“Their Rage Will Not Go Away”

An excellent article on populist anger in Newsweek by historian Rick Perlstein, who quotes John Maynard Keynes saying “Nothing corrupts society more than to disconnect effort and reward.”

That has been the operative assumption of all of America’s many populisms, left and right, good and bad, for well over a century. Sure, you can borrow something from an American that he believes belongs to him—so long as he doesn’t feel dispossessed from the deliberations. You can’t just take it. That was what happened when the anger of draft-age Americans overflowed into violence in the Vietnam years: the war they were to be sent to fight had been planned far from public scrutiny, by unaccountable “experts.” Populist anger in America is the anger of dispossession.

That’s how most Americans are thinking now about the bonuses paid to feckless financial engineers. . . .The delinking of effort and reward has become all too manifest. That always makes Americans angry. We do not like to reward those who do not produce. Here populists have the better of the moral argument.

Even more, populism has the better of the policy argument. Yes, the meltdown is complex. So will be the decision making. But if it happens only in antiseptic back rooms, government experts negotiating with corporate experts, proud to tune out the public’s righteously simplifying indignation, those policies will fail. That’s what happens even, or perhaps especially, when the issues are complex. Take away taxpayers’ sense of ownership stake in an issue especially, as with AIG, when taxpayers literally own the company and their rage will not go away. It festers. Quagmires result. And that’s when the “bad” kind of populism—the hateful kind; the violent kind; the demagogic kind—can flourish.

via Perlstein on Populism: Our American Common Sense | Newsweek Business | Newsweek.com.