The tyranny of populism

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="234" caption="“Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism” -John Updike"][/caption]

I received an email today from someone I know peripherally through my wife.  Before going further, please read his email, listed here.  Please note his name and those he emailed have been deleted from the message.

There, all done?  Good.

This jeremiad from a fellow citizen sounds much like many others we have all read and heard lately, especially in the last year or so.  There has always been an underlying populist sentiment among some people in the US, but it seems they have been especially vocal over the last few months.  I think even Ron Paul’s supporters might be getting a bit envious of the press coverage the Tea Partiers (teabaggers, according to some of their own signs) and now the GOOOH Party is receiving.

The common thread seeming to connect them all is an underlying belief that the United States is a direct democracy.  They believe that citizens do and should have the power to have a direct say on how the country is governed, whether it’s legislation or decisions of the executive.

They couldn’t be more wrong.

The United States is a democratic republic.  This means we get to elect our government, which then acts in our best interests (hopefully) without being a direct delegate of our individual wishes.  This is an important distinction and one the Founding Fathers were very careful in making when structuring our government.  They were all too aware of how mob rule would function and they set things up so that the minority has some protections from the majority and so that popular sentiment alone wouldn’t be enough to steer the ship of a nation.

James Madison was especially worried about populist rule and even debated on whether we should use the word “democracy” in deciding how our new country would be governed.  He viewed the direct democracy of ancient Greece as being somewhat erratic and inherently short-lived, whereas the Roman form of a republic ensured long term stability and survival.  Benjamin Franklin is famously quoted, when asked what kind of government he and the rest of the founders had created, “a Republic, if you can keep it.”

Thus, the United States was never set up to address the whims of the public at large through a kind of “push button” democracy such as we see in California’s endless ballot measures.  The populists decry our government as not representing them, but they aren’t the only ones in this country.

The government we have is the government we elected, for whatever our individual reasons for voting.  In any election, there are winners and there are losers.  Maybe your preferred candidate didn’t win, but this in no way means you are less represented in the Congress.

Yet, this results in a kind of deception from the populists, most especially as they are seemingly embodied in the right wing of the American political spectrum.  They use scare tactics and phrases to evoke fear in the rest of the populace regarding our government.  The email in question does the same thing.  The use of “socialism” is a popular boogeyman of the right, never bothering to address how inherently socialized some aspects of our country MUST be in order to promote a more egalitarian society.

Their duplicitous borders almost on a pathological mental block.  At a recent teabagger rally, one sign held proudly aloft by a seemingly clueless protester read “keep your government hands off my Medicare!”.  More famously, consider the following clip of Craig T. Nelson, appearing on Fox’s Glenn Beck show:



That’s right.  “Coach” thinks when he was on food stamps and welfare, he wasn’t getting help from anyone.  So too do the populists make the same mistake in decrying the “socialism” of government programs as they walk on roads paid for by other taxpayers, go to schools supported by other taxpayers, and post on an Internet created through a government program funded by taxpayer dollars.

They decry fictional tax hikes on the middle class while blaming President Obama for a 3% hike on the upper marginal tax rate in 2011, which was set in place long before he was elected.  They rail about a health care reform bill, calling it “government run health care”, despite the fact it is entirely driven by private market dollars.  But keep your government hands off my Medicare/VA/Social Security benefits!

More specifically, the email I received makes some lofty and similar claims as other rants by the populist right, even while being wholly uninformed.  For example, consider this paragraph:

Our Constitution does not allow for the taxation we have, healthcare, social programs, Post Offices, etc.  These losing programs are kept on life support at the expense of the tax payers--and the majority of those taxes are payed by the top wage earners.  80% of our tax burden is payed by 1% of tax payers.  Is that right?  Is that fair?

The author of the email hasn’t read the Constitution:

Article 1, Section 8, describing the powers of the Congress:

The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States;

To establish Post Offices and post Roads;

(bold emphasis added)

Still more puzzling is the seeming irritation over our progressive tax system.  It’s a common factoid of anti-tax people to point out a tiny minority pay a majority of the tax receipts.  What they fail to mention is that the same minority of people also control a majority of the wealth in the US, even as they are paying less taxes, as a percentage of their incomes, than the rest of the nation, including the middle class.

And who is that tiny minority?  The are the richest people in the country.  They are the titans of industry, heads of corporations, and beneficiaries of TARP bailout money under President Bush.

They are people who can dramatically impact national policy through their lobbying efforts well beyond the ballot box.  They are people who can influence our national economy, affecting every wage earner in the country.  They are people who own the stock market, in which so many middle class 401K retirement accounts are trusted.

Yes, it is ENTIRELY fair they pay a majority of the tax receipts in this country even though they are now paying historically the lowest tax rates imposed on them since the introduction of the income tax.

Yet, they are not all bad people.  Warren Buffett, with a personal worth of $52,000,000,000,recently blasted the US tax rates, complaining that he paid a lesser percentage of his income than his $50,000 per year secretary.  He too recognizes the inherent unfairness of our system of taxation, though not in the same vein as the author of our email.  He recognized that for the rich, it’s socialism, but for the poor it’s capitalism.

H.L. Mencken said “people deserve the government they get, and they deserve to get it good and hard.”  The tireless complaining about the government we have from the teabaggers and the populists is a shucking off of personal accountability and responsibility.  They create an artificial “us” and “them”, making it seem like the government they helped elect, even if their candidate didn’t win, is being foisted on them against their will.  They are the original sore losers.  They are the ungrateful masses who gripe about paying their fair share for the benefits they receive even as they complain about anyone else also paying their fair share.

Their notion of a libertarian utopia of small, weak government is clueless of economics, history, and government.  Just ask Somalia.

In short, they cannot judge for me what my patriotism looks like.  They cannot decide for me what opinion I have of government, especially given the overall ignorance of their own opinions.  They are welcome to take part in the political process by forming a new political party (GOOOH being the worst name for a political party since the Bull Moose Party).  But they should get ready for some powerful resistance from the actual majority which is largely content with our government, especially given the seemingly anarchic populist rage they see as being offered in emails such as the one I received today.