This is a well-written and thoughtful piece. However, in my opinion, it fails to address the elephant in the room: none of the people or policies you mentioned are actually populist because they envision them being performed in a deeply centralized and technocratically managed manner with near-zero variability.
I appreciate how you mentioned the contradictions of the Reagan administration. This should be expanded upon; the Reagan administration, despite its public-facing rhetoric, was very centralizing and deeply anti "free markets." They sought to construct a heavily cartelized economy with private sector central planning and made great strides in that direction. They set up something that was practically not too far off from being a Soviet-style industry planning board for the US airline industry, cartelized it, and, mostly through enabling, but sometimes through the explicit application of state power, helped it establish the hub and spoke system. Several hubs and spokes across different industries were established with the Reagan administration's assistance in the 1980s.
Also, protectionism is not inherently populist. An absolute monarch running a highly centralized system might use protectionism if he thought it was in his and the special interest groups' interest that it would keep them propped up, and protectionism can be harmful or helpful to the general public; it's case by case, and as always, the devil's in the details.
The modern GOP has absolutely not been the party of growth, and this is at least partially intentional. According to both the GOP and the Dems' own cherished institutions, the real GDP growth rate began to decline once they started setting up our current paradigm in interest in the late 1970s, it then had a few year uptick with the mass adoption of the internet, then back down again, then circa 2000 when the system took another leap towards completion the real GDP growth rate declined even further, and then after the response to 2008, which brought their envisioned system into near full completion, and the state we are in now, the real GDP growth rate fell off a cliff.
The USA's Old Republic had regulatory interventions that were immense for the entirety of its existence; today they would be called anti "free markets," but they actually increased the marketness of the economy. Example: until they began to mostly and de jure (and it could be argued illegally) get rid of them between the late 1970s and mid-1980s, the USA had capital flow inhibitors between states. They were fully and de jure done away with by the late 1990s (the biggest action that did this was the Riegle-Neal Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act of 1994, but one of its key provisions didn't take effect until '97, and then the first execution couldn't occur till '98). I assure you that a strong and evidence-based argument (and you would agree it was strong and evidence-based, even if you didn't agree with it) can be made that these inhibitors were actually market freeing, great for most people, great for scientific research and innovation, and were certainly quite populist (that they were populist can be proven beyond a doubt).
If for commercial and governmental matters, if it's private sector central planning or public sector central planning or an old corporatist state-like hybrid, which is what we have now, then it is by definition not populist. And it is also likely to be inferior to a more populist system. The populist Old Republic, with its democratic governance structures, such as mass member parties, and its political and economic decentralization, was simply cognitively superior to what we have now or what any of the people you mentioned are proposing.
Thanks for the interesting writing. I hope your having a nice week.
This is a well-written and thoughtful piece. However, in my opinion, it fails to address the elephant in the room: none of the people or policies you mentioned are actually populist because they envision them being performed in a deeply centralized and technocratically managed manner with near-zero variability.
I appreciate how you mentioned the contradictions of the Reagan administration. This should be expanded upon; the Reagan administration, despite its public-facing rhetoric, was very centralizing and deeply anti "free markets." They sought to construct a heavily cartelized economy with private sector central planning and made great strides in that direction. They set up something that was practically not too far off from being a Soviet-style industry planning board for the US airline industry, cartelized it, and, mostly through enabling, but sometimes through the explicit application of state power, helped it establish the hub and spoke system. Several hubs and spokes across different industries were established with the Reagan administration's assistance in the 1980s.
Also, protectionism is not inherently populist. An absolute monarch running a highly centralized system might use protectionism if he thought it was in his and the special interest groups' interest that it would keep them propped up, and protectionism can be harmful or helpful to the general public; it's case by case, and as always, the devil's in the details.
The modern GOP has absolutely not been the party of growth, and this is at least partially intentional. According to both the GOP and the Dems' own cherished institutions, the real GDP growth rate began to decline once they started setting up our current paradigm in interest in the late 1970s, it then had a few year uptick with the mass adoption of the internet, then back down again, then circa 2000 when the system took another leap towards completion the real GDP growth rate declined even further, and then after the response to 2008, which brought their envisioned system into near full completion, and the state we are in now, the real GDP growth rate fell off a cliff.
The USA's Old Republic had regulatory interventions that were immense for the entirety of its existence; today they would be called anti "free markets," but they actually increased the marketness of the economy. Example: until they began to mostly and de jure (and it could be argued illegally) get rid of them between the late 1970s and mid-1980s, the USA had capital flow inhibitors between states. They were fully and de jure done away with by the late 1990s (the biggest action that did this was the Riegle-Neal Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act of 1994, but one of its key provisions didn't take effect until '97, and then the first execution couldn't occur till '98). I assure you that a strong and evidence-based argument (and you would agree it was strong and evidence-based, even if you didn't agree with it) can be made that these inhibitors were actually market freeing, great for most people, great for scientific research and innovation, and were certainly quite populist (that they were populist can be proven beyond a doubt).
If for commercial and governmental matters, if it's private sector central planning or public sector central planning or an old corporatist state-like hybrid, which is what we have now, then it is by definition not populist. And it is also likely to be inferior to a more populist system. The populist Old Republic, with its democratic governance structures, such as mass member parties, and its political and economic decentralization, was simply cognitively superior to what we have now or what any of the people you mentioned are proposing.
Thanks for the interesting writing. I hope your having a nice week.
---Mike