Why Populism Fails

Reflections on the Trump Revolution

—You began ill, because you began by despising everything that belonged to you.

I had a suspicion that yesterday’s newsletter would result in a bitter discussion of Donald Trump. I don’t see the point in devoting a whole lot more time to him here. Are there not enough media outlets that discuss his every twitch? But two comments struck me as requiring a response. The first, from Steve Fleischer, was to the effect that yes, Trump is every bit as bad as I say, but fortunately too incompetent to do any harm.

The second came from our reader WigWag, who commended to my attention an essay by Alana Newhouse, published a year ago in Tablet, titled Brokenism. He argues that it explains “the vitriolic period we are in now to a tee.”

Newhouse’s thesis about American politics is that the old left-right debate is no longer relevant; instead, the fundamental debate is between those who believe there is “something fundamentally broken in America, and that it’s an emergency,” and those who don’t. The former are, in her term, are the brokenists:

Brokenists believe that our current institutions, elites, intellectual and cultural life, and the quality of services that many of us depend on have been hollowed out. To them, the American establishment, rather than being a force of stability, is an obese and corrupted tangle of federal and corporate power threatening to suffocate the entire country. Proof of this decay, they argue, can be seen in the unconventional moves that many people, regardless of how they would describe themselves politically, are making: home-schooling their children to avoid the failures and politicization of many public and private schools; consuming more information from YouTube, Twitter, Substack, and podcasts than from legacy media outlets; and abandoning the restrictions, high costs, and pathologies of the coasts for freer and more affordable pastures in the Southeast and Southwest.

Brokenists come from all points on the political spectrum. They disagree with each other about what kinds of programs, institutions, and culture they want to see prevail in America. What they agree on—what is in fact a more important point of agreement than anything else—is that what used to work is not working for enough people anymore.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, Newhouse argues, are status-quoists. She describes them thus:

… many people understandably see our current moment as a wave of change that can be ridden successfully—without overblown diagnoses or radical solutions. These are status-quoists, people who are invested in the established institutions of American life, even as they acknowledge that this or that problem around the margins should of course be tackled. Status-quoists believe that any decline in quality one might observe at Yale or The Washington Post or the Food and Drug Administration or the American Federation of Teachers are simply problems of personnel, circumstance, incompetence, or lack of information. Times change, people come and go, status-quoists believe—this outfit screwed up Covid policy, yes, and that place has an antisemitism problem, agreed. But they will learn, reform, and recover, and they need our help to do so. What isn’t needed, and is in fact anathema, is any effort to inject more perceived radicalism into an already toxic and polarized American society. The people, ideas, and institutions that led America after the end of the Cold War must continue to guide us through the turbulence ahead. What can broadly be called the “establishment” is not only familiar, status-quoists believe; it is safe, stable, and ultimately enduring.

WigWag suggests that I’m a status-quoist. “Status-quoists may hate Trump for all his foibles,” he writes,

but that can’t explain the obsessive nature of their hatred. What they really find impossible to abide is Trump’s lack of respect for a system they highly respect. It’s a system that benefits them disproportionately, though they are right to argue that it’s worked pretty well for most people at least since the advent of the New Deal. Those of us who aren’t appalled by Trump and find much to like in his program (regardless of how incompetently he carries it out) are Newhouse’s “brokenists.” I’m one; maybe [reader] Alan Potkin is too.

… I think Newhouse is really on to something. Her theory explains why politics is as angry and bitter as it’s ever been. What we’re witnessing isn’t the Hatfields versus the McCoys. It’s more akin to the Roman Catholics versus the Protestants shortly after the inception of the Reformation with the status-quoists playing the part of the Catholics and the Brokenists playing the part of the Protestants.

My response: This is not a new debate. It is one of the oldest in political history. But the right historical analogy isn’t the Protestant Reformation. It’s the French Revolution.

There is, yes, a profound temperamental and philosophical difference between people who argue for cautious, incremental reform, and people who say, “Burn it to the ground and start anew.” We used to call the former conservatives and the latter radicals. WigWag is correct to suspect that I am a conservative. These days I don’t much use that description, because it’s been appropriated by radicals. But my views about our political condition are similar to Edmund Burke’s appraisal of the French Revolution.

If you’ve never read Reflections on the Revolution in France, there’s a reason you were forced to read it when you were too young to understand it. I presume most of you have long since consigned it the attic of your memory. But I strongly recommend taking a few minutes now to skim it again. It remains keenly relevant. It even exceeds Alana Newhouse’s essay in profundity.

I agree with Newhouse’s observation: Our country, like many others, is riven between radicals and conservatives. But if I am not a radical, it is not because I fail to grasp that America is, in an important sense, “broken.” I too am a brokenist. In fact, I think I’ve made the case for this position better than Newhouse herself. She sees evidence for brokenism in the number of parents who home-school their children, watch YouTube instead of CNN, and move to states with more attractive tax regimes. But those are weak arguments. If you’re looking for better ones, you might try my essay, The Last Happy Days of the American Empire:

… America [I observed] had entered a period of precipitous decline, characterized by serial failures of domestic governance, stunningly destructive foreign policy, and a bewildering series of epidemics—obesity, mass shootings, opiate addiction. American life expectancy was falling, just as it had in Russia following the Soviet Union’s collapse. American culture had meanwhile become astonishingly vulgar, violent, stupid, pornographic, and coarse. Americans had come to doubt the principles upon which our country had been founded and to which it was consecrated. It is still not clear to me whether this doubt was the cause or the consequence of these events. Perhaps it was both.

It was not until the nomination—and then the election—of Donald Trump that the obvious at last became undeniable. Americans had lost faith in liberal democracy, much as the Soviets had lost faith in communism.

You’ll be pleased to see that I too excoriate our elites as imbeciles. As you can see, I’m hardly insensate to the argument that something is badly broken. I’ve been saying so for years. Ours was clearly a healthier and more optimistic country in the second half of the twentieth century.

If I agree with the diagnosis, why do I fail to welcome Donald Trump as our deliverance? Because I absolutely don’t believe that anything Donald Trump has to offer would rectify a single one of those problems, and indeed I believe he has made, and will continue to make, a bad situation violently worse.

Compute your gains: see what is got by those extravagant and presumptuous speculations which have taught your leaders to despise all their predecessors, and all their contemporaries, and even to despise themselves until the moment in which they become truly despicable. By following those false lights, France has bought undisguised calamities at a higher price than any nation has purchased the most unequivocal blessings! France has bought poverty by crime! France has not sacrificed her virtue to her interest, but she has abandoned her interest, that she might prostitute her virtue.

Anyone who argues that we are in such desperate straights that nothing could be worse is insane. Broken we may be, but we are also the world’s wealthiest and most powerful country. We’re suffering from an obesity epidemic, not starvation. Every American alive lives or could readily live in a luxury and opulence inconceivable to anyone born at the dawn of the 20th century. The problem that most vexes our radicals is the flood of immigrants, migrants, and refugees fleeing to, not away, from the United States.

The dream of ushering in a better world by burning everything down has a long pedigree, and the idea that it is all the fault of the elites, who should be jettisoned, has eternal appeal, recurring over and over at times of social stress. That’s why it’s been tried over and over, in one country after another, and every single time, it has made things worse—usually, catastrophically worse.

Burke foresaw the terminus of the French Revolution: It was not liberty, equality, and fraternity, but terror and tyranny. Like Burke, I am against abrupt, radical change that does away with established traditions and institutions, failing to consider the wisdom or practical knowledge embodied in them. Like Burke, I favor gradual, measured reform over revolutionary change. Like Burke, I believe that our social and political systems are complex and highly evolved; that they have evolved the way they have for a reason; and that before tearing them down, we should understand those reasons. If we determine they are serving an important function, we must first devise something better to replace them—before we destroy them. Like Burke, I believe that the radical overthrow of traditional institutions leads to chaos.

Your constitution, it is true, whilst you were out of possession, suffered waste and dilapidation; but you possessed in some parts the walls and in all the foundations of a noble and venerable castle. You might have repaired those walls; you might have built on those old foundations.

You suggest implicitly, WigWag, that I defend our elites because I’ve profited personally from the system that produces them. I am suffering, in other words, from false consciousness.

Not really. I neither defend them with especial enthusiasm nor have I benefited much from that system. I support myself by writing this newsletter. I have no connection at all to American political or corporate life. I own no stocks. I have no retirement account. I don’t even live in the United States. In fact, I’ve made all of these choices precisely because I find the American elite intolerable, and the feeling is mutual.

I wouldn’t last a day in corporate America. (I know. I’ve tried.) If awarded a government sinecure, I’d get myself fired within weeks for denouncing everyone around me as an idiot. (I know that from experience, too.) My career as a writer would be far more successful if I had a taste for socializing with the vulgar neurotics of our cultural elite, but I can’t even bring myself to refrain from writing professionally ill-advised sentences like this one.

You may reply that this isn’t the point: I’m a product of my class, and I’ve unconsciously imbibed its ideology like mother’s milk. Sure. But if you find that kind of neo-Marxist account compelling, you’re challenged to defend Donald Trump as the tribune of the working man.

If you’re willing to believe that I say what I do not out of class solidarity but because I think reason, in this case, favors the instincts of my class, let’s look at the evidence. What will happen if Donald Trump wins reelection and exacts his vengeance, as he has promised to do, on some two million employees of the federal government? He will, it has been widely reported, immediately signed an executive order, “Creating Schedule F in the Excepted Service.” He signed this in October 2020, in fact. It established a new employment category for federal employees. It was largely forgotten in the mayhem of January 6 and Biden quickly rescinded it.

Trump says, and those around him confirm, that if reelected he will immediately reimpose Schedule F. Don’t comfort yourself for a moment with the thought that he’s too incompetent to do this. It’s the heart of his promise for “vengeance.”¹

They intend to stack thousands of mid-level staff jobs. Well-funded groups are already developing lists of candidates selected often for their animus against the system—in line with Trump’s long-running obsession with draining “the swamp.” This includes building extensive databases of people vetted as being committed to Trump and his agenda. The preparations are far more advanced and ambitious than previously reported. What is happening now is an inversion of the slapdash and virtually non-existent infrastructure surrounding Trump ahead of his 2017 presidential transition.

He plans to centralize power in the Oval Office and replace the entire federal bureaucracy with loyalists who can be fired at will:

Mr. Trump intends to bring independent agencies—like the Federal Communications Commission, which makes and enforces rules for television and internet companies, and the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces various antitrust and other consumer protection rules against businesses—under direct presidential control. He wants to revive the practice of “impounding” funds, refusing to spend money Congress has appropriated for programs a president doesn’t like—a tactic that lawmakers banned under President Richard Nixon.

He intends to strip employment protections from tens of thousands of career civil servants, making it easier to replace them if they are deemed obstacles to his agenda. And he plans to scour the intelligence agencies, the State Department and the defense bureaucracies to remove officials he has vilified as “the sick political class that hates our country.”

This is a classic authoritarian scheme. Target the bureaucracy, stack it with loyalists, stifle dissent, reward friends, punish enemies. There will be no institutionalists like Mattis and Kelly to constrain him this time. He learned, during his first term, the importance of controlling the bureaucracy. Had he been firmly in control of the national security and justice apparatus, his coup attempt would have succeeded. He won’t make that mistake twice.

The first loyalty test will be whether an employee is willing to avow that the 2020 election was stolen and behave accordingly. No respectable or qualified member of the elite will work in government under that condition. There will be a massive exodus. All of those jobs will be filled from the lists of candidates they’re now drawing up.

By all reports—and there have been many, they’re not concealing this, they’re advertising it—the only qualification they’re looking for is loyalty to Trump. Previous, relevant experience is a negative; it means the candidate is an enemy. So all of these jobs will be filled by unqualified, angry, poorly-educated young men who have no idea what they’re doing and don’t care.

It is true that we’re now governed by men and women who are plodding and often incompetent. But if you think it can only be an improvement to replace them with lawless Trump loyalists who are completely incompetent, you’re dead wrong. As the Chicago Policy Review (hardly a bastion of DEI enthusiasm) notes:

[The] vetting process would include asking government officials “What part of Candidate Trump’s campaign message most appealed to you and why?” Former Trump White House aides have already started vetting candidates. Over two million employees make up the federal workforce in non-political positions. While many public servants provide basic services like mail delivery, food inspection, and air traffic control, the Schedule F policy most gravely threatens the national security apparatus’ human infrastructure. Former President Trump has purportedly said he would prioritize “cleaning house” in the national security apparatus if re-elected, targeting “woke generals” at the Pentagon, senior trial attorneys at all levels within the Department of Justice, senior members of the intelligence community, and the most experienced diplomats at the State Department.

Purging the most vital and knowledgeable federal civil servants sits somewhere between ending free media and questioning election legitimacy in the authoritarian playbook. The MAGA movement did their best to attack the media as the “enemy of the people,” continuing to back the lie that Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election. At present, Schedule F represents the most aggressive authoritarian action to reshape the government thus far. … the worst authoritarian flunkies and sycophants have spent their time since leaving the White House vetting loyalists to immediately take over the civil service should Trump win in 2024. Some would argue that incompetence limited the Trump Administration, but a dedicated law-abiding civil service provided a critical backstop against some of the most damaging excesses of Trump’s presidency.

The Review describes these plans as a “five-alarm fire,” wondering why they’ve failed to break through the normal political horserace coverage. I wonder, too.

Were all these dreadful things necessary? Were they the inevitable results of the desperate struggle of determined patriots, compelled to wade through blood and tumult to the quiet shore of a tranquil and prosperous liberty? No! nothing like it.

The US has some two million career civil servants. More than 70 percent work in agencies with national security responsibilities: Defense, State, Treasury, and Energy. Many work in highly skilled technical, administrative, policy, and legal roles. Their jobs require a great deal of specialized knowledge. These are the people who devise our sanctions policies. They give advice about the legality of drone strikes. They predict hurricanes. They determine which dual-use chemicals are too dangerous to export. They’re the people Michael Lewis described in The Fifth Risk, calling their responsibilities “the biggest portfolio of [catastrophic] risks ever managed by a single institution in the history of the world.”

There is a lot to dislike about this bureaucracy, and certainly, it is bloated. It urgently needs reform—in fact, our lives depend on it—and I’m all in favor of reforming it: by making it better and more competent.

If we replace all of these people with incompetent Trump flunkeys, it will not be better. At best, writes Lawfare (no bastion of DEI sentimentalism either):

shifting policy-aligned roles to Schedule F roles would have a chilling effect on such policy experts whom we rely on for their unique expertise, candor, and integrity, potentially making them more cautious about the advice they give, the portfolios they support, the risks they take in defending the Constitution, and their willingness to call out malfeasance or bad news.

At its worst, Schedule F will make it possible for presidents to remove thousands of experts who make US global leadership possible. By shifting protected civil servants to at-will employees, Schedule F makes it possible to fire them without the due process currently owed to civil servants. In other words, civil servants could be fired for any reason at all—for giving unwelcome advice, for prior jobs, for being the subject of unsubstantiated accusations of any type, for perceptions of partisan affiliation, or simply for being in a role the president wishes to open up for a loyalist. …

Because the policy would also allow replacement of current civil servants without a competitive process, replacements for nonpartisan civil servants could be made without regard to qualification and suitability, or based on partisan affiliation, creating a new kind of political appointee.

The potential loss of talent could be wide and extremely damaging. Axios also reported that, according to sources close to Trump, the former president intends to “go after” the national security establishment as a matter of “top priority,” including those in the intelligence community and State Department. Policy roles that could be reclassified as Schedule F could cut across many high-import areas: Russian defense strategy, Iranian nuclear programs, or Chinese regional security capabilities, among hundreds of other categories. The harm to national security of removing and replacing civil servants—whose work, as we have established, requires expertise, relationships, and clear understanding of risk—with individuals with no required qualification except loyalty to a single individual is self-evident.

You would think. But I wouldn’t be writing this if it were.

It is with infinite caution that any man ought to venture upon pulling down an edifice, which has answered in any tolerable degree for ages the common purposes of society, or on building it up again, without having models and patterns of approved utility before his eyes.

Which countries have performed similar experiments in ridding themselves of their governing class? The dynamic has been seen many times. Anti-elitism is not exclusive to right- or left-wing populism. But it is characteristic of both ideologies, and every time the impulse is indulged—every time an elite class is demonized and eliminated, especially when these elites are in charge of complex institutions or have essential skills and knowledge—the consequences are disastrous. Many countries never recover. Consider:

• The French Revolution

• The Russian Revolution

• The Great Leap Forward

• The Cultural Revolution

• North Korea under Kim Il-sung

• Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge

• The Iranian Revolution

• Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe

• Romania under Nicolae Ceaușescu

• Algerian after independence

• Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion

• Iraq after the US Invasion

• Congo after independence

• South Sudan after independence

• Libya after Gaddafi

• Venezuela under Maduro

I could extend this list for a long time, and I’m sure you could, too. In all of these cases, the elite was rotten. In all of these cases, the elites were surely worse than ours. Popular complaints about them were surely more justified. Yet in all of these cases, getting rid of them led to disaster. Purging your educated and propertied elites leads inevitably to immiseration, starvation, bloodshed, terror, and chaos. Their elimination was not the only reason these revolutions failed, but along with murder, it was the key element in the subsequent catastrophe.

Societies need their elites. They are rarely well-loved. They are often arrogant. They are often indifferent to the concerns of the masses, self-dealing, and corrupt. But you cannot run a country without them, and if you get rid of them without a plan to replace them—a plan involving an equally competent and experienced elite²—you will regret it bitterly. You will have laws overturned; tribunals subverted; industry without vigor; commerce expiring; the revenue unpaid, yet the people impoverished; a church pillaged, and a state not relieved; civil and military anarchy made the constitution of the kingdom; everything human and divine sacrificed to the idol of public credit, and national bankruptcy the consequence.

You don’t have to take my word for it. Take Burke’s.

Woe to the country which would madly and impiously reject the service of the talents and virtues, civil, military, or religious, that are given to grace and to serve it, and would condemn to obscurity everything formed to diffuse luster and glory around a state. Woe to that country, too, that, passing into the opposite extreme, considers a low education, a mean contracted view of things, a sordid, mercenary occupation as a preferable title to command. Everything ought to be open, but not indifferently, to every man.

1. He will also withdraw from NATO, as he wanted to do during his first term. He was constrained from doing this by his advisers, but they won’t be there the next time. This alone would be more than reason enough to recoil in horror at the prospect of a second term—that, and the fact that he’s absolutely stark-staring nuts.

2. It will soon become arrogant and self-dealing too. Four legs good, two legs better and all that.