Sustaining Socialism, Progressivism, and Populism

Robert E. Wright, Senior Research Fellow, AIER

APEE, 12 April 2021

 

The precepts of classical liberalism eventually prevail when pitted against the policies of populism, progressivism, socialism, racism, nationalism, and other illiberal -isms because classical liberalism articulates the closest approximation of social reality that human beings are currently capable of developing. History, however, reveals that societies can maintain numerous illiberal policies for decades and even centuries and that illiberal policies can even supplant superior, entrenched classical liberal policies. This essay describes some of the ways in which the degradation of journalism and higher education combined to create political pressure to substitute illiberal for classical liberal policies in the United States since the late nineteenth century.

Homo furem, a suggested Latin species name for human beings that literally translated means “man the thief,” is less uplifting than Homo sapiens but perhaps more accurate because human beings are more cunning than wise, willing to steal from their conspecifics via sleight of hand when brute force will not do. As Frederic Bastiat explained in The Law, theft is not always, or even usually, unlawful. The main effect, if not purpose, of many laws, rules, and regulations is to divert resources from one person or group to another, often in insidiously complex ways as Thomas Paine noted. Limited government, a keystone of classical liberal policy, remains the major bulwark against rule by, of, and for Homo furem.

Populism, progressivism, and socialism,[i] like other related but heterogeneous and fundamentally illiberal statist political movements or persuasions,[ii] attempt to lawfully divert resources from one group to another. Populists, progressives, and socialists cannot openly admit their redistributionist goals and many acolytes, like the literal workhorse Boxer in Animal Farm, may not even realize that they toil to perpetuate a variant of Homo furem. If socialists, progressives, and populists were as brutally honest as Pink Floyd in “The Dogs of War” -- “you must die so that they may live” -- fearsome opposition to their policy positions would arise.[iii]

So, instead, populists, progressives, and socialists purport to protect the average citizen from injustices perpetrated by elites and in some instances, like voting reforms, may have done so.[iv] To maintain their power when they push redistributive policies, however, they engage in three major rhetorical tactics designed to hide the distributional effects of their policy goals, including ignoring them, denying or distorting them, and unleashing ad hominem attacks on those who point(ed) them out.

Cognizant that public opinion on policy matters can to some extent be framed in ways that make reform adoption more likely,[v] illiberal statists engage in those three tactics via “printed” sources (printed newspapers, magazines, and books and now blogs or other posted websites), live “broadcasts” (speeches, radio, TV, and now streaming video), and “personal” but not privileged communication (letters and now emails and texts, personal visits, telegrams, and telephone calls). Populists, progressives, and socialists own some media outlets, while others they merely capture to varying degrees, constrained by the media’s bias in favor of controversy, bad news, and anything else that increases subscriber or advertising revenue.[vi]

The costs and benefits of each of those modes of communication vary but basically entail a tradeoff between message specificity and monetary cost, with printed and broadcast modes leveraging economies of scale to achieve a lower monetary cost per view but with a more generic message than can be delivered via personal communication.[vii] Hybrid approaches, like printing personal letters in newspapers, discussing speeches in magazine articles or on television, local book discussion clubs, and so forth, have been used to increase reach with little incremental cost.

Social media, which combines the customizability of personal communication with some of the economies of scale inherent in print and broadcast modes of communication, constitutes a new hybrid modality that over a given period or budget appears capable of attracting to a cause more followers, if not committed acolytes, than any earlier mode because it disintermediates key gatekeepers, i.e., publishers of news and commentary across media modalities.

Although since at least the Great War publishers have felt pressures to be more progressive (stressing differences and the need for reform) or patriotic (stressing unity and the status quo), until recently professionalism (stressing nonpartisan reporting of all major events) constituted the overriding goal of most journalists and publishers.[viii] The first major fissures appeared in the 1960s with the rise of a so-called “new journalism” that rewarded a creative, literary writing style over accurate factual description. Participatory and politicized journalism soon followed but at least remained controversial.[ix] Over the last few decades, however, major news outlets, including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, have become demonstrably far more partisan, especially towards the Left of the political spectrum, in their news coverage (i.e., excluding editorials and letters).[x]

At the same time, public primary and secondary education as well as higher education has become decidedly more slanted towards Left worldviews.[xi] A recent analysis of party affiliation, as measured by voter registration, shows that at 40 of the nation’s most elite universities, many more faculty members in key policy disciplines, including economics (4.5 Democrats to every 1 Republican), history (33.5 D to 1 R), journalism (20 to 1), law (8.6 to 1), and psychology (17.4 to 1) register to vote as Democrats. Younger faculty at more prestigious universities are even more likely to register Democrat than the 11.5 to 1 overall average ratio. Republicans at elite American universities are so few that in many, students are as likely to be taught by professors registered in the Left radical Green Party or the Working Families Party as they are to have a Republican professor. Not a single professor registered Republican in 66 of the 170 departments (39%) studied. In short, American university students in key policy disciplines at key schools are not learning equally from both sides of the political spectrum, much less being taught by classical liberal scholars on a regular basis.[xii]

The political leanings of professors teaching at lesser institutions offering “mass” higher education is similarly skewed but in the end that hardly matters because neither they nor their students possess sufficient clout or understanding to sway a public policy discourse dominated by elites. A third of college graduates demonstrate limited or no growth on the College Learning Assessment or Collegiate Assessment of Academic Proficiency measures of critical thinking, complex reasoning, or written communication skills.[xiii]

Moreover, grade compression (sometimes called “conflation,” “distortion,” or “inflation”) – which is a real phenomenon though more complex in its origins than often portrayed -- ensures that better students have little incentive to study hard because they learn that a modicum of effort is often sufficient to result in a high grade.[xiv] Whatever its causes, the high grades given to most university students, even mediocre ones, reinforces the Left’s emphasis on “equity.”[xv] Because merit has lost its meaning in U.S. mass higher education, most degrees, even ones tagged laude, do little more than signal basic literacy and numeracy and an ability successfully to negotiate bureaucratic structures to achieve symbolic goals. No independent thinking required, or, in many schools, desired.[xvi]

Finally, high school and college curricular content abets illiberal ideologies through the inculcation of historical and social narratives amenable to them.[xvii] Pedagogy remains rote and largely devoid of instruction in logic and statistics so that students do not learn how to rationally critique knowledge claims. Many graduates therefore unquestionably accept the populist-progressive-socialist policy prescriptions embedded in many so-called “liberal arts” courses.[xviii]

Consider the claims of a “communication” professor from Purdue:

Capitalism is destroying the world. Capitalists accumulate profits by wrenching unrenewable natural resources from the earth, dispossessing nations of their public wealth, and draining the lifeblood of workers everywhere.

Those words appeared in a peer-reviewed journal.[xix] Presumably in class the professor tells students what he really thinks, which would be fine except most of his students will never hear another version of reality and do not have the critical thinking skills necessary to question the professor’s absurd assertions.

When the current U.S. republic began to form in the mid-1770s, only a small percentage of the population graduated from high school, much less college. Nevertheless, many knew how to think independently and could be swayed with evidence and logic, as Thomas Paine did with Common Sense. Even barely literate men, like William Manning, could not just understand but articulate the Key to Liberty. Parents and other community members cherished common sense and independent thinking, a discipline of mind undoubtedly honed by widespread proprietorship. “Let it be remembered,” New York politician De Witt Clinton argued in 1828, “that the uneducated and unenlightened must necessarily be the mere playthings and tools of political ambition. … All popular error, confusion, and violence,” he believed, stemmed from “prejudice and ignorance.” It was “the business of education to purify this atmosphere, and to drive out the pestilence.”[xx]

Cracks began to appear in the antebellum period, during the great debate over slavery. More formal schooling, some of it public, combined with less proprietorship (more employment) and increasing numbers of foreign immigrants to decrease the median ability and incentive of Americans to engage in independent thought. Unitarian preacher William Ellery Channing was one of the first to sound the alarm when he complained that a small cabal of people could use a network of nonprofits to flood American readers with cheap misinformation. Worse still, this group of elites, actuated by party feelings, could “silence opposition” through “menace and appeals to interest.” In other words, they could frighten or pay off opponents to keep them from speaking out while pernicious doctrines spread via “controul of newspapers.” Anyone who resisted could be persecuted as a “hated party.” “Public opinion may be so combined, and inflamed,” Channing warned, “that it will be as perilous to think and act with manly freedom, as if an Inquisition were open before us.”[xxi]

Before the Civil War, Americans were more interested in questions of slavery and freedom than socialism. Various socialist experiments were looked upon as curiosities, not as threats because they remained purely voluntary affairs, and hence not subject to the same critique as slavery. Indeed, some pro-slavery thinkers tried to bolster support for slavery by likening it to a sort of socialism where the best members of society (plantation owners and other enslavers) provided cradle to grave protection for those ostensibly least able to care for themselves (slaves).

Pre-war trends continued after the Civil War, i.e., more employment/less proprietorship, more years of public schooling, and more immigration, especially from non-Anglo countries. As a result, rhetorical ploys gained power and hence frequency of use. Western and agrarian populists sought to take advantage of that situation by leveraging the collective power of the poor and middling classes.[xxii] While “robber barons” pushed for consolidation leading to increased market power and profits and laborers sought increased market power through unionization, Populist farmers wanted government regulations that would lower their main input costs, including freight and interest.[xxiii] They certainly faced cost squeezes and were right to form cooperatives to boost their monopsony power but using the coercive power of the state to disrupt other major industries was not Pareto improving.[xxiv] Although Populist candidates were largely unsuccessful at the polls, some Populist policy planks eventually became law with devastating consequences.[xxv]

One plank pushed railroad regulation, to the point of nationalization if necessary, to reduce farmers’ freight costs. To connect their interests with those of the working poor, they claimed to joust the powerful elites who headed up allegedly monopolistic railroads in an era when many railroads were going bankrupt due to what they considered cutthroat competition. Rate and labor regulations would eventually suffocate the railroad industry, forcing the subsidization of intercity passenger rail (Amtrak) and reducing freight to the bulk long haul market.

Populists also urged the issuance of fiat greenbacks or the free coinage of silver in order, they confusedly claimed, to simultaneously raise the prices of farm goods (i.e., cause inflation) and lower borrowing costs (which in nominal terms would increase with inflation per the Fisher Effect). They also complained that money velocity was too slow in rural areas, as if anyone could do anything about that.[xxvi] The Federal Reserve and New Deal eventually ushered in the age of greenbacks and unprecedented price and interest rate volatility.

Major policies reforms were floated in finance as well. Mary Elizabeth Lease argued that most Americans groaned under “a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street” and that plain folk were mere “slaves and monopoly is the master.”[xxvii] On its long march to Washington, DC in 1894, Jacob Coxey’s army proclaimed the Second Coming while demanding an end to interest payments without making clear why anyone would put capital at risk gratis.[xxviii] Confiscating capital was acceptable to Populists because they believed they were the people who made the “country rich, great, powerful, honorable and respectable … the people who pay the taxes to support government, produce the country’s exports, fight its battles.”[xxix] Populists did not want something for nothing, they explained, they wanted their just desserts as the producers of all wealth. Although it is tempting to conclude that such extreme policy positions stemmed from economic ignorance, Populists were adept at critiquing tariffs and other policies that injured their interests.[xxx]

Like populists, progressives and socialists purport to have the interests of the “little guy” or the “common man” or “workers” or some other broad collective in mind. After all, they need large numbers of supporters if they are to implement their policies. Like populist policies, though, progressive policies, from bureaucratization to nationalization, typically hurt more people than they help.[xxxi] Those injured by their policies tend to be the most vulnerable, poorer and less well-educated than the median, and much more likely to be female, foreign, and/or a member of a minority ethnic or racial group. Many of their thoroughly marginalized victims join them by seeking solace in slogans and substituting hope for analysis.[xxxii]

Apologists try to brush off the eugenic, racist, segregationist tendencies of early twentieth century America’s populist and progressive movements as “necessary to achieve its objectives”[xxxiii] without considering the possibility that the extension of Jim Crow laws, the disfranchisement of black voters, and immigration restrictions were among their core objectives, i.e., features and not bugs.[xxxiv] Progressives in particular pushed minimum wage laws not to aid the poor but as explicit attempts to keep black and foreign workers unemployed, thus pushing them out of the country or into the grave, anywhere but in wage competition with native born whites.[xxxv]

Unsurprisingly, elites leverage populist movements when they can and deprecate them when they cannot. Conservative populism, like that associated with Donald Trump, gets bashed as a fascist “threat to democracy” while progressive populism, like that associated with Bernie Sanders, gets smeared as a socialist “threat to republicanism.” Others read fear or triumph into populist “revolts,” with libertarians disdaining and statists cheering the increases in government power that illiberal statism sometimes ushers in, as in turn-of-the-twentieth-century America. According to one recent view, the struggle between populists and elites keeps government within the “narrow corridor” in which liberty can survive, a sweet spot between an overbearing state on the one side and an ineffectual one on the other. [xxxvi] This paper contends otherwise, that liberty will survive wherever people learn to think independently and receive unbiased information about the actual effects, and not just the stated intentions, of public policy choices.

 

References

---

[i] For how the three movements were separate but interconnected, see Sheldon Hackney, Populism to Progressivism in Alabama (Birmingham: University of Alabama Press, 2010) and Robert F. Durden, The Climax of Populism: The Election of 1896 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2015).

[ii] Shelton Stromquist, Reinventing “The People”: The Progressive Movement, the Class Problem, and the Origins of Modern Liberalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006); Sophia Rosenfeld, Common Sense: A Political History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011), 6-7.

[iii] Michael J. Thompson, The Politics of Inequality: A Political History of the Idea of Economic Inequality in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 16.

[iv] Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2017).

[v] Srinivasa Vittal Katikreddi and Shona Hilton, “How Did Policy Actors Use Mass Media to Influence the Scottish Alcohol Minimum Pricing Debate? Comparative Analysis of Newspapers, Evidence Submissions, and Interviews,” Drugs: Education, Prevention and Policy (2015) 15:125-34.

[vi] Richard Nadeau, Richard G. Niemi, David P. Fan, and Timothy Amato, “Elite Economic Forecasts, Economic News, Mass Economic Judgments, and Presidential Approval,” Journal of Politics (February 1999) 61:109-35.

[vii] Patricia Kuzyk, Jill J. McCluskey, and Susan Dente Ross, “Testing a Political Economic Theory of Media: How Were Steel Tariffs Covered?” Social Science Quarterly (December 2005): 86:812-25.

[viii] William David Sloan, “Journalists in Trying Times, 1917-1945: Propagandists, Patriots, or Professionals?” Paper Presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, Gainesville, FL, 5-8 August 1984.

[ix] Jason Mosser, The Participatory Journalism of Michael Herr, Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson, and Joan Didion: Creating New Reporting Styles (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2012), 1-62.

[x] Tim Groseclose and Jeffrey Milo, “A Measure of Media Bias,” working paper: http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/stuff_for_blog/Media.Bias.pdf. Accessed 20 Feb. 2021.

[xi] Christopher P. Loss, Between Citizens and the State: The Politics of American Higher Education in the 20^th Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 15-16.

[xii] Mitchell Langbert, Anthony J. Quain, and Daniel B. Klein, “Faculty Voter Registration in Economics, History, Journalism, Law, and Psychology,” Econ Journal Watch 13, 3 (Sept. 2016): 422-51.

[xiii] Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, “Measuring College Performance,” in Michael W. Kirst and Mitchell L. Stevens, eds., Remaking College: The Changing Ecology of Higher Education (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), 169-209.

[xiv] Alfie Kohn, “The Dangerous Myth of Grade Inflation,” in Lester Hunt, ed. Grade Inflation: Academic Standards in Higher Education (New York: SUNY Press, 2008), 1-11; Mary Biggs, “Fissures in the Foundation: Why Grade Conflation Could Happen,” in Lester Hunt, ed. Grade Inflation: Academic Standards in Higher Education (New York: SUNY Press, 2008), 121-52; David T. Beito and Charles W. Nuckolls, “Grade Distortion, Bureaucracy, and Obfuscation at the University of Alabama,” in Lester Hunt, ed. Grade Inflation: Academic Standards in Higher Education (New York: SUNY Press, 2008), 191-200.

[xv] Francis K. Schrag, “From Here to Equality: Grading Policies for Egalitarians,” in Lester Hunt, ed. Grade Inflation: Academic Standards in Higher Education (New York: SUNY Press, 2008), 93-107.

[xvi] Joseph C. Hermanowicz, “The Degradation of Merit,” Society (2019) 56:340-47.

[xvii] David Randall, Disfigured History: How the College Board Demolishes the Past (National Association of Scholars, 15 Nov. 2020).

[xviii] Nicholas Carr, “The Crisis in Higher Education,” MIT Technology Review 116, 6 :34.

[xix] Lee Artz, “The Media of Power, the Power of Media,” Perspectives on Global Development and Technology (2016) 15:497-516.

[xx] De Witt Clinton, An Address of the Trustees of the Public School Society in the City of New-York to Their Fellow-Citizens, Respecting the Extension of Their Public Schools (New York: J. Seymour, 1828), 8.

[xxi] William Ellery Channing, Remarks on the Disposition Which Now Prevails to Form Associations, and to Accomplish All Objects by Organized Masses (London: Edward Rainford, 1830), 18-19.

[xxii] Norman Markowitz, “Poor People’s Movements,” in Immanuel Ness, ed. Encyclopedia of American Social Movements, 1,117-57.

[xxiii] Nancy Cohen, The Reconstruction of American Liberalism, 1865-1914 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 177-216.

[xxiv] Matthew Hild, Arkansas Gilded Age: The Rise, Decline, and Legacy of Populism and Working-Class Protest (Columbia: University of Missouri, 2018), 105.

[xxv] Matthew Hild, Arkansas Gilded Age: The Rise, Decline, and Legacy of Populism and Working-Class Protest (Columbia: University of Missouri, 2018), 127-28, 134-37.

[xxvi] Walter Nugent, Progressivism: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 19-20, 23.

[xxvii] David Marquand, “The People Is Sublime: From Robespierre to Donald Trump, Populism Has a Long History,” New Statesman (21-27 July 2017), 30-33.

[xxviii] Jerry Prout, “Populism and Populists: The Incoherent Coherence of Coxey’s March,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology (May 2019) 78: 593-619.

[xxix] As quoted in Sheldon Hackney, Populism to Progressivism in Alabama (Birmingham: University of Alabama Press, 2010), 77.

[xxx] Walter Nugent, Progressivism: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 27-28.

[xxxi] Shelton Stromquist, Reinventing “The People”: The Progressive Movement, the Class Problem, and the Origins of Modern Liberalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006).

[xxxii] Eric Hoffer, The True Believer.

[xxxiii] Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, “The Upside of Populism,” Foreign Policy (Fall 2019): 28-31.

[xxxiv] Sheldon Hackney, Populism to Progressivism in Alabama (Birmingham: University of Alabama Press, 2010), 147-79.

[xxxv] Walter Nugent, Progressivism: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 23.

[xxxvi] Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, “The Upside of Populism,” Foreign Policy (Fall 2019): 28-31.