Jacob Levy: Populism's Dangerous Companions: "It’s an interesting and illuminating exercise to single out a shift from debates about cultural moralism to those about nationalism as the important destabilizing influence.... Jerry Falwell Jr.’s sycophancy toward a serial adulterer, multiple divorcé, and seeker of sexual favors from nude models and porn actresses is a nice synecdoche for the apparent surrender of the old religious right, even in the United States, on everything except abortion...
...But... economic anxiety... the new style of politics. But of course it remains true that it’s not the genuinely poor and precarious who have embraced it.... The kind of politics Davies is describing is a fearful one, and always ripe for demagoguery and hysteria. The more terrifying a picture can be painted of aliens and immigrants, foreigners and elites, the better for the electoral prospects of those promoting borders closed to trade and migration.... National collectivism has predecessors and ancestors.... There have been normal parties committed to economic protectionism, but hostility to immigration and immigrants calls forth something else.... The combination of a longing for unity and distrust of elites makes populism congenial to one-man rule. A would-be autocrat can speak in one unified voice, as competing elites cannot. He can offer the many an alliance against the few, marking them as enemies of the true people....
Davies argues that unlike the free market conservatives, the national collectivists “support an active economic role for government and a large and generous but strictly national welfare state.” But at least in the United States, supposed “free market conservatives” have held that latter position for generations... agricultural subsidies, Social Security, the Federal Housing Administration, and the GI Bill amount to a large and generous but mostly white welfare state from the 1930s on.... None of this was ever seriously challenged even under Reagan or Gingrich. It was the additions to the redistributionist state of the 1960s, aimed at urban and minority recipients, that were stigmatized.... The broad base of voters electing people Davies calls “free market conservatives” were only very rarely really free market conservatives as Davies imagines that position. And the distance they have traveled thus isn’t as large as he imagines it to be. Race is always one of the dimensions of alignment in the United States, and it exerts a gravitational pull on the others....
Davies may... understate the exceptional character of... Trump... by treating it as the birth pangs of a new normal partisan alignment.... He ma... overstate its novelty in substantive ideological terms...
#shouldread
