Populism and “The Worst of Both Worlds”

But it really came from the fact that she was trying to be Market Thatcher, but she was elected here's where populism comes in that she was elected by the Tory party membership, which is this tiny little membership. It's like a couple of hundred thousand people in a nation of something on the order of 70, 8100 million people.

And when he left, they replaced it with Liz Trust, who was sort of chosen by this very interior inside the party, just a small number of people making the decision. And she didn't have popular backing, she didn't have a popular mandate. And I think that explains sort of how she lasted four scaramuchis in office.

There was something for a while that people called the Tea Party movement libertarian populism. And now with Donald Trump in America, with some other leaders overseas, you have what is a very much not a libertarian populism. It's a sort of right wing, big government populism. But we've also had times in the past when you had left wing populism, when you had the populism was we represent the little guy as opposed to those big businessmen on Wall Street.

And so you had almost a socialist or a big government, left wing style of populism.

But in practice, now, that sort of in theory, populism was an appeal to popularity, to we represent the people, the ordinary man, the common man in practice. And here's one of the ways that populism goes wrong in practice, it tends to end up referring to what we're for the real people. We're for real America and real Americans in the populist imagination. And one of the articles you sent me, links to me had a good summary of this.

Basically, the idea of a unitary people, the people, quote unquote, the people sort of a trademark symbol on it, right? The people are one unit. And it's one unit that is supposed to all agree. And they all agree on something that just by coincidence, happens to be the exact agenda that the populist leader wants to pursue at this moment. Right? So it's this idea that the people is this one entity that are all agreed, and it's only this tiny little cabal.

It's George Soros or this small group of people in Hollywood and Washington DC. They're the only ones who are on the other side. And so we're for the real voice of the real people. And anybody who's not part of that imagined majority in reality, of course, there is no such unified single voice of the majority of the people. There's a whole wide diversity of opinions.

So I'm practice populism, come down to the idea that anyone who doesn't share the opinions of my particular faction is not a quote unquote, real American. He's one of the elites. He's one of these people, this small cabal or faction that needs to be pushed down and suppressed so that the real people can have their say. So in reality it sort of builds itself as being we're for the people, but in reality it always ends up being we're for a little minority or faction among the people.

We've got 30% or 25% or sometimes less people who sign up for our full agenda, but we paint them as if they are the real people and everybody else is a tiny minority and then use that as an excuse to run roughshod over them and to suppress them. And you see that a lot in Europe where it takes on this very overtly ethnic character of populism.

The real people are basically whoever has been here for 1000 years or 500 years or however far back, whoever came over with the Maggie's when they first came over into Europe. Those are the real Hungarians and immigrants and foreigners and especially refugees and people like that. Those are the threats to the real people. So it takes on this very ethnic majoritarianism that kind of casts to it, I would say.

And now what's happened is the religious conservatives have struck back and they've come back and taken over the ideology of the Republican Party. And so their form of populism is real America, is basically white Christian America and they adopted the sort of Christian nationalism.

But I think one of the things that's common with all forms of populism is it's an assertion, this assertion that my particular faction of people, my 20% or 30% of the voters, they're the real people, they're the real Americans, they are the unitary voice of the people themselves. It is a reaction, it seems like this overclaiming that how come my little faction represents the entirety of the people.

Well, I think that is in reaction to the fear underneath that that in fact they are becoming a minority.

I think just recently, the number of people who describe themselves as none of the above may have no specific religious affiliation. Some atheists, some agnostic, some simply not having any formal religious set of beliefs. Those people now outnumber evangelical Christians in America. So evangelical Christians are like the most fanatical Protestant group in America. I think they either outnumber or just about outnumber Catholics.

And the projection is by 20, 50, 20, 60, america will no longer be a majority Christian nation. It will be more like, well, what has happened in Europe, in many European countries, where the number of sort of practicing, committed religious believers is a minority in the population, that the large population is largely secular.

And so I think it's a combination of that sense of feeling like they ought to be the majority, but then fearing that they are becoming a minority, that fuels this sort of populism, that in a way, they need the populism even more because they need the fantasy that, no, it's only the small minority that's causing people to be secular. We are the real Americans. We're the real majority.

And if only we just asserted ourselves as the real majority, then we wouldn't have to be afraid that religious belief is going to be fading away and.

So majoritarianism is another ingredient of populism, which is this idea that if you represent people, then therefore the limitations of government procedures and protections of the rights of minorities, protections of the rights of the individual, shouldn't be brought up as obstacles. They shouldn't get in your way for whatever your agenda has to be, because after all, you represent the people.

It's kind of nice, but unfortunately, the medium is not really growing that much. So we're sort of reevaluating what we're doing there. But Scott is sort of one who always expresses this sort of quasipopulist exasperation with the elites, basically. Well, in defense of the populist, basically said, what about the elites? Aren't the elites corrupt? Aren't they foolish? Don't they impose these intellectual fads on

people? Basically, isn't the corruption of the elites an excuse for populism or a justification for populism? And so I was looking at that and saying, well, what about the elites part of it? I think the elites are not as bad as they're made out to be. So another aspect of populism in this idea that we represent the people as opposed to the elites, is there in populism, there's a contempt for expertise.

And so anyone who is in a position of authority in academia or who has worked in government, or who has some sort of position where they are endowed with some kind of intellectual authority, is considered suspicious just by virtue of being an expert, right? And so they love to use the term the socalled experts to imply that all these people who are experts in academia or in science or in scientific institutions, et cetera, are all frauds. They say they're experts, but they're not really experts.

And that's incredibly exaggerated. So oftentimes what you end up with with populism is by saying, oh, the elites are terrible. The experts don't know what they're talking about. So therefore, I'm going to do my own research. And doing my own research means watching some random guy who has a YouTube video in which he makes crackpot claims. So it's not substituting invalid expertise with real expertise.

It's often throwing out all expertise and simply going on whatever you feel to be true, or whatever sort of random idea has been popping around that somebody has been promoting that you either haven't tried to check or that you don't have the knowledge of the background to check.

that's functionally, what's going to happen? And so somebody who's out there connecting the dots of some conspiracy is going to be able to get your ear. So the article is talking about that and talking about the fact that, yes, the elites do make mistakes sometimes things like Latinx.

Here this idea you have to refer to people with Hispanic background, who, by the way, when you pull them overwhelmingly, we'll tell you we like to be referred to as Hispanic, but you say, no, the proper term is Latinx. The greatest thing about Latinx is it makes absolutely no sense in the Spanish language. Right. It doesn't even fit it with the Spanish language. You're trying to show how sensitive you are to Spanish speakers. I know.

So we're going to install our own people in power, give them even more power than anybody had under the old system. And we're going to be selecting people not who were selected because they're greater and better experts, but they're selected because they achieved Internet celebrity, or in the case of some of the older ones, tabloid journalism, celebrity back in the old days, right? But we're going to choose people who came up through the Internet or through television as celebrities.

We're going to put them in place, and we're going to get a new elite that has even less expertise than the old one. So I go on and talk about what we actually need to have as the alternative to both sort of what you might call elitism and populism, is you need to have the institutions that were actually put in place as part of the a liberal society precisely to deal with this problem. So one of the things I point out is this problem of the elites might be corrupt is not new at all.

The Founding Fathers were very well aware of it. They were dealing with the entrenched elite of an aristocratic society, and whoever had the ear of the king or whoever did the mechanisms to get his way up in parliament, and they were trying to come up with mechanisms that would limit the power of those people and allow competition and allow criticism. And they created all the institutions of a liberal, a bad liberal, I mean, a free society liberal in the political philosophers.

And so those are the institutions that a lot of the populists want to tear down or shove off to the side and make an end run around instead of revigorating them and using them.

Jonathan Goldberg wrote a whole book based on this, where I described it as being sort of like a it's the old conservative argument from Depravity or original Sin, but it's active, right? So the idea is that the original sin is we have a caveman's mind and psychology, which on top of which there's a thin veneer of intellectuality. I don't think that's true because human beings have been thinkers from the very beginning.

But it is true that intellectuality, that being able to think about things is an achievement. It's something that people need to learn how to do, and it's something that a culture needs to be able to support, and a culture needs to as a whole needs to learn how to do that. And we're often very bad at that. And there's a lot of institutional and I see especially in the media business. I often say that the market signals from the media business to me. Tell me I should be running a grift. That is.

I should be I should be running a con. I should be starting a podcast where I lie to people and tell them whatever they want to hear. Or start a substantial newsletter where I do that. And then I would get huge numbers of subscribers and people would love me and I hate my work. But there are people out there who do that.

So there is a lot of there's always this sort of ground for people who want to be told what they want to hear and to not want to have to think very deeply or very independently about what's going on in the world and about morality and about politics and about what ought we to be doing. So there's always that tendency of anti intellectuality.

And so I think you're always going to have that sort of populist movement underneath that sort of gives people permission to say, you don't have to think about this. Just go with your emotions, go with what you feel, go with your tribal affiliation. Whichever group you happen to identify with, you can go with that. And that's all you need to do because it is a certain freedom from effort that populism is selling to people. You are right, because you are one of the quote unquote, the people.

And he says, basically, what happens is it means that the average a poor person who's not well educated basically cannot legally start a business. Now they start them anyway. They just run them in the, quote, unquote, informal economy, the black market economy. They run them without a legal basis. But then they're always sort of on the edge of ruin because they have no legal claim to anything, right? They could be shut down at any moment.

They're in a legally precarious position, and they can't raise capital or take out loans because, again, they have no legal organization. It ends up being basically a subsidy to lawyers, and it ends up giving a monopoly to people who can afford lawyers.

So if you are well off and can afford a lawyer to do all the amounts and amounts of paperwork, then you can legally run a business in that society, and you get all the advantages of being the one person who can legally do this, and it shuts out everybody else who could potentially compete with you. So, yes, that is a serious problem. We don't have it in America as badly as they have it elsewhere, but it is a problem.

But one thing I want to point out is that a lot of that bureaucratic administrative state, ironically, it is the leftover of a previous wave of populism. And these are the people actually called themselves populists the capital P. This is the early 20th century progressives, and they were the economic populists. They were the left wing populist who said, oh, no, we have to have we can't have these big businessmen running them up. We have to have big government, we have to have more regulations.

And they're the ones who pushed for the massive regulatory state with the idea that being, well, we're going to be tying down JPMorgan and all these other malefactors of great wealth, I think that was FDR's phrase. And we're going to tie them down with all these regulations to make sure they can't run roughshod over again, quote, unquote, the people. So it was an economic populism that then produced big government as a reaction to the elites on Wall Street.

And then, of course, big government became its own group of elites that were.

And so they created these standards where the standard of free speech, which is that you have to allow criticism, you can't shut out criticism, you can't ban anybody. You have to allow a vigorous debate to go back and forth. And so the institutions of freedom of speech are tremendously important. I also think political institutions, that the institution of free elections is a way of basically saying that the leaders have to answer to the people at regular intervals.

They have to constantly be defending and being put on the spot for, well, you did this and people don't like it, so why justify yourself? And then somebody can come up with a better argument. Free markets are one of the great liberal institutions that are meant to fight corruption.

The irony of the left wing populace is they see all those are free markets that cause all these big businesses that have too much power, not realizing that actually free markets are one of the institutions that helps distribute power. Because what it means is that anybody can come compete with you. And also, it means that free markets also mean that you are not dependent on the goodwill of a politician to be able to make a living and to be able to run a business and to be able to survive.

And that's hugely important. That one of the character we talked about, the different characteristics of populism. Right. One characteristics of populism, it generally ends up leading to sort of what we used to call very inaccurately called crony capitalism. It's not capitalism at all. It was just called cronyism. But it's the idea that you have a system where you have a government controlled either by unelected bureaucrats or by demagogues, depending on your style of populism.

But the government has so much control over society that in order to survive, all businesses have to basically be on good terms with whoever's in charge politically. And so you see this, the right has developed this, adopted this. They've gotten very enamored with this idea that well, wait a minute.

So Ron DeSantis in Governor of Florida basically said, well, Disney opposed me on a piece of anti woke legislation and so therefore now I'm going to use my power as governor to cause problems for them. And he went and revoked the basically took the organizations in charge of the utilities and the power and the sewers at Disney World in Florida and said, well, I'm going to basically exert control over this. I'm going to appoint people as governor to run that.

And basically Disney will then be disney World will then be at my mercy. I could shut it down. If I don't like the way they're acting, I'll have them by the throat. And this is very much populist thinking. And of course there's the bureaucratic left wing version of that because they love to do the same thing too.

But it's this idea that if you don't have free markets and everyone is dependent for their livelihood and their ability to run a business and make a living, they're dependent on the goodwill of politicians. Politicians get this tremendous amount of power over people and ability to crush dissent, which we see in a lot of popular sort of quote unquote populist silent dictatorships, right?

But in the crazy coalition politics of Italy, that meant she got the prime ministership and she gave this fiery speech. And the interesting thing about the speech got a huge reaction among conservatives here in America about, oh, this is a great speech. And when I looked at it, what I found is there's this conspiratorial anticapitalism that's mixed in with the traditionalist anti

woke conservative social policy, right? So you have the conservative traditionalism, the pro religion profamily traditionalism, combined with this anticapitalist rhetoric about how well the reason why corporations are forcing this wokeness laws. Is that we'll be perfect consumer slaves and we'll be at the mercy of financial manipulators. And what I saw there, this is basically something I've been dreading for.

I've been dreading constant fear of mine for decades, which is that the Right or left would finally discover how little difference there is between them and join forces.

And that's why this synthesis of this anticapitalist rhetoric with the social conservatism, the traditionalism, that basically we should be using government to support traditional religious values and impose them on people, that is the thing that I've been looking for, and I'm starting to see more signs of in the west. And I think it's the big thing to be concerned about.

Now, in that piece, I also look at how that applies, how that parallels a speech recently given by Vladimir Putin, a fairly recent one, where he's reacting to the war in Ukraine, where he does the exact same thing. And in Putin's case, it's really funny because you can see how, like, a whole section of the speech is basically warmed over anticapitalist, anti imperialist rhetoric from his old KGB days in East Germany, right? Yeah.

It's the old Sovietstyle, anticapitalist propaganda, but then combined with him quoting a Russian fascist philosopher and talking about authentic cultures and traditional values. So he's doing the same thing there, where he's taken the social and religious conservatism and then combined it with the world, with parts of the old world view of the Communist, this anti capitalist conspiracy theory that America is this horrible capitalist empire he's taken us to and combined them.

And I think that's how he's providing a model that is now being adopted by American conservatives and European conservatives.

And the partnership is the Russian Orthodox Church gets official support, it gets legal support. The Russian government goes out and tries to actively suppress other kinds, other religions, including other versions of Christianity. Underneath this conflict, in Ukraine, there's actually a bit of a religious conflict, which is the Ukrainians, just in the last few years, petitioned to create a Ukrainian Orthodox Church that's separate from the Russian Orthodox Church.

And it's basically under the leadership of the Patriarch of Constantinople, who is based in Istanbul and not the Patriarch of Moscow. So there's this sense if the Russian invasion of Ukraine had succeeded, there's this sense that while Archbishop Kuro would have made sure that all the Orthodox churches in Ukraine were Russian Orthodox and under his control because he's in this sort of struggle for power with the Patriarchal constant snaple.

I think the thing is people and you can see Europe became secular and it did not immediately fall apart. Most people actually live according to, I think, a fairly decent secular morality. They live it implicitly in their regular life. Most people go out and they get a job. They find the work they want to do, they buy houses, they have families, they do all the things that, you know, peaceful, productive, decent, normal do.

They live according to an implicit morality of what I call rational selfinterest or enlightened selfinterest. But at the same time, they don't have the theory, they don't have the idea to defend that and to define fully what that means. And that's what leads to the sense of over going off a cliff and we don't know what we're doing.

And so, for example, the example being used here is during the beginning of COVID you had some government officials, including people from the Centers for Disease Control. So these are scientists or people in the science bureaucracy who are in charge of dealing with infectious diseases. And they were going to places like Facebook and saying, well look, these are what we see as the main sources, including sometimes specific people.

We see these as the main sources of disinformation of wrong information about COVID And we think you should be and basically suggesting that they should do something to prevent the spread of that misinformation. And in many cases they were actually really correct about the misinformation that the people who were spreading this were people who were crackpots, who were denying provable scientific facts about the pandemic. But the problem comes in.

And when you have a government official now, on the one hand, a government official in charge of fighting infectious diseases has a responsibility that can be communicating to the public. It's part of his job to say here's what we think is true and here's what we think is not true. On the other hand, whenever somebody who works for the government says something or suggests something, it's not 100% just a suggestion or just somebody's opinion.

It also carries the implication that, well, maybe there would be some legal repercussions should you not comply with what I'm suggesting. And so that's one of the things that we sort of have to deal with here is that and this technique of jawboning is not just a pyramid, it's been used on other things. But there's the sense of what happens when you have people who work for the government who express their opinion about what you ought to do.

And even if it's not an explicit direct threat, it is still someone from the government saying, gee, it's a nice business you've got here. It'd be a shame if something were to happen to it. So it could be an implicit threat.

And so I had a link to some fascinating discussions about ways to sort of determine the certain legal standards and this has been adjudicated in certain Supreme Court cases about what constitutes a legitimate, quote ungovernment, speech, the speech that's permissible for because you can't say to somebody just because you're a politician or just because you work for the CDC, you can't state your opinion on anything.

But at the same time you have to have like, under what conditions can you state it? Under what disclaimers you have to state it. And I think the big issue here comes this is another example of why you need capitalism, why you need free markets, because the less power government has to force people to do something, the less danger there is that a politician shooting his mouth off or a government official expressing an opinion could be even remotely conceived as an implicit threat. Right.

Because to threaten you, they have to have power over you. The less power they have over you, the less possibility that they could implicitly abuse that power.

My attitude is we better have our own coalition. Liberal coalition to go against that and to basically do if people are going to see what they have in common across party lines or across left and right lines when they're opposed to freedom. We should be making efforts to try to reach across ideological lines and across traditional sort of divides to make an alliance of liberals. And so neoclassical liberal comes from it's sort of a portmanteau, a combination of the classical liberal.

And so most people who are premarkers, we usually describe ourselves as classical liberal. The idea is that liberal, the word liberal just means pro freedom. And so liberalism in the 19th century referred to being a pro free marketer, being basically free speech and free markets. That's the classical liberalism. And then in the 20th century, the progressives and the populists came along and the big government guys came along and stole the term liberal to refer to this big government ideology.

But more recently, there's been a wing that calls themselves the neoliberals and they sort of define themselves as more market friendly. They're sort of left of center, but more marketfriendly. And they're more likely to be, for example, to be YIMBYs. So NIMBY means not in my backyard. It's the sort of person who opposes any development project that's happening.

You want to build a 20 story apartment building and they'll turn out at the local meeting and they'll yell and scream and try to block it and they'll sue you. Well, these are the yes in my backyard people where they say, no, we need to be building more housing. If you don't build housing, it gets expensive. People can't afford.

And sort of from a more of a leftist center perspective, they said, well, if you're going to be able to have affordable housing for the poor, you need to be building more housing. So we should be more open to profit driven free market approaches in housing. So these are what's called the neoliberals and they've kind of tried to make a brand out of the term neoliberal.

So I said, well, what if we could get some sort of coalition or cooperation between the neoliberals, the center left neoliberals and the center right classical liberals? As I said, let's call that neoclassical liberalism. And so that's sort of what I'm trying to promote as a liberal synthesis where we try to find this even though there are disagreements and philosophy and disagreements and priorities.

We try to find the things that we can cooperate on and work together on because I think if we don't. Then the advantage of forming a big coalition could potentially flip over to the illegal symphony that I've been worried about.

And I said, well, I decided having gone back to that and realizing, oh, I not only was able to put back together a lot of the old material that I had, but I was able to approve on it because I've been writing for 20 years since then, doing a lot of writing and I've learned even more. So I decided to do other round of it. So I got a group of students going through it just started on Tuesday.

And it's one of the things that I feel strongly about is basically having learned so much of sort of passing on those skills and the hard run wisdom and not just about little tips. Tricks and techniques but I've also done a lot of thinking about the process of writing and I think most people find the process of writing to be very difficult. To be very psychologically brutal and challenging.

I got one of the people who interested in the class said I think I'm actually I like the product of my writing but I find the process to be incredibly painful and difficult. And that's exactly trying to sort of address is there's a whole process of how you have to manage the actual act of writing, how you can break it down into sort of smaller constituent parts that are not as sort of brainbustingly complicated or as anxiety inducing.

And so they turn it into something where you have a series of discrete steps you can take that will make it manageable. And I think it's one of the keys to doing a lot of writing. As I've done over the years. Is being able to have that sort of to know the process you need to go through to keep just to keep chugging away at being able to do it without stumbling over the process of how do you manage this ability to take this complex. A lot of facts. A lot of ideas.

And you have to put them together in an order and give them a structure. How do you go about doing that? Well, I've got a series of techniques that I've developed over the years, insights into how to break that into a manageable process.

at it, right? You could put all this information out, you could get it out there for free and people get used to everything for free. The thing I hate, the slogan I hate the most is information wants to be free because it's usually set by people who are getting paid well to build the technological infrastructure, not to actually provide the information. So my view is information needs to get paid, right?

We need to find a way that people who are producing good ideas and producing good information can actually make a living at it, because there's no way I could do as much as I do if it weren't what I'm doing full time. If I were doing this on the side, I could do a small fraction of it. So finding ways that people can get rewarded for doing this and unfortunately, in the digital era, the media business has been going the other direction.

So, definitely, if you have a podcast you like, like this one, if you have a newsletter you like, subscribe to those things. Find ways to support them financially. But the great thing is the barriers to entry have been knocked out. They've been knocked down.

But if you want those barriers to enter, to be open, if you want people with your ideas that you like to be able to find an audience, then the responsibility goes to you individually to say, well, if I want that to happen, I should find the people I like and find ways to give them support. You guys probably have, like, a tip jar kind of thing where people can send in support and you can subscribe to my newsletter and substack. It's a way of supporting what I do at the various ventures that I do.