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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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.
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.
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 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.
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 »
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 »
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!
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.
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 »
Norwegian country music is somewhat bluegrassy. One of its featured instruments is the Hardanger fiddle.
“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 »
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.
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.
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.
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/