conservative US administration since Herbert Hoover, but it was never purely so. Reagan was an actor and a compromiser, who brought in elements that he didn't really believe in so that htey could be used. Hoover had never done anything like that. The conservative Republicans thought they could control the imported populsits, and at first they proved correcdt. Indeed, following Reagan the next two Republicans were more Nixon like than Reagan like. But the populists having come over, did not leave.
Nor did their concerns get addressed. By the 1980s the economy was fundamentally changing in the wake of the 70s. Heavy industry was not returning, "good" blue collar jobs were evaporating. Ethnic enclaves in urban areas were smashed. The progressivism of the late 60s and 70s felt free to attack long standing social matters. The liberals in the Democratic Party went to sleep and Democratic politicians appealed increasing to Progressives the way that conservatives had to Populists.
The breaking point proved to be a court decision again, that being the Obergefell decision. I warned it would have that impact at that time, but it was such a shock to core beliefs of conservatives and populist that a reaction by both was inevitable. The populists reaction carried along with it rage over a host of issues they'd been ignored on, many of them essentially economic, but some of them social. Because the social issues were there, conservatives did what they'd been doing since 1980, figure they could simply carry the populist along.
The 2016 election proved that to be completely incorrect. Two populists emerged, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. Election controls built into the Democratic Party's' process kept Sanders from being the Democratic nominee. No such controls existed in the GOP, and Trump ended up winning the election against Hillary Clinton, and incredibly poor choice for the Democrats, but only through the electoral college. Clinton carried the popular vote.
It was populists, particularly Rust Belt populist, who carried the day for Trump.
Enough of the conservatives remained in the party, and Trump was incompentent enough as a President, that conservatives kept the Trump Presidency from goign full bore populists. He knows that and his supporters do as well. A second Trump Presidency will not repeat that.
A European Tale
Giving the European story is more difficult than the American one, as Europe is of course a collection of countries, not one, and each country has its own story. So we'll do broad generalizations.
Europe, going into the 20th Century, remained more traditional, and hence more conservative, than the United States. Almost every European country, save for France, had some kind of monarch who at least represented tradition, but who had very limited, if any, powers, save for Austro Hungaria, Germany, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire, whose monarchs held real power. The Russian Czar actually held absolute power. Many countries, however, such as Sweden, had monarchs who had a least some veto type power over their parliaments.
In this system extremism was bound to rise, but underground. The more substantial a European monarchy was, the more likely it was to have really radical underground movements which, in the way we are analyzing this, would be termed Progressive. Imperial Russia had a host of far left Socialist parties. Germany had a strong radically left Socialist Party.
Other more democratic countries had radical movements as well, but they tended to never get as strong, or they would see their radicalism dissipate if they received voter support. So, for example, French socialist were elected to power, but they never behaved like a Communist Party once in power.
World War One smashed the old order in Europe. Democratic countries became more democratic. Countries with parliamentary democracies began to make their monarchs symbolic or eliminate them altogether. Monarchs in Austro Hungary, Germany, Russia, Finland (which had just become independent) and Turkey were tossed out, with the Russian one and his family losing tehir lives.
The 1920s accordingly saw struggles between liberalism and conservatism all over Europe, and in the most stressed countries, a type of populism and progressivism enter the mix as well, sometimes as arm contestants for the future of the country. The Russian Revolution can be seen as a contest between liberals and conservatives as allies, against progressives as enemies, with the radical left winning. The Russian Civil War can be seen as a contest between Progressives and Populists as allies, against Conservatives. Weimar Germany saw endless contests between Liberals and Conservatives, with Populists being the allies of extremists on the right and the left, giving their support to the KDP and the NASDP.
All of that, of course, gave rise to Communism, Nazism, and FAscism, which in turn gave rise to the Second World War.
World War Two, like World War One, smashed the existing order and saw the triumph of Liberalism in the West. Communism, won in the East, of course, but not in the same fashion. Like in the US, the post war free European states were very much consensus oriented and remained so even after the stress of 1968. AFter the Cold WAr, however, all European states began to see some of the same economic issues, and cultural issues, that had arisen in the United STates rise in Europe. Some of the state accordingly began to fall into extremism. Russia retreated into a weird sort of conservative imperialism that recalled its pre World War One status, but without a Romanov. Putin became the new imperial head. Hungary outwardly abandoned liberal democracy in favor of illiberal democracy. Poland teetered on the edge of liberal and illiberal democracy. Ukraine went for the long pass of liberal democracy.
And now we have a war in the former Russian Empire over the question.
Grape Nuts.
And in the US, we're about to have an election over it.
Unfortunately, that election will feature only two parties, and in one of them the ancient candidate feels he must take input from progressives in his party. The other party's candidate is an ancient narcissistic oddball who tells populists what they want to hear, and who feeds from them in an application of the Führerprinzip.
This is not good, to say the least.
The Democrats, of course, retain liberals in their party still. The progressives are few, but influential. The Republicans retain conservatives, but hey'v ebeen largely silenced and castrated. The GOP is the populist party.
Part of the reason we're where we are is due to a poverty of parties, and language. Populists have never been conservatives, and they aren't now. But they think they are. Progressives aren't liberals, but liberals don't really understand the extent to which that's not true.
Grape Nuts aren't made of grapes. . . but there's probably a lot of people who think they are.
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