To students of politics, populism is a thing of demagogic beauty, mass psychological wonder, and even intense personal conflict; watching it in action is a bit like watching your loud, ignorant, drunken right-wing brother-in-law careen over a 200-foot bluff in your new Cadillac. Does one celebrate the gain, or grieve the concomitant loss? Cognitive dissonance abounds — all this fun at such a cost.
At any rate, populist politics is the purest form of democracy, which is another way of saying, what the founders feared most — and for good reason. Democratic populism feeds and satisfies the rawest and simplest emotions at the expense of sound and complex reasoning. Look around. If ever there was a year of populism unleashed to the mobocratic detriment of small-r republicanism, it's this horrifying yet vastly entertaining year of Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, or who or what have you on the right. While barking in the base's defense, has even one among the pack of GOP "presidential" candidates yapped one sensible idea?
For those of us who justifiably cast our eyes in amused horror at big-r Republican bedlam, however, let us also examine ourselves, our gaping emotions, our populist impulses. For this is the year of not only the right's psychological wonder, but of the left's.
Single-payer, for instance, is a splendid idea of immense appeal — with as much chance of becoming law as I have of winning the lottery. Check that: My chance of winning the lottery is far greater than single-payer ever winning approval in a Republican House or filibustering Senate. It just ain't gonna happen. Yet before a singular stump it does receive roars of approval, which, realist that I am, stumps the hell out of me.
Or, let's take the bogeyman of Glass-Steagall, always an eminently populist crowd-pleaser. None other than the progressive Paul Krugman has observed that "repealing Glass-Steagall was indeed a mistake. But it’s not what caused the financial crisis [of 2008]." The Washington Post's superb Steven Pearlstein has observed that "Repeal of Glass-Steagall has become for the Democratic left what Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are for the Republican right — a simple and facially plausible conspiracy theory" of virtually no merit. And today the Post's excellent Catherine Rampell observes that "Glass-Steagall had nothing to do with the 2008 financial crisis"; that Glass-Steagall is "a distraction from the reforms we still need"; that had Glass-Steagall's "repealed provisions … still been on the books, almost none of the institutions at the epicenter of the [2008] crisis would have been covered by it"; and, simply, that "Glass-Steagall, or the lack thereof, is a red herring."
And yet, continues Rampell, restoring Glass-Steagall has "become the left’s litmus test for whether a politician is 'tough' on Wall Street." Democratic pols who "advocate reviving Glass-Steagall" are "populist heroes," while those don't are deemed to be "in the pocket of Big Banks." Now of course it could be that some pols are, or will so be — in the pocket of big banks, that is — but such a capture has nothing to do with the almost trivial insignificance of restoring Glass-Steagall.
Nothing, though, receives a bigger, progressive-populist cheer than such a statutory restoration, excepting the absolutely impossible passage of single-payer health insurance.
I "get" idealism. I admire and applaud idealism. Progressive idealism whispers to our aspiring angels. Again, I get that. But to this realist, what amounts to outright progressive-populist idealistic delusions are merely the right's selfsame barricade to the ultimate ideal of politics: winning the freaking election.