TOWARD A FEDERAL POPULISM: From the Writings of Paul Piccone

“What led the Soviet system, first, into Chapter 11 and, subsequently, into Chapter 7 was neither Reagan’s military Keynesianism nor Stalin’s crimes, but its wasteful central planning, social engineering, and abstract rationalism—characteristics which, in more moderate guises, also define all liberal-democratic regimes. Thus, far from being irreconcilable opposites, the bureaucratic centralism of the former Soviet Union and liberal technocracy in the West turn out to be variations of the same basic [Age of] Enlightenment [political] model—a model that, by defining all conflicts in economic terms, has successfully occluded a more pervasive logic of domination beyond labor/capital conflicts: [a logic of domination] predicated on the political power obtaining between the rulers and the ruled, the experts and the masses, the administrators and the administered. During the last couple of centuries, blaming capitalism for every imaginable problem has been a convenient way to conceal the equally questionable role of the New Class of politicians, intellectuals, and bureaucrats in institutionalizing and administering new structures of domination. [Confronting the Crisis: Writings of Paul Piccone, pp. 271-72]