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The New Yorker's George Packer has an interesting blog post about Progressives and Populists, comparing President Obama (the Progressive) to Democratic Congressman Tom Perriello (the Populist).

In political terminology that goes back more than a century, Obama is a Progressive, and Perriello is a Populist. Progressives came from the successful ranks of American society, they identified with the interests and aspirations of the educated and well-off, but their sense of civic responsibility was scandalized by the corruption of political machines and the evils of corporate capitalism. They were driven by moral conscience and pragmatic concern to crusade for a range of reforms, from the primary election to the income tax. Their impulse, individual and ethical in nature, was to cleanse and restore. Their model was the disinterested, public-spirited citizen who brought expert knowledge to solving social problems.

. . . A hundred years later, the scale of powerful institutions is taken as more or less a given by contemporary Progressives like Obama, who appointed an architect of the bank bailout as his treasury secretary. Their quarrel isn’t with bigness itself, but with the unfair advantages that political influence has conferred on corporations, insurance and drug companies, and banks against the consumer, the taxpayer, and the small businessman.

This is where distance between Obama and Tom Perriello begins to open. For Perriello is less a Progressive than a Populist. The Populists were agrarians, and when Perriello told an audience at a grant-giving ceremony in Martinsville, Virginia, that farm jobs could be the jobs of the future, he was sounding a very old chord in American discourse. In his language and sympathies, his frequent use of the word “elite,” his vilification of Wall Street bankers, Perriello is carrying the banner of the laid-off seamstress, the struggling truck-stop owner, the hard-pressed tobacco farmer. These were the constituents of the original Populists. They looked with anger upward rather than with sympathy downward. They didn’t come from the professional middle class, though some of their champions did, and they didn’t put their faith in the training and education of experts. If anything, expertise was suspect as a cover for the interests of the powerful. Hofstadter described the “dominant themes in Populist ideology” as “the idea of a golden age…the dualistic version of social struggles; the conspiracy theory of history; and the doctrine of the primacy of money."

It's interesting to consider that while Parker looks at the Populist vs. Progressive divide, the Progressives were themselves split both by geography and by partisanship. Some Northeaster Progressives first flirted with the Democratic Party while incarnated as "Mugwumps" focused on civil service reform and later joined with the Democratic Party under President Woodrow Wilson. But even within the Republican Party, progressives had two geographic wings. Nicol C. Rae explains in "The Decline and Fall of the Liberal Republicans" the divide:

If a fundamental conservatism inspired the more patrician progressives of the East, this was certainly not shared by their western brethren. Western progressivism, embodied in the figures of Robert LaFollette in Wisconsin, George Norris in Nebraska, and Hiram Johnson in California, was a genuinely radical movement, reflecting its populist antecedents and the continuing economic plight of the western and farm states. While the eastern reformers sought to alleviate the social conditions of the poor, and mitigate the excesses of big business and the machines, the westerners launched an assault on the entire political structure in their states and on the vested interests--notably the railroad companies--that had previously controlled that party structure. In pursuit of the extirpation of business influences from politics, the western progressives instituted the direct primary for all public offices, abolished all forms of political patronage, introduced nonpartisan elections and the city-manager system at the local level, and established the initiative, referendum, and recall procedures. In the western and plains states, with their large numbers of discontented small farmers and small businessmen, this assault on corporate control of the political process aroused enthusiastic electoral support. While the western radical and the urban progressives of the East had a common desire to improve living conditions and curb the excesses of big business and the political machines, the eastern progressives were highly suspicious of agrarianism and the fervor of the radicals' attack on the eastern corporate and intellectual elite.

Western Progressivism within the Republican Party tended to merge with some of the Populist sympathies the region had developed, but tempered by a Republican partisanship that distrusted a Democratic Party that represented "Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion." It's probably not a coincidence that the great Democratic Populist William Jennings Bryan had strong appeal in the West; he was a moral crusader who supported Prohibition, was an evangelical Christian, and was not from the South. And it's not a coincidence that years later many of these Western Progressives ended up supporting FDR. Northeastern Progressive Woodrow Wilson had a window of opportunity in courting these Progressives, but this failed for a variety of reasons (mostly the fault of Wilson).

While FDR came, geographically, from the Northeast he shared a lot in common with the Populist sympathies of the Democratic Party in its bases of the South and West. Parker is absolutely right when he says, "They looked with anger upward rather than with sympathy downward." This anger wasn't just upward, but Northward and Eastward. The economy of the post-Civil War Era favored not a random dispersal of bigness, but a geographic concentration of big business in the Northeast. Populists in the South and West were angry at a regional elite in the Northeast. While aspects of the New Deal have been interpreted as class-based conflict between the have's and the have-not's, there was a regional component between the have region, the Northeast, and the have-not regions, the South and the West.

Today's politics creates a confusion not found in the older political eras. The Republicans today are the party of the have's, but their base of support is in the have-not regions. The Democrats are the opposite, they are the party of the have-not's but are strongest in the wealthiest regions. It adds an unusual twist to politics today as the Democratic advantage in the wealthiest regions comes from the middle to upper class activists that are most similar to the Northeast Progressives of the bygone era. But instead of the party of William Jennings Bryan having a few Northeast Progressives grafted on, it's the party of Northeast Progressives with only a few William Jennings Bryan's.

Today, the House of Representatives will have a vote on a resolution offered by Congressman Kucinich to begin the process of withdrawing from Afghanistan by the end of the year. Just last summer, there was a vote on an amendment from Congressman McGovern to require an exit strategy for Afghanistan that received the majority support of the Democratic caucus. The question for today is if Kucinich's resolution will receive more support as doubts about the President's strategy in Afghanistan linger, or fewer votes because an immediate withdrawal is seen as more radical than just an exit strategy. Stay tuned . . .

The Republicans may have spent the last year attacking Obama's stimulus, but I think that the nature of our political system would have encouraged Republicans to pass their own muddled stimulus package if they had been in power. While there is always the argument that divided government would produce gridlock and force policies toward the center, there is the recent example of both Bush's own stimulus and the later TARP bailout under a Democratic Congress. Would the combination of a Democratic President and a Republican Congress work any better? Depending on the pundits you believe, we might be a few months away from finding out.

The GOP increasingly stands for the Graying Old Party. While a narrative focused on the Tea Parties might claim that opposition to socialist and government-run health care is the key to a Republican resurgence, the polls tend to show that most of the shift in the polling from 2008 and 2006 to 2010 is due to changes in turnout based on the natural likelihood, or lack thereof, to vote in a midterm election. While most Democratic-leaning voters still align with the Democratic Party, there is a shift among older voters who voted for Democratic candidates in 2006 and 2008. Is this about socialism, or simply that Republicans have been making the case for most of a year that Democrats are out to cut Medicare?

The Republican Party is not ready to seriously tackle entitlement spending, aside from a few noble exceptions like Paul Ryan. In the long term, entitlement spending like Medicare will be the budget buster, not the normal Republican monsters of earmarks or foreign aid. Add to that military spending, a category that some Republicans are proposing should be tied directly to GDP, and I don't think that the Republicans have any serious proposals for balancing the budget or even managing the deficit.

I've said this before, but it needs repeating that the Republican Party will try to seize the small government mantle because they oppose new spending proposed by the Democratic Party. But they will fight tooth and nail against entitlement reform or cuts to wasteful military programs. In switching to the Republican Party, Griffith highlighted not only his concerns about health care reform but his opposition to Obama's proposed cuts to an assortment of military and space programs that effected his district.

We may not like the Democratic plan to try to reform Medicare and bring down the long term costs to health care, but at least they have a plan. And while I'm not generally enthusiastic about raising taxes, I don't think that allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire for the wealthiest Americans is the deciding issue in today's political process. Overall, despite the election of Barack Obama and the perception that the Republicans have seized the cause of small government again, I don't really find a compelling case that the Republicans are superior to Democrats on most of the macroeconomic issues.

What we need, and what the Democrats also need, are low cost proposals for economic growth. The political will to tackle entitlement reform, cut defense spending, and clean up the tax code doesn't exist. There are serious problems in the long term with our nation's finances, problems that are growing grimmer the longer they are ignored. With the recent economic crisis creating the very real possibility that our economy will have permanently higher levels of unemployment, unemployment that will devastate a generation of workers, we need political solutions focused on fostering economic growth.

But what?

The Republicans used to have a narrative for economic growth, even if it proved ineffective. Tax cuts on capital and investment, wealth flows into business investments that trickle into research and development. Economic growth! Instead, we got a Wall Street bubble that spread to housing and brought down the entire economy when it burst.

So far the only Democratic narrative I've seen is to increase public investment in research and development directly. Can't Freedom Democrats do better?

Any thoughts?

It's January, 2010, and President John McCain is facing an economy on the verge of the greatest recession, dare we say depression, in decades. Working with the leadership of the Republican Congress, swept into office on his coattails, he creates a massive trillion dollar stimulus package made up primarily of tax cuts. Moderate members of the caucus push for some spending programs directed to the states and localities, in addition to a handful of spending programs related to campaign promises made by McCain.

This counterfactual may seem far fetched, but not when you consider the actions of then newly elected George W. Bush in 2001 in response to a much smaller economic contraction, although we also had a budget surplus as far as the eyes could see. Politically, the pressure would be strong for the Republicans to do something and when Republicans talk about the economy they almost always turn to tax cuts. And while the political narrative facing President Obama was the outcry opposed to big spending proposals, the political narrative under McCain would probably favor a larger stimulus, with an even larger percentage going to tax cuts, because moderates in both parties and both chambers would have to make the case against more tax cuts. That's practically political suicide for most of the swing members these days.

So would a Republican Stimulus, with less spending and more tax cuts and a greater impact on the deficit, be any more effective than the Democratic Stimulus? And if so, would it be because it included more tax cuts or because it was larger?

A recent Brad Taylor post, Behind the Moral Curtain, argues that competing interests writing constitutional charters results in illiberal documents. Perhaps, and it should be noted that this blog has made a long standing point against the idea of the US Constitution being a libertarian document, but sometimes, it should be acknowledged, competing interests may contract "negative rights" as a hedge against loss of majority power. So, the US Bill of Rights, for example, is an example of a liberal, or even a libertarian document, amending a not necessarily liberal document.

To frame this in terms of communitarianism, which is really the context for Taylor's critique, it should be noted that communitarianism shouldn't even be using the language of "rights," rather it should be using the language of "obligations." However, "A Bill of Obligations" in the context of monopoly government is utterly redundant, as if there is any need for enumeration of obligations in light of monopoly power. Communitarianism is the scourge of liberalism...

Max Borders does a does a bit of retrospective commemorating the year-and -half anniversary of the day libertarianism died.

Wrote Weisberg at the time, in delivering the final eulogy:

Their heroic view of capitalism makes it difficult for them to accept that markets can be irrational, misunderstand risk, and misallocate resources or that financial systems without vigorous government oversight and the capacity for pragmatic intervention constitute a recipe for disaster. They are bankrupt, and this time, there will be no bailout.

Borders does a fine enough job deconstructing how the passage of time has not borne out Weisberg's pronouncements, indeed even pointing out, if anything, it's Keynesianism that's now sinking back into moribundity. It is ironic that those who are usually quick to label libertarianism as "Marxism of the Right"(meaning an abstract theory whose failings in the real world are excused because it's not being applied correctly) have excused the failure of the Keynesian Stimulus because it's not being applied correctly, i.e., it's not big enough, not being dispersed fast enough, requires inspired, resolute presidential leadership, etc....

Allow me to add some additional commentary to Borders' treatment. In actuality, I would contend, and have been making this point for some time, that TARP and the Bailouts did mark the "death" of the Chicago School. In a sense, the actions of Bernanke could be construed to be consistent with Monetarist doctrine, even as the old-timers like Anna Schwartz recoiled in horror(Milton Friedman, of course, didn't quite survive to witness the spectacle). The likes of Weisberg can believe that the only problem with "regulation" is that the wrong people are in charge, but with the "right people" in charge, regulation of the system is still subject to the same open, sliding door of influence, with political connections propping up a system of winners and losers whose stability is going to be continent on some particularly putrid public choice economics. In a very real sense, the death of the Chicago School is the death knell of "orthodox economics."

I suppose we can forgive Weisberg a bit for an establishment mentality that viewed libertarianism through the lens of chicago school economics, but, as this fluff piece on Robert Rubin in the late 90s demonstrates, it's not like Weisberg has been exactly consistent in throwing bombs at Wall Street Capitalism. To establishment minds, the steady move of libertarianism away from establishment capitalism and the chicago school, along with the rise of the Austrian School, as well as an increasingly budding movement rooted in class politics, is completely foreign. But Libertarianism is reemerging as a much more radical movement.

In reading progressive opinion for the past year, I detected an implicit belief of sorts among many of them that American opinion(in terms of economics) could be bribed to move "center-left" through deficit spending. I never bought that wishful-thinking argument and have maintained that the Obama would make Entitlement Reform "the center-piece" of his Re-Election Campaign. Given the thrust of his recent public rally speeches, this isn't any longer a matter of speculation, but of obvious fact. Whether "health care reform" passes or not, the Dems are going to take a major hit either way in 2010, with the major theme being "fiscal reform." The Obama Admin has already selected the Republican they want to work with. Familiarize yourself with Paul Ryan, an Ayn Rand acolyte, because you are going to be hearing more and more about him. To me, it's just as plain as day obvious that a major Entitlement Reform Act of 2012 is coming down the pike. Progressives, for the most part, don't see it coming...

Shorter Yglesias: Get over the abortion thing. Take the Faustian Bargain.

Shorter Firedoglake: Go fuck yourself, Matt.

Memo to Beinart: Coalitions, indeed....

Recall, a year and half ago, David Brooks' opined that TARP and the Bailouts would usher in a new era of Progressive Corporatism, an "era of the educated establishment, in which government acts to create a stable — and often oligarchic — framework for capitalist endeavor." In other words, an end to "ideology." At the time, I posted that, contrary to Brooks, I saw the same as engendering a new era of radical class politics, a renewal of ideology.

Time has not been particularly kind to Brooks' foresight, as there is no more dirtier word now in politics than the "establishment elite." Brooks looks on at the populist discordant medley blowing sour tunes into his ears and is suddenly having flashbacks to the Doors or Jimi Hendrix, writing now of resurrection of the 60's New Left in the guise of WalMart Hippies. Brooks correlates today's Tea Parties with the 60's New Left, a rather humorous correlation, and a weak one at best. When engaging in 60's historical revisionism, it typically bears pointing out the usual erroneous conflation of the Hippie 60s counter-culture movement with New Left politics. The hippie counter-culture was largely apolitical, hence the appropriate use of the adjective "counter" to describe it. It was largely about self-organization of counter cultural institutions, not about using politics to change "the establishment." The New Left, on the other hand, was return of the radical left to american politics that had laid dormant for decades under the boot of FDR "Corporate Liberalism." Sure, there was some synergy, but at most, it can be said the New Left was much more culturally influenced by the Hippies than the Hippies being politically influenced by New Left politics.

The Tea Parties, for the most part, unlike the New Left--which was a systematic critique of the Corporate Left--is a mere partisan movement. If John McCain had been elected president--and, rest assured, he would have pursued much of the same fiscal policies as Obama(of course, with GOP establishment support)--do you think we would being seeing any Tea Party movement, apart from the libertarian stragglers that originally composed it? No doubt, the Tea party movement is cherry-picking libertarian ideas to make a squalid case against "Big Government." Prominent cherry-picker Jonah Goldberg takes umbrage with Brooks, pleading the case that Tea Partiers love America and seek only the restoration of the constitution. You would think, then, that the principles of the great charter, the Magna Carta(that is, establishing the principle that the rights of men are not to subject to arbitrary whims of rulers), at least in token, would be a consideration. But no, as Liz Cheney, Dick Cheney, and a concerted neocon intellectual class keeps reminding us, arbitrary Executive power continues to be a prime political wedge issue for the right.

So Brooks is right that the Tea Partiers, for the most part, are "anti-conservative," but not quite for the reasons he thinks. Writes Brooks:

Conservatism is built on the idea of original sin — on the assumption of human fallibility and uncertainty. To remedy our fallen condition, conservatives believe in civilization — in social structures, permanent institutions and just authorities, which embody the accumulated wisdom of the ages and structure individual longings.

I wouldn't use the term "original sin" as a foundational raison de etre of classical republicanism, but it is true that such holds "liberty" to be the daughter of institutional order. But, in classical republicanism, said institutions are not enforcers of arbitrary power. Tea party conservatism, to the extent it cherry picks what arbitrary power it is for or against, demonstrates it is indeed antithetical to "conservatism." But Brooks championing rule by elites is nothing more than obedience to authority. Neither are conservative, if you want to define conservatism as "republicanism."

Tea parties aside, there is ample evidence that a conscious class conflict is brewing in America. When it breaks partisan categories, then it will be radical. And then, the likes of Brooks will have their "New Left" to contend with...

The leftward drift in some libertarian intellectual circles is eliciting some skeptical reactions within the broader movement. Bryan Caplan's rejoinder, further elaborated here, is twofold: (1) most are unaware of the government-monopoly connection and (2) to the extent they are aware, most view government as the solution, not the problem.

Caplan views anti-capitalist libertarianism as confused branding at best, and, at worst, actually providing the rope to hang itself. My rejoinder to Caplan is that the actions of the US Government vis a via TARP, the Bailouts, and the Stimulus, has done more to popularize elements of libertarian class theory, in a such a short time, to the general public than the efforts of any concerted libertarian intellectual movement could ever hope to achieve. Arguments that 'the public' is incognizant of State-Corporate collusion doesn't match my experience nor seem particularly borne out by public polling, where, for example, opinions of "free markets" and "entrepreneur" poll high, but "capitalism" now polls low. Public opinion that views the Government working primarily on the behalf of "special interests" as opposed to the "general interest" or the common man is at all-time highs. A plurality of public opinion now views Government as a threat to rights. Caplan says his views are informed by his experience of teaching in University setting, but that environment is likely a biased sample(even at GMU).

The fact is, historically, there has always been a capitalist/anti-capitalist divide in libertarianism that goes back to the differences between the radical french liberal school and the french anarchists; reference, for example, the Bastiat-Proudhon debate over interest. Frankly, it could be argued that the original libertarian movement in the United States was anti-Capitalist, although it despised the idea of State Socialism more than that of State Capitalism. Caplan quoting the likes of Gabriel Kolko, who, despite his revisionist historical work demonstrating progessivism as a triumph of conservatism, nonetheless rejecting libertarianism at the time is hardly revelatory, nor instructive. The irony that Caplan entirely misses is that the libertarian-New Left fusionism "rebirthed" an self-identified intellectual libertarian movement in the United States. As for Kolko these days, you are not going to find him contributing at such places as the Huffington Post; rather, he relies heavily on libertarian outlets, such as Antiwar.com and even LewRockwell.com to publish his periodic rants against US Empire.

Personally, I prefer the term "Laissez-faire" to Capitalism, the latter historically being a term coined to denote an economic system midwife between mercantilism and communism. Today, Capitalism is typically characterized as sustainable economic system of private means of production and private property rights operating under rule of law regimes. Since libertarianism, historically, has been a fierce critic of 'rule of law" in the context of the State, Capitalism, from a libertarian perspective, should really be defined as an economic system of private means of production and private property rights operating under a "Ruling Class." In reality, that's really what capitalism is and as such, there is good reasons for libertarians to oppose it.

"Laissez-faire" is a historically misconstrued term that is typically conflated with "unregulated capitalism;" of course, no un-regular or arbitrary market would persist for very long(unless by force). Historically, "Laissez-faire" really means capitalism without rulers, in the historical context of the conferred privilege meddling of administrative French Statism. Frankly, among libertarians, it would be a well-recognized contradiction in terms for any "Libertarians Against Laissez-faire" movements to form. Unfortunately, however, Laissez-faire, in the popular cultural consciousness, hasn't retained it's original translated contextual meaning over as well as other French terms, such as "Bureaucrat" and "Entrepreneur." Terms like "anarcho-capitalism" or "market anarchism," that populate the American libertarian movement, aren't particularly good substitutes either, as the term "anarchy" is even more misunderstood than capitalism. We need a better term...