Tag: Populism

Joe Bageant was a journalist who wrote about how America misunderstood its white working class. He said in an inteview with the BBC in 2008 that white working class “rednecks” have political power, and were tending to conservative populism. Bageant’s comment on the financial crisis of 2008, Waltzing at the Doomsday Ball almost predicted the anger with elites triggered in the 2016 American elections by the Democratic candidate’s putting the white working class into the “basket of deplorables” who supported candidate Trump. His perspective and conclusions are “New Left”, and labor unionist – the working class has been oppressed by neoliberalism and neoconservativism.

Deer Hunting with Jesus is about the struggling, striving, suffering, white working class. It mentions gun culture, fundamentalism, alcohol, conservative talk radio, stock car racing, bass fishing, trailer parks, and country music. Deer Hunting with Jesus mainly about the consequences for working class Americansof the collapse of the detente between capital and labour in America . It prefaces George Packer’s The Unwinding as an account of the hollowing out of the economy. Bageant addesses the disappearance of jobs ith stories about real people. Bageant considered that much of the American working class has become hostile to “elites” who presume to teach, lead or influence working people. He identified some of the ideological and social influences, and struggles but struggles with history.

Bageant refers to the folk history foundation story of rednecks as the descendents Scotch-Irish immigrants. The common sense and widely accepted nationalist account of the history of working people, inequality and class in America history goes back to the bloodlines and culture of Scotch-Irish Americans and southern Poor Whites. This account endures was considered relevant by the author of Albion’s Seed and popularized in American Nations by Colin Woodard.

Migrants to America had to pay for passage – for 17th an 18th century immigrants from Britain, it meant joining a religious dissident group proposing settlement, or years of servitude and struggle. In America, settlers on the frontier occupied land and displaced the First Nations. This served English Imperial policy, until the settlers demand land and protection from the British Crown against hostile powers, including the First Nations. The American revolution was a revolution of American merchants and landowners against the institutions of colonial rule – a replacement of aritstocracy with oligarchy, in the guise of a democracy of hard-working strivers. The frontier culture favoured the strong and the brave – risk takers, prepared to resort to force to achieve worthy goals. This culture endures, but is not uniquely Scotch-Irish, British, Southern American, Appalachian, Western American or frontier. The history of people is a history of migration and struggle for shelter and subsistence.

Class, more than ethnic origins, is implicated. For instance, in the 1850’s the American Party proudly identified itself as the Know-Nothing party and engaged in violent protests that turned into riots. The history of class in divisions in America has been told in histories such as Nancy Isenberg’s White Trash, summarized in this Washington Post book review. I will have to read and consider that book.

Bageant argues that rednecks are an oppressed class that has so thoroughly absorbed American culture that it lacks class consciousness. Bageant’s view of the history of the working class seems to be based on popular histories – perhaps the Howard Zinn view of American history. Bageant seems to accept and adapt the Chomsky-Herman Manufactured Consent idea or the idea of a Polico-Media complex. Bageant accepts the idea that right-wing populism in America is exceptional. It may be unique and different, but right wing populism has appeared around the world.

Working persons want sufficient wages to live well, and to advance. Investors and manager want to extract labour from workers at the lowest cost, and to extract profits by selling the lowest quality goods and services and the highest profits that can be extracted. Working people are compelled to work with unpleasant co-workers and customers, and to take orders from bosses with arbitrary powers.

The working person must act from behind several literal veils of ignorance. Not surprizingly, life will appear chaotic and unfair. A person may suspect misinformation and systemic unfairness. The American redneck assumes that he knows what he needs to know, and has the capability and instincts to decide well and be successful and happy. The Dunning-Kruger effect is real, and exists as a consistent feature of thinking. Some people are consistently wrong – or just unlucky. The redneck is sure that someone is holding him back.

Redneck identity politics focusses on perpetuating the advantages, such as they are, of conservative white working people, against elites. Grievance at social “privilege” is at the root of identity politics. The word elite refers to political, social or economic advantage or “privilege In redneck identify politics it may be people who have “unfair” advantages, or anyone who does not know their place in society. Redneck populism is egalitarian in a levelling way. It is disrespectful both of “elites” and of persons who may be trying to gain advanages over members of the working class. It is also rudely sceptical. Elites may include corporations, investors, educated persons, managers and marketers. Competitors for economic opportunity may include immigrants, workers in other countries, minorities, women, or members of other ethnic or racial groups.

The resentment of unfair competition intersects with nationalism, racism and fascism. Notoriously, 20th century European fascist theorists rationalized the identification of enemies as central to patriotism:

“The specific distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy,”
For Schmitt, the friend/enemy antithesis was integral, even “existential,” to politics. It was existential in three senses: the enemy needed to be “existentially something different and alien”; opposing such an enemy was the essence of identity; and, in the implicit combat that followed, these enemies posed an existential threat. “The friend, enemy, and combat concepts receive their real meaning precisely because they refer to the real possibility of physical killing”.

“The terrifying rehabilitation of Nazi scholar Carl Schmitt“, The New Statesmen America, April 10, 2019

Who should the working person trust – oligarchs, managers, marketers, academics, politicians, revolutionaries, gurus, influencers?

Some writers – e.g. in a post in the Marginal Revolutions blog in 2017, the economist Tyler Cowen – mention American nations : a history of the eleven rival regional cultures of North America as a partial explanation for support for the candidacy of Donald Trump among American working class and middle class voters in the midwest in the 2016 American elections. I found a copy in the Oak Bay Branch of Greater Victoria Public Library.  It was catalogued as children’s nonfiction.  The children in Oak Bay must be precocious.  As Garrison Keilor said in his NPR broadcasts and books. “Welcome to Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average”.

Colin Woodard is a journalist and writer of explanatory nonfiction. American Nations presents a condensed introduction to a theory of American history: tracking regional culture back to the European settlement of different parts of North America by distinctive groups. Woodard accepts that the modern view of modern American historians that cultures of different parts of America evolved from the cultures of the first European settlers. The idea is that America was a political movement to create a state, as that term was understood in political theory and international law, before there was an American nation. This idea resembles some early modern political theories, and can be seen as a revival of theories of blood and race, but is less interested in the origins and traditions of particular settler groups

For instance Alan Taylor in American Colonies and other works. Consider this review and summary (Scott Alexander) of Albion’s Seed by David Fischer. Woodard summarized American Nations in a 2013 article in Tufts Magazine. (Map in the Tufts Magazine piece). Several of the “nations”:

• Yankeedom – New England was settled by English religious dissenters, who framed their activities as creating a new moral world in the wilderness.   Fischer used the term “Puritans”;
• Tidewater- Virginia and Maryland were settled by English gentry, who emulated the culture of the lower aristocracy and the rising English mercantile classes.  Fischer refers to the migration of the Cavaliers to Virginia after the triumph of the Roundheads and the rise of the Lord Protector. Fischer also refers to class differences between the Cavaliers and their indentured servants;
• Deep South – settled by agricultural entrepreneurs who moved to the Carolinas, bringing the plantation system, slavery, and self-serving attachment to the supposed traditions of the English aristocracy – descended from the Norman barons who conquered England in 1066;
• New Netherland – New York state surrounds New York City and Delaware. A trading centre – commercial and cosmopolitan;
• Midland – Pennylvania started as a land grant to a utopian religious dissident;
• Greater Appalachia, parts of the deep South, parts of the midwest Midland, and parts of the “Far West”(the prairies and Rocky Mountains). Northern English and lowland Scots came to America as indentured servants and immigrants and occupied the frontiers. After centuries of clan warfare in Europe, these belligerant borderlanders trusted their own kin and no others, and do what was necessary to secure the survival and advantage of the clan.  Woodard implies the Appalachians were the Americans that most readily adopted Manifest Destiny as an excuse to dispossess other nations. Fischer refers to Borderers, from both sides of Hadrian’s Wall as distinct entity, and as part of the migration of lower class people to America as indentured labourers.

Woodard’s ideas about the formation and persistence of political culture have some power to explain history. I don’t agree that this theory can account for current events.  The apportionment of values and tendencies to “nations” within the modern American polity has weaknesses. While the opponents of President Trump characterize his appeal as an appeal to local pockets of white grievance, e.g. in Appalalachia, Appalachians are not measureably more belligerent and grasping than other Americans – or for that matter anyone. Perhaps Richard Slotkin‘s cultural histories of the American willingness to use violence to acquire and hold property on a hostile frontier such as Gunfighter Nation have more traction in explaining American populism.