Public Choice Populism - A Manifesto, Part 3
The third part of my vision for a Libertarian-Populist alliance...
In the first part of this series, I gave an overview of the Public Choice Populist project. In the second part, I highlighted four of the grievances animating right wing populist movements across the globe and explained them in the terms of Public Choice Theory. In this third part, I will highlight the remaining four component grievances that animate right wing populists’ rebellion against the academic-bureaucratic-managerial-technocratic ruling class of Western societies. In each case I offer at least one example supporting the validity of the grievance, an explanation of how this component grievance is an aspect of the core grievance defined previously, and an analysis of the grievance from the perspective of Public Choice.
Grievance Five: the primary industries are habitually being taken for granted.
EXAMPLE: This grievance is substantially related to Grievance Two and Grievance Three – a metropolitanized bureaucratic and policymaking class is more likely to take primary industries and physical infrastructure for granted, particularly when making climate policy. The consequences of such myopic policymaking are movements like the Yellow Vests and the Dutch Farmer-Citizen Movement. In the United States, the Obama administration’s crushing of the Appalachian coal industry also serves as an example. In Australia, there have also been many instances of governments dominated by metropolitan-centric parties passing laws imposing substantial costs upon industries that are utterly critical to Australia’s agriculture-and-resources-centric economy. If we are to look outside the policymaking space, we can see that a subgroup of environmentalists – ones whom highly prioritize organic farming and the idea of shifting towards universal veganism – may also be examples of taking the primary industries for granted, as they frequently display ignorance of the practical agricultural realities of either organic food (such as how all-organic agriculture will use more land to produce less crops and thus essentially is a luxury good and cannot feed the entire global population) or abandoning animal agriculture.
RELEVANCE TO CORE GRIEVANCE: The ruling caste described in the core grievance does not include the primary industries, owing to the metropolitanized nature of this caste. In addition, whilst this varies greatly from nation to nation, the primary industries are typically much more exposed to market accountability than the ruling caste is. Additionally, the primary industries are great sources of employment to the uncredentialed, whereas entrance to the ruling caste is typically gatekept by higher education. To the extent “woke” ideology plays a role, “climate justice” motivates a punitive attitude towards primary industries that helps marginalize the contribution these industries make to society at large.
PUBLIC CHOICE ANALYSIS: The ruling caste’s metropolitanization arguably means they simply lack the relevant knowledge about the primary industries and consequently their policy prescriptions (and, outside the policymaking space, lifestyle practices) are based on incomplete information. Furthermore, this incomplete information may be a product of Rational Ignorance – policymakers may get no benefit (i.e. no votes) out of having a more fact-based view of the primary industries, since their voters are frequently not part of said industries either (furthermore, organic enthusiasts probably don’t gain anything from knowing more about the costs or inefficiencies of organic farming). It is true that the ruling caste’s preferred policies may impose costs on all consumers through raising prices, but to the extent that the ruling caste is higher paid than the average, this shields them from said costs to some degree. Again, “woke” ideology plays the role of imposing costs on policy dissenters or people openly supporting political parties that represent the interests of primary industries.
Grievance Six: the higher education system has turned credentialism into the new classism and presumes every dissenter from trendy “woke/Social Justice” orthodoxy is a bigoted moron deserving of rural impoverishment.
EXAMPLE: Ever since Vox published “The Smug Style in American Liberalism” (The smug style in American liberalism - Vox) even mouthpieces for the ruling caste itself have conceded that a strong streak of credentialist classism is a key component of their belief system, and recently a book called “White Rural Rage” (written by a political science professor and an influential progressive journalist) outright attempted to justify this mindset (interestingly, several of the academics cited in the book accused it of greatly misrepresenting their research, see White Rural Rage - Wikipedia). At the same time highly educated left-wing American politicians are describing rural voters as bitterly clinging to guns and bibles, or even dismissing them outright as “deplorables,” multiple studies have shown that the biggest predictor of voting for the left is higher education, and it is in higher education where “woke/Social Justice” orthodoxy is most dominant. The overall attitudes present within the ruling caste can really be understood as a kind of Social Darwinism (see Social Justice or Social Darwinism? | The Spectator Australia) – “truly smart” people vote left, get college degrees and consequently get high-paying jobs precisely because they are smart, and consequently can afford to live in desirable metropolitan communities. The stupid people are right-wing intolerant bigots without college degrees because they are stupid and thus they can’t get good jobs and have to live outside the metropoles.
RELEVANCE TO CORE GRIEVANCE: All populism is ultimately a critique of some sort of class system, and credentialism forms both the backbone (the mechanism by which class status is defined and conferred) and the legitimizing narrative (the moral justification) of the class system protested by right wing populists. Furthermore, “woke” ideology originated in and is propagated by universities and university personnel are generally part of the ruling caste identified in the core grievance.
PUBLIC CHOICE ANALYSIS: The dominant economic understanding of education is that education enables people to be more productive than they otherwise would be (or, to rephrase, it “increases human capital”), and that education has many positive externalities. These two things imply that the government needs to extensively fund education (as private parties will not invest enough, since they won’t have an incentive to do so) and that public investment in education will ultimately pay for itself (due to the productivity enhancements increasing taxation revenue). This rationale underpins both the universal presence of compulsory primary (elementary) and secondary (high) schooling in advanced nations, and also the equally universal practice of publicly-producing-and/or-subsidizing tertiary (university) education in these same nations.
This rationale, however, is quite questionable in the area of higher education. Substantial economic research has indicated that a lot of higher education’s value comes from credibly verifying pre-existing human capital rather than increasing it (see Michael Spence’s Job Market Signaling and Bryan Caplan’s The Case Against Education). There is also the fact that many fields in university – particularly fields of the arts and humanities – consist of knowledge with little economic value, and sometimes lots of hardline-leftist ideology that encourages people to be destructive rather than productive (for example many of those who engaged in violent riots in the wake of George Floyd being killed were animated by “ANTIFA” and “1619” ideologies propagated in universities).
From a public choice perspective, the political incentives behind higher education look very much like those that drive bureaucracy (more higher education funding results in bigger budget that results in more people who benefit from state largesse whom in turn vote accordingly for the parties that will increase higher education funding), with the additional benefit of being able to use a politicized curriculum, and/or the incentive of getting one’s student debt reduced, to win additional voters. Similarly to the case of Yandle’s “Bootleggers and Baptists,” the pro-higher-education politician’s self-interested motive is concealed by the publicly spirited rationale of increasing human capital and preparing the next generation to further enrich our society.
Grievance Seven: the vast majority of the mainstream press & entertainment industry has become a megaphone for that same trendy “woke/Social Justice” orthodoxy and is complicit in the active persecution of dissenters
EXAMPLE: Complaints about wokeness infiltrating pop culture have been exceptionally common ever since the “Gamergate” incident of 2014 (an incident that, contrary to popular belief, was primarily defined by a rejection of a particular hobby’s journalism corps by the hobbyists themselves), and perhaps reached their apotheosis in the South Park episode “Enter The Panderverse” (which mocked how Lucasfilm’s Kathleen Kennedy turned Lucasfilm’s intellectual properties, including Star Wars, into platforms for wokeness). These complaints do not lack a basis – they are a response to a genuine trend that encompasses (but is not limited to) many video games (such as Concord, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, Dustborn, Avowed, The Last of Us Part 2), the mainstream American comic books industry (in other words the comics published by Marvel and DC), fiction publishing (particularly in the Young Adult and Speculative Fiction subsectors), Hollywood films (see for example Paul Feig’s remake of Ghostbusters, all of Lucasfilm’s recent output bar Rogue One and the first two seasons of The Mandolorian, and most of Marvel Studios’ films released after Avengers: Endgame), and streaming services (see Amazon’s The Rings of Power). This trend is characterized by, among other things:
1. The systematic humiliation and emasculation of heroic males of European ancestry, and having females, non-Europeans, or non-European females usurp said males’ heroic roles (see for example Star Wars: The Last Jedi and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny).
2. The distortion of history to frame all Europeans as villainous, and to minimize the villainy of non-Europeans (see for example The Woman King).
3. The injection of “straight from the headlines” news events and social issues into fictional settings where such issues make no sense in the context of that setting, and in which these issues are always presented in a way sympathetic to the establishment left’s position on said issue.
4. Blatant double standards that present deeply racist, xenophobic ethnonationalism and the rejection of immigration (and even temporary shelter for refugees) as laudable so long as the people who practice it are “black” or “brown” (see for example Black Panther).
And this is just the entertainment media. The same perspective is clearly dominant in at least 80% of the mainstream news media across the US and Europe. Fox News (or Sky News or GB News) are the exceptions to the rule – the vast majority of the mainstream media within Anglophone and Continental European societies, especially when it is publicly-funded, sings from the same hymn sheet as The Guardian.
It is, therefore, no surprise that this same news media has taken upon itself the role of enforcing the orthodoxies and pieties of wokeness, with what we now call Cancel Culture. Patient Zero of Cancel Culture was, arguably, Justine Sacco, who lost her job after Gawker Media decided to highlight the fact she made a transgressive joke on social media. Gawker’s embrace of the role of public shamer and metaphorical-lynch-mob-inciter was one it played with reckless glee (until it got successfully sued for defamation), but they were hardly the last outlet to play said role.
We all know what they say about any politician with less-than-establishmentarian-left views. But, just like with Justine Sacco, they went far beyond critiquing the potentially-powerful – they savagely attacked internet denizens who complained about the wokeness of the entertainment industry’s output. The Gamergate controversy is the obvious case – the flashpoint for it was the simultaneous publication, across several gaming news outlets, of a series of articles all repeating the argument that the “gamer identity” was existentially imperiled by the presence of women in the gaming industry (see Our enemy, the gamers | DeepFreeze). Despite the fact that the majority of the journalists and commentators who wrote these articles were themselves white males, they argued that criticism of gaming journalism’s state constituted misogyny and racism (against non-whites). The same pattern of smearing fanbases as racist and sexist for rejecting woke ideology in fictional media has since become a norm (for example the same charge is levelled at the Star Wars fanbase here: Star Wars' Biggest Problem Is the Fans). The fact that people in the industry are essentially bashing their own customers really is quite strikingly paradoxical.
Other examples could be found but for the sake of brevity, I shall leave it at this. The vast majority of the entertainment media and news media are all singing from the same hymn sheet and actively attacking those who aren’t, typically with false allegations of atrocious bigotries. If you don’t enjoy being lectured about intersectionality by a television show centered upon a communistic coven of multiethnic lesbian space witches written by the former personal assistant to Hervey Weinstein (i.e. someone in no position to presume their moral superiority over the audience), you must just be a racist sexist homophobe, and if you dare post a negative review online that is linked to your real name, a journalist may try and get you fired. It is presently unknown if Trump’s re-election will stop this behaviour, but during his first term this behaviour was common.
RELEVANCE TO CORE GRIEVANCE: “Woke” ideology plays the role of legitimizing the status and power of the ruling class identified in the core grievance, and the majority of the mainstream media has essentially become part of that same ruling class as journalism and popular art have become progressively more professionalized fields over time. In addition, having control over most of the mainstream media is one of the methods by which the ruling class at least attempts to avoid electoral accountability, through influencing (or even outright lying to) voters.
PUBLIC CHOICE ANALYSIS: The obvious relevance Public Choice Theory has to this grievance is the issue of public broadcasting, which is nothing more than a make-work program and government subsidy for the ruling caste identified in the core grievance. At the same time, it is unsurprising that public broadcasters return the patronage of ideologically aligned governments with both their own votes and favourable coverage (which could be cynically thought of as in-kind campaign contributions). The incentives are similar to those governing bureaucracy.
The relevance of Public Choice to private sector action, however, is more arms-length. However, given the fact that woke ideology is ultimately a product of the universities, we can argue that the propagation of this ideology has been subsidized greatly by public education, and that the propagation of woke ideology functions as an investment in influencing voters to vote for left-wing parties, we can see a similar pattern of incentives in which left-aligned governments (which are more likely to support greater spending on public education) create jobs for their clients, who in turn create cultural products intended to divert more votes towards left-aligned political parties. The “public interest” rhetoric of how investment in education pays for itself and improves productivity is a cover for the self-interest of establishment-left parties and their cronies in the education sector. The role the media plays in such a system is to spread the mixture of wokeness and credentialism that serves as the legitimizing ideology of the ruling class’s dominance. Of course, in theory, the creation of woke cultural products should be curtailed by marketplace accountability – “get woke, go broke” in other words. The next section shall highlight a recent phenomenon that has undermined said accountability.
Grievance Eight: big finance has become an enforcement arm of “woke/Social Justice” orthodoxy through “ESG” investing conducted with public pension funds, and this has subverted market accountability
EXAMPLE: BlackRock CEO Larry Fink’s infamous statement that “you have to force behaviors” has come back to haunt him. Alongside State Street and Vanguard, BlackRock has been among the most prolific promoters of “ESG” investing, which is an investment strategy that grants preferential treatment to investment opportunities which comply with certain criteria that align with woke policy priorities (such as environmental “sustainability” and having DEI policies in employment). ESG investing has been identified as a key factor in the subversion of market accountability. For example, in the entertainment sector, one wonders why there are so many woke cultural products despite “get woke, go broke” being a thing – the answer to this is that entertainment businesses often secure investment by promising to produce cultural products that feature woke themes and/or a certain level of “representation” for the “underrepresented.” ESG’s other impacts, alongside an overproduction of woke entertainment and private incentives for “affirmative action” hiring, include divestment from the primary industries in the name of climate action (see Grievances Two and Five). In addition, the implementation of ESG investment by private firms allows woke policy priorities to become widespread without government enforcement, thus allowing these policies to proliferate without being subject to democratic accountability either – for example, voters in the US consistently oppose affirmative action at the ballot box, but ESG investing has encouraged affirmative action to become widespread in the US private sector because it secures more investment funds from BlackRock.
RELEVANCE TO CORE GRIEVANCE: ESG is relevant because it is one of the mechanisms by which the ruling class identified in the core grievance shields itself from accountability to either customers in markets or voters in elections. In addition, it is also an expression of the woke ideology that the ruling class operates in accordance with, and an instrument by which this ideology (and its associated praxis) metastasizes.
PUBLIC CHOICE ANALYSIS: At first, a Public Choice angle on this subject is hard to find, as ESG seems to be a purely private-sector phenomenon. However, there are two relevancies which must be pointed out. First, ESG investing is either a product of or a response to the “woke” mindsets being fermented within higher education (whether it be via the executives of these investment firms being directly indoctrinated, or by them designing an investment product intended to be sold to a market of those indoctrinated), and higher education is extensively publicly subsidized. However, the greatest overlap between ESG and Public Choice concerns the issue of public sector pension funds. Many governments fund their public sector retirement benefits via investment in ESG funds, even though ESG funds have been shown to underperform the market as a whole. Furthermore, the governments which do this are more likely to have larger numbers of public sector employees in the first place, as ESG investing and growing the public sector are both supported by the center-left establishment. The result is ideologically motivated overinvestment in economically underperforming firms and industries. In essence, ESG investing by governments is a kind of subsidy for politically-favoured products, firms and industries. Consequently, the standard Public Choice analysis of cronyism applies.
Keep following Doctor Casino for the epic conclusion of this manifesto…