Can we define “populism”? Perhaps, but what is gained by this?

What is populism? The most serious mistake with this question is its (usually unspoken) assumption that where we have a single word there must be a single corresponding concept and that when we use the word to refer to a diverse number of things they must share a single common property however different they may look. Thus, when we call all kind of things and all number of people “populist,” you can be certain that they all have one and the same property in common. We are dealing thus with a single concept that, with some ingenuity, can be defined. We can call this the Platonic fallacy. In his dialogues Plato regularly proceeds in this way. He asks “what is justice?”, “what is holiness?”, “what is beauty?” and assumes that in each case there is a single thing – the idea of justice, of holiness, or of beauty – in which just, holy, and beautiful things participate. An alternative to this “essentialist” view holds that general terms mark similarities between the things to which they are applied or, in more complex cases, that they mark overlapping series of similarities between them. In the latter case we can speak of a “family resemblance” between those things. Two things called by a common name may belong to the same family – and thus be called by the same name – without having any significant similarities in common as long as they are part of a chain of overlapping similarities. Terms applying to social phenomena are best understood as family-resemblance notions.

We should resist then also an essentialist account of populism – or more correctly of the term “populism.” Two recent attempts at providing such an account can help us to illustrate what is problematic in essentialism. In an already widely published book (What is Populism? 2017) the political theorist Jan-Werner Müller offers us an intriguingly simple characterization. Populism, he writes, is anti-pluralism. But this will not do for a number of reasons. We might say, first of all, that anti-pluralism is something wider than populism, that populists maybe anti-pluralist but that anti-pluralists need not be populists. The great dogmatic religions, for instance, are inherently anti-pluralist since each one of them demands total acceptance of an entire set of doctrines. Exclusive social castes and classes, like the Indian Brahmin and the European high aristocracy, are also typically anti-pluralist since they will accept only those who are like themselves. But there is a second and deeper reason for questioning Müller’s formula. It is that human society is inherently pluralistic. This is true even in the most doctrinaire forms of religion. The novelist Peter DeVries once pointed this out when he wrote humorously of the Dutch evangelicals of the American Midwest: “One Dutchman a Christian, two Dutchmen a church, three Dutchmen heresy.” Closer inspection will always bring out that the adherents to the same dogmas will nevertheless interpret them in significantly different ways. The reason is due to “the indeterminacy of meaning” (as philosophers have called the phenomenon) which brings it about that two speakers using the same words will inevitably give them different meaning. If that is so, then what Müller calls “anti-pluralism” is in effect not opposed to all plurality, since that is effectively impossible; it is, rather, a discriminatory view which quietly accepts some kinds of plurality and rejects others. The important question will then be which differences serve as the base for discrimination and which do not. So, defining populism as anti-pluralism is always possible, but it leaves us with a notion that is more or less empty and thus not very useful.

In Populism. A Very Short Introduction (2017), Cas Mudde and Cristόbal Rovira Kaltwasser define populism with another simple formula. They define it “as a thin-centered ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonist camps, ‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite’, and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people.” This is a little more substantive than Müller’s definition but not by much. Both definitions are, in fact, too formulaic to be of much practical use. Mudde-Kaltwasser seem to realize this because they are well aware of how open-ended the notions of “the people” and “the elite” are. But they assume that in different contexts, these notions will be fleshed out in one way or another and we will then have different substantive embodiments of populism. By calling populism a “thin-centered ideology” they mean to say, moreover, that “populism in itself” has little ideological content; but they assume once again that in its various embodiments it will acquire such content. All forms of populism have thus in their view one essential quality in common, but in actual reality they will vary though only in supposedly accidental characteristics. We can say in addition, just as in the case of Jan-Werner Müller’s formulation, that this leaves us with serious questions concerning the adequacy of the formula. The fundamental idea of a confrontation between a pure people and a corrupt elite is so general that it seems to fit many kinds of situation that we would not necessarily want to describe as populist; it seems to apply class conflict as conceived in the Marxist tradition but, in fact, also to every other form of revolutionary conflict. It fits, for instance, Nietzsche’s account of the slave revolt in morality in his Genealogy of Morals. Nietzsche is writing there of the collapse of ancient classical Greco-Roman civilization. Nothing can stop Mudde-Kaltwasser from insisting that the rise of Christianity was also a populist event. But we need to ask ourselves whether this way of using terms is illuminating. To treat all confrontations between a lower and a higher social class as populist appears much too broad to be of interest.

We should admit, instead, that there is no simple formula that can help us to understand populism. Populism is a complex and multi-dimensional phenomenon. We are, perhaps, better off trying to describe characteristic cases of populist politics. I

The place of America — in political philosophy

For those living in the United States, the conditions of American politics will, for obvious reasons, be of some interest. But given the economic, political, and military power of the US it is not surprising to discover that American politics is scrutinized all over the world. When one looks at the International media, it is striking how much attention they pay to American affairs.

Does this mean that American politics has also a particular interest for political philosophy? Well, certainly, as an exemplar of politics for American students of political philosophy. John Rawls’ classic Theory of Justice seems to have largely America in view, despite its aspirations of providing a universal theory.

It is also said that America’s political history provides a blueprint for the natural and perhaps even inevitable political development of other places in the world. In this story, the American republic and American democracy are assumed to be suitable paradigms for political order and practice everywhere else. But is this assumption realistic or will countries like China, for instance, always be following their own trajectory and one that does not necessarily lead to American style democracy? We must not forget that historically different countries have served as political models — ancient democratic Athens, Imperial Rome, and Revolutionary France. The role of America as a model for political development is by no means set in stone.

Another possibility is that because of its wealth and power the US is still serving the role of an avant-garde nation. Whatever happens here politically and economically, will eventually manifest itself in other parts of the world. So, if we find extreme forms of capitalism in the US or a deterioration of democratic life, similar forms of corruption are to be expected elsewhere. One immediate application of this thought is that the rise of Donald Trump signals a process that may extend to the rest of the world and has to be therefore of interest to political philosophy.

 

Why China matters – also in political philosophy

China is also becoming increasingly powerful in the economic, political, and military field with implication for the entire global balance of power. Finally, and not least important, China is one of the world’s richest civilizations with a continuous history of more than two thousand years. Its philosophers, writers, and visual artists deserve our recognition and admiration.

There are in addition some special reasons why political philosophers should pay attention to China. Our political philosophy has tended so far to be narrowly focused on our own Western tradition. It focuses till today almost exclusively on the Greeks of the classical age, the Romans of the Imperial age, and on European politics from the sixteenth century onwards with the addition, more recently of US American politics. As far as other political traditions are concerned, our political philosophers have either ignored them or simply applied their Western concepts and theories to the rest of the world. We have become used, for instance, to take just one example, to speak of the Chinese Empire projecting in this way our conception of the Roman and modern European empires to China. But are they really the same? The Chinese name for their state is “zhongguo” which means “middle realm” and thus speaks of a geographical order, not of a dominion. And were the Chinese rulers “emperors” in the same sense as the Romans? The Chinese emperor or “huangdi” was primarily a mediator between heaven and earth, whereas the Roman emperors were typically military commanders, as their title already indicates.

The classical Chinese philosophers have concerned themselves extensively with political matters and we would do well to study their writings – both for their intrinsic interest and asking ourselves to what extent they can illuminate contemporary Chinese politics. Is it, for instance, the case, as has been suggested, that the Communist Party of China has, in fact, recreated the Confucian bureaucratic order?

In looking at China, we may also discover that it operates with a very different large-scale picture of political history. Our Western view of that history has been, certainly since the Enlightenment, of political development as a linear, progressive movement. This may not be the predominant Chinese view. Luo Guanzhong’s historical novel The Romance of the Three Kingdom’s, written in the 14th century, tells the story of the disintegration of the “empire” and the rise and fall of local kingdoms at the end of the Han dynasty. The novel begins famously with the words: “Unity succeeds with division and division follows unity. One is bound to be replaced by the other after a long span of time. This is the way with things in the world.” The words suggest a cyclical course of development and this picture appears particularly apposite with respect to Chinese history in which the unity of the realm and its divisions have been a recurrent theme. We need to look, perhaps, at the preoccupation of China’s present rulers with the unity of China, and hence their obsession with the hankering for independence in Taiwan and Hong Kong, in this light.

A Bad Bargain

Joshua Green, Devil’s Bargain. Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Nationalist Uprising, Penguin Books 2017, republished with a new preface 2018

Joshua Green’s book has been somewhat overshadowed by the publication of Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury (Read more) but it adds significantly to Wolff’s account and corrects it at some important points. It tells in fascinating detail the story of bad bargain the American people accepted when they elected Trump.

Green, shows, in particular, how doggedly Trump had been pursuing the project of a presidential campaign. Over long years he had “developed many of the themes that became hallmarks of the eventual campaign – everything from the evils of Chinese currency manipulation to the economic damage that NAFTA inflicted on a broad swath of U. S. workers.” (p. 41) When Trump and Bannon finally met they discovered that “both believed, for instance, that the United States was constantly victimized in foreign trade deals.” (p. 93)

Green, whose book is based on extensive interviews with Bannon himself and his associates as well as with others in Trump’s circle, gives much credit to Bannon for Trump’s victory. He writes that “Trump wouldn’t be president if it weren’t for Bannon. Together their power and reach gave them strength and influence far beyond what either could have achieved on his own.” (p. 22) In a word, Bannon provided for Trump his own “hard-right nationalist politics” and “Trump sold this brand of nationalism with the same all-out conviction he brought to selling his own name. Whether he actually believed in it, he recognized that it was the key to closing the biggest deal of his life.” (p. xxix) It was Bannon, Green argues, who “supplied Trump with a fully formed, internally coherent worldview that accommodated Trump’s own feelings about trade and foreign threats, what Trump eventually dubbed ‘America First’ nationalism.” (p. 46) After their break, Trump sought, of course, to minimize the importance of Bannon for his presidential campaign. “Steve had very little to do with our historical victory,” he declared. (p. xxi)

Given Green’s premise of the importance of Bannon to Trump, it is obvious why he focuses so intensely on Bannon and his worldview — even more so than on Trump. Bannon is, in his eyes, clearly the more complex and more interesting character. Like Michael Wolff after him, Green highlights the volatility of Bannon’s career which took him from serving for seven years in the navy to Goldman Sachs as a banker, Hollywood and movie-making, two years spent on an anti-Clinton crusade, editor of Breitbart News and finally presidential adviser. Both authors also acknowledge the importance of Bannon’s Irish Catholic working-class background. But there are some differences in the two accounts. Green’s Bannon is more successful than Wolff’s and his development is more coherent. Green also makes much of Bannon’s long-standing preoccupation with Hillary Clinton and the ways he sought to undermine her.

 

Xi Jinping Rule

Susan Shirk, a China exert who served under Bill Clinton, said: “What is going on here is that Xi Jinping is setting himself up to rule China as a strongman, a personalistic leader – I have no problem calling it a dictator – for life.” Wu’er Kaixi, a Chinese dissident in exile, added: “Now he has become this monster that we are about to see.” Some critical voices could be heard even from China. Li Datong, the outspoken former editor of the China Youth Daily, called on lawmakers in an open letter to vote down the proposal because it would “sow the seeds of chaos for China”. The two-term limit had been introduced, he added, because of “the enormous suffering of the Cultural Revolution” and that it was “one of the most important political legal legacies of Deng Xiaoping”.

Others were more cautious. For Shi Yinhong at Renmin University in Beijing: “It means that for a long time into the future, China will continue to move forwards according to Xi’s thoughts, his route, his guiding principles and his absolute leadership.”  And Orville Schell, another American China expert, said this: “If you postulate that the world needs leadership, that America is in disarray and that Europe is a dish of loose sand, then maybe Chinese leadership has some virtues, particularly in areas like nuclear proliferation, climate change [and] pandemics. Whatever you may think of his authoritarian kind of leadership, at least he can lead.”

More positive even were the assessments of some Western economists who clearly don’t mind a bit of authoritarianism. For Robert Carnell, chief Asia economist with the ING Bank, Xi’s move provides some upsides “from an investment perspective” as it would enhance “China’s ability to get things done”. The transition into a consumer economy and Xi’s ‘Belt and Road Initiative, he said, were “more likely to be successful with a strong and steady leadership.” And similarly Raymond Yeung, chief Greater China economist at the Australian ANZ Bank, predicted increased policy stability, which in turn would be positive for China’s long-term economic reforms. “From an academic perspective, it will help reduce an unnecessary economic cycle adjustment triggered by the political changes and ease economic volatility.”

Speculation about the motives behind this initiative and it implications is thus rife, though largely unsupported by factual evidence. We may want to ask not only why Xi himself might want this enhanced position, but why the members of the Central Committee would agree to it. The answer may be that they are foreseeing a period of global instability that can be managed only by a strongman, strong-hand politics. The world-wide turn to authoritarian and personal rule – so noticeable, of course, also in Trump’s America – may reflect the same thought. Not a good prospect for liberal democracies.

Politics as a field of imperfect cognitive states

Our epistemologists have been thinking about knowledge for a long time and about how to define it. The standard view is that knowledge is justified true belief; but that hardly settles the matter since all three terms – justification, truth, and belief – are in need of further clarification. When it comes to the question where knowledge is to be found, we have tended to look at mathematics, or physics, or at cases where an object is clearly perceived under ideal conditions.

But in social and political life we are rarely dealing with knowledge in this sense. In these domains we encounter conjectures, surmises, guesswork, “convictions,” presumption, suspicion, interpretations, attempts to make sense, etc. I am particularly interested in states of uncertainty and disorientation because these seem to prevail now in our politics.

I have argued in Politics and the Search for the Common Good that politics is inherently a domain of uncertainty. Uncertainty affects all aspects of political life and brings about its characteristic volatility. Disorientation, on the other hand, is a malady that disrupts politics and can destroy political institutions. But the two are connected and for this reason we will need to look at them and their interrelation. We are uncertain when we don’t know (don’t know for sure) what has been, what is, or what will be. The difficulty we have in separating news from “fake news,” information from misinformation exemplifies this condition. We are disoriented, on the other hand, when we don’t understand what has been, what is, or what will be because we lack adequate words and concepts to do so. Our inability to analyze our current condition, to say what kind of political transformation we are experiencing and what might come after may count as an illustration. Though similar in some respects and interrelated as they are, uncertainty and disorientation belong, nonetheless, to different cognitive registers: one concerns our knowledge, the other our understanding.

We need to distinguish, however, between uncertainty and the feeling of uncertainty and likewise between disorientation and the feeling of being disoriented. The two are easily confused. The feeling is something that may or may not attach itself to an actual state of uncertainty or an actual condition of disorientation. But it is a secondary (and second-level) psychological state that relates to a primary (first-level) cognitive condition. We may be objectively uncertain about what is to come but feel confident that we know. In other words, we think we know when we really don’t. It is then said that we suffer from a sense of false certainty. False certainty is a common feature of political life and it goes hand in hand with its indubitable uncertainties. In his book Fire and Fury Michael Wolff writes that Donald Trump’s White House staff and members of his cabinet had become aware after a few months of “the baldly obvious fact that the president did not know enough, did not know what he didn’t know, did not particularly care, and, to boot, was confident if not serene in his unquestioned certitudes.” What holds for uncertainty, applies also to disorientation. We may feel that we understand what is going on, when this is, in fact not so. Disorientation is, in this respect, like dementia. Disoriented as we are we may still believe, just like the demented, that we are doing fine, are of clear mind, grasp what is going on, have things in hand.

We need to distinguish, moreover, between perceptual and conceptual forms of disorientation for it is the latter that is characteristically at stake in politics. We may be disorientated when we wake up in an unfamiliar room or when we are caught in a dense fog. Then we don’t know whether to turn left or right and find ourselves frozen in place. Even in the case of perceptual disorientation we must, of course, distinguish between being and feeling disoriented. Waking up in an unfamiliar pitch-black room we may still believe that we understand its lay-out but then bump unexpectedly into a wall. But both being perceptually disoriented and feeling perceptually disoriented are different from not knowing how to describe our situation adequately or not being able to act politically in an appropriate way because we lack the concepts for analyzing where we are and where need to go.

To make these distinctions does not mean to downplay the importance of feelings of uncertainty or disorientation in politics. Such feelings of uncertainty and disorientation may generate unease, anxiety, even nausea and these can stop us from acting or can drive us into precipitous action. But such feelings are still secondary to actual states of uncertainty and disorientation which have a far more direct impact on what happens. Actual uncertainty and disorientation, instead of creating anxiety, are often accompanied by opposite feelings of certainty and orientation, the resulting smugness may have an even more devastating effect than felt uncertainty and disorientation.

These insights have been captured well in Plato’s Republic. In its seventh book we read of humans living in an underground cave – an allegory for social and political life as we know it. Tied down, hand and foot, the inhabitants of the cave can see only shadows on the wall before them, not what produced them and also not the world beyond their cave. They are not only ignorant of the things beyond their range of vision, they are also unable to understand their own situation and they can also therefore not conceive of any alternative to their pitiful state. If anyone of the inhabitants of the cave manages to turn around and sees what produced the shadow play, he will, however, be “pained and dazzled and unable to see the things” whose shadows he had seen before. (514c) And if he should actually reach daylight, he will be dazzled once more until his eyes have adjusted to the above ground reality. But should he return into the darkness of the cave, he would once again be confused and “behave awkwardly and appear completely ridiculous.” (517d) There are thus for Plato two states of political disorientation: the first when one comes from the darkness of ignorance into the light of knowledge and the second when one returns from this light into the darkness of human social life. The inhabitants of the cave are convinced that they know and understand reality, but they are, in fact, familiar only with shadows and lack the concepts to understand their actual situation. They are both ignorant and disoriented but feel all the while certain and oriented. By contrast, the one who escapes from the cave will at first be thrown into a state of confusion. His felt uncertainty will make him realize that he lacks the words to understand reality as it is. He will be moved therefore to acquire the concepts necessary to describe how things are and in what way the world of common human life is one of illusion. But when he returns to the human habitat and encounters the false certainties of its inhabitants, he may not fare well. They may deride and resent him and even seek to get rid of him in order to preserve their precious illusions.

Who is responsible for our decline? – The Frankfurt School, of course.

Stuart Jeffries, Grand Hotel Abyss. The Lives of the Frankfurt School, Verso, London 2017

Poor Frankfurt School. Turn to the internet these days and you realize that the handful of German professors who go under that name are being held responsible for almost everything bad that has happened to society since … when? !990? 1970? 1945? Or even 1920? All these dates are being tossed around on those feverish websites. Neo-Marxism, cultural Marxism, feminism, multiculturalism, sexual excess, postmodernism, political correctness, and all in all the entire “Western decline” are due to their nefarious doings.

According to our new alt-right friends, the Frankfurt and cultural Marxist philosophy“now controls Western intellectualism, politics and culture. It was by design; it was created by an internationalist intelligentsia to eradicate Western values, social systems, and European racial groups in a pre-emptive attempt to spark global communist revolution.” (Click here) This discovery is, actually, a bit late. The Lyndon LaRouche folks have been saying much the same for the last quarter of a century. Walter Benjamin, the seemingly hapless Frankfurt intellectual – they have been saying – has in reality been the ultimate puppet master of modern civilization, responsible for everything from a bad turn in literary theory to bad TV. “Perhaps the most important, if least-known, of the Frankfurt School’s successes was the shaping of the electronic media of radio and television into the powerful instruments of social control which they represent today. This grew out of the work originally done by … Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin.” (Click here) What else would you expect from those nefarious German-Jewish intellectuals?

Stuart Jeffries’ Grand Hotel Abyss is an indispensable antidote to such fevered excesses. It traces the lives of the members of the Frankfurt School from 1900 to the new millennium and of the school itself from its uncertain beginnings in Frankfurt in the 1920’s, through its exile in America, to its eventual return to Germany. Jeffries’ story reveals how marginalized the Frankfurt School people were right from the moment of the foundation of their institute, how they were forced to relocate the institute first to Geneva and then to New York to save it from Hitler’s powerful grip. In the US, the Frankfurt scholars found it difficult to get adjusted and while some of them stayed after the war, the two leading figures, Horkheimer and Adorno, returned to Frankfurt only to be caught up in the cultural and political turmoil of the late 1960’s. At no point did they succeed in establishing a hegemony over intellectual, cultural, and academic affairs or, for that matter, over the political debate. Benjamin committed suicide while trying to escape the Nazis; Adorno died of a heart attack after being confronted by rebellious left-wing students.

How far does the academic influence of the Frankfurt School in fact reach? Certainly not very far into Anglo-American philosophy departments which are still predominantly positivistic and analytic in outlook. If we are to look for foreign influences in those places we must turn to the logicians, linguistic philosophers, and philosophers of science of the Vienna Circle, not to the Frankfurt School. Certainly also not in political science departments which are mostly dedicated to “government studies” and have typically only a few “theorists” in their ranks. Certainly not in Sociology department. The sociologist Robert Dunn in a recent book complains bitterly about “the positivist tendencies and narrow scientific preoccupations … which have prevailed within the disciplinary mainstream at the expense of engagement with the social and human problems engendered by modern capitalist society.” (Toward a Pragmatist Sociology, Temple University Press, Philadelphia 2018, p. vii) And it’s not a turn to the Frankfurt School he calls for but to the all-American pragmatist John Dewey. We can go through the roster of humanities and social science departments across America and may find a smattering of Frankfurt School influence, but the mainstream remains firmly committed to positivistic, hermeneutic, historical, and traditional scholarly modes of thinking.

Jeffries tells his story in a lively fashion. I certainly kept on reading — though with reservations. The problem is that like any number of books these days Jeffries’ focuses on biography and human psychology and treats the accomplishments of the biographed figures only as incidental. Jeffries spends much of the first chapter to establish that the founders of the Frankfurt School were motivated by Oedipal feelings against their fathers. He calls Walter Benjamin the School’s greatest thinker but never really explains to us what makes him so great. The ideas that made the Frankfurt School famous are never elaborated. When it comes to basic Frankfurt School concepts like those of “dialectic” and “reification” Jeffries falls back on sketchy and wholly unsatisfactory characterizations. In the end, I was ready to reach for a classic like Martin Jay’s book The Dialectical Imagination to help me with understanding what made the Frankfurt School so interesting.

The Atomization of Knowledge

We have learned that the ocean waves pulverize our plastic debris which is then consumed as dust by the fish we eat. The circle is closed and the poisons we have created come back to us in this altered form. The internet pulverizes human knowledge and feeds it back to us as unconnected bits of information. Our minds are bound to be ultimately  overwhelmed by all this new kind of poisonous debris.

Digital technology has had the peculiar effect of atomizing human knowledge and this in two ways. It has favored the creation of small bits of information which are passed around in digital messages. And it has overwhelmed our ability to concentrate on extended lines of reasoning. There is too much information, tempting us to move quickly from one bit to another. We are distracted by all these bits of knowledge that are offered to us so enticingly on all the websites of the world. This is already showing disastrously in our students who find it increasingly difficult to read whole books. We feed them instead with power point slides that contain carefully selected bits of information. Even this blog illustrates what is happening. Blogs are signals of the decreasing attention spans of those who write them and those who consume them.

One consequence of all this is that we find it increasingly difficult to weigh and assess the information that comes to us. We begin to believe things just because they have appeared somewhere on the internet. We lose our capacity to ask where this information comes from and who has authored it. The disunity of knowledge acquires thus a new and more extreme character. Human knowledge is a dispersed structure; there is disunity in it but there are also clusters of density and integration (theories, fields, disciplines, world-views). It is this equilibrium of unity and dispersion that is now coming undone. Click here

The result of all this is a wholly new condition for human knowledge. So, we need an epistemology that takes these developments into account. Call it a critical epistemology of the internet.

“This is the way the world ends”: Drowning in Plastics

There is much debate about climate change, but changes to our environment are nor limited to the weather. Environmental degradation is everywhere and, as the world’s population keeps increasing and more human beings want to participate in the benefits of modern civilization, it is not going away very soon.

One aspect of it is our growing production and consumption of plastics. Plastics cram landfills, they float in the oceans, are consumed by fish and thereby ultimately end in our bodies. Click here

The US and the West have long relied on China to take its used plastics for recycling. China has now banned those imports because of their poisonous impact. Now we are ready to poison some other, economically less powerful countries. Click here

 

Forget Fire and Fury; It’s Confusion and Turmoil in Trump’s White House

Michael Wolff, Fire and Fury. Inside the Trump White House, Henry Holt and Company, New York 2018

On August 8 of last year, Donald Trump threatened North Korea with “fire and fury like the world has never seen.” His words were meant to cow the North Koreans into abandoning their nuclear and missile arsenal but until now, at least, they appear to have been only idle threats. Michael Wolff has now adopted the phrase as the title of his book on the first nine months of the Trump presidency – surely, a cleverly ironic choice. For since his election Trump has proved to be more a source of combative words than of real achievements.

Wolff insists that Trump and his circle had never expected to win the election, that he had been planning his campaign, instead, as a business promotion for the Trump brand and a possible new television channel. Victory thus left Trump unprepared for the job ahead. This story must, however, be too simple since Trump had been toying for years with the idea of running for president. He had been telling everyone willing to listen of all the things that, in his view, were wrong with America and the world, how they could be set right in simple ways were it not for corrupt and incompetent politicians everywhere, and how he, Trump, could easily do so, given half a chance. There was, no doubt, some hesitation in him about whether he would actually want to put such words into action. But in the end, it was a combination of overconfidence and ignorance that propelled Trump to actually seek the highest elected office.

He did so with few thoughts about job once he was elected. He had run his shaky business for many years as a small, somewhat chaotic family affair. How was he supposed to operate now the vast machinery of the Federal government? What was worse: “Trump didn’t read. He didn’t really even skim. If it was in print it might as well not exist. Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semiliterate… But not only didn’t he read, he didn’t listen. He preferred to be the person talking. And he trusted his own expertise – no matter how paltry or irrelevant – more than anyone else’s.” (pp. 113-114) An explanation of the Constitution left him yawning. And when Joe Scarborough, the MSNBC host, asked him whom he called on for advice, Trump is supposed to have answered sheepishly: “Well, you won’t like the answer, but the answer is me. Me. I talk to myself.” (p. 47)

Resisting advice and skeptical of the Washington bureaucracy, Trump left himself, thus, open to being influenced by whatever he had seen most recently on television and whatever he had been told by the last person to speak to him. The problem was that even though Trump had strong opinions, he also changed them frequently and was often unable or unwilling to reach any final decision. Three factions vying for the new president’s attention emerged in consequence. There was Steve Bannon, backed up by Bob and Rebekah Mercer and the alt-right media, who pushed a confrontational agenda of “economic nationalism;” there was Reince Priebus and his cohort advancing a mainstream Republican Party line; and there was the family, Ivanka and Jared Kushner with their moderate “New York Democrat” friends. The competition between them soon turned bloody and led to the ouster of Priebus, Bannon, and others from the White House. The turmoil was exacerbated by the investigation of Russian interference in the election and possible collusion with this in the Trump campaign. This led soon to the ouster of the FBI director, James Comey, and Trump’s alienation from his Secretary of Justice, Jeff Sessions, one of his earliest supporters. The dynamic set thus into motion is still working itself out and we can expect more turmoil to come out of Trump’s White Hose.

While Donald Trump is the central figure in Wolff’s narrative, an important second role is filled by Steve Bannon. It was Bannon who, in fact, helped Wolff to gain initial access to Trump. Trump himself had then invited Wolff into the White House under the impression that Wolff was writing a book on his first year in office to be called The Great Transition. And so, Wolff, with Bannon’s help, managed to sit in the White House for half a year observing and overhearing the things he reports in his book. It begins and ends not surprisingly with Bannon. Its first section describes a dinner party in the spring of 2017 at which Bannon and Roger Ailes, the deposed head of Fox Television, freely dissect the Trump presidency and it ends after Bannon’s banishment from the White House with his declaration that “Trump was just the beginning.” For Bannon, Trump had, in fact, always been only the vehicle for his own political ambitions even as he was professing again and again his loyalty to the president. He could thus confidently declare after his ouster from the White House: “I am the leader of the nationalist, populist movement.” (p. 301) As far as Trump himself was concerned, Bannon foresaw that he would had little to fear from an investigation into his links to Russia. Yes, Donald Jr. had made a serious mistake when meeting with the Russians during the election campaign. But What he had done was possibly treasonous, or unpatriotic, and, in any case, “silly” and “bad shit.” (p. 255) And there was no reason to believe Donald Sr., when he denied all knowledge of this meeting. But none of this would be sufficient to bring the president down. It was, however, another matter altogether, if the inquiry should turn to Trump’s finances. “You realize where this is going,” Bannon said during another dinner party in July 2017: “This is all about money-laundering …. They are sitting on a beach trying to stop a Category Five.” (p. 278) Bannon had no doubt that Trump’s business dealings had been fishy. He thought, in the end that “there was a 33.3 percent chance that that the Mueller investigation would lead to the impeachment of the president, a 33.3 percent that Trump would resign, perhaps in the wake of a threat by the cabinet to act on the Twenty-Fifth Amendment (by which the cabinet can remove the president in the event of incapacitation), and a 33.3 percent chance that he would limp to the end of his term. In any case, there would certainly not e second term, or even an attempt at one.” (p. 308)

Bannon emerges from this account as Wolff’s tragi-comic hero. Unlike Trump, he actually reads books (to the astonishment of everyone else in the Trump circle). Unlike Trump, he has ideas, convictions, and “projects.” Unlike Trump, he thinks in large, strategic terms about politics. But his learning is spotty and his vision of political reality and his own place in it is distorted. We can’t help feeling that he has been caught in the web of “fake news” that threatens to swamp everything and which the Breitbart channel directed by Bannon himself was so clever to exploit. It turns out that Bannon has come to believe in the absurd Noel Howe and William Strauss theory that history moves in strict generational circles and that we are now in the fourth stage of that development, a moment when the existing order inevitably disintegrates. So, Bannon’s view of American and world politics is duly apocalyptic. And he is eager to speed the apocalypse on its way; Trump is for him only one of the tools to bring that about. If this world-view separates him from Trump, he shares with the president an overwhelming desire to speak, to communicate and what the one pursues with his tweets, the other does through incessant leaks. It is this inability to stay silent that finally brought Bannon down. Bannon’s leaks were, no doubt, a rich source for Wolff’s book they were finally also instrumental also bringing about the complete break with Trump.

Wolff’s book has been criticized for a number of factual errors – though none of them deadly – and for his willingness to conjecture and interpret, but when we read it in the light of what we already know about Trump’s presidency from other sources, we cannot doubt its overall veracity. Its devastating effect is not even primarily due to its revelations (there are a few) but to the fact that it collects bits of common knowledge into a single compelling narrative. The book is a major achievement of the kind that the great Roman historians would have recognized. It is not like works of modern historical scholarship with their endless footnotes referencing every claim, and their desire for detachment and balance. Like the Roman historians, Wolff seeks to tell a story and he allows himself to put fitting words into people’s mouths. Like the ancient historians, he revels in the foibles and vices of our rulers. And also in the style of those historians he is clearly advancing an agenda, all the while claiming to be writing in a disinterested fashion (“sine ira et studio,” as the Romans put it).

After reading Wolff’s book it becomes difficult to believe that the Trump presidency will have a happy outcome either for Trump himself or the United States as a whole. If that turns out to be the case, Wolff’s book will surely be read for a long time. Even if it comes otherwise, I hope that the book will be remembered for its vivid depiction of a deeply disquieting moment in US history.

 

Populism’s everywhere. But what, the hell, is it?

Three ways to think about populism

Populism is the political fashion word of the moment. Trump’s critics accuse him of being a populist. Steve Bannon calls himself proudly “a populist-nationalist.” The alt-right and their offshoots are considered populists. Populism is said to lie behind the UK’s Brexit decision. There are, so we hear, populist parties emerging all over Europe.

But do we know what the word stands for? It is, in fact, in the words of the English philosopher W. B. Gallie, an “essentially contested concept.”  (Click here)  Both its content and its valence are in dispute; the word does not serve as a politically neutral tool of analysis, in other words, but as a weapon in the political struggle and there may no way to avoid this. The natural opposite of “populist” is “elitist” – but that is just another essentially contested concept.

We may want to distinguish at least three things:

(a) Populism as a set of policies – and often of policies that are defined in negative terms. Thus, populism as opposition to “the other” (e.g., immigrants, Muslims, transgender people), as anti-globalization, as anti-establishment. But don’t expect there to be a sharply defined list.

(b) Populism as the politics of a particular social group: the populus consisting of disadvantaged white (?) males(?) — but there is no precise definition of who does and who does not belong to that group and, furthermore, why should we assume that the members of the populous adhere to a single politics? It may be safer to assume that they divide between left and right and that populism, understood in this second sense, has both a left-wing and a right-wing variety.

(c) Populism as a set of policies defined by a political elite (an activist political movement or even a ruling elite) which it ascribe to another social group (the populus), and which it then embraces or deplores – in the name of or on behalf of that social group. Think of Trump, the billionaire, claiming to speak for “the ordinary people.” Think of Bannon promoting “economic nationalism” in the name of a working class to which he clearly does not belong.

The tensions and contradictions in populism understood in this third way should be obvious. In his Bannon-inspired Inaugural Address Trump proclaimed that “the ordinary people” would now have access to government and we, see, indeed, how Trump receives all kind of ordinary folks in the White House. But they are there only for photo ops, not for serious consultation. When it comes to the latter, Trump is on the phone to his billionaire friends. Trump, the self-declared anti-globalist, is at the same time engaged in promoting his own name as a global brand. Steve Bannon, similarly, posed as the spokesman of the American working class, all the time being promoted and financed by Bob and Rebekah Mercer, with their billions of dollars and their nutty, extremist views. He says that he is an American nationalist, but also travels the globe to promote such nationalism universally to other nations.

In a word: contemporary populism is a looking-glass world.

Another headache

Should we worry about the alt-right? They are noisy and in-your face, but do they matter? It’s surely important to keep an eye on them and to know what they stand for. They may still fade away, but perhaps it is more accurate to see them as one symptom of the ongoing destabilization of our political order.