A PEOPLE'S POPULISM

No, the title of this essay is not redundant. What needs to be acknowledged is that there is a “people” who must recognize and acknowledge itself as a new political form and the ground of a new force for human social self-determination. A populist force. For some reason, even the likes of Alan Greenspan finds good reason to polemicize in his recent book, The Age of Turbulence, against a rising political populism or, what some have called an economic populism. What is Greenspan, this archetype of transnational, post-modern capitalism, worried about or afraid of? What is he trying to nip in its democratic and cultural bud?

It is clear for one who does not have his political head in the non-political sand, that there are significant stirrings of the people. These “people,” potentially radically ‘political,’ recognize that the putative intentions of the liberal-democratic, political “party system,” the promises of traditional state-controlled educational systems and the surface successes of progressive economic capitalism, are essentially and ultimately romantic illusions. Such illusions and ideological distractions, such false hopes, are not to be realized as validly universal or socially concrete in any imaginable material future. And they should not be.

What Greenspan is worried about is signs that “the people” are awakening to these illusions and delusions propagated by the established elite. They are becoming aware of the false hope of the--supposedly merely incomplete but imminently realizable-- projects of Modernity, the Enlightenment and the Liberal-Democratic Capitalism especially as envisioned by Neo-conservative proto-fascists. What Greenspan is afraid of is that “the people” are beginning to define themselves in terms of the primordial interests of local community and social individuality. He is afraid of people who no longer buy into the now long defunct“American dream” of pasteurized peace, leisure, security and prosperity. He is afraid of the dissolution of the deceptive imago of the individualist “self” that is realized by buying into such other false identities as the heroism of the amoral, imperialist American soldier putatively saving the world from communism, terror, or Islamo-fascism.

As posited in the Declaration of Independence and considerably substantialized in the American Constitution, “we the people” exist. “The people” is not merely a metaphor for some fantasy of innocent unity. We constitute the cultural and social possibility of any principled “American” future and must reach a sovereign, disseminated identity without being reduced to the mythic mass identity of the “melting pot” as thematized by American ideologists or equated with the rugged individualist of American cinema and media.

Such neo-populist “sovereignty” and identity realizes itself in a people’s democracy of federalized, neo-populist, multi-cultural communities and regions. This new community can be the only locus of political agency, reference and action. It will replace the ‘party system’ of elite partisan special interest groups who manipulate, degrade and corrupt the democratic heart and ethos of America. Only such a political formation developing a local culture of peace can stop their labor and wealth from funding the toxically extravagant life styles of the super rich, manning the barbarism of imperialist oil wars and enabling the militarist ideology and economics of empire and global homogenization.

This new populism is not the fascist populism of the Nazi’s, not the imagined regional populism of obsolete ruralism, let alone the bureaucratically administered and instrumentalized populism of Ross Perot’s past autocratic imagination. This “populism” is not the circumscribed, temporary movement of currently dissatisfied consumers, students or disaffected intellectuals. It is the “populism” of pro-democratic, self-possessed individuals who are beginning the revolution of community, of local belonging and the self-fulfilling abundance of historically and multi-culturally concrete, social individuality.

This Neo-populism realizes that its communities are not the raw material nor disposable labor of trans-national, post-modern globalism. Such social individuals are the historically self-conscious people who are open to and eager for the task of building new democratic, multi-cultural and spiritually based communities of a nurturing belonging and an existential purposefulness. Its task is to reappropriate the production, expression and experience of self, family and community from the simulacra of Hollywood, politicized media, the music-culture industry and the sports monopoly not to mention, of course, the phantasmatic purposelessness of post-Modern Capitalist pseudo-development. The latter is an errant virtualized pan-Ethos that denies the private, personal experience of body, organic-communal sociality and that critical intelligence which grows and matures in the historical process of creating and sustaining its own home.

Such individuals and such communities own and take responsibility for their own self-constitution socially, culturally and spiritually. Their State is one construed as regulative and not constitutive. It is envisioned in terms of the mediating principle of subsidiarity. Its State is one that negotiates the cooperation and sharing between regions and communities. It’s state is not one that controls, shapes and insturmentalizes the social individuality of communities in the name of GNP, Empire or a Utopian future that’s its ideological ‘advertisers’ imagine and promise. Populism’s future is here and now.

Such a populism sees beyond the fantasy of the neo-Imperialists false universalism, a project which seeks only to ensure the privilege and power of the old Colonialists and original imperialists. It sees beyond the role attributed to them of robotized expendability, utility and planned obsolescence as a function of a perennialized profit motive. This is a motive whose motif scoffs at and attempts to annihilate human autonomy, ethical responsibility and spiritual self-determination. It has no faith in local democracy. It knows no organic, rational limit nor criteria of real, human fulfillment.

For the new Populist Humanity, life is to be lived not used. Life is to be enjoyed not invested. Life is to be experienced not consumed in observing and obeying the aesthetic representations and imperatives of institutionally authorized artists, experts and image entrepreneurs. In the new Populist world one’s limit is one’s own and not that of calculated time, domesticated space, pharmaceutically engineered feelings and the fabulously fabricated futures of progressivist utopias. Here and now in the neo-populist vision, one’s future is not mediated externally by the wait for some new but equally fictional Godot but internally by the living re-creation of the new, different, other and possible out of the living traditions of the past. In this world one can accept that Other, whether an individual, religion or culture, that exists beyond one’s own limit, who need not be dominated, exploited, destroyed or, necessarily even understood. The third world, the foreigner, the cultural stranger need no longer be construed through the hungry eyes of militant Christian proselytism or Capitalist consumerism. They may be merely experienced, enjoyed and possibly even loved.