In the New York Times, Oren Cass attempts to make an intellectual case for populism as a political value, and with it something of a defense of those who would support Trump for president. His piece is entitled “This is what elite failure looks like”, and so he is writing firmly in the conventional discourse of “elites” v “the people”. He is himself a member of his that elite - indeed at a fairly elevated strata - and so his point is, I suppose, how other elites get things wrong.
The piece fails on multiple levels.
What does he say?
In a democratic republic such as the United States, where the people elect leaders to govern on their behalf, the ballot box is the primary check on an unresponsive, incompetent or corrupt ruling class — or, as Democrats may be learning, a ruling class that insists on a candidate who voters no longer believe can lead. If those in power come to believe they are the only logical options, the people can always prove them wrong. For a frustrated populace, an anti-establishment outsider’s ability to wreak havoc is a feature rather than a bug. The elevation of such a candidate to high office should provoke immediate soul-searching and radical reform among the highly credentialed leaders across government, law, media, business, academia and so on — collectively, the elites.
I am with him so far…
The response to Mr. Trump’s success, unfortunately, has been the opposite. Seeing him elected once, faced with the reality that he may well win again, most elites have doubled down. We have not failed, the thinking goes; we have been failed, by the American people. In some tellings, grievance-filled Americans simply do not appreciate their prosperity. In others they are incapable of informed judgments, leaving them susceptible to demagoguery and foreign manipulation. Or perhaps they are just too racist to care — never mind that polling consistently suggests that most of Mr. Trump’s supporters are women and minorities,1 or that polling shows he is attracting far greater Black and Hispanic support than prior Republican leaders.
And here is the meat of his argument:
The result is a shockingly irresponsible national game of chicken. Barreling from one side are elites who remain fully committed to their own preferences, to pulling the levers of power for their own benefit and to offering candidates in both parties who would preserve the status quo. Barreling from the other are ordinary people, the majority of Americans, who reject elite preferences but feel unable to assert others, except through the last resort that democracy affords them. Both sides are honking as loudly as they can.
The people do not pull to the side, nor should they. “The administration of the government, like the office of a trustee, must be conducted for the benefit of those entrusted to one’s care, not of those to whom it is entrusted,” observed Cicero more than 2,000 years ago. Anyone worried about the future of American democracy should be concerned foremost with the elites’ bizarre belief that the road is theirs. This is the root cause of present instability and poses the most serious long-term threat to the Republic. …
Taking the majority’s preferences seriously, even when they conflict with the preferences of more sophisticated experts, is often disparaged as populism. But while elected officials and their technocratic advisers may have special insight into how the people’s goals are best achieved, only the people can determine what those goals should be and whether they are being met. …
No set of facts or statistical analyses, to which an expert might have superior access, overrides what people actually value and what trade-offs they would choose to make. Leaders might seek to shape public opinion and alter preferences — indeed, that is part of leading — but they must yield to the outcome. Their obligation is to pursue the community’s priorities, not their own.
I have three points to make, from the general to the particular.
First, Mr. Cass has a point that it is not up to politicians and their staffs in a democratic society to override what people value. But when we get to “what trade-offs they would choose to make”, a problem arises. I would venture that most Americans agree on what are generally “good things” in a society: increasing income and wealth, economic stability, safety and security, opportunities for social, economic and political participation widely and equally distributed, extensive personal liberties, civility and community. In this sense, there is not much difference I can see in what a member of the elite and someone non-elite would put on this list. But where people differ is in where the trade-offs - and as Isaiah Berlin said most eloquently, there will always be trade-offs - ought to be made. There is not an “elite” answer and a “populist” answer - instead there are many, many answers, on which people across and within all socio-economic classes will differ from one another. Politics is neither about overriding the people nor about following them: politics is about figuring a solution to the trade-offs that at least most people will find reasonable, and recognizing that this will require attention to shifts in public sentiment, or facing electoral defeat. It is not “technocratic” to try to figure out how to balance various good things; it is the ordinary practice of politics.
Second, when we come to more specific sorts of policy preferences, what trade-offs the people would make are pretty hard to discern. If the people say “we hate inflation, and something ought to be done about it” and “we ought to greatly increase tariffs on imported goods”, well, what is the populist solution? I do not think it is wrong to ask our political parties to form coherent policy agendas, even at the risk of going against public sentiment.
Third, Mr. Trump, who indeed promises to tackle inflation whilst at the same time pursuing policies that anyone with some understanding of economics will recognize as inflationary. A defining aspect of Trump’s character, alongside his ignorance, his stupidity, and his amorality, is his cowardice. If political courage could be defined as telling one’s own supporters an unsettling fact, an inconvenient truth, then he has none at all. And so, in terms of figuring out what trade-offs he and his supporters would advocate, the answer is none: everything he promises will work out, it’s all good, we can have it all. Tell your rallies that “China”, not American consumers, will pay the tariffs, and fill our national treasury: why not?
“Elitism versus populism” is something of a dead end, a dichotomy that does not well explain all the various policy differences between individuals and their party platforms. Politics is, as the old saw has it, the art of the possible, of balancing this and that, of recognizing what matters to people as well as knowing our economic and technological and informational constraints, and of sometimes making the case that we must choose between having our cake and eating it. Nothing in Cass’s article dispels the problem of Trump’s false or incoherent policy promises, or makes the case that he represents “the people” in anything other than the basest terms.
It is claims like this that serve as a tell that the author might not be working in good faith. Here is a Times/Siena recent poll. Biden leads Trump in support from women voters. Biden leads Trump in support from minority voters. Yes, the majority of Trump’s supporters are women and minorities (I did some (literally) back of the envelope calculations), but that is because white men constitute only one-third of the electorate. So both things can be true: Biden leads among women and minorities; and most of Trump’s supporters are women and minorities. Mr. Cass knows this.
The core problem here, as I think you suggest, is the rhetoric of "the people" vs. "the elites", where Cass is either being dishonest or a little dumb in his formulation. It's proper to talk about "elite v. the people" if we're talking about something like Sunstein talking about "nudging" because that's baked into the concept that Sunstein is putting out--that there is knowledge that resides with a very small group of people as a function of their specific credentialization and training and this knowledge gives them insight into what most people ought to do that they do not do AND gives them insight into how to gently manipulate people into doing that something without them knowing that this is happening.
With Oren Cass, what he really means is "about 35% of the population has one set of political, social and cultural preferences" and "another 35% has a different set of preferences". Possibly the remainder has a third set of preferences, or is situated between the two other groups or is just completely heterodox and not really a group at all. Cass and people like him are trying to confer legitimacy on their preferred third by calling them "the people" and to delegitimate the opposing third by calling them "the elites". In socioeconomic terms, that absolutely doesn't fly--Trump's voters include wealthy small business owners, middle-class retirees receiving pensions from public sector work, billionaires, socially conservative Latinos, etc.; the opposing group includes college graduates barely ekeing out survival pay in the gig economy, older suburbanites, lower-income urban Black voters, union members in manufacturing industries, lower middle-class K-12 teachers in rural and peri-urban districts, etc. These are complicated bundles of sentiment and affiliation and neither is "the people".
Now if Cass wanted to ask if there's something valid about wanting to protect a particular place from change, or wanting to be rooted in some 'traditional' sense of identity and community, or other formulations connected to ethnonationalism, he'd have a point that deserves to be grappled with. But that's not what he's on about.
Glad you included the footnote about polling data. Is twisting facts for your own purpose a tactic of the “man of the people?”