Some voters, like some intellectuals, are attracted primarily by the mode of politics rather than the substance.
Just wanted to expand upon a thought I shared on X. Here was the thought:
I think we need to expand our political vocabulary beyond ideological content to include modes of politics.
People who talk about a populist “philosophy” as if it had perennial policy commitments are ignorant. It is more properly a mode of politics.
Populism can describe a perennial rhetorical style and spirit: Corrupt elites vs the virtuous people. The (rich or poor) rent-seekers, versus the producers. This style is as old and durable part of our civilization as the Old Testament from which it comes. It may also tempt practitioners to certain perennial excesses and vices: conspiratorial thinking, scapegoating.
But the content of populist ideas and policies changes from age to age as the status of certain ideas rises or falls. It delineates who holds the ideas, enthusiastic amateurs, or incumbent elites.
America’s most famous populist movement at its most radical edges promoted economist Henry George and fiat currency. Both of these are now defended in high-status think tanks from a variety of their “populist” critics.
The populist spirit can be your movement’s ally when your movement’s ideas are exiled from powerful institutions, but prevalent as “common sense.”
Other political modes exist. I would say a “conservative, Establishmentarian” mode exists — it is the suspicion of the novel, combined with a strong bias toward the futility of human effort. But it may be joined to any number of incumbent philosophies. Its signature virtue is patience with tolerable problems, and adjoining vice is perverse lassitude in the face of dysfunction and injustice.
So, dwelling a little more: I think an example of an “establishmentarian mode” joined to liberal or progressive politics explains the strange toleration of disorder, exploitation, and human trafficking around the southern border. The liberal political commitment demands an open border, but the way in which it is achieved is actually by cultivating an “establishmentarian” pessimism about either making it orderly (and safe) or simply accepting all the negative externalities as “the way of the world.”
Some voters, like some intellectuals, are attracted primarily by the mode of politics rather than the substance. I think this explains a little bit why populists seem to move so freely from Bernie-ism to Trumpism. And likewise, some are repulsed by the mode on offer. I think a lot of conservative intellectuals have a deeply anti-populist taste in politics. Before they disagreed with Trumpism, they were repulsed by it. It doesn’t change or impeach their intellectual objections, it’s just a prejudice acting as a bulwark around that conviction.
And I’m not against prejudice, of course, having learned my conservatism from Roger Scruton, who said that our task was to look for the reasons for commitments and loyalties that we didn’t reason ourselves into.