Jonathan Bernstein has a post today that I highly recommend, about the problem with the political term ‘establishment:’
Which is why I try to avoid the term “establishment.” It conjures up, to me at least, a monolithic group of insiders who either control or fail to control everyone else. But that’s just not the case in either political party. There certainly are highly influential groups and organizations and even people, but which ones exactly have more influence depends on context and circumstance and changes all the time, as far as I can tell. Dividing off a set of those people as an “establishment” just doesn’t help us understand what’s going on.
That strikes me as both correct and important. Read the whole thing. I’d only add a few tangent thoughts:
The persistence of the term ‘establishment’ — and the idea — is cultural-electoral. There’s a soft populism to which many (if not most) American voters respond well, and a wide range of candidates and causes in both parties try to tap into it by setting up an imaginary elite to serve as the boogeyman, and set themselves up as the saviors against such an establishment. There’s a vaule to being perceived as an insurgent in Amreican politics — both for popular an self-delusion reasons — and that can’t be done without an “establishment” to n’surge ‘gainst. The narrative frame is almost always conspiratorial populism; that some small elite force is destroying the common man not through legitimate small-d democratic victory, but through unfair financial and/or other manipulation. Most of the time in a pluralist political society, insurgents aren’t purely the raggedy masses and the establishment isn’t the Wizard of Oz. But that’s the required sales pitch.
As famously described by Hofstader’s essay, the narrative frame is underwritten by the twin emotional responses of paranoia and anger. Over and over again, the “establishment” is nothing more than the perceived object of populist fears. And those fears are, historically, pretty widespread in America: the Jeffersonians in fear of the Federalist/Bristish alliance, jacksonians vs. the Bank, anti-slavery vs. the Slave Power, western silverites vs. Eastern Gold, progressives vs. Big Business, isoloationists vs. Internationalists, the tea party vs. Washington, occupy wall street vs. Corporations. And it comes as no surprise that the opponents of these populist movements tend to try to undercut the populist nature of them: think of the pro-slavery forces deriding abolition in Kansas as nothing more than a handful of men with lots of Massachusetts money; or OWS/Tea Party being cut down as financial-backed by a few liberal/conservative interests.
It’s also my sense is that populism-fueled insurgencies are hard to hold together, or at least it’s hard to keep the populism in the insurgency once it gets to a politically-viable size. The process of normalizing true insurgencies into concrete political interests undercuts the emotional/narrative strength of their theses. After all, if you gain enough political power to exact change, have you not simply become the establishment? Strong populist movements, both within parties and between them, tend to fizzle. They either grow so large as to force them to become more pragmatic than any true believer can handle, or they get co-opted and fail to gain the strength required for continued relevent existence. In any case, they almost certainly attenuate as they grow: think of abolition as it expanded into anti-slavery, or 1880s/90s Populism as it became Democratic Bryanism.
