Public Choice Populism - A Manifesto, Part 4
The fourth and final 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 and third parts, I highlighted eight of the grievances animating right wing populist movements across the globe and explained them in the terms of Public Choice Theory. In this final installment, I shall move from theory to practice and consider how we can campaign for and implement the Public Choice Populist agenda.
Strategies for Public Choice Populists
I now move to suggest three strategies for Public Choice Populists. As I am an economist rather than a political strategist, I fully accept that these strategies are only tentative suggestions and may be contested. However, a starting point for activism and operationalization of the Public Choice Populist agenda is necessary, and to that end I offer the following three principles.
1. Validate Their Grievances
People are angry, and the grievances that were previously detailed are fair things to be angry about. Why shouldn’t farmers be angry that their livelihood is being slowly criminalized by green policymakers with no knowledge of how organic soybeans are grown? Why shouldn’t white male creatives be angry when they’re denied opportunities simply due to their race and sex? Why shouldn’t military veterans feel anger towards governments that prioritize the welfare of asylum-seekers (legitimate refugees or otherwise) over their own? Why shouldn’t miners who have been fired due to environmental activism feel resentment towards highly educated green journalists who tell them to “learn to code”?
There is a long tradition in liberal thought that sees the passions of the masses as potentially dangerous and sees taming these passions as part of what a responsible politician should do. Yet in today’s electoral landscape, where passions are running hot and forging popular coalitions is a necessity to win, asking our voters to calm down is suicide (and it isn’t like the other side is above whipping their voters into a frenzy, either). Our voters are not calm or dispassionate about the decline in their own circumstances, nor should they be, and consequently nor should Public Choice Populists. Instead, Public Choice Populists should validate our voters’ anger and resentment. Doing so helps our voters to perceive us as relatable.
Javier Milei may be an economics professor, but does he act like a dispassionate analyst? Absolutely not. And Donald Trump serves as an example, not just for his “mean” statements on social media; Trump too is a victim of classism despite being obscenely wealthy (see Donald Trump: The Outer-Borough President - The Atlantic), and this shared resentment is what helps him understand his voters and helps his voters relate to him. Libertarians may generally pride themselves on how rational they are, yet perhaps libertarians could do with fostering a bit of that bitterness and resentment within themselves; take a look at how Ayn Rand was treated by the artistic and intellectual elites of her day (something Jennifer Burns details at length in Goddess of the Market), at how both Hayek and Mises were commonly mocked and often dependent on sponsorships from philanthropists, and how to this day the academic left ruthlessly operates to purge libertarians from the academy (something they’ve largely succeeded at doing, except within economics faculties). Even Public Choice Theory itself has been subject to viciously defamatory attacks from leftist professors at prestigious schools (see Duke University historian Nancy MacLean’s Democracy In Chains, which smears Public Choice with the charge of racism, yet was written without the author even talking to a single Public Choice expert despite Duke University’s economics department having several of them).
Cultivating our own (quite justified) sense of grievance may be precisely what is necessary to connect with voters.
2. Stop Playing Respectability Politics
“Respectability Politics” is a term I have borrowed from the left – it refers to activism which advocates for a specific (typically minority) group by presenting such group as “just like normal (majority) people.” There are plenty of debates to be had over the tactical value of this kind of activism, however in this context I am using “Respectability Politics” to refer to a common habit in the circles of the mainstream right. Specifically, the habit of being exceptionally polite, as defined by the norms of people who predate Generation X.
Again, this kind of behaviour makes us less relatable to our voters. We need to be blunt and forward with our language and not hide behind “diplomatic” euphemism.
Javier Milei again serves as an example. He is now the President of a majority-Catholic nation, yet he repeatedly described Pope Francis (a fellow Argentine) as a “shit leftist” and “communist turd.” Clearly being a little bit coarse or mean or blunt isn’t going to destroy one’s electoral success. Not to mention, considering that our political enemies habitually accuse us of various personality defects, psychological problems and moral depravities like racism, we are justified in fighting fire with fire. After all, our political enemies are a bunch of parasites who are either intellectually dishonest about, indifferent to or morons regarding economic reality. They habitually lie, conspire against our civil liberties, steal our money and spend it on wars we despise, punish us for complaining about their actions, and ultimately desire to disenfranchise us and micromanage our lifestyles. A few epithets towards them are frankly justified.
The American experience has already proven that even the most socially conservative of voters will hold their nose and vote for someone who transgresses most widely held ideals about “common decency” and “politeness” so long as they are strong on policy. Donald Trump is not just prone to bouts of being verbally intemperate but is a thrice-divorced pussy-grabber with a personality that (as both Albert Mohler and Russell Moore recognize) bears little resemblance to any classical account of “Christian virtue.” Whereas social conservatives have literally spent decades complaining about how pop culture is “slouching towards Gomorrah,” Trump is a celebrity within that same lowbrow pop culture (for one, he’s a member of the World Wrestling Entertainment Hall of Fame). Trump has even managed to get the Republican Party to renounce the religious right’s two biggest political ambitions (abolishing same-sex marriage and federally prohibiting abortion), yet Christian-Right voters still voted for him in the 2024 Presidential Election. Said voters have reconciled themselves with the reality that they aren’t electing a pastor.
In brief, let us finally exorcise the spirits of Mary Whitehouse and Jerry Falwell from our activism. Let the conservatives of the future be South Park Conservatives. Let us speak what we and our voters really think, even if it ruffles the feathers of pearl-clutchers.
3. Target Higher Ed & Credentialism
Perhaps the most critical task for Public Choice Populists is to defund the institutions which developed and incubated (and continue to inculcate) wokeness – higher education. It is certainly beyond refute that some fields taught in the universities have great value, but at the same time certain other fields not only lack value but arguably sabotage human capital. Higher education also produces the Credentialism that serves as the ruling caste’s legitimizing narrative. Higher education is the engine that enabled “woke” ideology to take over the most prestigious institutions in our culture – credentials from prestigious universities are effectively “access all areas” passes to culture-shaping institutions.
This target gives us the seeds of a practical policy agenda. We can promote the defunding of public higher education, or at least specific woke courses. We can impose free speech requirements on universities that receive public money. We can make higher education less necessary by opening up more public sector jobs to people who haven’t received higher education (this would also have the positive impact of reducing credential inflation), and we can redirect funding away from universities and towards vocational schools.
Higher education is not the only place where woke ideology runs rampant – ideologically-driven teachers (and teachers unions) often try to insert this ideology (and/or said ideology’s praxis) into primary and secondary education. As such, stronger legal mandates for curriculum transparency and teacher accountability are desirable and moves such as the government refusing to hire unionized teachers are also on the table (even if that particular step would be quite radical). Another useful tactic is to promote School Choice, which would both undermine teachers unions and ideological monopolization of education. Another option is that policymakers could mandate that social science or social studies courses in public schools include a basic unit on economics (which would teach introductory neoclassical economic theory), and/or strengthen history education’s emphasis on the hundreds of millions of deaths caused by and crushing totalitarianisms imposed by Communist Party governments across the world.
A final obvious target is the practice of ESG investing with public money. A government cannot ban ESG investment outright without violating property rights, but investing public money is a different question. The argument against ESG investing with public money is, thankfully, one that can be framed in a bipartisan fashion – those on the left would typically argue that government workers should be paid well and that the government owes these workers a good retirement, but ESG investments generally underperform and thus represent a situation where the government is violating the fiduciary duty it should have towards its employees (the right-leaning case against ESG investing with public money has been previously detailed in Grievance Eight).
That said, higher education is still the key target. After all, higher education is where the primary and secondary school teachers are taught, and where business students are given ideologically tinged lectures about “corporate social responsibility.” The root of the rot is higher education, and therefore it is those institutions which should be addressed most urgently by Public Choice Populists.
Conclusion
Javier Milei and Vivek Ramaswamy both speak to a prospective alliance of the populist right with libertarians. Milei did this electorally, and Vivek has taken his pitch for “National Libertarianism” to National Conservatism conferences. This manifesto is intended in the same spirit – to facilitate this prospective alliance. The distinctive contribution this manifesto attempts to make is to explicitly synthesize the grievances of the populist right into a cohesive set of complaints that are explicable in the language of Public Choice Theory. I henceforth offer this manifesto for discussion among members of both populist movements and liberty movements.