RALEIGH – At the moment, it’s popular to be populist.
In the aftermath of the worldwide financial crisis and the resulting increases in unemployment, underemployment, and uncertainty, there is great skepticism about powerful elites, organizations, and interest groups. Every large institution, with the interesting exception of the U.S. military, has suffered declines in public confidence. In a recent Pew Research Center survey, for example, fewer than a third of Americans thought banks, large companies, labor unions, the federal government, or the media had a positive effect on the country.
To a large degree, the decline is deserved. Big government has shown itself to be intrusive, capricious, or corrupt. Big labor has shown itself to be in cahoots with big government, sacrificing the public interest to retain its special privileges and political power. Big business has also shown itself to be in cahoots with big government – funding its politicians, getting its bailouts, and exercising its lobbying heft not to stop bad legislation but merely to carve out comfortable or lucrative exceptions for themselves.
And big media, to the extent it remains a viable business, has with few exceptions shown itself to be in cahoots with the rest of the political class. No wonder the American public is fed up with big institutions.
During the 2010 election cycle, you can see politicians of all ideologies adopting populist rhetoric and imagery. They call out insiders and fat cats. They celebrate the nobility of small business, family farms, and local communities. They attack their opponents for being in the pocket of self-serving elites.
Some Democrats are shamelessly pandering to populist sentiment by resurrecting the grossest sort of know-nothing protectionism. They’re accusing Republicans of doing the bidding of Chinese and other foreign powers. The ads come complete with scary music, xenophobic imagery, and baseless accusations of foreign money flowing into pro-GOP campaigns.
Some Republicans are shamelessly pandering to populist sentiment by running ads about Ground Zero mosques, religious symbolism, dangerous immigrants, and the like instead of offering specific alternatives to the borrow-and-spend, Washington-knows-best policies that likely voters are rejecting in this election year.
A populist critique of political and business elites can be valid and useful. Certainly no clearer example can be found of big government and big business colluding against the public interest than the past three years of bailouts and fake stimulus. Moreover, simplistic Left-Right explanations of the origins of, say, the Dodd-Frank Financial Reform Bill fail to capture the extent to which powerful interest groups turned the legislative process into a series of fiscal and regulatory gifts for themselves – in the case of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the invaluable gift of continued existence on the public dole.
But populism is best applied as a healthy skepticism towards the sweeping political promises of entrenched elites, not as some sort of paranoid macro-explanation for the way the world works. It is no substitute for detailed knowledge, careful reasoning, and familiarity with the general direction of intellectual inquiry over the past century.
Despite longstanding disagreements on many issues, for example, most economists agree that free trade is better than protectionism for advancing the interests of the vast majority of people, and that when the government sets limits on prices, it creates surpluses (in the case of price floors such as minimum wages) or shortages (in the case of price caps such as rent controls). They also tend to agree that the biggest immigration problem a country can have is to be so economically and socially stunted as to attract little interest from immigrants, though that doesn’t necessarily mean the best policy is open borders.
But during election season, basic truths get sacrificed to political expediency. Politicians who recognize the basic truth that the current level of federal spending is fiscally unsustainable are savaged as creatures of corporate greed. Politicians who recognize the basic truth that free trade creates more jobs than it costs are savaged as agents of a nefarious foreign power.
Perhaps this kind of propaganda can turn an election here or there. But it’s despicable, and its purveyors should be ashamed of themselves.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.