Why Ideological Populism Is a Dead End
The politics of ideas -- conservative vs. liberal -- and the notion of popular sovereignty persist to this day. We need to understand why populism is a political dead end.
In Canada, populism is nothing new. “Prairie populism” was tried with John Diefenbaker. He won an election. That was pretty much it. The Laurentians just waited him out and went back to business as usual. You might be tempted to argue back that he and his party did not have control of the administrative mechanisms. What we need is a long march through the institutions but from the ideological right. But that isn’t going to work either. Let’s take a look at why this is the case.
Populism is a form of peaceful revolt by the citizenry that says, “Stop!” It wants to work through the mechanisms granted by the systems of governance for the peaceful airing of grievances. But it can never achieve its goals by working through the system. This dynamic is not well understood, in part because the arguments made by Jacques Ellul in Autopsy of Revolution are not well known and the implications of what he says are not fully considered. Too many tend to believe the illusions that the system puts forward as to how it works. People tend to believe in popular sovereignty. People tend to also believe that having better ideas can make the system run better. What they don’t understand is that fundamental to making the system work is the notion that if we have the correct ideas about how the world works, we can apply those ideas to the writing of policy that can be enacted through society’s governing institutions for the improvement of society. Using the right ideas, we can use policy and institutions to fix the things that are wrong with society. Another term for this is, “social engineering.”
“Social engineering” is inherently a liberal and modernist idea that is rooted in the conception of humanity coming out of Rousseau, that human beings are born good or “blank slates.” The idea is that if we can get society, if we can properly manage all of the mechanisms of economics, education, social policy, law and so forth, we can create a context within which people, as blank slates, will now just naturally and effortlessly flourish. As Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan asserted, “the medium is the message.” The modern state system — this includes the worlds of corporate administration and the governance of non-profits — is inherently built around this notion of social engineering. In this regard, all of our systems of governance, in the public and the private sector together, are fundamentally instruments of social engineering. At their core, institutionally and structurally, they are liberal in nature. This is the telos of the system. This is its meaning. The system is a technology built to implement ideas. This is what it is irrespective of whatever intellectual content we try to convey through it. All television shows are television shows. All car rides are car rides. All tweets are tweets. All technocratic, managerial governance is technocratic managerial governance. Changing the channel on which party is in government does not change the way things are governed. The content of technocratic managerial government does not change the nature of technocratic managerial government.
