What's the Matter With Populism?

I just finished reading Thomas Frank's "What's The Matter With Kansas?" Frank is an excellent writer, and the book is an entertaining polemic. The book is about Kansas City as much as it is about Kansas. I'm from Kansas City myself, and much of what Frank says rings true to me.

The book traces the rise of conservative populism in Kansas, and its baleful influence on public policy. The newest form of conservative populism has made the rich richer and the poor poorer, driving even greater waves of anger and resentment, and leading to even more self-defeating policies. There is one passage where Frank imagines a group of angry working class cultural conservatives marching on the wealthy suburbs of Mission Hills, denouncing the cultural elitism of the latter, and shouting "We are here to lower your taxes!" Articulating this sort of perversity is where the book really does its best work.

At the same time, Frank does not really give a good account of why this populist perversity arose. As a theorist of ideology, I tend to dislike arguments based on false consciousness. My sense is that the more you know about people's values and their circumstances, the less you will jump to the conclusion that they are necessarily acting against their interests. Rather, they may define their interests differently than you do. One of the things that gets jettisoned with so-called scientific Marxism is the notion that people have an objective interest which is the objective interest of their particular economic class. Life is much more complicated, and interests are made, assumed, and developed rather than simply superimposed on people.

That is not to say that there isn't a very good argument that conservative populism has led to government policies that harm working class people. It has, and Frank offers many examples in his book. But conservative populists are not necessarily dupes. Rather, as Dan Kahan has pointed out to me in conversation, people may believe that it is more important for them to have leaders that they trust and whose values they identify with than leaders who will benefit their economic interests. Indeed, if you think that much of what happens in the domestic economy is out of government's hands, or that government should stay out of it, you are naturally drawn to emphasize character and shared values as the key reason you vote for someone. Conversely, if you do think government has an necessary role in improving people's lives and responding to threats, and if you lack the time or inclination to study the issues in depth, you are likely to trust people whose values seem to be closest to your own as the people most likely to do the right thing.

That is why values matter so much in politics. (Here I am drawing on Dan Kahan's work on cultural formation of political attitudes) People use values as a proxy for knowledge about the causes of social problems and the effects of potential government policies. You might not know what the best solution is or what is causing the problem, but you'd rather trust someone who seems to be your kind of person with your kind of values to figure this out than someone who doesn't seem to share your values. If trust and confidence are the key reasons for supporting one kind of leader rather than another, values politics makes a good deal of sense.

What conservative populism has in common with its earlier radical versions is its resentment of social and economic class. At one point Frank suggests a reason why this resentment is so easily diverted to Hollywood rather than Wall Street, but does not develop it further. However, if I am right that people are looking for proxies that give them reliable information about who to trust and who not to trust, then the most important proxies are those that are most salient. Hollywood is simply much more salient than Wall Street. The culture industry is everywhere and, indeed, spends good money to make sure that it is everywhere. Business organization and the effects of good and bad regulation and deregulation, on the other hand, are far less salient to people's lives, even if their actual economic effects are far greater. The same goes for the mass media. Dan Rather is far more in people's faces than the board of directors of any Fortune 500 corporation. Put somewhat differently, the image of the fat cat and the malefactor of great wealth at the turn of the twentieth century has been drowned out by (and displaced by) the image of the pampered, self-absorbed actor or rock star, or the supercilious network reporter at the turn of the twentieth-first century.

The irony, of course, is that the people who produce mass culture are much more after profits than liberal indoctrination. Michael Moore may be a liberal propagandist, but Moore is an independent filmmaker who usually operates on a shoestring, rather than the chairman of the board of Viacom, or, for that matter, Rupert Murdoch. Things appear on television (including Fox) because people who run these businesses believe that these shows will draw audiences and thus draw advertising revenues. Large audiences, in turn, make money from advertisers, who in turn produce advertising campaigns for businesses. Frank points out that the right is losing the culture wars because a significant part of the Republican coalition-- big business-- is actually on the other side. Businesses are perfectly happy to coarsen public discourse if it will draw audiences, maintain eyeballs, make advertising effective, and thus increase profits.

If I am right that salience matters, rather than Frank's version of false consciousness, Democrats will have to win the trust and confidence of the public before the public will vote for their policies, no matter how much those policies help the average American. That may seem to be a tall order, but Democrats once had that trust and confidence for several generations, and there is no reason why they cannot have it once again.