True Populist

Anyone enjoy the first season of True Detective ? The “true detectives”, Rust and Marty, were very flawed people, but were driven by an unshakeable desire to see justice done — admittedly only on the “catch the bad guy” side it has to be said, not the “raise up the poor” side, but whatever. Griping entertainment with cinematic risk (à la Scorsese ).

This post I’m going to have a crack at writing about similar risk in politics.

What is True Populism?

You ought to read Thomas Frank if you’re asking this question, but here’s the short version.

True populism arose basically in Kansas in the 1890’s. It was a working class movement, cross-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-class (but rooted in the working class — upper crust people with a conscience, or “class traitors”, made up some of the composition). It rapidly spread across rural and small town USA.

Their cause was broadly speaking economic justice. The farmers wanted a fair deal, the workers wanted fair wages, not to be ripped off and exploited because they needed to work for wages just to eat.

No right-winger has ever been a true populist. Demonizing “the populist left” as like the conservative reactionary fake populists (Nixon, Buchanan, Trump, DeSantis, et al), is a terrible thing, and something Frank rightly rails bitterly against.

However, a lot of the grass roots support for these right-wing fake-populists comes from what would have been the Kansas roots — the farmers, the blue collar workers, the genuine intellectuals who had real knowledge in action, not book-knowledge “Das Kapital” idiocy. Real knowledge — what it is like to be desperately poor.

By the way, old Karl Marx had such knowledge. Academic leftist pseudo-marxists do not. A lot of that type of marxist-socialist (the mere book-read nerd type) rightly abandoned Leninism (too violent), but then unrightly turned traitor and adopted neoconservatism or centrist neoliberalism (basically anti-communism, but not for good reasons). Neoliberalism is no less violent than Stalinism or Leninism, just a different form of violence.

However, even some pseudo-Marxists who did not jump ship to neoliberalism have still not understood populism. However, I won’t say old K.M. himself would’ve or would not have embraced populism, I don’t know what he would’ve thought. It is however always a slimy cop-out to label something “bourgeois” and reject it via the label connotations (although, this is a legitimate tactic as regards MacDonalds fast-food, just apply the label “MacDonalds” and Boom!, you have an instant rejection by a bolshy food-snob like myself). Marxism itself is bourgois, justsayin'.

However, you can find Idiot Nerds writing against populism${}^\ast$ from the Marxist Ivory Tower say here :

Says this marxist nerd: “Those of us who would change the world must first unlearn the dogmas of capitalism and construct new ways of thinking. Only when these ideas become sufficiently widespread (whether in the working class or a group defined on some other basis) can a challenge be mounted which could really threaten the dominant structures of the present society. Only then can we begin to consider the possibility of radical social transformation as an immediate political possibility.”

“Those of us who would change the world…” oh my gawd!

${}^\ast$I picked this article out because it was fair writing, it’s not exactly vigorously anti-populism, but it was too smug for my taste. Also, the author might not be an academic, so the “Ivory Tower” jab is just me doing some rhetoric.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for “raising class consciousness”. But man, it’s not rocket science. Some of these academic marxists have no clue. They’re almost impediments to overthrowing neoliberalism (I know they do not mean to be, I don’t hate these writers).

You need a little humanity, some honesty, some humility, some balls, and a bit of a load of sh*t dumped on you by a boss. That can be turned into a potent revolutionary force brew. You don’t need a whole new language or elite level comprehension my friends. There are no dogmas of capitalism anyone needs to unlearn to know they’re being abused.

I think the revolution will be over well and truly before that author gets around to “consider the possibility of radical social transformation.” (Sounds like a plagiarism from a friggin Pete Buttigieg line — or was it the Starbucks CEO campaign, Howie $chmultz.)

This is one thing about populism, it can run over a population like a steam-roller, without killing anyone. We know it from history. More recently we saw fake-populism from the right-wing almost mimic true populism in spreading like a cancer. What we need is the steam-roller. Not the plague.

Also, what the hell is “sufficiently widespread”? You do not know what that is until after the fact. But there’s no point pissing around waiting for class consciousness to arise the way you say it should. It’s not science. Scientific materialism, or whatever the hell you think modern Marxism is based upon is a pile of horseshyte. But by all means, try to mold something from it if you can, I’m not opposed to the effort.

A revolutionary force does not need an army of policy wonks. There are plenty who’ll crawl out of the woodwork once the hard yakka has been done. Some might even be good MMT’ers, so you won’t all get f*ked over by more austerity in the name of Neo-Marx.

To Be Good Requires Populism

In political economy no pure ideology is going to take unless “the people” accept it. You are illegitimate if you force people at gun-point to accept a political regime. (Literal or figurative gun-point, either.)

“Where is the gun of neoliberalism?” you might ask. This is the thing, the neoliberals have the most powerful gun imaginable, it is invisible. Figuratively speaking. In cold hard visible Parliamentary and Congressional vote records you can easily see the gun if you want to, it’s the gun of artificial austerity — depriving the workers of the means to fend for themselves in the class war by over-taxing them and under-spending on public utilities.

There is no other macroeconomics lens that shows the horror of neoliberal austerity more clearly than MMT. The horror is truly seen once it is realized how the monetary system works. It is only then you realize austerity is a tragic waste of human lives. It is a gun, not just by metaphor but by concrete material effect. You might as well just be done with workers you resent by gasing them or executing them in neolib firing squads.

Neoliberalism works much more smoothly than a Nazi. You do not have to have a gas chamber or noose around the neck of a worker if you tax them and then starve them.

Pure ideologies have a natural pull towards totalising the economy. “Our way or the highway.” Populism is against such totalization. It listens to the voice of the people, and attempts to satisfy the many, while minimizing the costs to the few.

Is “listening to the voice of the people” itself a pure ideology? Not in my view, because that voice is highly heterogeneous. That voice contains contradictions, so is not pure. But that is why it is good.

To Be Good Requires Risk

The once popular freshman Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (or AOC) could have been a good populist. She had the right idea when she said once that there was no point to having a seat in Congress to fight injustice if she was not prepared to lose an election for speaking truth to power (or the like).

It is never too late for redemption, I say.

What about newly elected Representative John Fetterman? He’s not a true populist yet because he still believes in the “Tax-payer funded” myth .${}\dagger$ But he has potential to go that last yard. (It is tough for people elected out of local government office into central government, since in local government they were (still artificially mind you) operating in a regime that was financially constrained, in central government they are not, but many politicians cannot flip that switch.)

${}\dagger$Incidentally New Zealand academic Jonathan Barrett managed to write about the “tax payer funded " myth too, but still used atrocious language framing. He wrote as if the government has money “funds”. There is no such thing. The NZ Parliament has votes in the chamber for spending appropriations (and a bunch of Select Committee public hearings for the public to have their say before the votes). There is no fund in the New Zealand government, except on a spreadsheet.

If you are going to call a spreadsheet entry you control a “fund” you are some special type of sociopath. Legally the NZ government score-keeping is nothing like the legal liability of a private charity, savings & loan, or other house that has a fund in a bank account. Those bank accounts are funds, not because they are pots of gold, but because legally the holders are entitled to redemption from the banker. The government score-keeping is under no such liability. Only the NZ Crown has the legal right to issue the NZD by fiat. Banks have no such right.

The NZ government neither has money nor does not have money. We have a pure MMT system. It is a simple public monopoly and score-keeping system. It is good, popular and fit for purpose, if only the politicians knew that purpose and held to it (collectively they do not).

Rep. John Yarmuth (Kentucky) made the journey to MMT eventually, then retired. A pity. But as a private citizen he now also has a chance to redeem for past misguided allegiance to neoliberal centrism. I wonder what will become of him? It is never too late for an established insider, now an outsider, to risk facing the guns of neoliberalism. Take a few on the chin or in the guts for the working class.

Yeah, yeah, call me out for volunteering someone else for the firing squad. But you don’t know me. I’d take a gut full of bullets for all the workers of the world if they could be free of their bosses and still productive and creating the goods for each other. The perennial problem is utter obscurity, I can’t seem to take any bullets since no one is aiming at me. I’m a true populist but don’t have the holes in my guts to prove it.

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