In democracies, political life revolves around procedures that are oriented towards deliberation, the confrontation of interests, and the gradual management of conflicts. In democratic political life, it is therefore always necessary to give some more time to time. Populists, by contrast, are notoriously impatient. They claim to be able to solve problems immediately, without needing to wait for democratic processes of collaboration to give rise to consensual solutions. In this regard, populism is anti-political; it rejects, either out of ignorance or dishonesty, the very foundations of the art of politics, which is dialogue. When impatience for utopia outweighs the need to resolve the conflicts of public life by political means, representative democracy falls into a deep state of crisis.
There are those who would like to see in participatory democracy the solution to the crisis of legitimacy that excites populist impatience. By participating in political dialogue, citizens are supposed to broaden their understanding of political life, widen their circles of solidarity, and learn to reassess their interests in terms of communal norms and public goods that are the result of democratic collaboration. This idea fails to convince, however, not just because its pedagogical idealism is unjustifiably optimistic. Theoretical infatuation with participatory democracy is suspect also because it would encourage us to neglect the imperial context in which democracy in America developed historically.
The Founding Fathers understood America’s revolutionary war of independence in terms of a translatio imperii et studii that effectively transferred imperial power and civilizing savior faire from England to the United States. The underlying assumption was that, as a former British colony, the United States was destined to not merely continue the civilizing mission of the British empire but to surpass it. It was in this sense that Jefferson spoke of the newly formed nation as an empire of liberty, that Hamilton referred to the US as a republican empire, and that Franklin spoke of the US as the only empire in history that would expand by honest and virtuous means. To this self-satisfying and providential vision of America’s civilizing mission, the Founding Fathers added another British imperial ideal, which Sir Francis Bacon had first formulated in his utopian Nova Atlantis as the techno-scientific domination of nature for the betterment of all mankind. Thus conceived, American democracy was thought to radiate the light of an enlightenment that was both providential and techno-scientific. The nation had a manifest destiny to expand its dominion universally. But it was rather contradictory and at odds with itself: to propagate democracy by means of the anti-democratic practices of empire and to do so in order to secure, not the enlightened goal of perpetual peace, but the idiotic ideal of perpetual prosperity.
The swift success with which this empire of liberty expanded across North America had less to do with the imagined republican virtues of British settlers in North America and the self-acclaimed manifest destiny of these “good pilgrims’ progress” than it did with the evident decline and eventual collapse of the Spanish empire. First, under Jefferson, came the Louisiana Purchase. Then, under Jackson, the US annexed Florida. With Polk in the White House, the US invaded and conquered all of northern Mexico. And finally, in 1898, the US conquered the island nations of the Philippines, Guam, and the Mariana Islands in the Pacific, and Cuba and Puerto Rico in the Caribbean.
Here then, in the imbrication of the US’s imperial progress with Spain’s imperial decadence, is the modern translatio imperii that best explains both the rise of the US’s empire of liberty and the determination with which US imperialists defended their empire’s expansion as a “blessing of civilization.” America would liberate these island nations from the double tyranny of Spain’s inquisitorial church and absolutist monarchy in order, putatively, to enlighten them. But as Mark Twain argued in his capacity as a representative of the Anti-imperialist League, to enlighten, in this sense, actually meant to subject these island nations--under the guise of colonial democracy--to American imperial tyranny.
Imperial tyranny includes by excluding. Convinced that Native Americans could never develop the requisite republican virtues, US imperialists eliminated them through a genocidal campaign that began in the colonial era and did not end until well into the 1920s. Enslaved Africans and their descendants fared no better, especially in the South, where--after the Civil War--they were subjected to the state-sponsored terrorist regime of the Ku Klux Klan and the Jim Crow laws that lent this regime a veneer of democratic legitimacy. And for their part, when immigrant workers organized into unions in an effort to improve their working conditions, the Robber Barons of the Gilded Age did not hesitate to massacre them.
As W.E.B. Du Bois argued, these massive displacements and forced exclusions obeyed the expansionist logic of capital. So long as the “abolition democracy” that emerged in the South during Reconstruction did not hinder profits, the industrialists and financiers of the North were happy to back democratic collaboration between northern carpetbaggers and southern scallywags. But as soon as abolition democracy in the South threatened to undermine the imperatives of capital, the North retreated and focused instead on “Winning the West.” As a result, the carpet baggers of the North were rebranded as tyrants and the scallywags of the South, as traitors. The rise of abolition democracy in the South provided American imperialists with a justification for establishing a colonial democracy in their own back yard. In this regard, the Jim Crow South became a laboratory for American empire and the colonial democracies the US would eventually impose on its overseas territories in the Caribbean and Pacific as well as the “Banana Republics” of Central and South America.
Populism in the 1890s grew as a countermovement to the socially destructive forces unleashed by this expansionist logic. But neither the utopian spirit of this populist movement nor the rancor, resentment, and prejudice that sustained populist efforts at reform proved forceful enough to galvanize this movement into a durable political party. The so-called “People’s Party” would be summarily usurped by the Democratic Party’s political machine and its 1901 presidential candidate, William Jennings Bryan. Bryan lost the election, delivering the final blow to the populist movement. When President McKinley was assassinated in 1901, his Vice President, the “rough-riding” Theodore Roosevelt, ended up occupying the White House. Not only had populism succumbed to imperialism, but imperialism would now also become the new populist credo.
Unlike the populism of the 1890s in Kansas, Texas and other Southern States, which sought to defend vulnerable sharecropping farmers from the depredation of railroad magnates and Wall Street financiers, populism today no longer belongs exclusively to the poor and downtrodden. Instead, it is the expression of semi-affluent people who, rather than oppose the rich and powerful, prefer to persecute the destitute. These populists identify with empire’s disdain for democracy and regard democratic dialogue as an impediment. They consider any compromise with their opponents as being tantamount to a betrayal of the will of the people. Hence their conspiratorial identification with tyranny and their preference for governance by dictate.
Having grown accustomed to undermining democracy in other countries, US imperialists now impose similar limits on democracy at home. At issue in this imperialist disdain for democracy is an imperium that is based on the autocratic premise that whosoever controls communication shall rule society. In our imperial democracy --where elected representatives pretend to rule without actually ruling and plutocratic imperialists pretend to defend popular sovereignty in order to mobilize it against democracy--dialogue timidly gives way to propaganda. The imperialists propagate the fears and delusions that excite and torment the populists.
Nowhere is this intimate relationship between imperialists and populists more evident than in the so-called “debates” concerning immigration. While millions of refugees and stateless people seek desperately to find a place where they may make their lives and homes anew, the comparatively affluent and privileged masses who make up populist movements in the imperial homeland, instead of expressing solidarity with the flight and plight of the forcibly displaced, identify them as the enemy. In the eyes of these populists, whose minds have become dominated by propaganda that feeds fears of replacement, the displaced are the displacers, the victims, victimizers.
By substituting an ideological for an historical view of the past and present, imperial populism justifies misanthropic cruelty as revolutionary fervor. When they persecute the displaced, imperial populists feel as though they are participating in a “revolutionary happening.” They tell themselves: “Cruelty stems entirely from our spontaneity, and through it alone do we become fully independent and self-sufficient beings.” Yet this substitution of reason by cruelty qualifies as “revolutionary” only in the sense that it subverts enlightenment and undermines the sovereignty of the people.
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