A spectre is haunting the progressive elite -- the spectre of populism. All the powers of the global progressive establishment have entered into a secular alliance to exorcise this spectre: global leaders and multinational institutions, progressive left and Islamic extremists, left-wing professors and Hollywood moguls, social media and intelligence agencies, progressive politicians and government unions, tech billionaires and NGOs, feminists and gays.
Where is the populist nationalist who has not been decried as "extreme far-right" by opponents in power? Where is the pro-life activist who has not been investigated by the FBI? Where is the objective reporter that has not hurled back the branding reproach of extremism, against the more advanced populist activists, or anyone that does not recite the narrative of the reactionary progressive elite?
Two things result from this fact:
I. Populism is already acknowledged by all in the progressive elite to be itself a power.
II. It is high time that populists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the spectre of populism with a manifesto of the populist movement itself.
I. PROGRESSIVES AND VICTIMS(1)
The history of almost all hitherto existing society is the history of patronage and clientage. Freeman and slave, lord and serf, administrator and beneficiary, activist and rent-a-mob, in a word, patron and client stood in magisterial or servile relationship in which unequal power predominated.
In earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere this power relationship between patron and client. In the tribal community the village "big man" accumulates women and distributes favors. In feudal society the great lord defends his patrimonial estates from the piracy and plunder of other lords and a grateful peasantry grubs for the crumbs from his table in return for his protection.
For a moment in the nineteenth century this age-old relationship is interrupted by the rise of democratic capitalism. It substitutes enthusiastic Christianity for religious hierarchy, family for clan, trust for power, contract for status, equity for debt, and exchange for plunder.
From the self-made industrialists of democratic capitalism emerged an educated, progressive youth, born to prosperity, in love with authenticity, and searching for meaning. These progressives sneered at the surprising inventions of their fathers; they shouted down rules and roles and sought to achieve epiphany in creativity. In the sufferings of the industrial worker, painfully journeying from rural starvation in the status culture of the country to a moiety in the trust culture of the city, they found that meaning.
Expensively educated and segregated from ordinary life, the rising progressive elite determined to convert the wealth of the producers to relieve those who lived below the poverty line. They agitated for child labor laws, factory acts, government pensions, government unemployment benefits, government insurance. They advocated for votes for women, civil rights for blacks, welfare benefits for single mothers. Everything that offended their educated sensibilities would be reformed by legislation or mitigated by elite patronage.
Each step in the development of the progressive elite was accompanied by a corresponding political advance of that elite. Unknown before the rise of the commercial middle class, those political insurgents in the early development of modern government, the progressive elite has at last, with the establishment of the modern administrative state, conquered for itself a dominant political sway. The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole progressive elite.
The progressive elite, historically, has played a most reactionary part.
The progressive elite, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all benevolent, fraternal relations, and substituted between man and man no other nexus than naked political power, than callous "government programs." For employment at will it has compelled employers and employees into a rigid system of labor "rights." For "learning by doing" it has enforced a rigid system of compulsory education and box-checking credentialism. For mutual aid and fraternal association it has enforced a rigid system of compulsory government insurance. For saving it has substituted a rigid system of income redistribution. For stable prices it has substituted ruinous inflation. For charitable care it has substituted rule-bound social services.
The progressive elite has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation into a mere sexual encounter.
The progressive elite cannot exist without constantly re-regulating the instruments of production and consumption, and with them the whole relations of society. Constant tinkering with credit, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the progressive epoch from all earlier ones. All free, unhampered relations, with their record of competence and achievement, are swept away. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is ever compelled to face with sober senses his subservient relation to his progressive masters.
The need of a constantly expanding supply of victims chases the progressive elite over the entire world. It must criticize everywhere, nestle everywhere, and dominate everywhere. It has made victims of stalwart working men, confining them into labor unions dominated by its nominees. It has convinced well-born women of a spurious victimhood, representing their minor frustrations in the public square as eternal oppression. It has made victims of African-Americans, poisoning the painful liberation from bondage of the African slave with entangling bonds of patronage, and unjustly sponsoring a black racism that it ruthlessly persecutes in white people. It has made victims of vulnerable women, smashing the lower-class family with bribes and subsidies for single parents, creating a world in which the men don't work much and the women don't marry much. It has made victims of children, ripping them from their fathers, and incarcerating them throughout childhood in indifferent government schools. It has made victims of gays, truckling to every political fashion of the left-wing gay activists.
The progressive elite, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal government compulsion than have all preceding generations together. Care of the aged has been stripped from families and burdened on taxpayers; education of children has been stripped from parents and awarded to an administrative apparatus; relief of the poor has been stripped from the charitable and awarded to box-checking bureaucrats; the proud independence of the scientist has been converted into servile dependence upon political grant distributors. What earlier century had even a presentiment that such a deployment of political force would be tolerated by any human community?
The reactionary welfare state has overlaid democratic capitalism and reverted to the ancient power relations. It substitutes secular paganism for enthusiastic Christianity, government schools for independent schools, administrative regulations for free enterprise, government programs for mutual aid, victims for citizens. In the modern welfare state piratical progressive patrons collect tax plunder and government administrators distribute benefits to grateful clients and victims.
Our epoch, the epoch of the progressive welfare state, possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified power relationships. Every sinew of modern society strains to force citizens into one or other co-dependent role: progressive master or helpless victim.
We see then: the means of power and patronage, on whose foundation the progressive elite built itself up, were generated by democratic capitalism. That wealth and its productivity alone provided the resources by which the ruthless subventions and mechanical administrations of the progressive elite could be represented to the class of victims as caring and compassion.
The essential conditions for the existence and for the sway of the progressive elite is government power; the condition for government power is tax revenue. Tax revenue rests exclusively on the productivity of the producers. The advance of government, whose constant promoter is the progressive elite, constantly encroaches upon the productive capacity of the producers and their ability to serve the needs of the consumers. The development of the modern welfare state, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the progressive elite bases its power. What the progressive elite therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the populists are equally inevitable.
II. VICTIMS AND POPULISTS
In what relation do the populists stand to the class of progressive victims as a whole? The populists do not desire to use the clients of the progressive welfare state as political pawns in elite power games.
They have no interests separate and apart from those of the progressive victims as a whole.
They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mold the culture of the victim classes. The populists are distinguished from the progressives by this only:
1) In the struggles of ordinary people everywhere to aspire to the bare middle-class life of a thriving family, a good job, and a home of their own, populists offer this radical program: the way forward is through acquisition of skills and the Protestant Ethic and not through political force.
2) In the deployment of government resources towards progressive victims populists are dedicated to the principle of a hand up not a hand out, to reinforce success not subsidize failure. The immediate aim of the populists is the formation of non-progressive Americans into a governing majority, the overthrow of the progressive hegemony, and the reduction of the political power to its just position as coequal with the economic power and the moral/cultural power.
The theoretical and practical proposals of the populists are in no way based upon a specific program such as the comprehensive and mandatory government programs of the progressive elite. They merely express, in general terms, the commitment of the populists to offer to the progressive victims a complete manumission from the slavery of the progressive plantation.
The distinguishing feature of populiism is not the abolition of government generally but the abolition of unjust progressive government programs in particular. Progressive government programs are the final and most complete expression of the system of exploiting and appropriating the voting power of the victims that is based on progressive hegemony, on the exploitation of the many by the few.
In this sense, the program of the populists may be summed up in a single sentence. Abolition of progressive injustice.
We populists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing the benefits of health care, of education, and of welfare, which benefits are alleged to be the groundwork of all solidarity, equality, and dignity. But does the progressive government program create benefits for the victims? Not a bit. It creates progressive power, i.e., that kind of political power which seduces people of few skills and independence into inter-generational dependency while begetting a new supply of victim votes for fresh exploitation. The welfare state, in its present form, is based on the false choice between laissez-faire individualism and social assistance and deliberately obscures the real choice between a free and benevolent association and a compulsory government dependency.
We have seen above, that the first step in the emancipation of the victim class is to raise the victims out of dependency to a secure competency. Emancipated from the progressive plantation they may then take their place in the political life of the nation. Populists have no wish to lead or to exploit the emancipated victims, other than to congratulate them on their new-found emancipation.
III. COMMONERS AND POPULISTS(2)
Section II has made clear the relation of the populists to the progressive victims. They want nothing for them or from them except their emancipation from dependency.
Modern progressive hegemony has turned the economy of free enterprise into a vast sweat shop ruthlessly forced by regulation and taxation into compulsory support of the progressive patronage machine. Masses of workers are organized like soldiers. As privates in the progressive army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the progressive elite and of the progressive State; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the payroll tax, by the inspector, by the regulator, by the social-service worker and above all by the cadre of progressive activists and government managers. The more openly this despotism proclaims equality and compassion to be its end and aim, the more petty, the more hateful and the more embittering it becomes.
In some Americans the petty and hateful exploitations of the progressive elite ignites a populist fire; in others, the commoners, the same injustices provoke merely a resignation, a truckling to overweening power. These commoners, the natural allies of the populists, have been set against the populists by the cunning propaganda of the progressive elite.
But commoners and populists are thrown together by the cruel hegemony and escalating subventions of the progressives. The improved means of communication in the internet age permit commoners and populists to share their common grievances. And that union, to attain which the burghers of the Middle Ages required centuries, the modern commoners and populists may achieve in a few years.
Thus will the exploited commoners, in partnership with the populists, combine to win the battle of democracy. Commoners and populists will use their political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all privileges and unjust power from the progressive elite and remove all instruments of unjust compulsion from the hands of the State.
Of course, from the beginning, this will be effected without despotic inroads on the rights of employment and property or by means of measures which appear economically insufficient and untenable.
The following will be pretty generally applicable.
1. Abolition of all takings of private property except for a specific public purpose and that with just compensation.
2. A moderate and flat-rate income tax to replace the current unjust and corrupt progressive income tax.
3. Abolition of the death tax.
4. Guarantee of property rights even for emigrants and rebels.
5. Decentralization of credit by the abolition of central banking and the institution of free banking subject to clear and practical risk limitation. Abolition of the subsidy for debt.
6. Decentralization of the means of communication and transport from the hands of the State.
7. Abolition of all government sponsored enterprise and unfair competition with private enterprise.
8. Equal liability of all to labor. Abolition of licensure and credentialism. Abolition of racial preferences. Abolition of academic sinecures and collective bargaining by government employees.
9. Combination of learning and working; gradual abolition of the distinction between education and training.
10. Abolition of forced adolescence. An end to compulsory government education. Emancipation of children by examination.
When, in the course of development, progressive-provoked antagonisms have disappeared, and all economic affairs have been distributed in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its exclusive political character and dissipate into the economic and moral/cultural sectors. Overweening political power, properly so called, is merely the organized power of the progressive elite for oppressing all others.
In place of the old progressive hegemony, with its groups and group antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.
IV. POSITION OF THE POPULISTS IN RELATION TO THE PROGRESSIVE ELITE
The populists fight for immediate aims; they fight at every opportunity the expansion of the admininstrative state and its political patronage and corruption. They never cease, for a single instant, to instill into populists and commoners the clearest possible recognition of the hostile antagonism between progressives and the rest of society.
In short, the populists everywhere support the movement of freedom against the existing political order and its program of government expansion.
The populists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the power of ideas, peaceful persuasion, and faithful cooperation. Let the ruling progressive elite tremble at a populist revolution. Populists, commoners, and progressive victims have nothing to lose but their shame. They have a world to win.
MEN AND WOMEN OF THE WORLD, UNITE!
Footnotes:
1. By progressive is meant the educated elite, the patronat of the modern welfare state. By victims is meant the class of welfare state beneficiaries who, deprived of savings or property by government patronage, are reduced to selling their voting power in order to live.
2. By commoners is meant people of moderate temper shamed into silence by the cultural hegemony of the progressive elite. By populists is meant people of moderate temper that resist the cultural hegemony of the progressive elite.
