Populism versus populism
On the competing strains of populist politics.
The West is
abuzz with reports of a populist wave: rolling through Europe, sweeping across
the Atlantic, and crashing into Gomorrah-by-the-Potomac. Donald Trump’s
election as president of the United States—a watershed event as unthinkable as
it was improbable to many across the ideological spectrum of American
punditry—followed hard on the British people’s vote to exit the European Union,
a cognate popular rejection of bipartisan elite opinion.
In short order,
Matteo Renzi was the next shoe to drop. Italy’s now-former prime minister, a
young, attractive, politically “progressive” technocrat, darling of the
European cognoscenti, had been hailed—it seemed like only yesterday—as Rome’s
(or is it Brussels’s?) answer to Barack Obama. He resigned in November, though,
after the Italian people resoundingly defeated his proposed constitutional
“reform.” The scare-quotes are offered advisedly: Italy having been virtually
ungovernable since Garibaldi forced what passes for its unification, Sig.
Renzi’s reform was a scheme to end the paralysis by accreting power to himself
at the expense of the legislature. Think of it as a gambit to codify U.S. President
Barack Obama’s “I’ve got a pen and I’ve got a phone” style of centralized rule.
The victorious Trump
had the populist wind at his back. Thus, efforts to caricature the real-estate
mogul and reality-television star as a budding Hitler fell flat. Renzi, by
contrast, ran into the teeth of that wind. The hyperbole casting him as a
would-be Mussolini took its toll.
Renzi’s fall is the
continental aftershock of the Brexit earthquake. The “Remain” camp’s failure
ushered out David Cameron of the Europhile center-right. He is succeeded by
Theresa May, who has promised to carry out the public will despite her
(understated) support for “Remain.”
But that’s not all,
not by a long shot.
In France, the
socialist President François Hollande’s favorability rating is so
infinitesimal—well under 10 percent in some polls—that a reelection bid was
inconceivable. The two viable candidates to succeed him are both riding the
populist wave: the virulently anti-Islamist Marine Le Pen of the Nationalist
Front, and the intriguing François Fillon, the former prime minister. As Fred
Siegel incisively details in City Journal, Fillon is a social
conservative whose economic program is Thatcherite (sacré bleu!) and has
its sights trained on Paris’s bloated public sector. One way or another,
dramatic change is coming.
Meanwhile in
Germany, Angela Merkel, who set Europe’s tinderbox ablaze by rolling out the
red carpet for millions of Muslim migrants from North Africa and the Middle
East, is suddenly advocating strict anti-Islamist measures—such as banning
Muslim women from donning the full veil in public. These eleventh-hour concerns
over Islamic resistance to assimilation in the West arise as she campaigns to
seek a fourth term amid poll numbers that, while still fairly good (57 percent
in November), have sagged. The principal beneficiary has been the nationalist,
anti-Islamist Alternative für Deutschland party, whose popularity has risen
steadily, coincident with a surge of domestic jihadist attacks.
Certainly, change of
some potentially transformative kind is gripping the West. But is “populism”
the right diagnosis for it? Count me a skeptic. Oh, it is not that the populist
impulse is to be doubted; the question is whether attaching the label “populism”
to the dynamic helps us comprehend the multi-layered, internally contradictory
angst behind it. In recent years, the misdiagnosis of the complex grassroots
surge in the Middle East, the so-called Arab Spring, led to disastrous policy
choices. Oversimplifying such a phenomenon has consequences.
For one thing,
turning our attention back to the American election, one might think a
victorious populist candidate would win the popular vote. Fully 54 percent of
Americans cast their ballots against Donald Trump. His principal rival, Hillary
Clinton, outpaced him by nearly 3 million votes, slightly over 2 percent of the
137 million votes cast—about the same amount as Jimmy Carter beat Gerald Ford
by in 1976. In fact, though she did not win a majority of the electorate (she
garnered about 48 percent), the percentage edge by which Mrs. Clinton’s
popular-vote plurality exceeds Trump’s is greater than that of ten elected
presidents, five of whom won the popular vote (Nixon in 1968, Kennedy,
Cleveland, Garfield and Polk), and four—in addition to Trump—who won electoral
majorities despite losing the popular vote (George W. Bush in 2000, Harrison,
Hayes, and John Quincy Adams).
Yes, the story of
the election is a popular surge, but it is less a rush to
Trump than a stampede away from Democrats. Trump performed impressively in
attracting 2 million more voters than the 61 million the Republican
standard-bearer Mitt Romney had in 2012. But Democrats have now hemorrhaged
over 4 million voters since Obama’s high-water mark of nearly 70 million in
2008. In that same eight-year time frame, the U.S. population
has grown by about 18 million.
All that said, had
just 80,000 votes (roughly half a percentage point) shifted to Clinton in three
tightly contested battleground states (Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin),
we would not be talking about a populist revolt in the United States. We would
be talking about how Americans elected a former First Lady and twice-elected U.S. senator
who has been a pillar of the political establishment for a generation. Trump
won by a hair, so the pillar is now a relic.
There is, in
addition, more than a little irony in the fact that Trump, the populist, was
rejected in the “direct democracy” sense but nonetheless prevailed thanks to
the Electoral College, one of the most anti-democratic institutions created by
the U.S. Constitution.
At the start of the
Republic, the Framers frowned, at least for public consumption, on political
parties and the notion of national campaigns. “The office,” it was said,
“should seek the man,” not vice versa. The Electoral College was the
constitutional contrivance by which the states, through carefully chosen
electors (rather than the populace), would exercise patriotic good judgment in
picking the right man—it would surely be a man back then—to lead a far more
modest federal government. The functioning of the College changed in short order,
and drastically over time, as the societal shift toward direct democracy made
the electors more beholden to the voters. Yet the College still performs its
essential role of ensuring that the presidential election is decided by the
states, not by a national popular vote that would render small states
irrelevant. (Note that California, a single huge state that Clinton won by a
staggering margin of 4.3 million, accounts for her entire popular-vote edge
over Trump.) That is as it should be. George Will sums matters up with
characteristic clarity: “[T]he Electoral College shapes the character of
majorities by helping to generate those that are neither geographically nor
ideologically narrow, and that depict, more than the popular vote does,
national decisiveness.”
Still, it is not the
mechanism on which one would expect a populist to rely.
It cannot be
gainsaid, though, that populism, at a certain elevated level of generality, is
a significant factor in the West’s electoral tumult. The question is whether it
is a quantifiable factor because the populism has evolved into a single,
identifiable movement. I do not believe so.
As the prior
essays in this series have eloquently related, populism is a grass-roots
phenomenon oriented against the establishment. But “establishment” is an
amorphous term that means different things in different places, and thus the
reasons for resistance to it vary widely. As has become increasingly obvious,
moreover, a single establishment can meet resistance for divergent reasons because
the grass-roots are not monolithic.
The populist urge is
no stranger to envy and scapegoating; it is thus comfortably at home on the
political left, fueling dark narratives of exploitation, colonialism,
mercantilism, and income equality when the establishment to be opposed is
private wealth. It has found a home on the right, particularly in the era of
Reagan and Thatcher, when the targeted establishment was statist government and
its incursions into the shrinking realm of individual liberty.
What does that tell
us, though, in our own age of crony socialism, an expanding combination of
statist governance and private wealth, often unabashedly allied in their
euphonious “private-public partnerships”?
As the adminitrative
state grows ever more intrusive, favored business interests extend the chasm
between haves and have-nots. Small competitors, unable to keep up with the
costs of regulatory compliance, are crowded out. The behemoths meanwhile bask
in the glow of too-big-to-fail status, battening on the profits while their
losses are socialized. The objections to these cozy arrangements between big
government and big business are surely popular. Yet, they are often
antithetical to each other: the left clamoring for more regulation to cut the
tycoons down to size; the right demanding the dismantling of Washington’s
metastasizing bureaucracy.
In today’s populism,
globalization is frequently cited as the lightning rod that harmonizes the
diverse populist strands. But putting aside whether a global anti-globalism can
be viable, here again we encounter as much division as unity.
Crusading to save
the planet from the scourges of industrialization, fossil-fuel production, and
climate change, the left’s post-nationalist populists seek more muscular global
governance to rein in international commerce—heedless of the stubborn fact that
the welfare state, already on an unsustainable cost-benefit trajectory, is
dependent on economic growth. The right’s populists see the transfer of
national sovereignty to supra-national tribunals as a peril to be opposed; they
want the evisceration of multi-lateral arrangements in the hope that the
benefits of commerce (rising employment and wages) can be hoarded at
home—heedless of the stubborn fact that international trade provides millions
of domestic jobs while lowering consumer costs.
Clearly, wrath
against the established order is bubbling up. To bumper-sticker it as
“populism” may be technically accurate, but it is not very edifying. Whether as
a weathervane or in search of a villain to blame, a bumper-sticker tells us
what we seem to believe or want to believe, not why or whether we should
believe it. In Liberal Fascism, his magnificent “Secret History of
the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning,” Jonah Goldberg
recalls a proclamation by America’s proto-populist. “The people of Nebraska are
for free silver,” thundered William Jennings Bryan, “and I am for free silver.”
Okay, but why? On that core question, Bryan could only burble, “I will look up
the arguments later.” That, in a nutshell, is populism. As a lawyer, I think it
would be unseemly to look too far down my nose at the facility to argue whatever
side of the question expedience (or “Mr. Green”) dictates. That facility,
however, is a professional skill, not a philosophical position.
Like fascism,
populism is a term often bandied about with little or no consensus about its
meaning or direction. It is the callow voice of a culture that gushes about its values while
its principles fade from memory. To be sure, in a democratic
society, a politician who loses touch with what the public is thinking, with
the angst it is feeling in threatening times, is apt to have an aborted career.
One remains mindful, though, of the Burkean wisdom that “your representative
owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays instead of
serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion.”
Donald Trump’s
judgment has been an issue throughout his four-plus decades in the public
spotlight. He has dramatically changed his business model (after multiple
bankruptcies), his political affiliation (five times since the late 1980s), and
even his view of “crooked” Hillary Clinton (until recently, a “terrific
person,” a “great senator,” and “a great wife to . . . a great president”).
Similarly elastic have been his positions on such matters as protection of the
unborn (he says he is now pro-life but continues to support government funding
for the rabidly pro-abortion Planned Parenthood), socialized medicine (he now
says Obamacare must be repealed and replaced, but he has applauded the Canadian
and British government-run healthcare systems), and the war in Iraq (he claims
to have opposed it from the start, though he is on record offering tepid
support before the U.S. invasion and
scathingly condemns Obama’s premature pull-out).
Even on his
signature campaign issues of immigration, trade, and national security, Trump
has not exactly been a model of clarity—a distinct asset for the successful
populist, who must never plant his feet too firmly. His quest for the
Republican nomination in a talented seventeen-candidate field caught fire when
he called for mass deportations and border security. “Make America Great Again”
was the campaign’s slogan but “Build that Wall!” was its battle cry. Indeed,
the Left’s tireless narrative, that Trump is a racist, is built on a melding of
these two messages into a smear that Trump’s idea of American greatness is the
absence of Mexican immigrants.
Once the gop nomination was secured,
however, and the campaign shifted to the more centrist general electorate,
Trump’s rhetoric softened, with traces of his history as a supporter of amnesty
detectable in promises to “bring back” many of the aliens he has committed to
deport—with legal status. Mark it down: there being neither the public will nor
enforcement resources necessary to deport upwards of 11 million people, Trump’s
actual immigration enforcement program will look much like the Mitt Romney
“self-deportation” plan he once ridiculed. He will step up border security,
deport aliens with serious criminal records, prosecute businesses that
knowingly hire the “undocumented,” and rely on the aliens themselves to draw
the conclusion that leaving—or not coming in the first place—is the best
option. Simultaneously, expect to find the new president working with the
dreaded political establishment to give legal status (likely, citizenship) to
sympathetic categories of aliens—such as the “dreamers,” immigrants brought
into the country illegally as children, through no fault of their own.
Trump professes
himself a free-trader who nonetheless sees America being taken for a ride by
“bad trade deals” and greedy American corporations that move operations to
friendlier overseas business climes. This toxic combination, in which China and
Mexico are the main culprits, has in Trump’s telling robbed the American middle
class of tens of millions of manufacturing jobs, which he promises to reclaim
by renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement (“the single worst
trade deal ever approved in this country”); torpedoing the Trans-Pacific
Partnership (a multilateral agreement signed by Obama—a cornerstone of the
ballyhooed but unachieved “pivot to Asia”—that has no chance of Senate
approval); and slapping punitive tariffs, upwards of 35 percent, on companies
that transfer divisions to foreign countries and then seek to sell their
(consequently cheaper) products in American markets.
The narrative
clearly resonated in rust-belt states like Michigan and Pennsylvania, which
voted for the Republican presidential candidate for the first time since
1988—back when blue-collar workers were known as “Reagan Democrats.” Still, the
anti-trade rhetoric sounded the Manichean wiles of left-wing populists from
Bryan to Saul Alinsky, whose Rules for Radicals (Rule 12)
instructed aspiring “community-organizers” to “pick the target, freeze it,
personalize it, and polarize it.”
Contrary to popular
belief, American manufacturing is up. It is manufacturing employment that
has suffered. That is the fallout of robotics and other technological
innovation, not trade. In recently rehearsing Economics 101 at National
Review, Kevin D. Williamson illustrated that the putatively negative side
of a trade imbalance reflects not a budgetary deficit but a surplus in
capital—i.e., foreigner vendors, rather than using the dollars they make to
buy American goods, invest in American assets. As the reality of potential ruin
from tariff and trade wars sets in, Trump in the Oval Office may bear little
resemblance to Trump on the hustings.
Trump’s national
security positions are similarly Delphic. He has been unfairly pegged as an
isolationist for rebuking Bush’s Islamic democracy project and Obama’s war on
Qaddafi’s regime in Libya. In fact, Trump’s objection has been to what he
regards as ill-conceived interventions, not interventions in furtherance of
America’s vital interests. Nevertheless, his perception of those vital
interests is not clear. He has promised to “wipe out” the Islamic State
jihadist network with a commitment of “very few” U.S. troops
by working closely with friendly Arab states—though he has also threatened to
halt oil purchases from some of those states due to their reluctance to commit
ground troops to the fight. The new president says nato will also be a key component
in this effort, a departure from his campaign’s depiction of the alliance as a
senescent remora, filled with fading powers that divert military dues to fund
lavish welfare states while American taxpayers foot the bill for their
security.
Trump has also
variously vowed to rip up, rework, or strictly enforce Obama’s Iran nuclear
deal (the “Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action” between the jihadist regime in
Tehran and the United States, plus its negotiating partners—Russia, China,
Britain, France, and Germany). His rhetoric has been alarmingly admiring of
Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, a “strong leader” who has “very strong control
over his country”—characterizations that, while accurate, were jarring to hear
from a would-be American president. The fear is that these rose petals reflect
naiveté rather than vapid diplo-banter: On the one hand, Trump appears to
envision a strategic alliance with Russia to fight isis and other Islamic terrorists
. . . notwithstanding Russia’s ongoing, operational alliance with Iran, the
world’s leading state sponsor of jihadist terror.
On the other hand
(with populists, there are always many hands), Trump’s latent interest in
invigorating nato and commitment
to reverse Obama’s hollowing out of the armed forces would put him at
loggerheads with Putin soon enough. And while vilifying Obama and Hillary
Clinton for their skittishness in identifying “radical Islamic terrorism” as
America’s enemy, Trump has been oddly complimentary toward Recep Tayyip Erdo?an,
the Islamist strongman who has moved Turkey away from the West. If Trump
follows through on a more hardheaded approach to jihadism, he will quickly find
Turkey—a sharia-supremacist nato ally
that notoriously supports jihadist organizations—to be part of the problem, not
the solution.
It is in the
nature of populism that neither supporters nor detractors can predict with
confidence what Trump will actually do as president. It should come as no
surprise, then, that Trump’s victory has spurred efforts to give content to his
populism. Most notable of these from conservative Republican circles has been a
plea by Mike Lee, the stellar senator from Utah, for the pursuit of “principled
populism”—an exercise in cognitive dissonance over which I caused a minor stir
(at National Review) by likening it to a call for “a sober
Bacchanalia.”
The senator’s brief
strangled in its own illogic, as odes to populism inevitably do. The
“characteristic weakness” of populism, he conceded, is the lack of “a coherent
philosophy,” which inevitably makes its “proposals” (I’d have said
“careenings”) “inconsistent” and “unserious.” Well, yes . . . that is because
populism is inherently unprincipled, inconsistent, and unserious, such that
arguing for “principled populism” is a fool’s errand. Lee is anything but a
fool. His is a clever effort to appeal to Trump—who will need cooperation from
the Republican-controlled Congress—by exploiting this supposed populist moment
for conservative ends. As he dilated on the subject, Lee’s “principled
populism” emerged as a menu of conservative proposals “focused on solving the
problems that face working Americans in a fracturing society and global
economy.” The menu is highly appealing, but it is not “principled populism”; it
is conservatism—or, as Lee modified it, “authentic conservatism” (the modifier
seems a subtle rebuke of the progressive-lite “compassionate conservatism” of
the Bush-43 years).
As I observed at the
time, Lee’s entrée into the trendy populist brand was his critique of the
“chief political weakness of conservatism,” which he took to be the failure to
perceive problems. This is a misdiagnosis. Conservatives are quite good at
perceiving problems—especially problems demagogically manufactured into crises
for the purpose of rationalizing populist solutions, which historically run in
the statist direction. In reality, the chief political “weakness” of
conservatism—it is better to think of it as a challenge—is that
modern Americans are conditioned to expect that government can solve all our
problems, or must at least try to solve them. It is the lot of conservatives to
resist solutions that are popular but barmy. Populism cannot change the fact
that government is incapable of solving problems upstream of government—problems
of culture and complexity that government amelioration efforts, however
well-intentioned, often exacerbate.
There is obvious
incompatibility between conservatism’s “don’t just do something, stand there”
nature and populism’s demands for action that is forceful even if rash. Yet Lee
managed to convince himself that populism is capable not only of ratcheting up
limited-government approaches but even “anchor[ing] conservatism to the
Constitution and radically decentraliz[ing] Washington’s policymaking power.”
Again, these are worthy conservative objectives. They are rooted, however, in a
deep understanding of why the Constitution’s separation-of-powers framework and
promotion of individual liberty are, in the long run, good for society. That is
not an understanding populism is wont to help along. Populism is more mood than
theory, and is thus notoriously content to have big-government preening overrun
limited-government caution.
Senator Lee deserves
credit nonetheless for trying to wage conservatism by defining populism in a
manner that might be enticing to Trump. The new president simply is not
ideological. Neither is he a conventional politician, much less a technician
steeped in policy wonkery. His learning curve will be steep.
On the positive
side, Trump’s learning curve, like the America he envisions leading, is open
for business. His exhilarating victory paved the way for a ritual pilgrimage to
Trump Tower in midtown Manhattan by political heavyweights and those who crave
that lofty status, all vying for the new president’s heart and mind.
The parade gave
conservatives no shortage of appointments to celebrate. Senator Jeff Sessions
from Alabama, a highly accomplished former prosecutor and Senate scourge of
illegal immigration, is slated to be attorney general. A triumvirate of
battle-tested former generals—Michael Flynn, James Mattis, and John Kelly—will lead
crucial national-security agencies (the National Security Council and the
Departments of Defense and Homeland Security). Congressman Mike Pompeo, first
in his class at West Point and a Harvard Law School graduate after
distinguished military service, will head the cia.
Scott Pruitt, the excellent Oklahoma state attorney general who made a habit of
suing the Environmental Protection Agency over its economically ruinous,
Obama-driven excesses, has now been nominated to run that very agency. Rick
Perry, the extraordinarily successful former governor of Texas, has been
nominated to run the Energy Department, despite once famously forgetting its
name in a 2012 presidential debate—which seemed forgivable since it was then an
entity he hoped to abolish. Tom Price, the longtime Georgia congressman and
medical doctor who has vigorously opposed Obamacare, will, if confirmed, be
charged with administering it—and managing the transition away from it—as
Secretary of Health and Human Services. A passionate school-choice advocate,
Betsy DeVos has been nominated to run the Education Department. And so on.
But yet another
“on the other hand”: For a populist who thrilled his base with promises to
“Drain the Swamp”—a chant that rivaled the intensity of “Build that Wall” during
Trump rallies in the campaign’s closing weeks—the new President is installing
many political establishment honchos in key administration posts. Reince
Priebus, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee, will be
chief-of-staff, responsible for who and what the President sees. At the helm of
the Labor Department will be Elaine Chao, the former Bush Labor Secretary and
the wife of the Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the D.C. establishment
personified. The administration hopes to feature at least three alumni of
Goldman Sachs, the investment bank nestled at the intersection of government
and finance that Trump disparaged throughout the campaign: the senior adviser Stephen
K. Bannon (who is actually an anti-establishment firebrand); the Goldman
president Gary Cohn as chief economic adviser; and, for Treasury secretary,
Steven Mnuchin, Trump’s campaign finance chairman, whom the left, in grand
populist hyperbole, has accused of once foreclosing on a ninety-year-old widow
over a twenty-seven-cent payment error.
In what
promises to prompt a tough confirmation fight, Trump has nominated another
“master of the universe,” Exxon Mobil ceo Rex
Tillerson, to serve as Secretary of State. A corporate titan whose diplomatic
experience was earned not on the chancellery cocktail circuit but by making
hardnosed international business deals, Tillerson is a self-proclaimed close
friend of Vladimir Putin. He accepted Russia’s Order of Friendship medal in
2013. The following year, he opposed sanctions against Russia after Putin’s
annexation of Crimea, and—against the Obama administration’s wishes—attended a
petroleum conference in Moscow at which he shared a stage with a Putin crony
under sanctions. At a juncture when the Democrat-media complex is aggressively
pushing a storyline that Putin “hacked the election” on Trump’s behalf—an
overwrought claim based on the WikiLeaks publication of embarrassing emails
stolen from Clinton allies, absent any indication of tampering with the actual
voting process—the Tillerson nomination risks playing into the opposition’s
hands.
Another curiosity:
Tillerson is also a climate-change enthusiast who supports imposition of a
carbon tax and has praised the Paris Agreement on climate change. In campaign
mode, Trump railed against corporate taxes and pledged to retract America’s
signature from the Paris Agreement.
Trump’s position was
that climate change is essentially a hoax peddled by China to saddle the U.S. with
stifling restrictions on commerce. Since his election, however, the new
president has told The New York Times his mind is
“totally open” on this “very complex subject.” His post-election guest list
included enviro-zealots Al Gore and Leonardo DiCaprio. There was also the Tesla ceo Elon Musk, who agreed to
join Trump’s business advisory council. Though dismissive of Trump during the
campaign, Musk hopes to persuade him to lead on the Paris Agreement rather than
abandon it. So, evidently, do hundreds of major American corporations, 360 of
which—including such heavyweights as General Mills, Hewlett Packard, Nike,
DuPont, and Unilever—have co-signed a letter urging Trump to reaffirm Obama’s
Paris pledge.
The Paris Agreement,
which President Obama formally signed in September 2016, is a useful measure of
populism’s weaknesses as a diagnosis of, and prescription for, the current
political moment. We really do not know what Trump will do about it.
The pact regards the
climate as a global corporate asset that must be preserved by a supra-national
institution, the United Nations, to which nation-states make commitments to
reduce greenhouse gas emissions (including such ubiquitous substances as water
vapor and carbon dioxide). Of course, the U.N. has
no means of compelling its members to honor their commitments. Thus, the point
of the multilateral instrument is to make these aspirational reduction targets
politically viable and, ultimately, legally enforceable.
In theory, an
international agreement may not be legally enforced in the United States absent
compliance with the Constitution’s treaty process. In addition, legislation is
often necessary because treaties are presumed to be understandings between
nations that do not create rights and obligations for individual citizens. That
means the people’s representatives are supposed to weigh in. Popular opinion is
supposed to matter.
So, what does public
opinion tell us? Well, the airy notion of “saving the planet” is undeniably
popular. In polling touted by the Washington Post, the Chicago
Council on Global Affairs maintains that 71 percent of Americans (including 57
percent of Republicans) favor the Paris Agreement goal of cutting carbon
emissions, although the paper concedes that many Americans are unaware of the
agreement’s terms. It is not to be doubted that support is significant among
younger people educated in our universities. The Bernie Sanders populists do
not engage in much economically productive activity but have been reared on
green activism as a substitute for religious devotion.
Inconveniently,
though, the green cause has decidedly less appeal when consideration shifts
from its elusive goals to the concrete, painful means of their achievement. Notwithstanding
the absence of any assurance that compliance would meaningfully decrease
temperatures, the Paris Agreement calls for the United States to reduce
emissions by over 25 percent by 2025. That would necessarily cause a spike in
energy prices, significantly driving up the cost of consumer goods and, in
turn, gutting employment as producers struggle to cut expenses.
There is a
conceptual debate about global warming—the degrees to which it exists and to
which human activity is a material cause—despite the alarmist left’s best
efforts to marginalize climate-change skeptics as “deniers.” Still, the
practical political debate, as ever, is about costs and benefits. A society
that eschews the pain of balancing its budget, regardless of the obvious damage
mounting debt will do to future generations, is not about to volunteer for
painful economic contractions in order to achieve speculative climate benefits
to be realized decades from now. Consequently, there is no way the Senate would
approve the Paris Agreement—not even by a bare majority, much less the
two-thirds supermajority required by the Constitution’s Treaty Clause. Nor
would Congress as a whole enact legislation that would implement the
agreement’s terms.
So wy is the
Paris Agreement an issue for Trump? Because, knowing all of this, Obama signed
it anyway. He calculated that climate-change pain could be imposed without
Congress’s consent—just as he unilaterally subjected the nation to the security
risks of the Iran nuclear deal, another multilateral agreement that was never
ratified under U.S. law but was
“endorsed” by the United Nations (specifically, by the Security Council).
Alas, Obama’s
calculation was shrewd. Transnational progressives have developed cagey ways to
circumvent democratic obstacles to their globalist agenda. International
agreements are drafted to include terms purporting that they “enter into force”
when a certain modest number of nations sign them, regardless of whether this
is sufficient to bind any particular signatory nation under its domestic law.
The Paris Agreement, for example, is said to have “entered into force” on
November 4, 2016, on the strength of acceptance by a mere fifty-five nations (out
of 197 that are “parties to the convention”). Once an agreement is “in force,”
international lawyers and bureaucrats begin claiming that it has created
“norms” with which even non-signatory nations must comply under “customary
international law.”
Moreover, another
international agreement, the 1969 Vienna Convention on Treaties, holds that a
nation’s signature on a treaty, even if not adequate for ratification under
that nation’s law, obliges that nation to refrain from any action that could
undermine the treaty’s objectives. Since the United States has never ratified
the Convention on Treaties, you might think its provisions are irrelevant to
our consideration. But the post–World War II web
of multilateral conventions is the maddening thicket of transnational
progressivism, where “the law” is whatever end progressives seek to achieve—and
the principle of democratic consent is a quaint oddity. The U.S. State
Department, a devotee of international legal structures despite their erosions
of American sovereignty, tells us that because several other nations have
ratified the Convention on Treaties, “many” of its provisions are now binding
customary international law even if the treaty remains unratified.
Thus—voila!—the conceit that presidents (progressive ones, anyway) may
unilaterally subject the nation to international obligations, even ruinous
burdens, without any input, much less approval, by the people’s elected
representatives.
It thus falls
to the new populist president: Does he placate the “Save the Planet”
enthusiasts and “evolve” into a climate-change leader? Does he indulge the
“Drain the Swamp” advocates and remove America’s signature from another statist
power grab? Or is the populist’s Art of the Deal all things to all people—does
he tell Americans, “We’ll always have Paris,” but he’s going to make the
agreement work better and smarter?
My wager is on
option three. The populist is a follower of public opinion, not the shaper of
it: a reflection, not a compass. The stubborn truth is that there is no “the
people” in the sense of one mind. The people may think they want the swamp
drained, but few of them actually want the swamp to disappear—they just want a
better breed of swamp creature. On climate change, as on much else, what they
want is contradictory: a pristine earth and its exploitation for their benefit—sustainably,
of course.
Though he feared
pure democracy’s tendency toward tyranny of the mob, Hamilton probably did not
say that the “people is a great beast.” However apocryphal the attribution, there
is much to be said for the sentiment, and for de Tocqueville’s wisdom: “The
will of the nation is one of those phrases most widely abused by schemers and
tyrants of all ages.” The “Arab Spring” is case in point.
Legend has it that a
democratic uprising erupted on January 4, 2011, when a fruit vendor named
Mohamed Bouazizi set himself ablaze outside the offices of Tunisian klepto-cops
who had seized his wares. According to Western lore, the suicide protest
ignited a sweeping revolt against the corruption and caprices of Arab despots
by repressed populations desperate to determine their own destinies—desperate
to actuate the “desire for freedom” that, in President George W. Bush’s
telling, “resides in every human heart.”
It was a tragic
misreading, transmogrifying a complex phenomenon in an anti-democratic culture
into a relentless wave of democratic populism. This is not to say that the Arab
Spring was bereft of young, tech-savvy, secular democrats. It was delusional,
though, to showcase them as the face of the revolution. The claim that
democracy had animated the Muslim masses was sheer projection by Western
analysts, an elevation of hope over experience regarding a region whose
authoritarian culture of voluntarism (conception of Allah as pure will) and hostility
to non-Muslims rejects liberty, equality, and the unity of faith and reason.
Looking back now at Turkey, Egypt, Syria, Libya, Iraq, and so on, it is
obvious—as some of us maintained at the time—that the Arab Spring was better
understood as a populist ascendancy of sharia supremacism. Its Islamist leaders
were quite content to exploit democratic means (particularly, popular
elections) for an end that was the antithesis of democracy’s liberty culture:
the installation of authoritarian sharia governance.
By interpreting the
revolt as democratic populism, Western leaders rationalized the provision of
aid and encouragement to anti-Western Islamists. Support for Islamists
inexorably empowered their jihadist soul mates. Inevitably, the region exploded
in conflict, causing massive population dislocations. Yet, unwilling to let go
of the Arab Spring illusion, Germany’s Chancellor Merkel and her allied
Euro-progressives laid out the welcome-mat for millions of Muslim refugees,
even though it was well known—though studiously unmentioned—that influential
Islamist leaders have instructed the diaspora to migrate into Western societies
but resist assimilation, to pressure the host countries to accede to demands
that swelling enclaves govern themselves under Islamic law and mores. The
result: European nations are under jihadist siege, and their citizens are
rebelling against not only their political establishments but against a modern
conception of “Europe” that bears little resemblance to a West once worth
fighting for.
Over-interpreting
the latest wave of American populism would also be a mistake. It is freely
conceded that the 2016 campaign elucidated a nation’s rage against the
political establishment. But it is a deeply divided nation that rebels for
different reasons.
Progressive
populists indict the capitalist system for wage stagnation, under-employment,
and the explosion of education and healthcare costs. They demand a more robust
safety net (i.e., ever more redistribution of wealth) and an even more
extensive, aggressive administrative state (i.e., ever less democratic choice)
to tame the tumult of market cycles, “save the planet,” and impose their
anti-bourgeois pieties. As much as I’d like it to be, this is not a fringe
position. So stunning was Trump’s narrow victory that we’ve quickly forgotten
what preceded it. Nevertheless, the other major story line of 2016 was how
close the populist candidacy of Bernie Sanders, an avowed socialist, came to
prying the Democratic nomination away from Hillary Clinton. It failed only
because the party establishment rigged the contest for its preferred epigone.
Sanders’s shock troops have not gone away; today, they are the dynamic faction
on the American left.
Trump’s populist
following is more difficult to read. It is dead set against big government . .
. except when it’s not. It wants its wall built, but with a big door through
which legal immigrants will stream in. It wants government regulation pared
back, but with more tariffs and restrictions against foreign manufacturing and
currency manipulation. It wants isis destroyed,
but without committing American troops. There are, however, several things on
which it is clear: It is proudly pro-American, ostentatiously patriotic,
pro-military (without being adventurous), pro–law enforcement, and opposed to
an open-door for Muslim immigration in the absence of “extreme vetting” to weed
out potential terrorists and anti-Western agitators.
The left and several
of Trump’s detractors on the right imputed to his “America First” rhetoric the
pre–Pearl Harbor isolationists of that name, who sought to appease Hitler and
refrain from war in Europe. It is unlikely, though, that Trump was even aware
of the connection. His “movement,” as he came to call it, was an unapologetic
blowback against the Obama left. It is because he accurately read this mood and
became its vehicle that Trump emerged victorious. But the nearly implausible
narrowness of his triumph and the enduring strength of progressive populism
caution against construing the 2016 election as a wholesale rejection of
Obama’s transformative program. For that to happen, Trump will have to govern
well.
Deep dissatisfaction
with the established order is convulsing the West. It is plainly fueled in part
by dimming hopes for upward mobility in society’s lower economic rungs and by
the aggression of sharia-supremacist Islam. The environment is a fertile one for
competing strains of populism. They illuminate our unease, but they tell us
precious little about how to rectify it.
Read more in The New Criterion’s
ongoing series on populism.
Andrew C. McCarthy is
a senior fellow at National Review Institute and a contributing editor at National
Review.
This
article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 35 Number 6 , on page
4
Copyright
© 2017 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com
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