What Modern Populism Gets Wrong
Tucker Carlson’s foray into the realm of populist whistleblowers, it’s worth exploring how the growth of neo-populism on the right and full-blown socialist populism on the left both get fundamentally wrong. Carlson, an exceptionally wealthy elitist member of the media, it seems, is suddenly concerned about the toll taken on America by his fellow elitists. That concern is apparently making it VERY difficult for normal Americans (of which he presents as one).
The trouble with Carlson’s populist concern — beyond it’s rank hypocrisy and lack of self-awareness — is that it applies only to those aggrieved white, middle class Americans in the heartland. Carlson goes to lengths to explain that this is an “America for Americans” populism. That is also its glaring weakness.
America, you see, had a pretty great run for nearly 100 years because the innovation and advances in society spawned here didn’t travel very far very fast. Manufacturing, a great driver of societal growth, remained the purview of industrialized nations for a VERY long time. As a result, the C- student in the US was able to get a job stamping steel, mining coal, or punching rivets and make a pretty decent living.
Along comes a pesky thing called globalism that populists (on both sides) don’t want to acknowledge. For Carlson’s C- followers, that meant they were suddenly in competition with a billion otherC- students in other countries. Competition for low-skilled industrial jobs was suddenly much greater. In fact, when only 5% of the world population resides within your border, the number of jobs making goods for the other 95% moves closer to the 95%.
The global middle class is expanding. It has been for years. The number of people able to make a decent wage in other parts of the world is growing. Because those jobs used to be US exclusives, the number available here are shrinking. That is not a function of elites screwing the US middle class, it is the nature of the system more efficiently meeting demand.
Carlson believes he is decrying the power of economic elites. In reality, he is decrying the reality of economics distributing power more equitably on a global scale.
And the Socialists?
The Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez/Bernie Sanders/Liz Warren wing of the left, who are similarly aggrieved about the ill effects of capitalism are actually crying for the antithesis of what they want. In their eyes, like Carlson’s, the elite (or the bourgeoisie) who control the means of production are the evil keeping Americans down and we just need more government to make a level playing field.
This is exactly the wrong prescription. China has become a global competitor not because it doubled down on authoritarian government. They became a competitor because they realized they needed more, not less, capitalism. They had to allow more business to efficiently allocate demand for goods by their people. In fact, you can argue that the net effect of their government involvement in markets has been a net loss. For years they grossly distorted the solar energy market by dumping huge amounts of money into artificially low solar prices to steal market share.
This is one example of how government fundamentally alters the competitive landscape. Their solution to what they see as the failure of capitalism is to double down on more of this. We need more government meddling, not less. More regulation, not less. We need more government control, of more sectors of the economy, not less.
It is 1080 degrees removed from the correct prescription.
What They Fail to Grasp…
The Warren/Sanders/AOC wing of the left, and the Carlson populist wing of the right, both fail to grasp that we do not actually have a free market. What we have is a market that has become so cumbersome that only those with great wealth can navigate it.
To that extent, Carlson comes closer to hitting the target, but still misses. He understands that economic power allows you to use the levers of government as a cudgel against competitors. To that extent, he is correct that some degree of the American workers malaise can be attributed to domestic political and economic abuse. However, much of that malaise was inevitable because we do not live in a world with a central unified code of conduct for business.
Emerging countries have their own laws for things like minimum wages, environmental protections, etc. China is finally starting to realize that unfettered air pollution is not a long-term viable strategy. Sure, it helped grow the economy in the short-term, but they will face massive long-term problems when the health concerns of a billion aging citizens breathing coal exhaust for 30 years takes hold. They will be forced to reconcile the costs of early industrialization just as the US once did. Until then, they will tolerate far more abuse and make their products for less, thereby moving more of those US low-skill jobs to a place where they can be done cheaper.
This migration of US jobs to areas of the world where they can be done cheaper is the heart of the problem driving the US toward economic equilibrium. The competitive advantage we had for decades has run its course. No amount of complaint about how the unemployed coal worker is a victim of Washington — or in desperate need of MORE from Washington — will address this. Trump’s effort to manipulate markets to keep dead businesses and dead industries alive will not help.
The only thing that will help at this point, is recognizing that America’s “populist” problem is simply the result of our lowest-skilled finally having to compete against all the low-skilled of other countries in the world. When we finally get that, we will force the difficult discussion of how to make our low-skilled the most attractive option. As long as our high school dropout in Detroit has no competitive advantage relative to a similarly capable Chinese worker, car companies will make cars MUCH closer to the billion Chinese customers.
That is the economic reality and it has precious little to do with the boogeyman Carlson, Sanders, AOC and Warren are using to scare Americans, and will not be solved by their flailing and ill-conceived solutions.