After Populism

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Wednesday, July 12, 2023

 

To call Donald Trump a populist was almost to understate his effect, which is still being internalized by our political class. It didn’t even matter that the campaign promises turned out to be false. “Build the Wall” was an act of vandalism against political orthodoxy that held that the government existed only to facilitate the greater movement of goods, capital, and people over borders. It was the unspoken governing charter of our elite that we would pursue by capitalist means the Marxist promise of a world without the irrational loyalties of family, nation, and faith.

 

The American people were content to let this idiotic consensus flourish among the governing class when the government still seemed to be delivering the goods we wanted: economic growth, lowered crime rates, and wars decisively won. And then, our miserable 21st century began. A fumbled response to 9/11. Wages that seemed to stagnate. A financial crisis and real-estate crisis. Surging opioid addictions and deaths of despair, declining life spans. More recently, inflation. And then the final act of elite failure: the Covid-19 pandemic. From every perspective, the response was botched and yet high-handed.

 

The election of Trump brought about a predictable response from the elite he was elected to repudiate. If he wanted to make America great again, then their scholars and pamphleteers would demonstrate that America was never great. But, even now, that same elite is starting, slowly, to abandon their previous utopianism in the face of the challenge he presented to them. And this remains true in Europe too, where national populism also challenged a broken EU consensus. Borders are back. China is now increasingly treated not as an aspiring member of the free world, but a menacing challenge to it.

 

Here we come to the impasse of the current moment. Populism has worked, in its way: It challenged the elite, and exposed them. That’s the good side of populism, clearing out the corrupt. The bad side of populism is when it empowers a new demagogic strongman, or anti-elite. Think of Huey Long or, perhaps, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.

 

Ron DeSantis’s campaign is built on populist consolidation, the idea that we will just more and more effectively restrain bad actors. DeSantis has proven he will use the powers of his office to contain elite conspiracies against the public interest — whether that is countermanding ultra-progressive teachers’ unions inflicting a curriculum that parents reject, or disciplining public servants who put progressive ideology ahead of their official duties. That’s necessary and appealing, but only in a limited way; it’s almost like the opposite of a governing agenda.

 

What Republicans need is a vision for restraining the self-interest of elites and elevating the governing ambitions of the people themselves. That means we need a serious education agenda that forms our brightest to have virtues beyond workaholism and good taste. They need an ethic of service, even to those who are unlike themselves.

 

Many of our problems can’t be solved by simply disempowering diversity, equity, and inclusion offices. How does that fix the recruitment crisis in our military? Or the drug crisis facing rural America?

 

If I had one suggestion for where to start, it would be with an agenda for young boys, who continue to fall behind in achievement, whose skills are increasing devalued, and who are too often formed to live a life of passivity. Many of our social problems are super-concentrated among younger men and are connected to a lack of typically masculine virtues. Schools that are failing so many boys should be considered failing schools.

 

If “Build the Wall” was a slogan meant to tear down a consensus, “Let’s raise a generation of great men” has a similar thrill of being politically incorrect. But it also points out that some of our problems will be solved only with a real generational effort. Building a wall was about correcting a past mistake. Raising great men is about deciding to have a better future.