In the United States and around the globe, statism benefits from sharing its conceptual space with populism, broadly defined as an advocacy for the interests of common, working people, for the general improvement of their lot. The interrelation between the two is perhaps attributable to the success of nineteenth and twentieth century state socialists in reshaping the peasantry’s attitudes, in prevailing over the residues of absolute monarchy. That is to say, it is unlikely that, having travailed under the yoke of feudal slave states for centuries, the class of serfs would have been especially receptive to the idea that the state was the answer to their prayers.
Nevertheless, having longed for justice as they bore the weight of the Ancien Régime’s nobles, the entreaties of the socialists would have resonated with the workers, who would not have descried the differences between the statist and stateless sorts. So although it may be that their recent ancestors would have seen through, in the words of Karl Hess, “the anomalous position of using political power to abolish political power,” a new generation of plebeians seized on any chance whatsoever of rooting out the old system.
The legacy of the historical development, then, is that today the surrogates of the state — when they draw new powers into it — enjoy the advantage of full support from blue collars around the world. It is the paradox, displayed anew in every act of political theater, of the toiling masses cheering on their tormentors as they ensure the chicaneries of the very powerful.
The challenge is to bring to light a truth that, though borne out in blatant heaps of evidence, is lamentably counterintuitive to nearly everyone, that governments are the foremost enemies of the working class. Argues Anthony Gregory, “Leftists usually [correctly] understand how wartime provides politically connected corporations with high profits and cushy contracts. What is more often neglected is that the history of the American domestic welfare and regulatory state also corresponds closely to the rise of corporatism. It is no coincidence.”
American champions of labor-centric populism readily assail the instances of business/government scheming that corroborate their ideological predilections, but in the next moment disavow all of their suspicions of power. They give credence to the idea that the same state they charge with the worst kinds of corporate elitism would brandish its might for anyone but the influential. Conservative populists, calling on the language of religion and a counterfeit “live and let live” precept, analogously (and equally hypocritically) dispense with their distrust of the state when their pet issues are implicated.
In his revision of the state-sanctioned account of the Progressive Era, Gabriel Kolko writes, “The dominant fact of American political life at the beginning of [the twentieth] century was that big business led the struggle for the federal regulation of the economy.” Progressive Era political episodes that are now uniformly attributed to an imaginary government war against the powerful were in fact no more than the sordid but successful ventures of the business class to squeeze out competitors and line up future favors.
Kolko points out that the inappropriately named “trust busters” of that period were really fixed on “end[ing] the bane of destructive and unprofitable competition,” in opposition to “[p]opulists” and “trade unionists” who might “threaten the entire fabric of the status quo.” The state, notwithstanding all of its tough talk for the wage earner, was bought and paid for long before the Progressive Era and long before the American state was even born.
Instead of trammeling the greed of gluttonous, Gilded Age robber barons, the progressive reforms of the statists’ “living thing” — Woodrow Wilson’s honorific for the state — were situated to catalyze that greed. We would be naïve indeed to look upon the state as an impartial machine for justice. Where limited government types are deluded by the fantasy that the state can be used to safeguard free markets against power and privilege, state socialists are comparably beguiled by the hopeless chimera of reaching economic equity through the state; both theories would have us apply the one institution defined by violence, injustice, and oppression to thwart the same.
When the state manages the economy, it does so not as a trustee or steward of the people, as if even that rationale were ethical or intelligible, but as the contrivance of reavers who would take from the productive classes without contrition. It is only when we realize that the state is a product without value that we will stop buying the sophistic propaganda of the criminals who sell it.
Oh dear, more mangled folk history. There are a lot of things conflated here that were far more distinct, sometimes occurring at different times and places and sometimes even opposed to each other:-
- With limited exceptions, e.g. the formal status of Jews in mediaeval England, slavery was practically unknown together with serfdom.
- Absolutism was hostile to feudalism and inconsistent with it, only coexisting with it while it was destroying it, leaving only relics. However, part of the destruction was achieved by buying off feudal magnates with positions and legal privileges within the state; these, and their associated burdens, were miscalled feudalism by the later critics of that system.
- Outside Russia, and to a lesser extent parts of Central Europe, absolute monarchy and serfdom were not linked (these serfs were the result of a later flowering, the "Second Serfdom"). Elsewhere, the rise of absolute monarchy and the decline of serfdom went together and were even linked, as the absolutists reformed serfdom to improve their "cameralist" methods, e.g. Denmark was the first European absolute monarchy, and it reformed to a situation in which peasants were not allowed to move to towns before the age of 40 but not otherwise bound to the land like serfs (other techniques were used to exploit them, but that's a long story). Eventually, even Russia's absolutists reformed serfdom away, for similar reasons of improving their take – it was done at the former serfs' expense, lumping them with debt to pay compensation.
Actually, it might well have, for those who were still close enough to the old ways – genuine feudalism, etc. – to understand them. In fact, particularly in the Vendée, peasants resisted the French Revolution because they preferred their own local ways and traditions, with their quasi-paternalist links to the state. (As late as the 1940s, the squirearchy of the French speaking part of Italy, which had never been brought under French absolutism, retained its own customary connections with the people well enough that it organised the resistance against Fascism there after Italy surrendered, or tried to; elsewhere, it was mostly the Communists).
By the way, US English has distorted the meaning of the word "conservative" away from that in the rest of the English speaking world, though not as much as "liberal". For similar reasons, it is not true that "In the United States and around the globe [emphasis added], statism benefits from sharing its conceptual space with populism"; there is some overlap, but much less, as populism usually only means a blend of bottom up grass roots values/movements and top down demagoguery to try to tap into and steer those. There is only an instrumental use of state methods as means, not affirming the state as an end (e.g. it's not in "for God, King and Country", unless and until statists manage to conflate state and Country or rulership and King), and that only from taking them for granted.
Across a wide range of political philosophies, the assumption of the good intentions of those who govern is nearly universal.
Leftists don’t seem to notice when corporations support, cooperate with, and co-opt regulatory agencies. As smaller, nimbler, more innovative, and more cost efficient competitors disappear, leftists blindly march forward calling for more regulation. The result hurts both the smaller companies, and the general public.
The right, by definition, will support those in power, even if the goals of those in power violate the professed principles of the right.
Many libertarian leaning commentators, such as John Stossel, assume the good intentions of government officials. If government officials do something that does not appear to make sense, Stossel assumes ignorance as a cause.
The Romans had this one figured out ages ago: the operating principle is cui bono. If you can figure out who is benefiting, both in the government, and in the public supporters of a given policy, you can figure out why that policy is being implemented.
You’re right on, Mr. Cantin. People need to stop making apologies for the agents of the state as if their actions are born of ignorance as against a desire to benefit.
I appreciate your comment. When I used the word “slavery,” I meant it in the sense that we often use it as libertarians to express statist political exploitation as against any more strict historical sense. Though I realize I may have been unclear, it wasn’t my goal to conflate the feudal system with absolute monarchy. Instead, I enumerated them together to explain that the broadly non-political classes during different times and in different places would have shared in common a reluctance to put stock in the idea that the state was a medium for their advancement or that of their general condition.
Regarding the question whether commoners would have understood the differences between state socialism and anarchist socialism, I was trying to make the point that, for those peasants who did identify with socialism, it is unlikely that they would have fully appreciated its similarities to the old systems.
As for the meanings of the terms “liberal” and “conservative,” I fully recognize the myriad usages for these words both in the United States and abroad in the English-speaking world. Often, precisely because they have so many meanings, it becomes impossible not to use them in confused or ambiguous ways that are informed by the vernacular. My goal here was just to discuss what most Americans would probably understand as being two major, though not completely distinct, currents of populist thought.
I still do generally think that labor-style populism, unionism, etc. identifies all around the world with expansions of the total state, and my claim is that this is a profoundly undesirable condition; this is the basic thesis of Kevin Carson’s newest study, “Labor Struggle: A Free Market Model.”
Again, thank you for the comment. I hope it will help readers see through some of my vagueness and understand the point I was trying, however vainly, to make.