I was catching up on my reading while flying back to Ottawa and found myself nodding again and again in agreement while reading this May, 2010 essay by Mark Lilla. Particularly interesting given yesterday's events in Washington:
Many Americans, a vocal and varied segment of the public at large, have now convinced themselves that educated elites—politicians, bureaucrats, reporters, but also doctors, scientists, even schoolteachers—are controlling our lives. And they want them to stop. They say they are tired of being told what counts as news or what they should think about global warming; tired of being told what their children should be taught, how much of their paychecks they get to keep, whether to insure themselves, which medicines they can have, where they can build their homes, which guns they can buy, when they have to wear seatbelts and helmets, whether they can talk on the phone while driving, which foods they can eat, how much soda they can drink…the list is long. But it is not a list of political grievances in the conventional sense.
American populist rhetoric … fires up emotions by appealing to individual opinion, individual autonomy, and individual choice, all in the service of neutralizing, not using, political power. It gives voice to those who feel they are being bullied, but this voice has only one, Garbo-like thing to say: I want to be left alone.
A new strain of populism is metastasizing before our eyes, nourished by the same libertarian impulses that have unsettled American society for half a century now. Anarchistic like the Sixties, selfish like the Eighties, contradicting neither, it is estranged, aimless, and as juvenile as our new century. It appeals to petulant individuals convinced that they can do everything themselves if they are only left alone, and that others are conspiring to keep them from doing just that. This is the one threat that will bring Americans into the streets.
Welcome to the politics of the libertarian mob.
The new American populism['s].. political target is an abstract noun, “the government,” which has been a source of disenchantment since the late Sixties. In Why Trust Matters, Marc Hetherington uncovers the astonishing fact that in 1965 nearly half of Americans believed that the War on Poverty would “help wipe out poverty”—a vote of confidence in our political institutions unimaginable today. The failure of the Great Society programs to meet the high expectations invested in them was a major source of disappointment and loss of confidence.
Americans are and have always been credulous skeptics. They question the authority of priests, then talk to the dead; they second-guess their cardiologists, then seek out quacks in the jungle. Like people in every society, they do this in moments of crisis when things seem hopeless. They also, unlike people in other societies, do it on the general principle that expertise and authority are inherently suspect …
Which brings us to Fox News. The right-wing demagogues at Fox do what demagogues have always done: they scare the living daylights out of people by identifying a hidden enemy, then flatter them until they believe they have only one champion—the demagogue himself. But unlike demagogues past, who appealed over the heads of individuals to the collective interests of a class, Fox and its wildly popular allies on talk radio and conservative websites have at their disposal technology that is perfectly adapted to a nation of cocksure individualists who want to be addressed and heard directly, without mediation, and without having to leave the comforts of home.
The media counterestablishment of the right gives them that. It offers an ersatz system of direct representation in which an increasingly segmented audience absorbs what it wants from its trusted sources, embellishes it in their own voices on blogs and websites and chatrooms, then hears their views echoed back as “news.” While this system doesn’t threaten our system of representative democracy, it certainly makes it harder for it to function well and regain the public’s trust.
The conservative media did not create the Tea Party movement and do not direct it; nobody does. But the movement’s rapid growth and popularity are unthinkable without the demagogues’ new ability to tell isolated individuals worried about their futures what they want to hear and put them in direct contact with one another, bypassing the parties and other mediating institutions our democracy depends on. When the new Jacobins turn on their televisions they do not tune in to the PBS News Hour or C-Span to hear economists and congressmen debate the effectiveness of financial regulations or health care reform. They look for shows that laud their common sense, then recite to them the libertarian credo that Fox emblazons on its home page nearly every day: YOU DECIDE.
1) The human desire for a simple seamless narrative is a deep and enduring one. So the sorts of populist narratives that the Becks and Palins (and occasionally the Stockwell Days) of the world are capable of streaming out have a willing and eager market. Paranoia, in particular, or rather the narrative that everything conspires against me and that's why my life is less than optimal, is an extremely popular one.
2) The greater the dissatisfaction with life, the greater the need for narrative. Humans WANT and need things to make sense, so when there is unhappiness in abundance, there better damn well be a good narrative to get it to MAKE sense. Doesn't matter if you're a poor Afghani, Gazan, or Somali who is convinced the non-Muslim world, and especially western democracies, are the source of all your misery, or whether you're from Michigan or Idaho and probably should have taken more civics classes in high prior to deciding that the government is your worst enemy and wants to take your guns away; a narrative is a narrative is a narrative.
3) No two ways about, public administration is denser and more opaque these days, whether you're a part of that public administration complex, or simply another taxpayer. People have no idea how or why things are done the way they are done. Governments do not reveal the reasoning and balancing of objectives that takes place in thwe policy chamber. And as I am fond of saying, when transparency gets up and leaves the table, fear, loathing and paranoid conspiracy theories are more than willing to take its seat.
In that sense, I see libertarianism as a response to the failure of government, and a great many other institutions to explain themselves, or perhaps more importantly, to make themselves understood. Remember, there is a difference between giving a speech or sending a memo, and fostering true understanding. I get to look at a lot of so-called “competency profiles” of those in leadership roles, and while they all generally include being a skillful communicator and persuader, they rarely include being forthright and an exquisite explainer.
Certainly one of the things readily inferable from the rather vast research literature in what is collectively referred to as “organizational justice”, is that less transparent actions by authority figures (and agents of institutions) are more likely to be perceived as unfair. And of course, perceived unfairness tends to breed both mistrust and all too often vengeance and sabotage of institutional functioning as a means of achieving what some perceive as equity. I.E., you screwed me, so I will mess up the functioning of your institution just to even the score. I note some of the research on tax evasion that identifies those who think the government does not spend their tax dollars in a fair or justifiable manner as more likely to make unjustifiable deduction claims on their taxes (again, I think you screwed me over, tax-wise, so I refuse to play by the rules).
4) The current debacle over the mandatory census long-form provides an excellent arena for seeing this in action. I have yet to see a single reasonable or logical explanation for the refusal to complete a long form (and believe me, I would accept “I'm lazy and I don't feel like it” as reasonable). The brunt of all posted and publicly discussed objections are generally based on imagined occurrences, or factors which make no sense, in what seems like the total absence of any knowledge or insight about how the census works or is used. It,s like this separate reality that stems from some Quixotic narrative of slaying government demons.
At the same time, I have yet to see any government spokeperson come out and articulate how and why things are done the way they are, in such a way as to debunk the narrative, or simply stop it from gathering more momentum. Once again, clarity and transparency are absent, and rabid ill-informed populism fills the empty space. I don't blame either side. Understanding census methodology is not the sort of thing you can suss out on your own. At the same time, having had the legal authority to compel all these years, StatsCan never got skilled at the art of seduction or persuasion. When push came to shove, they didn't know how to sweet-talk, and are paying the price for it, by being taken advantage of by populists within the government who may, themselves, not truly understand how the census works.