Reviewing The Populist Delusion by Neema Parvini
Written by E. D. Parish
I remember for the first time wanting to learn more about politics beyond the clickbait headlines and the endless spin of current events. Unimpressed with so-called conservative intellectuals like Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, and William F. Buckley Jr., I read a lot of left-wing political theory—Marx, Kropotkin, Marcuse, and, my personal favorite, Baudrillard. It wasn’t until a few years later that I discovered that rigorous and insightful right-wing theory existed. While The Populist Delusion wasn’t my starting point, it’s a great introduction. Parvini’s aim is to summarize the thought of a selection of brilliant yet under-appreciated political theorists from the 20th century. As a former Shakespeare professor, Parvini writes with clarity, condensing complex ideas into lucid prose. Having read many of the authors he highlights, I can confirm that he captures their ideas accurately. I strongly encourage you to read this book and can assure you that, if you read it, or, better yet, each of the authors he profiles, you will understand politics better than the overwhelming majority of people around you.
In the introduction to the book, Parvini boldly asserts his thesis that “all social change at all times and in all places has been top-down and driven by elites rather than ‘the people.’” To help grasp this idea, think about the uselessness of the Canadian Trucker Protests or the anti-immigration protests this past summer in the UK. Alternatively, consider how Civil Rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. succeeded with promoting anti-discrimination legislation but couldn’t mobilize against the Vietnam War. Parvini’s hypothesis, informed by the authors discussed, is that populism only works with elite backing—that the ruling minority, rather than being responsive to public opinion, works to manufacture consent (as was proudly announced by early 20th century Progressives Walter Lippmann and Edward Bernays) and pursue their personal self-interest. It should also be noted that discussion of ‘the elites’ is not an invitation to conspiratorial thinking. Rather, the so-called elites are merely the organized minority as opposed to the disorganized mass in relation to a particular social force, e.g., religion, economics, politics. It should also be emphasized that, while normative conclusions can be drawn from the arguments made, Parvini envisions himself engaging in a strictly descriptive “science” of power. While some cited authors seem enthusiastic about their discoveries, others seem quite remorseful to be undermining ‘the populist delusion.’
The first author Parvini discusses is Gaetano Mosca, the progenitor of the Italian Elite School of politics. Despite being a liberal himself, Mosca argued that human societies are always governed by minorities and that ‘the people’ can never be sovereign. Mosca also devised the concept of the political formula, the legal and moral justification which ensures minority rule. While calling it a myth may sound pejorative, Mosca emphasized that moral unity between the rulers and ruled is crucial to just governance as well as assuring the populace that it is ruled for moral reasons rather than mere force. Nevertheless, while both necessary and valuable, the political formula cannot be established as true—hence its status as a myth. Two examples of political formulas which Mosca discusses are the divine right of kings and the rule of the people—both false and both crucial for facilitating governance. Mosca notes that, because democracy is impossible, the use of “the will of the people” as a political formula will be a constant source of resentment and division within a governed population. One deficiency in Mosca’s analysis is that he fails to appreciate the role of opinion shapers, mythmakers, and information disseminators, such as media organizations and religious institutions, in politics; however, future elite theorists, following the insights of Neo-Marxists such as Adorno, Horkheimer, Gramsci, and Althusser, would put a much greater emphasis on this class of people.
Robert Michels, one of Mosca’s students, expanded Mosca’s observation that societies are always governed by minorities to apply to all large-scale social organizations, what he calls The Iron Law of Oligarchy. Michels derived this Iron Law by empirically investigating unions and left-wing political organizations—ostensibly the most democratic forces in society—and discovering that hierarchies of decision-making repeatedly reasserted themselves. While the mass restrains the ruling elite—there would certainly be an outcry if political officials were too intrusive into people’s personal lives—the ruling elite is not responsive to the mass. Citizens do not need to be convinced, but their concerns merely need to be assuaged; this is because most members of social organizations are basically disinterested in the organization’s goings-on and have a strong status quo bias—without formal organization, popular movements will be unable to persist in opposing a particular policy for a long period of time. Michels also insightfully observes—contra democratic mythmaking—that the first goal of those in power is to maintain and expand their power, regardless of the benefit or harm caused to stakeholders. (This insight would go on to be foundational to anarchist Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s book Democracy: The God that Failed.)
Turning away from the Italian Elite School, Parvini highlights the work of German legal scholar Carl Schmitt, who was heavily influenced by French Catholic theorist Joseph de Maistre. Though Schmitt is a prolific author, Parvini, for the sake of parsimony, chooses to only focus on two key ideas of his, the state of exception and the friend-enemy distinction, as discussed in his Political Theology and The Concept of the Political, respectively. Schmitt observed a liberal desire to remove politics and human decision-making from governance altogether. This desire also served to obscure the loci of power in liberal republics. However, Schmitt argued that no set of laws could account for all potential circumstances, and therefore there must be a person who can declare and navigate the state of exception, i.e., a sovereign. Modern America, an allegedly rules-based order, is governed almost exclusively under the state of exception. Consider how the “War on Terror” was never declared by Congress or the vast centralization of power in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Continuing his refutation of the possibility of a post-political state, Schmitt asserts that the friend-enemy distinction, the existential conflict between those who affirm and deny one another’s ways of life, is the essence of politics and exists prior to the state. Because politics exists prior to the state, there cannot be a neutral or apolitical state. Moreover, every nominally non-governmental institution which depends on the state must also affirm the state’s political theology. (For example, the state can tolerate Christianity, but it must ruthlessly suppress illiberal Christianity.) Ironically, a liberal state must be just as totalizing in its scope, albeit with a preference for soft over hard power, as its alleged ideological adversaries. Though not referenced by Parvini, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Schmitt’s brilliant insight that the infusion of sanctimony into politics facilitates the dehumanization of the other. When conflict is merely between the English and the French, it is easy to appreciate the thrownness of the situation and the humanity of the opponent. However, when conflict is between, for example, freedom and totalitarianism, the opponent ceases to be a mere adversary but becomes an evil enemy.
After Schmitt, Parvini turns to my favorite political theorist, Bertrand de Jouvenel. De Jouvenel, though very fond of the separation of powers in theory, is also a harsh critic of the concept, observing that it has clearly failed to materialize. The many distinct nodes of power, rather than checking the central government, have been forcibly transformed into its mouthpieces. The separation of powers (much like democracy) is just another example of the tendency de Jouvenel observes of checks on power becoming means by which power expands; de Jouvenel notes that originally the divine right of kings was a check on power—it was the doctrine that the king could not do anything that God prohibited—but it later transformed into the power-expanding doctrine we know today: everything the king does is sanctioned by God. Similarly, while democracy was supposed to ensure that leaders were accountable to the people, it has in fact licensed those with a ‘popular mandate’ to, “in the name of the people,” centralize power far beyond what any medieval king could do. Milton Friedman liked to quip that, while you think your neighbor is paying for your free stuff, your neighbor thinks you’re paying for his, all the while you’re both being robbed blind. As an example of the expansion of power enabled by mass democracy, de Jouvenel draws attention to how the modern draft couldn’t be implemented until after the French Revolution. De Jouvenel sardonically remarked that if the lack of violence is a proxy for the level of civilization, then the democratic age is surely the least civilized. But perhaps de Jouvenel’s greatest contribution to power analysis is what has come to be known as the high-low vs middle mechanism. According to this mechanism, the high is the central political authority; the middle is autonomous spheres of influence, such as churches, fraternal organizations, and the family; and the low are those without political power. The high uses the grievances of the low as excuses to take power from the middle, leading to an ever greater centralization of authority. Given how counterintuitive this claim likely sounds to those who have embraced the Marxian doctrine that the so-called high and middle conspire to oppress the low, I would encourage everyone to read de Jouvenel’s seminal work On Power, wherein he rigorously details countless examples of this mechanism’s being at play; one example Parvini highlights is the way in which Henry VIII (high) crushed the Catholic Church (middle) in order to provide patronage to his client groups (low). De Jouvenel’s theory of patrons and clients offers a very powerful lens for analyzing contemporary politics—one need only look at which groups respective politicians wish to give money to.
After de Jouvenel, Parvini turns to the work of James Burnham, a former Trotskyite who later repudiated Marxism but embraced many of its materialist explanations, arguing that it was not the proletariat but the managerial class which overthrew the bourgeoisie, in Russia, Germany, and America. Managers straddle the public-private divide, making power appear more decentralized when it is in fact more centralized. It is worth noting, in support of Burnham’s thesis of managerial control, the ratio of administrators to professors at American universities has skyrocketed in the last 40 years. In his book, An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives, Curtis Yarvin asks how it is possible that, not only do Harvard and the New York Times both more or less agree today, but they both agreed with one another 50 years ago, despite the fact that Harvard today forcefully disagrees with Harvard 50 years ago. Burnham’s answer to this puzzle of how the opinion-forming institutions of America are not merely on the same page but reading the same book at the same speed is managerialism. Following Michels, Burnham suggests that the first interest of managers is to maintain and expand their power; this is very frequently directly contrary to the interests of any shareholders or stakeholders involved. As an example of the independent interests of managers, Parvini cites how, between 1970 and 2010, the Ford Foundation gave $46,000,000 to LGBT causes, despite Henry Ford’s being a vociferous conservative and the connection between LGBT causes and car production being profoundly unclear.
Fifty years after James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution, Sam Francis, a student of Burnham’s, wrote his magnum opus, Leviathan and its Enemies, wherein he sought to defend the managerial hypothesis against objections and expand on some of its ramifications. Francis observed that financial elites were no longer autonomous but that their incentives were forcibly restructured to make them cozy up to power. Parvini gives the examples of John Gibson, John Schnatter, and Brendan Eich, CEOs of Tripwire Interactive, Papa John’s, and Mozilla, respectively, who were all forced out from their positions for publicly opposing progressive dogma. Francis also strayed from Burhnam’s roots and sought to emphasize the importance of ideology in the American political system. He observed that, following Schmitt’s writing on political theology, despite America’s being a so-called secular, liberal republic, figures like MLK were elevated to the status of national saint, utterly beyond reproach. Francis also argued that the heralding of “equality” as a highest virtue was an ingenious and elusive technique by which managers could expand their power; because equality is such an unstable arrangement (see Robert Nozick’s “Wilt Chamberlain argument” or Murray Rothbard’s “Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature”—Nozick and Rothbard, notably, were both libertarians, not conservatives), there must be increasing intervention, surveillance, and control. Francis also wrote an influential essay, “Anarcho-Tyranny, USA,” wherein he argued that the state increasingly rigorously monitors, coerces, and polices regular citizens while simultaneously being ever more lenient on criminals; when considering how, in the UK, pasting anti-immigration stickers can net one a prison sentence comparable to those who abuse children, it’s easy to appreciate his thirty year foresight.
Paul Gottfried, friend of Francis’ and fellow student of Burnham’s, also sought to explore the relationship between state, ideology, and the governed population. He observed that, in classical political theory, the government modified itself to serve the people, but in contemporary society, the government seeks to modify the people to serve its own ends. He argued that those in power sought to generate an atomised, consumerist society, because this would empower the state; the telos of American liberalism is “the disappearance of every constraint which does not emanate from the state [de Jouvenel’s ‘middle’]… In a word, it ends in the atomization of society, and in the rupture of every private tie linking man and man, whose only bond is now their common bondage to the state. The extremes of individualism and socialism meet.” Gottfried, heavily influenced by Michel Foucault, also wrote extensively about the way in which the state engages in social engineering to enforce conformity and pathologize dissent. Many progressives believe that if everyone had the same information, they’d all come to the same moral conclusions. Hence, you’ll often hear the refrain that you’re “not educated” on a topic if you disagree with them. What this entails is that disagreement is not a mere difference of opinion but instead a mental deficiency or moral pathology. There is nothing to be learned from engaging with conservatives, but instead therapeutic techniques must be implemented to correct the faulty behavior.
This is far from a complete summary of the rich ideas densely packed into Parvini’s The Populist Delusion, but hopefully it is a sufficient enticement to the fascinating and vivacious world of right-wing political theory. Parvini believes the authors he has cited have sufficiently debunked the eponymous ‘populist delusion,’ the idea that the people are sovereign and the ruling class is responsive to the popular will. Whether he is successful in this project is up to you, but it is clear that not every argument of Parvini’s is flawless. For example, he believes that he has successfully refuted the “liberal myth” that there can be antagonism between the state and society, but he also cites multiple authors who vociferously argue that managers and rulers have interests which diverge from and contradict the interests of the ruled. Parvini also leaves as an open question whether the ruling class sincerely believes in the political formula, as was suggested by Gottfried, or whether the dominant political theology is merely instrumental, as was suggested by Francis. Parvini also suggests that the separation of powers is impossible, while citing multiple authors who hold the separation of powers as aspirational; is it possible for distinct sources of power to be genuinely and indefinitely separated, or is Parvini right in his claim that all power inevitably converges? Furthermore, Parvini neglects to discuss the many factions in politics, e.g., Democrats and Republicans, treating the ruling class more as a monolith, and thus he doesn’t sufficiently tease out the ramifications of such apparent internal clashes on the exercise of power.
Despite the questions which may remain, Parvini clearly and effectively demonstrates the way in which power moves, acts, and changes hands as well as its use of patronage, its tendency to infect seemingly autonomous spheres of civic life, and its dogmatic adherence to and upholding of its own political theology. For those curious about the nature of power in contemporary western society, Parvini’s The Populist Delusion is undoubtedly an excellent place to begin your deep dive into political theory.