Discovering Progressive Populism

A recent column by David Brooks in the New York Times shocked the hell out of me. And not for the reason that Brooks titled it “My unsettling interview with Steve Bannon”—unsettling because of the dangers it portends. (The interview is loaded with phrases ranging from a “populist revolt” to “totally and completely destroy…our enemies.”) Rather, it shocked me because I found myself—this quintessentially left-leaning liberal—on the same page as Bannon, the populist, at least in two respects, if not a third: his diagnosis of our troubles today (“ruling elites…detached from the living experience of the people”), and who should be dealing with this, namely concerned people in some sort of groundswell. (“Once [the people] have a purpose, you can’t stop this movement.”) Could I be a populist?

Where I part company with Bannon is in his prescription of how to deal with this. Like Karl Marx, Steve Bannon has the wrong solution for the right problem, if he has any solution at all, beyond anarchy. He was raised in the right neighborhood (working class) and went to the right school (Harvard Business School) and worked for the right company (Goldman Sachs) to appreciate how the privileges of the “hereditary educated elite“ have come at the expense of so many other people in society. In other words, he rails against social imbalance, as do I.

But does Bannon want to fix the problem, or just blow everything up and then hope for the best? His is a zero-sum game, with his tribe, the “winners,” while the current establishment will be the losers. If, however, imbalance is the problem, what’s the point of promoting another form of imbalance—to shift privilege from one group of winners to another? Have we not seen enough of this in recent history: in Russia, from the Tzars to the communists; in Eastern Europe after 1989, from the communists to capitalists; and now, in so many countries, from capitalists, or whoever has the power, to a parochial form of populism, whether religious (as in Iran, Turkey, India) or chauvinist (as in Russia and Hungary). In fact, Bannon’s solution could very well backfire, by exacerbating the very entitlements that he so bitterly opposes. The vacuum left by wrecking government would quickly be filled by powerful corporations. And then, with the ensuing frustration about yet more privilege, the result could be utter anarchy.

Anger, like greed, can make people dumb and dangerous. The Russians learned that from Stalin, the Germans from Hitler. Let’s hope that Americans will not learn it too, with the rest of us in tow. These times are too dangerous for that.

So, if not Bannon’s angry populism, then what’s the option? To stay the course, and make corrections at the margin, such as fixing capitalism, which we hear about ad nauseam? ¹ Capitalism certainly needs fixing, but fixing capitalism will no more fix a broken America than would fixing communism have fixed the broken regimes of Eastern Europe. It is society that needs fixing, by putting capitalism back in its place, namely the marketplace, and out of the public space. Surely, it must be obvious by now that we will make no headway on climate change, or income disparities, or the demise of democracy itself until we restore balance in our broken societies. And this will require a reframing of our politics as well as our practices.

The Need for Balance

To appreciate this balance, consider our most basic needs: for consumption, protection, and affiliation. Each is mostly served by a different sector of society. Just as private sector businesses provide most of our goods and services, so too do public sector governments provide many of our protections—for policing, of course, but also with regulations that hold powerful private interests in check. Bannon’s call for the “deconstruction of the administrative state” (and a recent Supreme Court decision to do that with government regulations) is as nonsensical as was the deconstruction of private business under communism. Beyond these two needs lies the third, just as basic, yet often overlooked: our need for affiliation, through our social relationships. This is provided, not by private businesses or public governments, but significantly by the associations we create and join in our communities.

These associations belong to another sector that is both ubiquitous and obscure. Obscure, in part, because it suffers from a mixture of confusing labels, including “civil society,” the “third sector,” and the sector of “non-governmental” as well as “not-for-profit” organizations. Call it the plural sector, and we can see it taking its place alongside those sectors called public and private, for the sake of maintaining balance in our societies, also to restore that balance in the first place.

And ubiquitous because there is a great variety of such associations, which have a major impact on all our lives.  Belonging neither to the state apparatus nor owned by private investors, some of these are owned by their members, as in farmer cooperatives and clubs, while a great many others are owned by no-one: think Greenpeace, Wikipedia, the Mayo Clinic, and more generally, foundations, food banks, and social movements. Many of us may work in private sector business and most of us may vote for public sector government, but all of us live much of our social lives in plural sector associations, for example, when we work out at the Y, receive treatment in a community hospital, attend some religious service, volunteer for a charity.

This sector has also been obscured by our obsession with the linear politics of left and right. With collective interests on the left and private interests on the right, where to put the community interests of the plural sector? Certainly not in the center, as some sort of compromise between left and right. We will have to get past this simplistic rendition of our politics, with domination on either side, or else paralysis in the center.

left ______ center ______ right

Imagine, therefore, abandoning this tired old line in favor of a circle, around which the three sectors can be seen to collaborate for balance (as in public/private/plural partnerships, or PPPPs), while holding each other in check. Put differently, a healthy society balances public sector governments that are respected with private sector businesses that are responsible and plural sector associations that are robust.

Exacerbating Imbalance through Angry Populism

American society, like a number of other “liberal democracies”, is not healthy. It suffers from severe imbalance that favors private sector interests. Just consider the extent of legal bribery in the country after the Supreme Court opened the floodgates to retain the private funding of public elections. Bannon’s angry populism will not correct this.

If the problem is the mistreatment of many American workers, who struggle to make ends meet and retain their jobs, why “deconstruct” government, whose responsibility is to protect its citizens? Challenge, instead, the private interests that are hindering government from doing this job, by their lobbying to reduce its services and to reduce its progressive taxes on the wealthy while maintaining regressive taxes on everyone’s purchases and properties.

In a letter of 1816, Thomas Jefferson recognized “the aristocracy of our monied corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength...” Two centuries later, Bannon et al fail to recognize that business has won this trial. His angry populism rails against big business while attacking government, thereby exacerbating the very problem he claims to address.

Progressive Populism for Balance

Instead of exacerbating the current imbalance, we need to restore balance, across the three key sectors of society: governments to protect, businesses to supply, and communities in which to affiliate. In the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville recognized the key role of community associations in sustaining the new Democracy in America, writing prophetically in his two-volume work by this title that “… civilization itself would be endangered” if people “never acquired the habit of forming associations…” While Americans still form associations galore, the health of their civilization, and many others, is damaged by private interests that undermine government protections and community affiliations.

Bannon is right in claiming that major social change has to begin on the ground, with what can be called communityship, in the plural sector, ahead of the established leadership in the public and private sectors. As Franklin Delano Roosevelt reportedly replied when asked by a community organizer to support his cause: “I agree with what you’ve said. Now go out and make me do it.” Not to deconstruct, but to reconstruct, positively, with an abundance of local initiatives in the plural sector that spread—“go viral”— to drive governments to do what is necessary and businesses to do what is responsible. There do exist significant precedents for such grounded change, for example, in the 16th Century Reformation in Europe and the 20th Century civil rights movement in the United States. And then, once balance is restored, not for this sector to dominate—we have had enough of that—but to take its place alongside the other two sectors to maintain that balance.

So, what am I to do with this epiphany of mine, having discovered at this late stage that I share two-thirds of Bannon’s populism? That’s easy: reframe the third, in favor of another kind of populism. In place of the angry, regressive populism that would take us backward, to some other imbalance, let’s promote a constructive, progressive populism that can take us forward, to balance. For the sake of survival, we shall have to rally around our sectors, to make ourselves and our authorities do it.

---------------

Heeding the old adage about there being nothing new under the sun, after I had settled on the term “Progressive Populism”, I looked it up on the Web, and found several recent uses of the term, all in much the same spirit, but not about balance across the sectors.²

© Henry Mintzberg 2024 with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. See Rebalancing Society that diagnosis the imbalance and RebalancibngSociety.org that prescribes a path to balance. I am also working on a pamphlet that will elaborate on this progressive populism.

^{1. For example: Accountable Capitalism, Breakthrough Capitalism, Caring Capitalism, Compassionate Capitalism, Conscious Capitalism, Creative Capitalism, Customer Capitalism, Flexible Capitalism, Humanistic Capitalism, Inclusive Capitalism, Pluralistic Capitalism, Progressive Capitalism, Regenerative Capitalism, Stakeholder Capitalism, Sustainable Capitalism, and my favourite of all, Democratic Capitalism (since capitalism is the noun, democracy, the mere adjective).↩}

^{2. For example, in a journal review article, a Globe and Mail commentary, and two books on populism.↩}