CHAPTER FIVE Mass Democracy and the Populist Alternative
IT HAS long been customary to relate calls for direct democracy and for expressions of the popular will to a revolt from below. Abundant political commentary exists for this view, and one can cite, among those who expressed it, Walter Lippmann, Irving Babbitt, José Ortega y Gassett, and the framers of the American Constitution. All such thinkers warned against giving “the people” their head, and they affirmed the need for educated minorities that could rein in popular passions and reckless appetites.
As the second chapter makes clear, bureaucratic government was entirely acceptable to nineteenth-century liberals, providing that certain conditions were met. Administrators were expected to uphold properly made laws impartially, respect the sanctity of property and the family, and behave with personal rectitude. It was also hoped that public servants would act as a check on the popular will and the partisan aspects of government. A reading of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right or François Guizot’s addresses to the French Chamber of Deputies should confirm this point. Hegel’s references to Staatsbeamte as a class with no interest but the public good was by no means an invitation to social engineering.1 It was an attempt at recognizing the intended role of unobtrusive guardians of public order, who would also, as a last resort, deal with otherwise insoluble social problems. Furthermore, Guizot, in introducing French public education in 1833, went out of his way to disavow any Jacobin intent. As one interpreter explains: for Guizot “instruction was not a means of advancing human equality. Its purpose was to render cohesive a society which rests upon the inequality of faculties. It had for an object avoiding the democratic peril defined as social confusion.”2 By providing every Frenchman with minimal vocational training and some degree of shared culture, the liberal July Monarchy hoped to create national unity and at least a tolerable general living standard. But the pursuit of this aim was not viewed as inherently democratic. It was an attempt by the state to ward off the “democratic peril,” seen as an upsurge of social disorder that would give rise to a revolutionary dictatorship.
In many ways populism seems to be the polar opposite of the politics practiced by nineteenth-century liberal states. In Latin America populists have promoted both redistributionist economics and public works programs. Dictators such as Juan Peron in Argentina and Getulio Vargas in Brazil appealed directly to the people when they crushed social and institutional opposition to their personal rule. In the United States the Populist or People’s Party, organized in Omaha in 1892, backed positions that were anathema to traditional liberals. The American populists advocated unlimited coinage of silver, a graduated income tax, state control of public utilities, particularly of railroads, and direct election of federal senators.3 Though inimical to classical liberals, such populist positions have attracted the communitarian socialist Christopher Lasch, particularly since they were wedded to conservative cultural attitudes.4 The Populist Party represented the agrarian American heartland and mobilized its constituents against the alliance of corporate capital with expanding federal government. Populists hoped to locate effective governing control in the states and expressed open disdain for the commerce and culture of the Eastern cities. Their call for referenda and for other direct consultations of the popular will were aimed at circumventing entrenched powers, and for the populists those powers were typically associated with distant urban elites, especially in New York and Washington.
What is indeed a strange twist in the history of populist movements has come in the way direct democracy and the popular will are currently invoked. For at least twenty years, starting with the French National Front in the 1970s, movements that have labeled themselves populist have incorporated large chunks of the nineteenth-century liberal legacy. This has not always been clear, and the editorializing that has occurred against populist “racists” and “counterrevolutionaries” has made it even harder to notice this fact. In the National Front’s program, published in 1985, party leader Jean-Marie Le Pen repeatedly presented himself and his cohorts as French national liberals: “We defend economic liberties because without these there are no political liberties. As nationalists we wish in all domains to preserve the greatest possible national independence, and we know this will happen not from withdrawing into ourselves, but from a vigorous offensive of which only an economic system based on free enterprise and competition is capable.”5
Critics of the National Front and of its controversial leader have traced its political outlook to “extreme rightist” currents, from pagan fascist to Catholic clericalist, and from diehard supporters of the Vichy government to French Algerian refugees. (In 1965 these refugees entered French politics behind their presidential candidate and fellow French Algerian Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour.)6 The National Front has also been likened to the following of Pierre Poujade, the politician who rallied rural France in the 1950s in what became a vociferous tax revolt. But, as the French psephologist Pascal Perrineau demonstrates, the electoral regions in which National Frontists from the mid-eighties onward and Le Pen as their presidential candidate have had the most success are not the electoral strongholds of either the Poujadistes or the Tixier-Vignan-couristes. Poujadistes made electoral inroads almost entirely in rural regions, especially Maine, the Vendée, and Berry, while the French refugees from Algeria only scored well in areas full of pieds-noirs (as the Algerian refugees were known).7 By contrast, the National Front has gathered strength throughout the eastern part of France, and particularly in the southeast around Marseilles. In some elections it has garnered more than 20 percent of the votes in the Paris Basin and in the industrialized areas along the Rhine, Rhone, and Loire Rivers. In and around Paris, Frontists have attracted both shopkeepers and industrial workers, and in the presidential election of April 1988, Le Pen drew significant numbers of votes from all socioeconomic groups.8
This appeal may be partly attributed to the timely issues which Le Pen has hammered away at, particularly immigration and criminal violence, which he has linked directly and indirectly to the North African “invasion” of France. Certainly he and his party never miss the opportunity to point to the cultural and physical threat posed to French national identity by the presence of a large, mostly unassimilated Muslim, North African population. Le Pen has, furthermore, cast himself and the National Front as the one true alternative to the “gang of four” (the two right-centrist parties together with the Socialists and Communists). Voting for the National Front and holding referenda on controversial political issues after the National Assembly votes on them are the ways Frenchmen are told they can regain power over the state. By these populist means, lepénistes insist, voters can make the “gang of four” responsive to the French nation.9 The National Front has also been inventive in combining programs and electorates, in appealing to both free-market and pro-environmentalist constituencies, and in seeking the support of the Catholic Right without offering it more than rhetorical gestures. (Despite his cultivation of a pious image, Le Pen was embroiled in a divorce battle with a sultry wife whom he lost to a former lieutenant. He then lost the lieutenant, who bolted his party and denounced him to a hostile newspaper, Le Monde, as a capricious brute.)10
The character of the National Front has remained predominantly national liberal, however ingeniously or cynically its politicians reach out to Catholic rural or working-class electorates. The party program of 1984 combines appeals to a national identity and national culture with proposals for denationalizing industries, limiting public administration, and providing tax relief to business.11 It also invokes the example of Margaret Thatcher in emphasizing the need to put unions back in their place. In 1984 Le Pen inveighed against a practice (introduced in 1946) of having union representatives play a key role in the distribution of federal funds for social programs (the Caisse Sociale). He has also periodically complained about the power of the Force Ouvrière and the Confédération Générale de Travail, the national union organizations with which France’s current president, Jacques Chirac, is locked in battle.12
Despite Le Pen’s flirtation in the sixties and early seventies with France’s traditionalist (Catholic nationalist) Right and its interwar corporatist economics, by the mid-seventies he had come to define himself as a national liberal. This Breton politician with close ties to Algerian French refugees began to frequent the Club de l’Horloge, a group of young conservatives who had broken away from the anticapitalist French New Right. While that Right, under the leadership of flamboyant publicist Alain de Benoist, celebrates Celtic-Graeco-Roman religion coupled with organic economics, the Club de l’Horloge seeks to harmonize European Christian civilization with the free market. Often it seems to be promoting the Christian humanist classical liberalism defended by the economist Wilhelm von Roepke and by postwar American conservatives. But the Club de l’Horloge has a harder edge. It has taken a strong stand against France being flooded by non-Europeans and speaks of the nation state as the necessary political structure for the contemporary West.13 It has also provided key advisors for the National Front, most notably Jean-Yves Le Gallou.
Critics of the National Front insist that it is intent on restoring the past, though which past is not agreed on by all of its interpreters. Typically its detractors depict it as full of French neo-Nazis trying to bring back Nazi totalitarianism or its Vichy counterpart. Almost all of these assessments are ideologically colored.14 They emphasize Le Pen’s anti-Semitism, which is either exaggerated or else inferred from his stance on immigration and French national identity. There is no doubt that Le Pen has made tasteless jokes about Jews to his colleagues and on September 13, 1987 opined in an interview with Le Monde that whether or not the Nazis killed their victims in gas chambers “is a point of detail in the history of the Second World War.” Still, it is far from clear that he is the ferocious anti-Semite denounced in Le Monde.15 The tasteless jokes were in some cases reported by personal enemies who defected from his party, and their reports, it may be guessed, were not entirely accurate. Nor is there convincing evidence that Le Pen does not believe in the reality of the Holocaust. Rather, he has disparaged its relative historical significance at least on one occasion. He has also emphatically stated that those who lament Nazi crimes most loudly often faiI to notice the even greater enormities committed by the Communists.16
It must be kept in mind that French Jewish organizations, almost without exception, support the social Left. As in Canada and the United States, most Jews in France are enthusiastically behind liberal immigration policies, gay rights, and pro-feminist legislation. It is only natural that they and the National Front be at loggerheads; and while Le Pen has picked away imprudently at Jewish sensitivities, particularly when the Holocaust is brought up to support socially liberal measures, Jewish organizations would not likely have held back in any case in condemning his social views.17
Le Pen has also been unrelenting in criticizing the double standard among Jewish and Arab nationalists who favor multiculturalism for France. Why, he asks, is particularity to be the privilege of a Jewish or Arab state, while Frenchmen must consent to the eradication of their collective identity? All the same, the National Front has not called for denying Jews their full rights as French citizens. It has not attacked them as racially alien, though it has engaged in ridicule of its Jewish political opponents. It is therefore questionable whether the National Front should be compared to Nazi or Vichy leadership, which stripped Jews of civil rights and brought about their physical destruction. Sparring with French Jewish spokesmen is not the same as persecuting Jews or even advocating that practice.
As Pierre-André Taguieff and American commentator Franklin Adler point out, moreover, the casting of Le Pen as an interwar Nazi type has already begun to backfire. Imitating their critics on the Left, Le Pen and his followers now depict themselves as an aggrieved group being denied the right to ethnic difference that others are enjoying in their country. They have put together their own “antiracist” organization, L’Alliance Générale contre le Racisme et pour le Respect de l’Identité Francaise et Chrétienne, and insist that the same respect accorded to non-French and non-Christian minorities is due to traditional French Christians.18 When this courtesy is not extended, the members of the Alliance intend to sue their defamers under the same antihate laws invoked by their opponents on the Left. Such a strategy may help the Front play the same game as its enemies, but it does so at a price, increasing the power of the managerial state as an arbiter of victimological claims. It is the government, after all, that must decide whether the Front’s “right to difference” is one to be respected.
Le Pen and his followers have also incurred attacks in the French press for identifying modern France with the kingdom of Charles Martel and Charlemagne.19 In his apostrophes to the “historic France of forty kings and fifteen hundred years,” Le Pen is accused of ignoring the changing character of his country. But in their fixation on fluidity, Le Pen’s critics end up denying to France any claim to national continuity.20 Nations can endure even while changing. The claim by Eastern and Central European Jews to be the descendants of ancient Semitic tribes represents a less believable assertion of national continuity than the one made for Frenchmen by the National Front. But the Jewish claim to continued peoplehood, which provides moral justification for the modern Israeli state, is one that many of Le Pen’s Jewish and Christian critics accept. Such an acceptance seems appropriate, particularly after the destruction of European Jewry, as a collective reparation for injuries inflicted by anti-Semites. But Le Pen’s question remains valid nonetheless. Why should Frenchmen who have inhabited the same land, spoken (more or less) the same language for centuries, and who share an extended gene pool not have the same right to believe in their nationhood? And why is it unreasonable to believe that a still growing population in France of six million largely unassimilated North African Muslims can change the French national character irrevocably? With one of Europe’s lowest natality rates (together with that of Italy) and with multicultural doctrines being taught in schools and in the media, the European French population may be justified in feeling demographically and culturally threatened.21 Aristotle notes in the Politica that a polity does not remain the same if one replaces all or most of its population. That remains the case even if the new population settles in the same location and bears the same name as its displaced predecessors.22
One problem French populism will have to face and that its critics have not addressed is the Front’s appeal to contradictory politics. Quite often the National Front falls between two stools: social democracy and classical liberalism. Talk about “détatisation” and economic freedom may win some of the owners and captains of industry, but is not likely to create for the Front a permanent working-class constituency.23 It attracts that constituency by taking a hard line on both crime and immigration and by demanding that employers have only French workforces. The Front has also advocated social measures—e.g., family-leave allowances—which approximate those elsewhere introduced under feminist auspices. Unlike the contemporary Left, the Front has taken this position to encourage natality and to rebuild the French population.24
What must be asked, however, is whether the Front can continue to call for social measures of this kind without forfeiting its claims to be an opponent of the modern administrative state and an advocate of a market economy. Undoubtedly immigration has been, for the Front and other European populists, the most reliable electoral issue. As Perrineau and Jérôme Jaffré demonstrate in detailed analyses, the Front can bring together social classes, as occurred in the presidential race of April 24, 1988, when anti-immigration sentiments are at their height. That happens whenever the government ignores the rising anxiety about crime and about alien cultures spreading in certain urban areas.25 Immigration also produces further demands on the already stretched funds for social services, and all contemporary populist movements have been quick to turn this problem to their advantage. Whether Austrian and Italian regionalists or the supporters of Proposition 187 in California, populists have stoked electoral fires by pointing to the pressures being put on safety nets by immigrants, and particularly by illegal ones.
Behind this financial issue is a communitarian one. Because welfare programs and pensions and services to the elderly require transfers of income from the young and employed, it seems necessary here that a bond exist between the payers and payees.26 Social programs can no longer be credibly presented as insurance measures. They are, for the most part, gifts of money being made by one sector of society to another. And people only consent to such gifts willingly on behalf of those whom they see as members of a family or nation. They oppose doing the same for an uninvited stranger. Liberal pluralists therefore have had to convince others that all humankind have a right to the growing taxes that national governments collect. The making of this argument has not been easy, and populists have taken advantage of the skepticism generated by pluralist “human rights” rhetoric.
But this particular issue has not created an electoral majority for populists in France, any more than it has for similar protest movements in the United States. Typically the National Front has done well in the initial phase of French presidential races and in elections for the European Parliament. It has been less successful in regional races and must usually concede its votes, according to a prior agreement, to the candidates of the right-center parties upon reaching the second round of elections. In 1988 and 1992, during its best showings, the Front managed to elect only a handful of deputies to the Assembly. Though it has made strides in municipal races, particularly in Marseilles, Nice, and other urban centers of Arab concentration, the Front has not been able to displace the Gaulliste Right-Center as the French Left’s official opposition. Because of its being a target of media attack and because of its lack of a large patronage base, the Front has had difficulty fielding candidates of national stature. According to Perrineau, most of its votes are gestures of protest, cast on ballots that will not decisively change the national party structure.27
In this respect it resembles the populist Right in the United States, which has now coalesced around the presidential hopeful Patrick J. Buchanan. Like Le Pen, Buchanan has defiantly rattled left-liberal elites, called for restrictions on immigration, and attacked “big government,” except when it acts in pursuit of the national interest. Like Le Pen, Buchanan has angered Zionist groups by thundering at their anti-Christian remarks, opposing the Gulf War, and questioning some aspects of the established account of the Holocaust. In all of these gestures Buchanan, like Le Pen, has made it clear that he will not play by the other side’s rules. He will not accept “Christian guilt” for the sufferings of non-Christians or “white guilt” for the condition of nonwhites. Buchanan scorns the grievances directed by alleged victims of Western civilization against the majority culture, and he treats these complaints in the context of a cultural and political revolution against his own country and coreligionists.28
Like Le Pen, however, Buchanan and his followers grouped in the American Cause have launched a protest movement without the possibility of building a majority base. Though tens of millions agree with Buchanan’s stances, at least an equal number oppose them vehemently. And like Le Pen, Buchanan looks to a vanishing past for his own electoral counterrevolutionary army. Whereas Le Pen appeals to a bourgeois nationalist electorate to effect his counterrevolution, Buchanan hopes to turn society around with his fellow ethnic Catholics and with Southern white conservatives.29 Neither core constituency, however, can yield the votes necessary to alter national political life in France or in the United States. Moreover, the control of social programs by federal administrations provides for them vast leverage in dealing with populist challenges. In the battle between President Clinton and a Republican Congress in 1995 over raising premiums for entitlement programs and forcing public administration to live within its means, Republican majority opinion in the United States melted away within weeks. Between October and December 1995, Clinton’s popularity soared, even among groups who disagreed with him on social questions.30
The identitarian politics and appeals to a cultural heritage that populists favor can only work among those who share a traditional communal identity. Populists will not likely be able to mount a majority opposition to the managerial state in any other situation. The populist movements with the broadest and greatest long-range strength are regionally based. They have also developed within countries whose administrative frameworks are not so deeply implanted as those of the United States or France. In Austria the Freiheitliche Partei has moved from its original regional base in Carinthia to win the votes of Austrian non-Carinthian decentralizers and immigration restrictionists.31 Before the Austrian federal elections of December 17, 1994, the FP had commanded almost 23 percent of the Austrian vote, and though its share has fallen to 21.5 percent, it remains highly competitive with the center-left Austrian Socialists and center-right People’s Party.32 In Italy the Lega Lombarda, founded in Milan, became a major national political force in less than ten years, and an expanded alliance that it helped put together for all of Northern Italy, the Lega Nord, entered the federal government, with major cabinet posts, in April 1994.33
There is no need to ascribe organizational genius to the leader of either of these movements: to the photogenic fortyish bachelor-sportsman, Jörg Haider, who heads the Freiheitliche Partei, or to the Milanese politician, already notorious for his wheeling-dealing, Umberto Bossi, who directs the Lega Nord. Regionalist parties that invoke communal identity and demand the right to determine their own citizenry do well in particular circumstances: having a Catholic rather than Protestant population and central governments that are problematic for their peoples. Austria, for example, only became a country in 1919, out of the battered remnants of a once great empire. Its socialist founders, moreover, repudiated any link—and in fact insisted on the “discontinuity [Un-terbrechung]”—between their own republic and the Habsburg empire, which had been defeated in war and subsequently overthrown.34 For years afterwards a substantial minority, if not majority, of Austrians favored union with Germany.
The unification of Italy in 1870 was equally fraught with problems, in this case glaring economic disparities between the industrial North and rural South and a parliamentary regime driven by graft. Social critics and historians were outlining the political failures of the Italian Risorgimento almost from the time that Italy had undergone its unificazione mancata.35 The chief theorist of the League and a distinguished professor of government at the Catholic University of Milan, Gianfranco Miglio, has spent forty years detailing the structural flaws of all Italian regimes from 1870 onward. In 1980 Miglio took over the directorship of the Gruppo di Milano, a group that was drafting a model federal constitution for a regionalized Italy. His reason for this involvement was the conviction that Italians could not function as an effective national state.36 Modern Italy, says Miglio, is a “neofeudal arrangement” for collecting and distributing patronage. He describes Italy not as a sovereign state but as a people beset by parties and administrators.37
Miglio, among other spokesmen for the League, has stressed the Germanic and quasi-Protestant character of his region, which has been unnaturally joined, or so goes the received account, to the Latin South and its lawless spirit.38 Despite these efforts to present the Italian North as part of the Protestant commercial world (which by now in Europe may be an anachronistic concept), the communal sense animating Lombard regionalists seems strongest in Catholic societies. Both Protestant individualism and Protestant obedience to “lawful” authorities have aided managerial regimes working to “modernize” social morals. In Catholic, particularly Latin-Catholic, societies, by contrast, the taking of social control by such government has generally gone slower, because of deeper and more extensive family ties and less respect for public administration.39 (As an obvious illustration one need only compare the amount of tax evasion in Italy to that of the United States, Canada, and Sweden. Among Italians it has been estimated as being at least four times as great as among Protestant democracies. Nor do Italians outside of politics refer to the Roman administration as “our government.”)
The League until now has not brought about a changed constitution for Italy. Shortly after the spring 1994 victory, Miglio broke with his former advisee Bossi, on account of what he called broken promises.40 A similar stalling might have occurred on the part of leaders of the Freiheitliche Partei if the December 1994 election had turned out better for them. Haider might have had second thoughts about pressing forward with his plan to reconstruct Austria and might have accepted a major role for his party in a center-right coalition.41
More important, however, in the long view is that regional populists in Central Europe have made their own will matter. They have generated widespread discussion of issues that public administrators and most prestige newspapers would prefer to ignore, from immigration restrictions to regionally determined rights of citizenship. The leghisti delight in citing Article 33 of the Declaration of Rights, which precedes the current Italian constitution. In this article the Italian national assembly is given the power to alter fundamentally the constitution of its own government. Italian regionalists and their allies may eventually have the votes to bring about such a change.42
A certain similarity may be seen between European Catholic regionalists and the Québecois. Like European regionalists, the Québecois live in a problematic and, relatively speaking, recently devised federal structure, have an established regional identity, and insist on their right to rescind a political arrangement deemed as unsuitable for their culture. The former premier of Quebec and (former) head of the secessionist Parti Québecois, Jean Parizeau, has also complained of the “ethnic factor,” that is, unwanted non-Francophone immigration into his province, which he blames on the federal government.43 Without formally separating until now, the Québecois have extracted from the federal administration sizable concessions on linguistic and immigration questions.44
What does distinguish the Québecois separatists from Central European regionalists is ideological. The Québecois do not reject either managerial politics or social engineering. They seem happy with both, as long as they are practiced by Francophone administrators. By contrast, Austrian and Italian regionalists represent the bourgeois liberal politics of the nineteenth century, without a continued belief in the framework of the nation state. For them, central governments no longer seem to serve established societies. They are seen as predatory and intrusive, stripping peoples of their earnings and distributing them among strangers and politicians. In the face of this perceived degeneration of the nation state, European bourgeois regionalists feel they must look elsewhere for appropriate political forms.
These intended forms are at least partly based on a return to a market economy and to a fortified civil society. In a similar protest against administrative interference in communities and families, Le Pen has tried to resurrect the principle of “subsidarity.” This, he explains, requires that barring an emergency, no more distant level of control be applied to problems that arise in a local or familial sphere than those authorities that already exist there. Allowing a central administration to interfere at will in the arrangements of families and regions undermines authority at every level, except for that exercised from the top. Far better, Le Pen maintains, to force the central state into acknowledging the legitimacy of other authorities than to concede its power as inevitable.45 Miglio has examined the same theme from a constitutionalist angle. In a truly federalized Europe, he maintains, the central administrative state should continue to exist as an instrument of convenience. There one’s deepest political loyalty, however, will be to a self-governing region possessing a distinctive cultural identity. Central governments may continue to provide for defense, though, as seen by Miglio, a European federal government can perform this function as well as an Italian national one for Lombardy, Liguria, and other Italian regions.46
Though devolution of power has become an issue in the United States as well, here it has not led to a tumultuous reconsideration of political structures. In the United States it has not posed a major threat to either the managerial state or its conception of democracy. For the most part, the call for devolution in the United States has been a barometer of periodic financial discontent. In Investor’s Business Daily (15 November 1995), for example, we are made to think that “secession movements are alive and well in the U.S.” and have erupted in New York, California, and Michigan. In all of these states, it is noted, there are widespread complaints about inattentive and distant governments that do not provide uniformly adequate services. The article cites economist Gordon Tullock, who believes that California “has simply grown too large to be governed as a simple entity and ought to be broken up.”47
Investor’s Business Daily calls attention to financial and managerial problems that are fueling “secessionist movements.” But these movements are not about secession, and the comparison made in the piece between Catalan and Scottish separatists and the disgruntled residents of Upper Michigan and Staten Island is entirely misleading. Attempts in the United States to force the federal administration to give certain areas more public funding have nothing to do with regional secession. Regionalists predicate their claim to political sovereignty on cultural solidarity; the former, by contrast, is taking place among those without a cultural base or any real aspiration toward self-rule. In a country with an increasingly transitory population, it is becoming harder and harder to find families inhabiting the same locality from one generation to the next. In some areas deemed as secessionist-minded (e.g., California and Staten Island), demographic compositions change too rapidly to permit the growth of any long-standing identity between the majority population and a particular region.
The American populist-regionalist movement that may come closest to the European kind is the Southern League. Founded in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in June 1994, it is directed by the Southern Presbyterian minister and history professor Michael Hill.48 Both Hill and his advisor Thomas Fleming have established close ties to European regionalists and cite the Lega Nord as an organizational model for American Southerners. The American Constitution, they insist, was founded explicitly on the principle of dual federalism. Southern states are urged to reassert this principle to liberate their people from “government by fiat.” In a manifesto published in the Washington Post (29 October 1995), Hill and Fleming present the South as a culturally distinct and profoundly Christian region. What the League seeks to do, they explain, is to cleanse their region of foreign administrative oppression: “After so many decades of strife, black and white Southerners of goodwill should be left alone to work out their destinies, avoiding, before it is too late, the urban hell that has been created by the lawyers, social engineers, and imperial bureaucrats.”49
There is one truth that may embarrass the Southern League’s founders but tells much about American political culture. While millions of Southerners, white and black, gave their votes to President Clinton and to an expanding federal administration, the Southern League, which claims to stand for an entire region, has only a membership of several thousand. The Italian Northern League, by contrast, has acquired a membership and electorate in the millions. Twelve years ago, more than a hundred thousand Lombard separatists gathered to celebrate the victory won at Legnano in 1176 by the medieval Lombard League against Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa.50
Historical memories and cultural identities are weaker in the United States than in Europe. But equally noteworthy is the stunning success achieved by the American managerial state in neutralizing its opposition. Entitlement programs and media support for expanded social services have increased governmental power against by-now-waning opposition. Both Christopher Lasch and political sociologist Stanley Rothman comment on the link between the current American political class and the breakdown of America’s Protestant bourgeois ethos. Social constraint, individual responsibility, and deferred gratification once provided the moral framework for constitutional government. These qualities were especially critical for a polity that stressed individual identity and whose religious underpinnings were Protestant and more individualistic than those of Catholic societies.
Lasch believes that cultural renewal and communal freedom are still possible in the United States because the lower middle class continues to resist wayward elites.51 Lasch’s pessimism is short-term, inasmuch as he looks to working-class decency to renew American society. Rothman, however, offers a gloomier prediction about freedom and community in the United States. With deep regret he declares that “it is still my expectation (or fear) that the future does lie with authoritarian bureaucratic societies, even if these are partly associated with the market and private property.” One reason this seems likely, he suggests (with unmistakable moral anger), is that “the current decay of bourgeois standards is translating itself into escalating physical violence.” This outburst of “the violence which was always breaking through the patina of civilization” will require repressive physical control, and Rothman does not believe that, without individual religious constraint, either the state or individuals can “restore or create a sense of personal responsibility.”52 Intellectuals will not likely tame human nature by devising humanistic or pluralist values. On this point Rothman is unsparingly harsh: “A renewal may occur in the society, or there may even be a shift in orientation on the basis of a new cultural understanding, but such a shift will not be initiated by secular intellectuals.”53
Despite my general agreement with much of this analysis and its underlying concern, I would disagree respectfully with two of Rothman’s points. One, it is not clear that culture was primary and politics secondary (as Rothman at least suggests, if not explicitly states) in the unraveling of bourgeois society. The managerial state played a steady and significant role in effecting that result. It created a public of individual claimants (and, finally, governmentally approved victims) for handouts and other administrative favors, and it set into operation a series of programs aimed at behavior modification that have been largely successful. As Paul Veyne reminds us in looking at life under the Roman Empire, most people at most times have been apolides, that is, not without a place of residence but without interest in their civic existence.54 They have belonged to what Benjamin Ginsberg in another context calls the “captive public,” those who allow government to do things for and to them.55 Far from being an unusual situation, it is the one in which all people, save for sporadic and exceptional groups, have been willing to live. This truth was apparent to Plato, Aristotle, and Xenophon, who assumed that Greeks but few others had a disposition for civic affairs. Most non-Greeks might exist under stable regimes, but not under those that they constructed and oversaw.56 Americans may have become like ancient Persians, more fit to be ruled than to rule themselves, but the reasons are political and not just moral and cultural. The managerial state has contributed to an entire way of life, and Americans, by embracing it, have also accepted its cultural accompaniments. Others have not made these adjustments with the same alacrity; and among Southern and Central Europeans premodern or early-modern institutions and attitudes have acted as a force of resistance.
Rothman also may be wrong to imagine that the present lack of moral self-discipline must result in a police state erected for the sake of public order. Behind this prediction can be glimpsed the shade of classical political theory. According to Plato and Aristotle, a decayed democracy produces licentious conduct, which becomes the seedbed of tyranny. Tyrants rise to power by fanning democratic disorder and by exploiting personal and political excesses.57 But in postliberal societies such as ours, violence and intemperate conduct are behavioral and administrative problems. Criminals can be warehoused and treated therapeutically, while those with the means will get out of harm’s way by relocating as far from inner cites or deteriorated suburbs as public transportation allows. Nor has the growth of the managerial state left the United States impoverished. GNP continues to grow, together with the size, reach, and financial needs of government.58
A process that has aided this managerial control of social behavior is the transformation of the family. Rothman notes this development, and Edward Shorter, in The Making of the Modern Family. treats it in some detail. A social historian, Shorter looks at the transition from the modern to the late modern family and singles out the distinguishing characteristics of this process: the ascendancy of peer group socialization in place of parental authority, the large-scale entry of women into the work force, and the growing dissociation of erotic activity from marriage.59 Shorter explores the institutional changes that have affected the Western family in the twentieth century, and particularly in the last forty years. While undoubtedly connected to social, demographic, and cultural circumstances, the weakening of the bourgeois family, as examined by Shorter, is further correlated to a specific political occurrence: in the last seventy years the managerial state has become the dominant socializing force and accelerated those cultural changes of which it has approved.60
In The Search for the American Right Wing, William B. Hixson indicates how tightly the defense of bourgeois modernity has been tied to opposition to the managerial state: between 1955 and 1987 the one constant feature in the American grassroots Right was its increasingly archaic view of modern society. The Right, as seen by Hixson, combines a political idea with a social one, a premanagerial conception of the federal government that combines a belief in the nuclear family with well-defined gender roles. Unlike Hofstadter, who demonizes the populist Right, Hixson does not denigrate his subjects. Rather, he is struck by the apparent hopelessness of their restorationist dream. As an oppositional force the populism analyzed by Hixson faces insurmountable problems. It has had to build a political coalition that weds economic grievances to cultural stands.61 But both of these positions are intrinsically difficult for a populist movement in late-twentieth-century America. Calls for communal or local control in moral and social matters will likely arouse suspicion from journalists and the media. Such demands typically bring forth damaging assaults on the “fascist” mindset behind them. And the types of long-term material concerns that an American populist movement must address are the ones the managerial state has already used to consolidate its power. Such a movement will not be electorally successful unless it offers itself as a material provider, but in so doing it may have to replicate the establishment that it claims to be opposing. This is doubly true for left-wing populists, who fail to give even the appearance of being independent of the state. The democratic socialist Alan Wolfe, for example, praises Scandinavian socialism, while inveighing against the market-driven government in his own country.62 But, as Christopher Lasch rightly observes, despite Wolfe’s fondness for populist tropes, he does not object to the political establishment, except to the extent that it tolerates a quasi-free market.63
In any case, appeals to a moral heritage have become divisive in our society. Talk about lawfulness and marital fidelity has angered civil rights and feminist activists looking for codewords for racism and repressive Victorian standards.64 And “Judeo-Christian,” a term invented by Christian traditionalists hoping to reach out to Jews, has aroused more peeve than acceptance. Jews polled on this usage do not want to be identified with an explicitly Christian ethic, while atheists, Muslims, and Buddhists resent the failure of Judeo-Christians to extend to them recognition of their moral cultures.65
In an even bolder search for value-unity, the self-described libertarian populist Bill Kauffman offers this recipe for the restoration of American localism: “Only when we restore to Americans their birthright—local self-government in prideful communities that respect the liberties of every dentist and Baptist and lesbian and socialist and hermit and auto parts dealer—will we remember what it means to an American first.”66 Though Kauffman makes a cogent case against the merits of an American empire spreading “global democracy,” it is unclear how his own communitarian, localized America would work, even if the managerial state approved it. Culturally unified groups may conceivably include auto parts dealers and dentists and may even indulge a few hermits. But they are not likely to embrace traditional Baptists, lesbians, and socialists in “prideful communities.” To whatever extent such groups do live together, it will be as a pluralist experiment overseen by political therapists, or as urban conglomerations without social or cultural unity.
An alternative vision of a posttherapeutic America with some communal elements can be discerned in a short book by John Gray, In the Enlightenment’s Wake (1995). Gray would concede most of the argument of this chapter about the unbroken social and political power of the managerial state and about the dishonesty of its “liberal” self-image. Although by sentiment a classical liberal, Gray does not hide his belief that his own heritage is now obsolete.67 Nonetheless, he believes that Western public administration may be introducing a new kind of society by promoting Third World immigration. Administrators and journalists have done this partly to render nation states more porous. But the immigrants who come in, Gray notes, are not socially isolated. They live in ethnic enclaves in which they are building an extensive communal life. These immigrants use their resources to erect mosques, support communal charities and services, and, like Eastern European Orthodox Jews, preserve distinctive cultures in settings that are both modern urban and ethnically heterogeneous.68
Gray’s celebration of ethnic enclaves as the restorer of community in the West may be overly optimistic. He is celebrating not the return of Western community but the influx into Western countries of predominantly non-Western immigrants. Such a development, it may be argued, will produce cultural clashes and weaken even further the already fragile civilizational identities of the host countries. Communities, after all, are not simply interchangeable, and the arrival in France of millions of North African Muslims has alarmed French secular republicans as well as French Catholic nationalists. Incoming Muslims agitate to have their religious values taught in French schools, and they do not easily adapt, or so it is widely believed, to civil institutions that are not subject to ecclesiastical (by which is meant their own ecclesiastical) authorities.69 There is also no guarantee that ethnic enclaves will throw their weight against the managerial state or its pluralist ideology. Generally, this has not been the case until now. In Canada, England, France, and Australia, Third World immigrant organizations and immigrant votes have supported parties and politicians who favor multicultural initiatives.70 In-group cohesiveness among the immigrants has not caused them to rally to the threatened social traditions of their hosts.
Despite the objections that might be raised to Gray’s expectations, he does present one undeniable truth: concentration of unassimilated communities of any kind in the West will bring the managerial state more difficulties than benefits. Administrators will have to deal with larger and larger numbers of people who feel no loyalty to their pluralist court religion or to its therapeutic projects. They will have to administer subjects whose home lives clash with their own public ideology and whose support will be purely perfunctory. American “moderate” conservatives (i.e., neoconservatives) have proposed ways of coping with this quandary. They have advocated generous immigration policies but stress the need to combine them with intensive public training in “democratic values.” America should become the “first universal nation,” but its steadily changing population should be made to appreciate the present political system and to carry on the crusade for “human rights.”71
Unlike these relative moderates, however, administrators, social workers, and academics often romanticize the collective lifestyles of Third World immigrants. Whether as victims of the West or as imagined avatars of nonsexist and nonracist cultures, these groups are seen by the European and American Left as entitled to their differences. But it may be impossible for a managerial state to socialize those who have such a privilege or to check the balkanization which may result from its exercise. Proliferating alien cultures exercising a “right to difference” can, after all, subvert a host society. Though the resulting dilution of established ways of life may serve pluralist ends, it also prevents the forces of democratic progress from keeping a firm social grip. Shortly before his death, an English poet identified as a social democrat, Stephen Spender, complained of the difficulty of preserving “democracy” among those who “care nothing about it.” Spender trembled for the political future if his London neighbors, mostly non-Western patriarchal theocrats, took over English society.72 While this may never happen and while Spender’s neighbors may continue to vote for Labour Party multiculturalists, their presence causes deviations from the behavioral norms that Western pluralists demand from mainstream citizens. This double standard is ultimately detrimental to the authority of the managerial state and its intellectual priesthood.
Equally important for the weakening of pluralist ideology is the ascendancy of postmodernism, though in the United States postmodernist ideas until now have had their strongest following on the intellectual Left. The postmodernism that is most familiar to Americans questions universal truths, treats science and logic as peculiarly Western inventions, and pleads for a “right to difference” among those allegedly victimized by Western institutions. Feminists, blacks, and gays have all appealed to a postmodernist Left to justify a distinctive form of self-expression for themselves and other reputed victims of Western hegemony.73 Such appeals have been totally compatible with the reconstructionist designs of the managerial state. No less than multicultural social critics, the managerial state has emphasized the rights of accredited victims, and its own list of disadvantaged groups overlaps the one featured in postmodernist academic polemics.
But there is another side of postmodernism, already widely represented in Europe, that is explicitly opposed to the managerial pluralist conception of Progress. Basic to the European New Right, this postmodernism is associated with such controversial political theorists as Alain de Benoist, Marco Tarchi, and Alessandro Campi. Both Bossi and Le Pen have ties to this postmodernist Right, and the “differentialist form of argument [argumentaire différencialiste]” characteristic of regionalists and nationalists in Europe often betrays a postmodernist provenance for their ideas.74 New Right theorists and feuilletonistes in France, Germany, and Italy deliver attacks on liberal universalism and consider “human rights” as a mere pretext for the expansion of the managerial state. Unhappily, these postmodernists confuse a late-twentieth-century development with the liberalism of the old bourgeoisie, while not paying enough attention to the differences between the world built and sustained by that class and contemporary mass democracy. Postmodernists of the Right sometimes also make the mistake of idealizing oppressive Third World regimes, because of the anti-Americanism that they and these governments share. And they persist in propagating simplistic negative views about the United States as the source of all the world’s monetary, moral, and cultural evils, in the face of abundant counterevidence.75
But they also bring to their investigations a perspective limited to those who can survey political life from outside the present tolerated political conversation. They point out to what extent Right and Left in the West have become indistinguishable defenses of managerial power. Couched in what seem arbitrarily formulated universals, these defenses of administrative manipulation, explains the postmodernist Right, are held to be incontestable. Against the liberal managerial order and its list of human rights, the postmodernist Right calls attention to its own alternative. It speaks on behalf of the distinctiveness of peoples and regions and upholds their inalienable right not to be “culturally homogenized.”
According to former New Leftists Paul Piccone and Russell Berman, the appeal to political universals echoes a bourgeois culture that has been appropriated by New Class operatives. The insistence that everyone should follow the same political model, explain Piccone and Berman, reflects the interests of state managers, now in alliance with multinational corporations and deluded or bribed intellectuals. All of these groups are relentlessly opposed to human particularity and community, conditions that obstruct the consolidation of their own power. Without social planning as a human right, or so goes this postmodernist argument, families and regions in the United States would reaffirm their identities and educate their young in accordance with ancestral wisdom.
This communitarian vision is open to criticism on several counts. There is no evidence that most Americans are looking for roots, save as a conversation piece or as a victimological asset. There also is no reason to conclude that if people did organize themselves along traditional communal lines, they would thereby create a harmonious world. Communities have been hostile to each other throughout time, and it might be asked whether the restoration in the United States of European ethnic enclaves would lead to the happy interaction of American Serbs, American Croatians, and members of other groups bearing bitter memories about historical enemies.
It is, furthermore, naive to believe that all communities will come to view their own traditions as no better or worse than those of others. The assumption of cultural superiority is not confined to global democratic enthusiasts. It is equally characteristic of traditional religious and ethnic communities, which have histories of treating each other unkindly. While it may be possible to get most of these groups to live together, as they were doing in the United States before a managerially directed pluralism, such coexistence will have to be built on the residual influence of the Age of Reason. Postmodernists of the Right plainly detest this epoch; nonetheless it was the Enlightenment belief in shared human Reason that provided a basis for mutually respecting communities. Although the Enlightenment also produced less fortunate legacies, particularly the idea of “rational” world government, it did shape the prospect for communities that can coexist in harmony. Defenders of that communal prospect, like Edmund Burke and Johann Gottfried Herder, also contributed to the appreciation of national traditions and thereby to the flowering of European romanticism. But there is nothing contradictory about an organic traditionalism that tolerates and even finds some of itself in other traditions. The considered tolerance of traditions shown by Burke and other romantic precursors went beyond the outlook of a narrowly sectarian or culturally closed society. Eighteenth-and nineteenth-century cultural commentators assumed there were common features of thought and habit in all civilized societies that made them more similar than different. The attitude toward communities on the postmodernist Right harks back to that modernist perspective more than it does to the exclusivist sentiments of at least some pre- modern societies.
Another observation may be in order about the postmodernist Right. Its defense of tradition has still not moved from a critical stance or a shared demonology toward any workable alternative to the managerial state. Although a source of hatred for the postmodernist Left (Jacques Derrida, among other representatives of this side, has called for censoring European New Right publications), the postmodernist Right has had little direct political influence.76 Its ideas remain entirely oppositional and depend for their effect on being popularized by the European populist Right. Significantly, the intellectual and populist Rights both reveal the same widening chasm between European regionalists like Alain de Benoist and recycled nationalists like Le Pen. As Benoist has observed in correspondence with me, it is only in the present “Manichean [intellectual] universe” that he and Le Pen could be grouped together. In a less controlled political culture, their differences would seem more obvious. Unlike Le Pen, Benoist does not believe that cultural identity is fixed as an “essentialist” attribute by “glorious historical points of reference.” Even less does he think, like members of the National Front, that the “history of France stopped in the past.”77
Despite high-placed enemies and internal divisions, the postmodernist Right does continue to exercise a critical function. It has become the other edge of the postmodernist sword. No longer do all attacks on bourgeois modernity come from either the academic scribes or the media priesthood of the managerial state. The aggressive self-defensiveness of human rights activists and engaged pluralists, moreover, suggests their own intellectual limits. The pathologization of dissent and the calls for government and media censorship that emanate from these groups underscore their unwillingness to discuss openly what is now being challenged. Not only postmodernist intellectuals but European populists are accusing their opponents of hiding obvious truths. Thus Le Pen ridicules French journalists for “pretending” to believe what no thinking person could accept: that democracy means submission to administrators, that gender roles are social constructs, and that the French nation consists of populations wandering in and out of the historic French hexagon.78 Despite the dismissive treatment given to such charges by the press, they do raise questions about the meaning of intellectual tolerance. Respectable journalists and academics do not invite discussion of what they no longer intend to treat as open questions. They expect that those whom they honor with academic and journalistic posts will know how to behave in ritualized dialogues. Those they induct into their circle will be sufficiently cowed or sensitized not to deviate from established therapeutic and globalist assumptions. This expectation may still be justified, but in a highly literate society with multiple information sources, it is hard to keep real political disagreement from being noticed.
TOWARD A STRIPPED-DOWN POPULISM
An area in which the managerial state has been able to socialize easily is public education. Public school systems have been receptive to social psychologists and therapeutically inclined administrators; in much of the Western world public schools have functioned in the absence of serious competition. Ninety percent of American students attend public schools from kindergarten through high school, and in Italy, Sweden, Portugal, and Greece the percentage of students in pre-university public education is even higher.79 In Italy and France, however, parents have organized to promote “liberty of instruction” and are now publishing nationwide reports on alternatives to public schools. Two plans for private education that have been touted in Europe are a Swedish program, first implemented in 1990, and the voucher proposal being introduced in some American states. Significantly, neither takes measures to keep the public sector out of private schools. In Sweden the government has tried to resurrect private education as a competitive alternative to the public system. By distributing subsidies the ministry of education has pushed the percentage of Swedish students attending private institutions from 1.1 to 5 percent. In the United States some states, for example, Michigan and Wisconsin, pay private schools, among others, a prearranged amount per registered student. This policy is presented as a means of increasing parental choice. But the Swedish and American plans leave the state, not private institutions, as the ultimate custodians of learning: the Swedes are rebuilding private education as a state-administered project, while Americans make public support for private schools dependent upon compliance with federal and state behavioral and admissions guidelines.80
Despite increasing public administration in the United States, some skepticism about its reach and purpose has set in. A changing attitude is present toward the ideas and class associated with governing. This attitude has gone from being affirmative in the 1950s, a time when the American “democratic faith” was most widely believed, to being overwhelmingly critical. Though Americans still want government to look after them, almost half of those polled fear the same government and do not believe it “represents” them.81 The negative view of public education and the popular quest for private alternatives is a case in point. Although the state and its therapeutic administrators still hold the good cards in any plan now being considered to privatize education, more important, it would seem, is the demand itself. People are losing faith in the capacity of government to provide adequate educational services. Today the greatest faith in the American administrative regime is found among immigrants, a fact not likely to be lost on the political class and its defenders. Immigrants may feel grateful to a government that has encouraged them to come, in the face of popular resistance.82
One should not assume (like the American Political Science Association and columnist David Broder) that Americans, especially young ones, have turned cynical about government. “Cynical” refers to those who question the self-congratulation engaged in by the American political class. People may vote for whatever gray alternatives the system permits, but no longer find those alternatives especially appealing and define their relation to them in starkly utilitarian terms. Most Americans do not wish to rule themselves but are not happy with the governing that goes on. Thus they ask that power be turned over to regions and states whenever they sense that federal administration does not respond to their needs. Finally citizens are protesting more and more against the rule of judges. Whence the outcry at judicial tyranny in California after the passage of Proposition 187 and in Colorado when a state referendum was passed against the introduction of special bills protecting gay rights.83 The move by judges to strike down these populist initiatives caused tempers to flare. Furthermore, judicial governance in the United States, which in Kansas and Illinois has resulted in taxes being raised for court-ordered school busing, has become an incendiary issue. Judicial remedies are now widely seen as excuses for the rule of social experts.
In 1995 several governors, most notably Pete Wilson of California and John Engler of Michigan, emphatically refused to pay for an unfunded mandate from Congress, the Motor Voter Act, which required the states to extend voting registration services to motor vehicle departments. Whereas most of the protesting governors stressed the unfair financial burden being inflicted, Wilson and Engler also brought up the populist constitutional issue, namely, that the federal government had no constitutional right to be interfering in the conduct of elections by the states.84 As in his stand on Proposition 187 and his suspension of affirmative action programs in California, Wilson took the lead in marching under a populist banner. The citizens of states and their elected state officials, he indicated, were justified in resisting undue interference by federal administrators and unelected judges, or by Congress when it exceeded its enumerated powers.
Clearly Wilson, who rose politically as a liberal Republican, was trimming his sails to an electoral wind. His populist stands had brought him as a gubernatorial candidate in 1994 from more than twenty points behind his Democratic opponent to a decisive victory. In 1995 Wilson pushed his luck by trying to parlay his populist image into a presidential nomination. His lackluster personality kept this from happening, and thereafter Wilson returned to California to deal with judicial and administrative attempts to block his resistance to federal power.85
What is most striking about this populist adventure is its lack of a rightist ideological dimension. Unlike Buchanan and Le Pen, Wilson does not appeal to the ideals of bourgeois modernity or to Christian resistance to late modern lifestyles. He supports abortion rights, equivocates on gay issues, and generally gets poor grades from the Christian Right. He avoids cultural wars on most social issues in order to get to the heart of his agenda: the punishment of criminals, the restoration of power to the states, and tight control of borders against illegal immigrants.
In some of these stands Wilson resembles the Canadian populist Preston Manning, whose Reform Party in 1992 displaced the centrist Progressive-Conservatives as Canada’s federal opposition on the right. Scion of a political dynasty from Alberta, where the elder Manning had been premier and head of the populist Social Credit Party, Preston Manning has continued a family tradition by opposing leftist elites. He has thundered against immigration expansionists and in Alberta was outspoken in support of the death penalty. Manning has called for a federal referendum on the restoration of capital punishment and advocates the same democratic technique for other questions of national importance.86
For all of Manning’s invocation of a Canadian national consciousness, his party has distinctly regional and ethnic appeals. It picks up most of its votes in the prairie and Western provinces. In 1992 Reform Party candidates won large pluralities in both these areas. The Reform Party has also gained a stronghold in the British Protestant Canadian East, most conspicuously around Uxbridge, Colburg, Newmarket, and Belleville. There and elsewhere in Eastern Ontario, Manning’s Anglophone Canadian nationalism enjoys exuberant support.87 His party has opposed not only Quebec-secessionism but the linguistic disabilities imposed on Quebec’s Anglophone population by the ruling Parti Québecois. Manning has thereby merged federalism and regionalism with British cultural identity, though it is difficult to foresee what kind of change to the Canadian political structure he and his party would introduce once in power.
While it is not being argued that populism as a postliberal democratic force can only prevail by avoiding divisive moral issues, this may be increasingly true of North American Anglophone societies. Without control of public administration, social programs, and the media, populists must pick their issues with exceeding care. They will have to focus on what is inoffensive to late modernist sensibilities but also on what captures electorates that fear violence and relative deprivation. Those whom populists must attract belong to a Hobbesian world: driven by the quest for commodity and the fear of violence, these electorates are capable of, at most, provisional allegiances. They follow those who dispel their fears and who convincingly promise to satisfy material needs.
But the convenient state that has resulted from this disposition and from the ability of some to exploit it has at times acted imprudently. It has tried to do what it should not, at the cost of its real but modest mandate. The political class has forgotten that its subjects will serve it and its court religion to whatever extent it goes on feeding and protecting. As in Hobbes’s Leviathan, though subjects are materially driven and fear-obsessed, their loyalty is not unconditional. It is only there when their needs are being met—or, more precisely, when people believe this is happening. Fearful subjects have given up liberty for security, but they may regret this choice if the sovereign loses their respect. This Hobbesian understanding of the nature and limits of authority goes back to the dawn of modern political thought, and it throws light on the populist insurgency that now confronts the managerial state.