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ABSTRACT
An intellectually charitable understanding of populism might begin by recognizing that, since populist citizens tend to be politically uninformed and lacking in higher education, populist ideas are likely to be inarticulate reproductions of the tacit assumptions undergirding non-populist or “mainstream” culture rather than stemming from explicit theoretical constructs, such as an apotheosis of the unity or the will of “the people.” What features of our ambient culture, then, could explain the simplistic and combative approach that populists seem to take to politics and policy, their impatience with political debate and deliberation, their willingness to set aside democratic legal forms and political norms, their nationalism, their personalization of politics, their inclination toward conspiracy theorizing, their fondness for fringe sources of information, and their suspicion of political, scientific, and media elites? Using focus group and survey data, we can understand these populist traits as reflections of the culture of “democratic technocracy”: a regime in which we, the people, are assumed capable of rendering sound judgments about how to solve our social and economic problems. Whether or not this assumption is warranted, its cultural dominance seems likely to generate the ideas that populist citizens apparently take for granted.
Notes
1 While the text argues only for treating ideational determination as the default explanation, which would allow for irrationalist explanations when we fail to come up with plausible rationalist explanations, a radical ideational determinist would never allow the legitimacy of turning to irrationalist explanations. For the radical ideational determinist, social scientists’ failure to produce rationalistic, intellectually charitable explanatory understandings ought to be seen as enunciating the limits, thus far, of social science—not, as the irrationalist social scientist would hold, because rationalist explanations are wrong, but because social scientists are as fallible and ignorant as the Others whom they are interpreting, and thus may simply fail to know what the true rational, explanatory understanding of the Others is, in a given case. In other words, the radical ideational determinist does not illegitimately derive the impossibility of explaining a given Other sympathetically (rationalistically) from the failure of fallible contemporary social scientists, or historians, to understand that Other. Therefore, when the radical ideational determinist joins the contemporary social scientist and historian in failing to produce a rationalist explanation, she advises us simply to say, about the Other, “We do not understand the Other yet,” rather than crediting an irrationalist explanation of the Other.
2 See Friedman Citation2019, ch. 4, which argues that neoclassical economics goes wrong not in attributing rationality to agents but in defining rationality to be coextensive with adequately informed and perfectly logical decision making. Thus, neoclassical economists equate “rational” agents with perfect decision makers—leading, ironically, to the embrace of irrationalist explanations of mistakes, as seen in behavioral economics and in economists' claims of political “irrationality” (e.g., Caplan Citation2007). Ideational determinism avoids this lapse into irrationalism by noticing a vast middle ground between perfect decision making and irrational decision making: the ground of mistaken decisions, whether they are caused by inadequate information, inadequately interpreted information, or sheer logical error.
3 This is not accidental, given that neoclassical economics treats all truths as self-evident to rational economic actors (Friedman Citation2019, ch. 4).
4 David Estlund (Citation2008), who coined the term epistocracy, meant rule by an elite with both superior knowledge of technical means, as in my usage, and superior knowledge of truly good ends. The latter type of knowledge is not at issue in my analysis, since in technocratic policy making, the ends are taken for granted and are not seen as the province of a technical elite. (Indeed, knowledge of ends is usually considered to be in possession of the people, whose charge to epistocrats is to discover the best means to achieving those ends, as in the “pragmatistic” model of technocracy discussed below.) Knowledge of technical means seems to be what recent writers about “epistocracy” have in mind, if only unwittingly. Despite these writers’ failure to provide any explicit theoretical account of which type of knowledge is supposed to be possessed by “experts,” in practice they propose to count as “epistocrats” only those whose views can be expected to correlate with the views of social scientists (Brennan Citation2016). No contemporary defender of epistocracy has yet claimed, with Plato, that epistocrats have superior knowledge of the just or the good—although passages such as the following suggest that we may soon see such claims made explicitly: “While I no doubt suffer from some degree of confirmation and self-serving bias, perhaps I justifiably believe that I—a named professor of strategy, economics, ethics, and public policy at an elite research university, with a PhD from the top-ranked political philosophy program in the English-speaking world, and a strong record of peer-reviewed publications in top journals and academic presses—have superior political judgment on a great many political matters compared to many of my fellow citizens, including to many large groups of them” (ibid., 121). “Political philosophy” and “ethics” concern ends, not means, so this writer seems to be suggesting that his doctorate in philosophy has conferred on him expert knowledge of the just or the good. (See Gunn 2019 for a critique.)
5 I mention government inaction so as to emphasize that no particular content is required for a technocratic claim to count as technocratic. Free-market economists who advise that social and economic problems be solved by means of a policy of laissez faire are every bit as technocratic as those who advise that they be solved through policies of “intervention,” as the former, as much as the latter, base their advice on what they learned in their training as experts in the effect of government action or inaction in economic affairs.
6 Similarly, see Habermas Citation[1973] 1975, 35, 53–54.
7 See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGgiGtJk7MA from 1:05 to 1:21.
8 Ibid. at 0:47 and 1.33.
9 For a description and critique of naïve technocratic realism, see Friedman Citation2019, ch. 1.
10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGgiGtJk7MA at 0:20 and 1:29.
11 The analysis in the text does not seem to me inconsistent with the following journalist’s take on the hydroxychloroquine episode: “Trump’s deep-seated outsider mindset engendered a willful disregard for advice that often got him into trouble—financial, reputational and otherwise. In the end, though, whether it was his ill-conceived airline, his debt-saddled casinos or his professional football misadventure, Trump’s failure to heed warnings from even his most trusted advisers often served to enhance his celebrity with a sufficient portion of the public that doesn’t take the time to parse the particulars. ‘He thinks he’s the smartest guy on the planet,’ former Trump Shuttle president Bruce Nobles told me Tuesday. ‘He really does’” (Kruse Citation2020). Trump’s extremely high (and evidently incorrect) opinion of his intelligence might have explained how he was able to assume the role of “outsider” so well—it was in character for him—but it contradicts the polemical assertion that he rejected the very concept of expertise. On the contrary, it seems that he considered himself the ultimate expert, just as the ambient culture of technocracy accords this status to “the people.”
12 By the “technocratic” left, I mean the left that is committed to solving social and economic problems by means of piecemeal state action. There is also, however, a non-technocratic, emancipatory left, which is committed to the wholesale abolition of the systemic barriers to human freedom, such as those created by capitalism, which are responsible for those problems. See section IV.
13 Another possible interpretation of disagreement, however, is that one’s opponents are irrational. As political epistemologists, we may need to reject this interpretation, but most citizens are not political epistemologists, so they may well embrace uncharitable psychology; most folk psychology is, indeed, uncharitable.
14 https://news.gallup.com/poll/27286/government.aspx, citing results from 2016.
15 Bader et al. 2020, as cited in “Fear Factors,” Harper’s Magazine, February 2020, 19.
16 This paragraph is adapted from Friedman Citation2019, 296.
17 A complication in this analysis is that relatively uninformed citizen-technocrats are likely to pay scant attention to any political news, whether mainstream or alternative. I view this as an advantage of the analysis, as it allows us to account both (for example) for voters who identified as Republican but only gradually came to support Trump (only a plurality of Republican primary voters supported Trump)—whose policy views were not very conservative (e.g., he opposed free trade and an interventionist foreign policy and strongly defended middle-class entitlement programs)—and the swing voters (Obama-to-Trump voters) whose support tipped the election. The former tend to be relatively well informed, but their sources of information tend to be Fox News and talk radio. (A January, 2017 Pew survey found that 40 percent of Trump voters named Fox as their “main” source of news, dwarfing the number-2 choice, CNN [8 percent], but this does not allow us to distinguish Republican Trump voters from the much smaller cadre of swing voters. See Gottfried et al. Citation2017.) These sources would have given the conservative populists the policy information necessary to discern Trump’s non-conservatism, and could thus account for their slowness to embrace him. Insofar as the swing voters were relatively uninformed by any media outlets, they would, in my analysis, be “purer” populists in the sense that they would have to go more exclusively on the presuppositions they picked up from the ambient culture of democratic technocracy, unmixed with right-wing ideology of the sort that might have been gleaned from Fox.
18 Some of the effect is doubtless due to a more accurate sorting of liberals toward the Democratic party in recent decades, but this could not account for a 50-percent decline in Democrats’ authoritarianism scores unless it were offset by a similar increase in Republicans’ scores, which did not occur.