Scared Of People?
Odd deluge of anti-populist articles lately and not all against tea-baggers.
Time.
The implication across the board seems to be that people are either misinformed or our children. They want the deficit reduced but they also want the government to focus on job creation. They hate the stimulus but they want unemployment benefits. They want budget cuts but only for other people's programs. They don't understand that payments to Wall Street firms, to the auto companies and to AIG were done for their own good.
These are all old arguments against the mob.
And some of these are funny arguments.
One says that the people are contradicting themselves because they want to cut spending but they also want a jobs program! Well, yeah. Maybe people think that the government could re-prioritize its spending in such a way that you could create jobs and ultimately close the budget deficit with the increased tax receipts. Maybe people don't think we should be spending more in Iraq and Afghanistan than we were even a few years ago. Is it really that people want the government to spend more and save more at the same time? I doubt it. It's more that they worry that the money spent so far hasn;t been spent fairly or effectively. Maybe the people have different budget priorities than their leaders or the press. It's at least possible.
Another argument against the people is that people hated the auto bailouts just as much as the bank bailouts. But the auto bailouts helped auto workers -- you know, the very middle class workers the people keep saying deserve the help. What a tin eared criticism! The objection wasn't that auto workers were helped it's that they were helped while other people suffered. Why did the government help auto workers but not nurses, lumber jacks or magazine writers? Besides, thousands of autoworkers lost their jobs anyway.
Then there's the health care argument. These fools don't like a bill that gives them many things they want! Is it possibly because the bill also doesn't give them many things they want? Or even that it was badly explained?
Our civic debate is drifting in a dangerous direction. We're telling the hoi polloi to shut up. We want blue ribbon bipartisan commissions to make tough choices for us instead. The sentiment is deeply undemocratic and it is, as Jim Sleeper notices on the other side of the page, very Hamiltonian.
There's really no reason for populism to be a dirty word. It's flat out the case that the government's response to the financial crisis and to the recession was deeply unfair. Rather than tell the people to get over it our government should be trying to set things right.











