republicans, populists, democrats
It's not about the capital
Barack Obama was a republican.
Note the lowercase “r.” It refers not to a political party but rather allegiance to a form of representative government. All the Founding Fathers considered themselves republicans, their leadership of which reflecting what Thomas Jefferson called the natural aristocracy: people whose legitimacy was a function not of who their daddies were—which was, in their somewhat novel view, an unnatural aristocracy—but rather their demonstrated fitness in terms of education, competence, and virtue. In the centuries since, such figures have gone by a series of other names, among them “the wise men,” “the best and the brightest,” and, most recently “meritocrats.” We recognize meritocrats as people who have gone to the best schools, are members of the professions, and occupy key administrative positions.
Such people ran this country pretty much uncontested for the first fifty years of the nation’s history. But beginning with Andrew Jackson, the republicans faced a challenge from people we have come to know as populists. As in vox populi, the voice of the people (which gives you a sense of how far back populism goes in Western civilization). Populists define themselves as representing the interests of the many against the interests of the few—for them, the phrase “best and the brightest” is one of mocking irony, and indeed David Halberstam’s 1972 book of the same title was a history of how the national elite led the United States into the debacle of the Vietnam War. Populism has taken a series of forms in the last two centuries, on both the left (e.g., the agrarian radicals of the 1890s) and the right (e.g., the McCarthyites of the 1950s). But whatever its particular focus, populisms define themselves in opposition to entrenched power.
Of course, entrenchment is often in the eye of the beholder. Perhaps the best way of understanding the core of the argument between republicans and populists is their stance toward institutions. Republicans are institutionalists: they tend to believe in the efficacy and legitimacy of government, business, churches, and other forms of formal—which is to say, in the most literal sense of the term—incorporated bodies of people. Populists are anti-institutionalists: they tend to consider institutions as sources of oppression, with the exceptions of the ones they lead (which tend to be local, improvisatory, and temporary). Populism can be a useful and corrective force in society, holding republicans accountable and challenging their complacency. But it can also be destructive in corroding forms of legitimacy that make an institutional order possible. This is what we’re seeing with President Trump, a populist who operates solely in a paradigm of power. When given a chance, populists become authoritarians, as they have since the time of Julius Caesar.
In our time, Obama was the quintessential republican, which is to say the quintessential meritocrat, in terms of his upward mobility, talent, and sense of moral energy. The fact that he was African American was the capstone of his membership in natural aristocracy, a testimonial to the vitality of institutions that could be reformed and structured to promote even the most oppressed of peoples. But many of the same attributes that made him so attractive to so many also repelled others, particularly in the way he acted to buttress the financial system in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008. It was in opposition to this sensibility that the populist Tea Party (“tea” as an acronym for “taxed enough already” and an allusion to the volatile—and, in fact, near-anarchic—Boston Tea Party of 1773, skillfully maneuvered by members of the Massachusetts elite such as Samuel Adams and John Hancock (and a nervous John Adams who nevertheless spurned the monarchists who tried to keep him in the fold).
There is, however, a stratum in our political culture between the republican and the populist: the democrat. Democrats in effect occupy a middle ground: they are institutionalists, but institutionalists of a more freewheeling kind. They compromise; they improvise—they’re pragmatists. This is why both republicans and populists tend to dislike them: republicans consider them unprincipled and populists consider them sell-outs. Which, at different points, has been true. But at different points they have also been crucial figures in stabilizing the health of the body politic. Abraham Lincoln was a democrat. So was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson. In times of crisis, they tried to steer a middle course. They were hated for that reason, and their solutions tended to be partial at best.
We really need democrats right now. We have members of the chattering classes who saying this, but leaders have yet to emerge. We need to look had for them and encourage them. The future of the republic depends on the democrats.