What both forms of populism share is a tendency to treat virtue as a fixed property of groups and policy as a way of redistributing power from the disfavored to the favored. When I said we needed “a liberalism that builds,” David Dayen, the editor of The American Prospect, responded that “we need a liberalism that builds power” and that the way to get it is for the government “actively supporting the very groups that have been left out of past economic transitions, building the necessary coalition for long-term transformation.”
Every policy, in this telling, has two goals. One is the goal of the policy or the project; perhaps you’re trying to decarbonize the economy or build affordable housing or increase competition in the market for hearing aids. But the other is the redistribution of power among groups: Does this policy leave unions stronger or weaker? Environmental justice groups? Corporations?
Under the populist theory of power, bad policy can be — and often is — justified as good politics. In California, the California Environmental Quality Act is defended by unions that use it to “greenmail” all manner of projects. CEQA is meant to protect the environment, but the threat of unending litigation can be used to win non-environmental concessions on virtually any building project in California.
Here is the full NYT piece, interesting throughout, for instance:
My view of power is more classically liberal. In his book “Liberalism: The Life of an Idea,” Edmund Fawcett describes it neatly: “Human power was implacable. It could never be relied on to behave well. Whether political, economic or social, superior power of some people over others tended inevitably to arbitrariness and domination unless resisted and checked.”
Worth a ponder.
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