On the show Wednesday with Paul Ramsey, we talked about how Trump is a bookend for Nixon containing the period of peak managerialism. The managers ran Nixon out of town for the crime of being a strong executive and now Trump, the strong executive, is running the managers out of town. It remains to be seen if that is how it plays out, but it is a good way to containerize this period of history.
Doing the show, it occurred to me that we can do something similar with populism in that it was populism that gave birth to managerialism. When you look at the birth of progressivism, it started with the populist movements. It peaked with the FDR administration, which is the rise of the managers. Now we see a populist movement rising to smash what was set off by original populism.
Here is where you see the two faces of populism, democratic and authoritarian or anarchic versus orderly. Of course, it is a fact of history that democracy leads to authoritarianism, so this long cycle dating to the 19th century follows a predictable course, just more slowly and mildly. The synthesis that will result from it may be a modern version of what the Framers imagined.
Anyway, that is for some posts this week. The show this week is a review of and comment upon populism in its many forms, as well as the criticism of it in light of the events unfolding in Washington. It is one of those shows that meanders around a bit, so it has no main point, just a main theme. Perhaps if the topic is of interest, I can do a more formal deep dive into the topic.
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This Week’s Show
Contents
- Intro
- Populism
- The Negative View
- The Positive View
- Populism in America
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They hate populism because it is inextricably associated in America with rural Southerners and Midwesterners, the OG Dirt People.
I feel like the three Democratic presidents after Nixon – Carter, Clinton, and Obama – all made populist pitches to Americans. Carter had the humble peanut farmer thing going. Clinton did the sax playing, the “I feel your pain”, “Sister Souljah”, etc. Obama’s whole hopey-changey pitch was about helping out the people instead of the elites.
Was it smoke and mirrors, sure, but this whole mask-off, we are the institutions and better than you, you need to listen to us or go away, thing is VERY new. It really was Hillary Clinton’s arrogance and limousine liberalism taking over the party.
The practice of insulting the voters and saying “we know better than you” began with Obama, not with H. She just took it to the next level. He was the first major party presidential candidate I ever heard insult the voters, which has since become a standard part of the D party platform.
That aligns with when the Dems overtly became the party of minorities and women, so of course they’d have contempt for the traditional American voter.
It hadn’t gotten there yet under Slick Willie.
I wonder how much social media contributed to the mask-off phase. It is bad enough that everyone they know IRL thinks just like them, but then on social media, literally everyone agrees with them. Anyone who disagrees is blocked, kicked off or simply not presented. “Wow! We bugmen are the majority!!!!”
Agreed.
The parasites fear exclusionary populism. They can’t feast on the self-reliant, independent ruralites as easily as they can on captive urbanites. This is extremely offensive to them so they’ve spent a lot of time war-gaming on how to transfer the dirt people to the cities. The UN sustainability goals demonstrate this quite well. This is a battle between exclusion/inclusion, masculine/feminine, order/chaos and ultimately right/wrong.
I’ve been around “self-reliant independent” ruralites. They are indeed the salt of the earth, but let’s not go too far. The real problem when the mask comes off is that eventually those captive urbanites get tired of also being insulted.
Minor nitpick, do we have to use negro-speak? OG originated in the early 1970s with the Original Gangster Crips, a street gang in Los Angeles. The term was derived from the gang’s name and originally meant “we’re the first”.
Hear hear.
I was going to listen, but I’m sitting here, a fire going, one of my dogs curled up beside me, looking through our sunroom, at the new chicken coop across the yard.
Just a few minutes of bliss before I venture back to the clown world we live in.
Thanks to you all, and Z for his fine work.
Time to feed the chickens.
Sounds like the perfect time to listen. Once the chickens get fed of course.
That’s the plan.
Bartleby- That sounds sublime and far-removed from clown world.
Great show, Z.
I hope everyone has a nice weekend.
Toss ’em an extra dipper of corn, compliments of OK. And take a dram of the strong waters while you’re about it.
Melville may be my favorite American writer (tied with Hawthorn and Updike). We see now why you chose your name.
Use Omega-3 feed. And let them forage.
Yup
We Use Omega-3
and those little shits forage like gremlins
I pile leaves up and they jump right in!
Scratching and clawing
Just a quick aside about your remarks around the 13:07 mark: Citizenship and nationality are not the same things at all, so it is possible–and regrettably commonplace–for those who do not have American or other nationality to have citizenship. Citizenship is a bureaucratic thing; a paper thing. Nationality is rooted in blood and soil, as the etymology of the word “nation” itself makes clear. When I lived in Europe 40-odd years ago, European passports (and the endless forms that one had to fill out for this and that) had two separate categories for nationality and citizenship. Whether that be true… Read more »
Yes. So true. This is why America will ultimately not stay configured as it is today. That, or we just breakdown into a Mad Max landscape.
Yes, I was just having this conversation recently. We will have to learn to acknowledge nationality again, rather than “full rights of a empire”. Once the Fed finishes breaking down (we seem to be in Red gaseous stage with Trump), the differences will become much more of an issue.
Don’t be shy! Why not both!?
Populism has only been a bad word for a relatively short time. Since about 2015, when Trump came down the escalator. Not long before that, the NYT called Elizabeth Warren a populist and meant it as a compliment. Just as they only like democracy when it’s “our” democracy, they only like populism when it’s “our” populism. Zman gives the “managerial elite” too much credit for honesty. While many of the faceless idiot bureaucrats may honestly, in their deluded way, believe they are on the side of the little guy or the common man, the deliberate mendacity of US senators (for… Read more »
Jeffrey Zoar: “Just as they only like democracy when it’s “our” democracy, they only like populism when it’s “our” populism.“
Well, like, duh…
“Populism has only been a bad word for a relatively short time. Since about 2015, when Trump came down the escalator.”
No, I’m afraid you are mistaken about that (you must be very young; enjoy it while it lasts):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_E._Watson
As long as the subject is Populism, let’s demand the assassination of Huey Long be re-opened! He dared to speak against the sainted FDR, while the latter ran for president no less than 3 times while hiding cancer from the American people as per reliable medical biographers. He snuck away multiple times to have surgeries aboard the yacht of his friend Vincent Astor.
At this point give me ONE reason we should accept the narrative around Long’s killing.
Here come the Kingfish.
Better “every man a King” than every man a debt serf.
Carl Weiss, MD, assassin of Huey Long…
I knew that figured I would let someone else share the fun!
IIRC this Weiss was then conveniently offed like Jack ”Ruby’ — without looking it up to be sure.
Back in the early 2000’s, the daughter of millionaires from Potomac, MD married a normal, mid-western guy. My dad joked at the time that it restored his faith in God because that scenario occurs so rarely and he was happy for the guy. The marriage was held at Mar-a-Lago. At one point, both sets of in-laws were together and Trump walked over to introduce himself and ask them about their experience at the resort. He treated the elite, cloud people with the same level of respect and interest as he did the blue-collar, dirt people. There was zero respecter of… Read more »
I know a similar story, of a couple being married at a Trump resort and Trump stopping by and talking to the couple and guests, taking pictures, etc. Obviously Trump has lived a very charmed and blessed life but he seems to have connected with commoners in a very real way of the sort you just haven’t seen in a long time. Compare him to out of touch weirdoes like Eric Schmidt or Bill Gates and it’s just very obvious. Heck compare him to the sort of people that staff Democratic administrations. The fact is that people in places like… Read more »
“Obviously Trump has lived a very charmed and blessed life but he seems to have connected with commoners in a very real way … .” Trump is Queens, New York through and through and a thoroughgoing vulgarian, but he clearly loves “our” (former) country, and we love him. But if my grandmother were still living, she would describe him as being “as common as pig tracks,” although she, too, would vote for him for the reasons I mention and would describe him as “gracious,” which he certainly is, as there are no end of stories to verify, including the fact… Read more »
We checked in some years back at the Marriot in Atlantic City and it was a shithole. Checked right out. Got a room at the Trump Chairman, next to the Taj Mahal.
A slight glitch when we get there about the room and right off — they upgrade us to the Presidential Suite at no extra charge. The view of the Atlantic Ocean from the floor to ceiling windows was unreal and the days were cloudless.
Needless to say, made the trip a LOT more enjoyable.
“Here is where you see the two faces of populism, democratic and authoritarian or anarchic versus orderly.” I don’t know about that. Perhaps populism itself is a chimera. I happened across and old grad school acquaintance at the grocery store the other day and he recommended “The Populist Delusion” by Neema Parvini. I haven’t read it yet but apparently the thesis of the book is similar to my own view, namely that populism doesn’t really exist — political conflicts and even revolutions are battles between competing groups of elites, who conscript the hoi polloi to their cause, and then the… Read more »
Populism does exist, but just not in the way most have been taught.. In any form government, the general opinion of the plebs is not important. That includes “our democracy” which has consistently had open borders and pushed other wildly unpopular laws, etc.
Where populism matters is when the elite are squabbling among themselves. Then the sheer weight of pleb opinion becomes a thumb on the scale for the elite coalition with popular support. The elite meltdown over populism has to do with it being used to disrupt their managerial state.
I would argue that populism is simply the reemergence of common sense in a sick society that has lost its connection with ancient wisdom. It is an evolutionary repair mechanism that seeks to purge the illness of rapid chaotic change versus tried-and-true slow adaptation. If the driver of the bus is jerking the wheel left and right with reckless abandon, then Joe lunchbox in the back must step forward and put a stop to it or everyone dies.
Glad you mentioned William Jennings Bryan.
From my high school history classes in the 1990s, the textbooks basically used him as the face of populism to discredit it, finishing him off by mocking him over the Scopes Trial.
That was the extent of our exposure to the topic.
Bryan recognized that the old gold standard was a deflationary attack on the debtor class but his solution (expanded silver currency) was an inadequate measure. The appropriate response was to wrest control of monetary policy from the elite by creating a non-usurious banking system. Eventually, the financial elite recognized that the boom and bust cycle caused by the deflationary precious metal currency system was unsustainable. Their response was the Federal Reserve system, a private, usurious banking collaborative beyond the reach of political control. They can inflate the currency or crash the economy at their pleasure. One of their main activities… Read more »
To his credit, Bryan resigned as Secretary of State rather than go along with Wilson’s plan to send American boys to die in the trenches of Europe for “democracy”…
They still do it. At my niece’s high school, she did a project on Bryan and mentioned it over Christmas. I was very surprised. What was the angle? I asked. Oh, the dangers of Christian fundamentalism, she replied, meaning Christianity.
Funny how there’s never any discussion of the dangers of Jewish fundamentalism (aka “Zionism”) isn’t it?
Trump pushed Zelenskyyyyy in the Oval Office. I saw it! I saw it! I saw it! Trump should be charged with assault and battery! lol. Call Leticia James!!!!
That was the best White House presser I have ever witnessed.
Sounds like Zelenskyyyyyy was the one who got pressed.
J D wanted to give zelensky a “pink belly”
All Zelensky had to do was keep his mouth shut and walk away with some money. He couldn’t or didn’t want to do it. Trump didn’t blow this up, Z did. Was he trying to? Either way, he is an idiot and if he is alive at the end of next week I will be very surprised.
Zelensky is trying to stay alive by refusing to cede even an inch of territory: he knows that his own citizens will finish him off if he signs any such agreement. Don’t forget that Ukrainians have lowest IQ in Europe (in the 90s).
This IQ number would be way smaller if it were not for the ethnic Russians, which are about 20% of Ukrainian population.
Germans understood in 1945 that they lost, Ukrainians are not capable of it, especially after euphoria of international support in the last 3 years.
I think Americans might be catching up (or down) to the Ukrainians. I just watched Fox News for two hours while doing a repair project and not one person on that network understands what Trump is asking Zelensky to do. Apparently Trump will need to literally say the word “surrender” before most people get it. Two hours of “maybe he needs to say this” and “they need to offer this and that for that” and “Putin still has designs on Europe” (Brit Hume). It’s like we’re in a madhouse. Over and over and over with this shit while the country… Read more »
Given the degree to which he’s made a fool and pariah of himself, Zelensky’s only remaining somewhat smart move would be to call up his CIA-Mossad handlers and tell them he wants the “Tel Aviv option” where he gets to resign, keep some of his ill-gotten loot and retain a small bodyguard force and retire to a beach house in Tel Aviv. He’ll probably still end up dead soon. Indeed, it’s hard to think of any other single person in the world who has a greater variety of powerful and dangerous enemies. His fate will also be a nice warning… Read more »
Hey Zman, or anyone else who knows the answer – what is the name of that bluegrass band that is at the beginning of the Friday show? Every time I hear that it resonates deep in my honky soul somewhere.
When you mentioned how Europeans view the stereotypical American, it made me realize that bluegrass seems like a purely white American thing. Do Europeans have a bluegrass scene, or is it solely a west of the Atlantic type of music?
Came from Celtic/English/Scottish folk music. There used to be a show on public radio that showcased that music I forget the name of it but the hosts name I remembered cuz it was so unique – Pheona Richie.
That show was “Thistle and Shamrock” I used to listen to NPR all the time back in those days; it is unlistenable now
Thistle and Shamrock was really good.
Car Talk was great, too. I do not care about cars at all but those brothers were really fun to listen to back in the day.
It’s actually kind of fun to tune in to NPR for a couple minutes every few weeks just for the sake of schadenfreude.
Tom and Ray Magliozzi, i.e. the Tappet brothers.
They had a line about being careful about fixing one thing on an old car, because something else might get jealous. Lol, very true!
Still cheaper than a new car and without all the modern crap that ruin modern cars. Modern cars all look alike and have for the last 25 years, so unless your older car is an old hooptie, nobody can really tell it’s 20 years old.
The average length of a new car loan has ballooned to 72 months. That’s 2 extra years of mandatory full coverage insurance and 4 years compared to the 60s and 70s.
Yep, you can blow money on new cars, or blow time and labor keeping the old ones going (and have a fun and profitable hobby while you’re at it). Or not know how to fix the old ones and have the worst of both worlds lol.
Yes. If you’re not handy with a wrench, you will spend more money on repairs. But even then I doubt you are going to spend anywhere near a new car payment (and collision) having the occasional repair. The cost of repairs on new cars is stupidly high. One story making the rounds last year was the five thousand dollar taillight on a GM truck.
The Mennonite part of me is too cheap to even consider it!
I enjoyed listening to them even though I was no kind of gearhead since high school. I tuned into NPR wherever I lived and probably thought I was more sophisticated for that and only watching PBS on TV. Even so, I was aware of the left wing bias, but there was at least a bit of respect for traditional values from classical and folk music programming to occasional conservative commentators. I distinctly remember listening to Federica Matthews-Green, the wife of an Episcopalian turned Antiochian Orthodox priest present a segment on All Things Considered. She was a prominent pro-life advocate, but… Read more »
I can definitely hear the Celtic roots in it, but I would argue that the centrality of the banjo makes bluegrass unique from that sort of British folk music. I guess what makes me wonder if Europeans listen to it, is how strongly it is associated with the American Southeast. Whenever I hear the intro it immediately transports me in my mind to sitting on an open porch, thick with that muggy, swampy air that so much of the South has, with cicadas in the background and fireflies flickering. I don’t know if that would come through to people from… Read more »
Although I like bluegrass, I don’t know too much about it. However, I wonder if there might not be a major regional variation within bluegrass. Specifically, is there mountain bluegrass (Appalachian Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, Georgia), versus lowland bluegrass (Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, South Carolina, Georgia, Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, Arkansas)? I’ve gotten the vague impression that mountain music revolves more around the banjo, while lowland music features the guitar more. But I could easily be out to lunch, and probably am.
For those of us who misspent our youth listening to heavy music, it is interesting to note the similarities between bluegrass and speed/thrash/technical heavy metal.
Those old banjo, guitar, and fiddle fellows who played those blazing bluegrass melodies at amazing speed would be reincarnated in bands like Dream Theater, Symphony X, and many others.
The similarities in these types of music is an example of an extended phenotype, if I understand that term correctly.
Do those metal musicians acknowledge the debt?
I’ve always thought of it in ethnic terms— Scots-Irish, Appalachian. It’s even kind of a thing up here in PA, believe it or not.
I think lowlands, I think slavery and more black influence, blues and gospel, but I’m not an historian of music. Just my impression.
I don’t think there’s really such a thing as lowland bluegrass
Yes. Think Bill Monroe of flat land Kentucky vs. The Stanley Brothers of the Virginia Mountains. Both brilliant, some overlap, yet distinctive differences.
Thank you. I was hoping the distinction wasn’t just a figment of my imagination.
The sound of bluegrass is American, because of the banjo (and things that sound like banjos, and guitarists imitating banjoists). The banjo is the dirt people harpsichord, as locked to and evocative of them as the original is to the royal court. When American musicology was populist—always on topic!—the banjo was “the only American instrument,” the one sound wholly newly invented here. Not so, but that was the story back when musical innovation was credited to workers and miners and places and folk, not to blackness (good), whiteness (bad), and corporations (the breath of God). The idea of identifiable people… Read more »
“…not least to discredit the inventors of bluegrass (losers).” Exactly. Unfortunately, to most Americans the sound of a banjo can mean only one thing: ignorant, toothless hill folk getting ready to sodomize you. The movie “Deliverance” set back Appalachia 100 years in the eyes of most Americans, especially the elites who despise and wish to depopulate the entire region hence the “who cares?” attitude that hundreds of thousands of Appalachians died in the opioid crisis. All the good will from those corny, yet mostly lovable rural-based tv shows of the 60s (Andy Griffith Show, Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, Petticoat Jct,… Read more »
Incidentally, there are a great many Twilight Zone episodes that are highly sympathetic to rural whites and rather few that portray them negatively.
Regarding Deliverance, while doubtless an influential film, it was not seen by enough people to overturn positive views of hillbillies all on its own. There were broader forces at work, and they antedated Deliverance.
There are also quite a few Twilight Zone episodes that are downright subversive. They warn about Big brother and are written around many themes that we can see today in real life, a dystopian horror show right before our very own eyes. One of my favorites is “Number 12 Looks Just Like You.” There’s several lines in the script where the girl who has to get the transformation so she can be beautiful like everybody else is saddened by the loss of her dad. Her best friend tries to console her as follows .. Valerie: I’ve been thinking about what… Read more »
Then CBS cancelled all those great shows in 1971. They even have a name for it, the “rural purge”. Orchestrated by one Fred Silverman.
Deliverance was released in 1972.
Fair trade though, we got Archie Bunker.
Archie was of course, intended as a way of ridiculing the “working class bigot” type. Perhaps unintentionally though, he was often the only voice of sanity on that show while Meathead and the Sally Struthers characters constantily illustrated liberal buffoonery.
And in real life, Carroll O’Connor was quite a bit of a liberal buffoon himself.
I always thought that was ironic. I knew about O’Connor’s leftism and found it funny that the role he was best known for was someone so different.
Norwegian country music is somewhat bluegrassy. One of its featured instruments is the Hardanger fiddle.
Have you heard of the Shazam app? It is so good, it can even identify music on a store loudspeaker with a lot of ambient noise in the background.
Thanks for the suggestion, I may have to fo that route. I can’t believe no one knows the name of that band, Z had to have mentioned it sometime.
Think how easy it would have been for DeSantis to just do his job, steal “Trumpism” from Trump, and be president right now—instantly co-opt the whole MAGA thing for the “deep state” and save the whole system in its fully rotten 2020 form. But he couldn’t do it. In the primary he not only didn’t run for the nomination, he didn’t even run against Trump. He ran against Trump voters. Remember “listless vessels?” (He’s illiterate.) The end. And Elon has blown it just as badly, but we can’t do anything about him yet. Only Vance has played it right so… Read more »
By the time Vance’s play pays off, it will be too late to save it. These white DC bureaucrats grow old, and the next generation cannot install Windows on their laptop without assistance. Time grinds and the 1940s and 1950s grow fainter and fainter. The beast is tottering on its walker into the grave muttering about alliances we read about only in history books now.
American populism was a reaction to capitalism. The political parties successfully neutered the early populist movements. The capitalists were also able to successfully control the managerial state inaugurated by the New Deal, which ended up as a partnership between the managerial bureaucracies and monopoly capitalism. That partnership has continued to this day. Trump is going after the bureaucracy but it is unlikely that a billionaire has any stomach for going after monopolistic capitalism. We could end up with the libertarian wet dream of unfettered capitalism and the inevitable reaction against it.
zelensky is a repugnant little toad with a nasty toad-like voice. can’t help but wondering if the WWF style press conference was staged or set-up by in one way or another. ANd by what side?
I always look forward to your show every Friday. Thank you for your insight. I believe you are a legitimate way to break through to the normies in my circle. Thank you for doing what you do without trying sell me supplements or other bs. One of these days when I’m more financially secure, I will at the very least buy you a coffee. If things go better for me, you will be at the top of my list to speak at an event. o7
I keep mentioning that book about the Scots lol. One thing that really blew my mind was one of the early figures of the Scottish Enlightenment saying that man naturally wants to increase his property and material prosperity, this becoming the basis for a new morality. Anyway, you get the material advances of the 19th century, the rise of democracy, the development of capitalism. We conquer nature; we’re rich; having property, we’re powerful, or at least think we are. There’s a bloom of humanity, and a new problem of mediocrity. It turns out to be an unnatural state of affairs.… Read more »
Did I just read that Nuland, Rice, that pudgy Ukrainian dude, and Blinken, allegedly conferred with Zelenskyy and told him to sink any deal with Trump?
Why that’s a violation of the Logan Act!!
Then it occurred to me that, even if it was so, magic 8 ball seems to be heading in no arrests for ANY violation by the anointed ones.
I guess I can look forward to the release of the Epstein Files!!
Leftard elites and reading the tea leaves are not two things one would figure go hand in hand these days. It’ll probably take firing squads or scaffolding to possibly wake them up from their fever dreams.
“Let me be clear: I am not using these numbers to say that women, blacks, and Latinos do not still face problems because of sexism and racism. These numbers say nothing about individuals being passed over for promotions because of their sex or ethnicity, about glass ceilings, or about discriminatory or harassing interactions in the workplace. But there can be many people who legitimately think they haven’t gotten fair treatment without justifying the rhetoric that the orthodoxy uses about white male privilege” Charles Murray, Human diversity Clever tactic to reach the feeble-minded who are deeply hypnotized, or cowardly pandering which… Read more »
latter
I’m having a hard time keeping up.
Can you do a show on fishing some day so that we do not have to see the other man link?
here is the link – https://zmanfishing.com/