The need for an enlightened populism

Where democracy ends, fascism begins. So we should stop forerunners in their tracks. Populism is the main forerunner.
There are always different interests and different views that need to be balanced. What makes democracy work is not the rule of the majority, but the the recognition and acceptance of plurality. Even economically, inclusive societies do better than exclusive ones. In a democracy it is never the winner takes all. 

Many people have been getting a more open-minded view of cultural and national and religious differences. We consider that modern, liberal, enlightened. We may even glorify differences and we overly respect those groups that have been treated or are treated disrespectfully. That makes us feel we belong to the right kind of people.

But other people, tired of economic, political and religious tensions between different groups in a country long for a less diverse society. One dominant religion, one dominant culture, one dominant tribe. They may remember fondly the past. But the past has never been that nice. The French revolutionaries around 1790, who almost invented nationalism, were shocked to discover that more than 80% of the French didn't consider themselves French and even didn't speak French, at least not what the people in Paris considered to be French. Today, the Parisian people consider the small-town and the rural French as the true French, la France profonde, not yet urban and international. Assumptions, the world is full 0f them. And the more brittle our assumptions, the more we seem to believe in them.

Obsession with the past is a recipe for stagnation and exasperation. Any type of obsession: both glorifying the past and blaming the past. If it wasn't for colonialism and slavery, black people would still live in peace in Africa, without artificial, 'unnatural' borders. But only the most uncrossable borders are natural. Borders are never simple and always are shifting and permeable. That is what border areas should be.

The injustices of the past father the slippery monster of grievances. Rightful grievances should be met. But here is a snag. Two snags actually. Unfortunately, both are huge.
One snag is that grievances often are fostered. They feed indignation and so identity. Such grievances can never be met. It's never enough. People may have become addicted to the poison of grievance. Grievances start with facts, but they may grow into mental infections. We can bend over backwards and the grievances still may stay. How many excuses and compensations were needed to resolve old wrongs, like true Germans having to live outside Germany?
The other snag is even more pernicious. Modern, liberal people who are inclusive, open-minded, internationalist, look with disdain to more traditional, exclusive and nationalist people, consider them backward bigots—and so exclude them. Inclusive people exclude exclusive people.
That's the rub. A progressive, developing, modernizing democracy creates its own nemesis.

We should accept and embrace differences; we should especially accept and embrace everyone who historically was excluded. And so we exclude the ones that are not modern, not international, not inclusive. They are the losers, the 'deplorables.'  They hopefully will dissolve and die out while enlightenment advances.
So they despise, even hate, the people of goodwill, the know-it-alls, the yups, the expats, the graduated, the well-to-do, the well-employed, the modern: the … (expletives deleted) elite.

This frustration becomes pot-boiling when from the outside a new proletariat comes in: hard-working people willing to do odd-jobs, work for a pittance—and usually bringing a few new loafers alongside. Insiders who are stagnant look badly at outsiders who are on the way up.

And then come people who offer a way out. Populist politicians sell a double hamburger of a lie. They promise back to the good old days. Well, they weren't that good at all— and you can't go back to them.
As Carl Rogers once remarked, nobody is shouting out load to large crowds that the sun will rise again tomorrow. The more unfounded the message, the more the volume is turned up. Who needs arguments?

Populism is the bastard child of progress and progressivism: an unrecognized offspring. But one: this bastard has a power, no matter how backward or even ugly you may think it is: numbers. And two: people susceptible to populism are real people with real lives under real conditions. Whatever we may think of their thoughts, they have them for a reason. For a couple of reasons, usually.

Reactionary nationalism is dangerous, but people are nationalist for a reason. Understanding the reasons, even acknowledging those reasons is necessary. There is no other way to get your reasons for modernity and internationalism acknowledged with them. Why would people listen to people who don't listen to them?

Populist voters  deserve better leaders than the ones they have got. Or not? Anyway, we all would be better off by better populist leaders. Less unreliable, less egocentric, less crazy.
Where can we find a better alternative? Social-democrats would be the best bet, at least in Europe, but they seem to have forgotten their raison d'être. To take care of common people with simple interests and simple outlooks is not very sexy for politicians. And they have been bowing to the prevailing winds of neo-liberalists and neoconservatives who sincerely think they own the place. Well, they don't. At least not anywhere near to the extent they are assuming that.

To cater to common people may seem not to be very sexy for politicians, but in the face of the inexorable dwindling of simple work, it is one of the deepest human and political challenges for the century that just began. The new proletariat is not necessarily poor and ill and dirty; it often has plenty of leisure and usually some money to spend on that. The options for wasting your life have grown considerably. Drugs have been diversifying from alcohol. The US is going the way of Russia: life expectancy is decreasing. Twenty years ago that would have been unthinkable.

Don't leave an enormous segment of the population to the Pied Pipers of populism. From populism may come fascism. From fascism dictatorship. From dictatorship the degrading and fragmentation of society or the horrors of war and civil war.
After coming thus far we shouldn't stop progress. We have to eye populists coolly and their constituencies warmly, at least with understanding. We have to understand their views.  We have to recognize their interests. And we have to communicate that understanding and that recognition in the most practical and down-to-earth way possible. If they don't listen to us, we should start listening to them.

The tragedy of populism

To understand the present rise of populism in Western democratic societies we need to understand five global trends, that have been slowly building up over two centuries and are accelerating:

1. The ever expanding role of technology diminishes the need for simple work.
2. More and more people concentrate in ever larger cities.
3. The international mobility of people is still increasing.
4. The international mobility of business and money is still increasing.
5. Developing countries are finally catching up, including the giants China and India.

Urbanization and  internationalization create a network of megacities with growing interaction between them, while the integration with the rest of the countries they are in lags behind. Metropolises like London, Frankfurt, New York, Shanghai and Tokyo are increasingly part of one international network.

Less visible, but more fundamental: ever more people are unemployed. In the US only a quarter of all non-working adults are in the unemployment statistics. The others don’t try anymore. The dropouts from the workforce are an ever growing poor leisure class. With growing passivity goes growing drug abuse, including pain killers and antidepressants. Read for example 'Our miserable 21st century' by Nicholas N. Eberstadt in Commentary, Feb. 15, 2017 explaining why Trump shouldn't have been a surprise.

These work force dropouts are no longer necessary. Above they are supplanted by technology, sideways their work is supplanted by laborers in the developing countries, and at the bottom of the labor market they are supplanted by immigrants, either legal or illegal who are willing to do the work they feel is below them. The only economic function of the work force dropouts is consuming. There will be always simple and honorable jobs, but not in sufficient numbers.

UK farmers are worrying: who has to help with the harvest if Brexit becomes a reality? In Finland, the annual harvest of swamp berries is done by Vietnamese flown in. Till the Vietnamese can earn the same money in their own country. In the Netherlands the unemployed refuse to do menial jobs in horticulture, they stopped doing the heaviest work in factories already forty years ago. The difference between them and foreign people who are willing is simple: what for many immigrants is up, for them is down. And down is unpalatable when the general development is still up.

Those left behind in the this international and technological dynamic are not conservative, they are reactionary: progress is threatening, they want the conditions of yesterday to be restored.
They are the ones who elect the populists: unreliable and sometimes unsavory characters that can’t solve their problems. They will rather worsen them. The disappointed people will be in for more disappointment.
They will not see the dynamics in society, they will see conspiracies by the rich and the smart.  By the elite, a concept once more en vogue. (Excuse the elitist expression.)
Like with most problems, there is no solution without starting to acknowledge the problems and their underlying dynamics. Who should acknowledge and understand the problems? Primarily the well-employed and well-earning. Out of compassion; out of enlightened self-interest.

One of the few ideas around that will,  if not solve, at least lessen the problem is a simple basic income for everybody, no strings attached. The hard working will cry wolf, but populism and fascism are an immensely worse perspective. But what will that do to immigration?
The outflow of failed states is threatening the whole international system. This is already putting pressure on national sovereignty. That pressure will only increase. We are in for more multinational institutions, not less. But that is anathema to the populists. Catch 22?

Prudence

Machiavelli, wondering about the difference between successful and failing republics, tried to find out what were the key success factors. He found two: Virtú and Fortuna, virtue and fortune. Virtue we might call today merits and fortune we would call luck or good-luck.
Whatever our qualities, our merits, our competence, we also need good-luck to be successful. At the very least we need not to have bad-luck. Some people maintain that good-luck can be fostered, even managed. I agree, up to a point. Robert Heinlein said: One man’s magic is another man’s engineering. So what others call luck, may be the result of effort.
We never have everything in hand, though our mental attitude and mental capacity may diminish the influence of randomness and improve our chances to get lucky. All this means that the more qualities we have, the less the role of luck. What qualities do we need?

In his Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius, Machiavelli analyses virtue. The main ingredient is prudence, also called practical wisdom, the power of common sense, practical and sound judgment.The second is discipline and the third is justice. Prudence, discipline and justice explain the phenomenal rise of Rome during several centuries. And growing imprudence, indulgence and injustice have brought its slow downfall. Interestingly, Machiavelli considers religion to be the most important determinant of discipline.

Discipline is out of fashion, self-indulgence is the fashion and so indignation with the indulgence of others: undisciplined indignation. Justice is still a powerful concept, though difficult to implement when discipline is weak and self-discipline seems almost a lost art. My guess is that indulgence is directly proportional to drug and alcohol consumption. This is not to mean that discipline and self-discipline can be increased by forcing down drugs and alcohol consumption. It is rather the other way round: more discipline and self-discipline will lead to less consumption.

But what about that key concept of Machiavelli - and for that matter Aristotle: prudence? According to the thesaurus, prudence is a quality that allows people to choose the sensible course. Prudent belongs to the same family as careful, meticulous, scrupulous, circumspect, cautious, discreet, and wary. Prudent implies the exercise of both caution and circumspection, suggesting careful management in economic and practical matters. We may subsume economic matters under practical matters. Therefore, prudence is also called practical wisdom.

Chaim Herzog, one of the pioneers of Israel, wrote about the wisdom of his father, the chief rabbi of Israel. Everybody sought him for his advice. Elsewhere he tells that his mother had to run the house and the family, because his father was no good in practical matters. What other matters are there?

A practical orientation does not conflict with an interest in the world of the mind. William James, who was more open-minded than any modern psychologist about religious, spiritual and parapsychological matters, was also the father of pragmatism. Nothing is as practical as a good theory, said Kurt Lewin, also one of my favorite authors. Which means, by the way, that impractical theories are bad theories.

Even in a supposedly practical field like management impracticality abounds. I remember reading the report of a well-known management consultancy firm. They found that the communication between the directors and between the directors and their underlings was unsatisfactory. So they proposed a 'communication development program,' that - surprise, surprise - they could offer. It seems practical, but it isn't. Communication is unsatisfactory for a reason. Or for many reasons. Maybe people were afraid of a coming merger; maybe people were afraid of each other; maybe the market or the technology had changed and they were lagging behind; maybe one of the directors was sleeping with the secretary of one of the other directors; maybe the directors were too old, too inexperienced, too stubborn or not smart enough. Maybe people belonged too different lodges or service clubs. Whatever the case, improving bad communication without finding out the reasons is as sensible as widening the doors of a shop that attracts not enough customers from the passers-by.

I think prudence always start with facing the facts, checking if these are the facts that need to be faced, if they are all the relevant facts. What are the practicalities? What is desirable, what is possible? What is the objective, what are the criteria, what are the options?

Can we teach prudence? Probably, but it won't be easy. Because imprudence is rooted in personal characteristics and limitations. People are surprisingly fact-resistant and not always solution-oriented. They even may prefer awful conditions they are used too; disasters that may strike others more than themselves; they may indulge in apocalyptic perspectives, they may be set on self-destruct.
The main condition is reality-orientation: seeing fantasies for what they are. A second condition is the ability to face uncertainty. A third condition is simply pride in good work, in right decisions, in solving problems - or better: avoid problems.

Politically, imprudence seems on the rise. It is often called populism. Poor people, they don't know what is in stock for them.