Public Choice Populism - A Manifesto, Part 2
The second part of my vision for a Libertarian-Populist alliance...
In the previous part of this series, I introduced readers to the basic concepts behind and the core grievance of my proposed libertarian-populist fusion. I now proceed to define what I believe to be the biggest “component grievances” uniting right wing populists. 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 Theory. This part of the series will cover the first four of eight component grievances, and the last four will be covered in Part 3.
Grievance One: immigration policy is being used as a kind of gerrymandering where the politicians of the center-left import constituents that will vote for them, as opposed to immigration policy being based on the interests of the nation as a whole (and that charges of “racist” are used to silence reasonable criticisms of said immigration policy).
EXAMPLE: The recent US experience under the Biden Administration has both raised awareness of the costs of unmanaged immigration at the US-Mexico border (now that large cities are having to provide services to large migrant influxes) as well as the cynical role such immigrants play in plans to establish and reinforce Democrat-voting majorities (especially in the wake of Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk highlighting the fact that this has been establishment Democratic Party strategy since the days of Judis & Teixeira’s “The Emerging Democratic Majority”). Before the Biden administration, anyone highlighting either of these points was habitually accused of bigotry, but now that inner-city African-Americans are complaining that city services typically spent on them are being diverted to migrants such accusations have become much less common and even many Democrats are willing to publicly acknowledge the costs associated with completely unmanaged immigration; indeed, as of early June, President Biden closed the US-Mexico border. A similar situation exists in the United Kingdom, where Tony Blair substantially loosened immigration controls on the basis of studies that demonstrated migrants generally voted Labour, yet anyone noticing that an unfortunately large proportion of recent immigrants are religious fundamentalists averse to adopting liberal civic values is accused of sympathizing with Hitler.
RELEVANCE TO CORE GRIEVANCE: The ruling caste described in the core grievance is increasingly unaccountable to either voters or marketplaces. Immigration-as-gerrymandering is a method by which the elected components of this caste escape democratic accountability (and consequently remain able to support state-employed or state-privileged components of this caste, and thus help those components escape market accountability). The accusations of racism deployed against dissenters is an example of the role “woke” ideology plays in deterring criticism of the ruling caste’s actions and positioning the ruling caste as the moral superiors of the allegedly bigoted masses.
PUBLIC CHOICE ANALYSIS: Public Choice argues that politicians will pass policies that serve their own interests, and one interest that politicians have is getting re-elected (politicians, like everyone else, want to keep their jobs). Being able to import voters is, thus, something politicians will obviously be tempted to engage in, particularly since doing so doesn’t necessarily involve spending more money (like “pork barreling” does). To the extent that certain costs of such voter importation can be avoided by the politician (for example if an imported voter constituency is more likely to be violent than the native population, yet politicians often have extra security compared to a member of the general population) this only increases the incentive to engage in it. Of course, politicians can, via the education system, invest in the propagation of woke ideology which imposes costs on critics of the politician’s immigration policies.
Grievance Two: climate change policy is degrading living standards and social mobility (and that charges of “science denier” are used to silence reasonable criticisms of said climate change policy).
EXAMPLE: The Dutch Farmer-Citizen Movement, the French Yellow Vests, and the growing German hostility to how their national transition to green energy is being implemented, are all prominent examples of rebellion against exceptionally stringent anti-climate-change initiatives, and the results of the 2024 European Parliamentary elections also serve as evidence that “green” climate change policy is becoming deeply unpopular. Green policies have, among other things, greatly increased food and energy prices across Europe, and gasoline prices in the United States (through influencing decisions made by the Biden administration). The environmentalist component of “wokeness,” often referred to as “climate justice,” is a particularly extreme view of imminent irreversible disaster that can only be averted through the empowerment of global managerial bureaucracies (essentially a shift to economic fascism on a global scale). It is also common knowledge that climate scientists who speak out against “climate justice” are often dismissed as shills or cranks even if they accept the reality of Anthropogenic Global Warming (an example would be Dr Judith Curry).
RELEVANCE TO CORE GRIEVANCE: Responding to Anthropogenic Global Warming has been a mission for the ruling caste because it presents many opportunities for this caste to both pursue their own material enrichment and justify their contempt for “dirty, polluting” industries and the people within them. Academics, bureaucrats, politicians, highly-credentialled professionals, entertainers and mass media industries are all in low-carbon industries as are “green” corporate cronies. The costs of climate policy will not be borne by them, but rather by those in the “carbon economy.” However, the carbon economy is critical to keeping us supplied with very critical things such as food and energy, and making these things more expensive disproportionately impacts the poor. The poor are further impacted when green policy wipes out traditional industries which employed large number of people (such as coal mining in Appalachia).
PUBLIC CHOICE ANALYSIS: The dynamic between rent-seeking entrepreneurs in the renewable energy industry and environmentalist activists is a classic example of what economist Bruce Yandle called a “Bootleggers and Baptists” dynamic – a coalition develops between those who support a regulation for moral and/or ideological reasons (Baptists) and those who support the same regulation because it serves their own interests (Bootleggers). The Baptists, such as Extinction Rebellion, stage public demonstrations, whereas the Bootleggers (lobbyists for Big Solar/Big Wind/Big EV) talk with politicians behind closed doors in order to get subsidies and other privileges. Certain public sector interest groups also have an interest in climate policy, such as scientists who need to secure public grant money (and thus have incentives to refrain from open dissent) and regulatory bureaucracies that can expect to grow their budget (as per the Budget Maximizing Model of William Niskanen) as they are further empowered to address the problem.
Grievance Three: the civil/public service is a self-interested special interest group that has become increasingly metropolitan, authoritarian and partisan left.
EXAMPLE: Perhaps the most illustrative example of the mass embrace of authoritarianism by bureaucratic authorities in recent memory is the response to COVID-19. The response is now readily acknowledged to have been a monumental overreaction – jurisdictions with an authoritarian response to the pandemic saw no significant difference in death rates than those which adopted a more liberal approach. Dr Anthony Fauci – perhaps the central global figure in this response – has openly admitted that many measures to combat the panic were arbitrary (such as six foot social distancing) and outright mistaken (such as closing schools), and if US Senator Rand Paul’s critique of Fauci is correct (see Dr Paul’s Deception: The Great COVID Cover-Up) Dr Fauci also encouraged the censorship of critical discussions on social media and thus was complicit in the violation of free speech rights. This censorship, supported by the Biden Administration, strongly targeted suspicions that COVID-19 was leaked from a lab, and whilst Fauci and his colleagues privately believed this to be the case (and had funded likely-illegal research which was potentially responsible for the very virus in question) he strongarmed several scientists he knew into writing a paper (The Proximal Origin Of SARS-CoV-2) intended to discredit such suspicions. Even if Dr Paul’s allegations turn out to be false, Fauci was complicit in what was the greatest peacetime violation of Westerners’ civil liberties in decades and all the costs thereof (such as economic and educational losses). If Dr Paul’s allegations are true, Fauci’s authoritarianism was magnified by Fauci’s self-interested desire to avoid accountability for funding likely-illegal research and resulted in an act of exceptionally egregious scientific malpractice.
It should not come as a surprise that support for the Fauci-ist approach was noticeably stronger on the political left than the political right, as the establishment left is more strongly enthusiastic about bureaucracy than the establishment right. Bureaucrats return the favour – it is well known that public/civil servants donate substantially more to the political left than to the right. This same group’s voting behaviour almost certainly mirrors such donations, given how left-leaning bureaucrat-dominated cities (such as Washington DC, Brussels and Canberra) are.
RELEVANCE TO CORE GRIEVANCE: Civil/public servants are a key subgroup of the ruling caste defined in the core grievance. Their metropolitanization and political partisanship help to alienate them from the very public they’re meant to be serving and to the extent they embrace authoritarian attitudes they are by definition embracing the idea that they should have power over the masses. They are also strongly shielded from democratic accountability.
PUBLIC CHOICE ANALYSIS: The proposition that the civil/public servants (aka bureaucrats) are self-interested and have shared interests which they act to advance is a core tenet of Public Choice, and as such this grievance invites a Public Choice perspective. The relevant scholarship is William Niskanen’s Budget Maximizing Model. Bureaucrat donating and voting behaviours also make sense as an expression of self-interest on their part – they are making investments in the political success of the parties most likely to further increase their budget. To the extent that bureaucrats are metropolitanized and partisan-left, these factors can greatly influence how they evaluate the costs and benefits of any particular policy, and the possibility that their evaluations diverge from those of the majority of the polity. This same language can be used to describe the bureaucratic bias towards authoritarianism – not only does authoritarian policy typically result in increased budgets for bureaucrats but bureaucrats may perceive the costs of authoritarianism to be low when they are the ones exercising the authority rather than the ones whom the authority is imposing upon.
Grievance Four: Western nations cannot afford to be (and perhaps are not even capable of being) the World Police and that each nation should primarily serve its own citizens.
EXAMPLE: This is perhaps the most Amerigocentric of all the grievances, as much of this sentiment emerged in the aftermath of the US’s failed attempt at “nation-building” in Iraq and Afghanistan. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were, in part, justified to voters by a small-l-liberal idealism which placed the United States in the messianic position of being able to turn these places into modern and free societies. The experience of failing to do so, at the cost of many deaths and much money (which could’ve been used to improve the lives of American citizens at home) clearly influenced the MAGA movement, which includes among its slogans “America First.” The connotation here is obvious – self-sacrificial (and ultimately futile) idealism is out, and self-interested realism is in. There are also manifestations of a similar sentiment, both in the USA and in Continental Europe, surrounding migrants and how recent (and often illegally entering) migrants receive public services and benefits above those available to citizens. In both situations the reasoning behind the sentiment is contributive: those who have paid their taxes to the state (or, in the case of veterans, those who have risked their lives to defend the state) should have their interests prioritized above those of either recent arrivals or foreigners in other countries (neither of whom have paid taxes) or the arms industry.
RELEVANCE TO CORE GRIEVANCE: High-ranking military officers are paid by the state and are, by definition, members of the ruling caste described in the core grievance. They are fundamentally bureaucrats. In addition, defense sector cronies are by definition trying to escape market accountability (all cronyism inherently is). To the extent “woke” ideology plays a role in this particular grievance, it could be argued that the political response to the European Migrant Crisis was in part driven by a sense of post-colonial guilt (something “wokeness” tries to instill in persons of European descent, although in Angela Merkel’s case it was likely post-WW2 guilt that was the culprit). Ergo, the tolerance of illegal immigration by, and diversion of public resources to, recent migrants was performed by guilty elites to assuage their consciences (at the expense of poorer European citizens).
PUBLIC CHOICE ANALYSIS: William Niskanen’s Budget Maximizing Model was developed from his experiences within the US Department of Defense, and as such is particularly relevant to discussing military spending. Like all bureaucracies, the military’s incentive is to continually increase its budget, and wars provide a great opportunity to do so. Private firms in the defense space (such as arms and aerospace manufacturers) also have an incentive to keep military spending high so as to boost the supply of government contracts, and therefore also have an incentive to lobby for hawkish foreign policies. Such defense cronyism is so prevalent in the US that it is frequently described as the “revolving door” between high-ranking positions in the military/DoD and seats on the corporate boards of defense firms. With regard to the prioritization of recent (and sometimes illegal entrant) migrants above current citizens, the public choice analysis from Grievance One (see above) applies, although woke ideology may also generate non-electoral benefits in imported votes that are not present in domestic votes (such as the ability to soothe the policymaker’s post-colonial guilt).
Keep following Doctor Casino for Part 3, coming soon…