Conflicting Stories: On Rogers M. Smith's "That Is Not Who We Are!: Populism and Peoplehood"
Rogers M. Smith |That Is Not Who We Are!: Populism and Peoplehood | Yale UP | 2020 | 176 Pages
Rogers Smith is a distinguished professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania and the immediate past president of the American Political Science Association (and, full disclosure, someone I have known and respected for forty years). Like large numbers of writers and scholars, he is appalled by the Trump phenomenon, and in this book analyzes the nature of the populism Trump pretends to be rely upon.
Not surprisingly, he finds Trumpian populism abhorrent, and wants to find a different kind, one that “expresses respect and a spirit of generosity toward others.”
A noble aim, to be sure, but unfortunately Smith’s analysis runs aground by focusing on generalities and by neglecting the reality of conflict.
Like many scholars, Smith hopes to find a single key to the complex phenomenon he is describing, an occupational hazard for almost any academic. For Smith, the problem with contemporary liberalism, and the reason liberals have had trouble responding to Trump, is the lack of a clear, coherent liberal story about “peoplehood” that resonates widely. Liberals have not been able to tell Americans who we are in a simple, inclusive story, according to Smith. Because of that liberal flaw, Trump has been able to give free reign to racism, misogyny, anti-immigrant sentiment, and religious bigotry (“very fine people on both sides”).
Smith tells us that things were, paradoxically, better and easier during the Cold War, when the entire world was divided into “us” versus “them,” and Americans knew who they were. “I grew up in that world, and I can attest that it made choices about political identity, not just for [countries] but for individuals, seem more straight-forward than they do today.”
One has to marvel at the oversimplification in that understanding of identity, and I would be remiss if I did not point out that it could only have been written by a cis-gendered, white, Christian male. Did women who were kept out of the workplace in the 1950s and 1960s, and kept in bad marriages due to arcane divorce laws, have a straight-forward, non-problematic identity? Did African Americans? Latinx immigrants? Did LGBTQ Americans, who were jailed, disowned, lobotomized? Jews who experienced anti-Semitism?
And what about now? A sizable number of Americans believed that Barack Obama was not born in the United States. A woman who believes in QAnon conspiracies is about to be elected to Congress. A huge portion of Americans refuse to wear face masks to protect others or even themselves, and say they will not be vaccinated against COVID19 when a vaccine becomes available, making us the pitiable laughing stock of a world in which we used to be admired. At home, the politics of abortion have roiled American politics for over 40 years, and white policemen still kill or maim members of minority communities with sickening regularity.
Are these kinds of conflicts really going to be fixed if liberals could just find the right story? It’s telling that when Smith discusses the discontents of minority groups in the United States, the example he chooses is rural citizens in Wisconsin, almost all of whom are white, people who (surprisingly, to some) voted for Scot Walker for governor and Trump for president. As Smith says, they may have legitimate grievances. But what, exactly, will allow an Evangelical Protestant farmer in rural Wisconsin to find common ground (a phrase Smith clearly likes) with, say, a Black lesbian mother in Los Angeles, or a Muslim immigrant to Chicago, or a child born in Texas whose parents crossed the border?
The answer for Smith is better, more inclusive stories about who we are. In the search for such stories, Smith looks at the political theories put forward by John Dewey, Barack Obama, and Abraham Lincoln, and has smart, insightful things to say about each of them. He sees Lincoln’s reliance on the Declaration of Independence and its discussion of rights for all as the most promising, but unfortunately does not go on to explain exactly how Lincoln or the Declaration can help us with any of our current intractable conflicts. Nor does he dwell on the fact that the Declaration was drafted by a Virginia slave-owner who impregnated one (if not many) of his female slaves.
There is alternate American political theory that Smith does not look at, and if he had, he might have been less hopeful that he had found the key to the liberal dilemma. In the Federalist papers, three of America’s founders made clear that any political system has to be based on realism about human nature, and therefore upon the fact that humans will always pursue their self-interest. “As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed,” Madison writes in Federalist #10, the most important American state paper. “As long as the connection subsists between [man’s] reason and his self-love, his opinions and his passions will have a reciprocal influence on each other.” Madison goes on to discuss “the diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate,” and says unequivocally, that the protection of these “faculties. . .from which the rights of property originate,” is “the first object of government.”
The Federalist was written to convince the (white, male) citizens of New York to ratify the new Constitution (they did). Thus the American Constitution—as opposed to the lofty Declaration—recognizes that conflict over values, ideas, and property is inevitable. A simple “story” was not going to convince a South Carolina plantation owner and a Philadelphia Quaker in the late eighteenth century to agree on much of anything. Today, it is not going to convince a die-hard abortion opponent and a die-hard believer in abortion-on-demand to sit down and break bread together. Nor is it going to provide security to the millions without adequate health insurance or a decent income, nor is it going to convince the rich that higher taxes are necessary, or pay anyone’s college tuition or medical bills.
Smith mentions but does not dwell upon material interests, but he downplays the idea that politics is driven by them. He pleads with people to be “generous” but largely ignores the economic precarity that often leads people to lack generosity (and become angry) and for politics to become zero sum as a result. He praises Obama’s political theory but does not discuss the fact that the economic recovery Obama put in place left millions behind in places like Cleveland, leading them to consider voting for Trump.
FDR had said about Wall Street, “I welcome their hatred,” and put in place a federal jobs program. Clinton made Robert Rubin, the head of Citigroup, Treasury Secretary, and Obama appointed Timothy Geithner of Wall Street to the same job, and did not prosecute anyone responsible for the financial meltdown of 2008, a meltdown that ruined millions. Therein lies at least one key to the virulent populism unleashed by Trump, a populism that a “story” based on the Declaration of Independence won’t erase.
There is an even deeper problem with Smith’s theory. Liberalism as a political theory derives from the European wars of religion of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It is a political theory meant to allow people who want to kill each other to cohabit the same political space as peacefully as possible. That is why we have a First Amendment; that is why we have an Equal Protection Clause; that is why we have a Constitution at all.
There is no doubt that Trump’s populism is abhorrent. The solution is unlikely to be found only in a better story about who “we” are, as admirable as the search for such a story might be.
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