Populism vs. Elitism

I said I was sympathetic to certain forms of socialism. Just before I woke up this morning, I realized (or, more accurately, remembered) the reason why:

I'm a libertarian populist.

I know why so many libertarians despair about the future of freedom. It's because they tend to look down on the common people. Some of them go so far as to attack democracy as little more than a means by which the benighted masses can loot their neighbors and legislate various ways of getting something for nothing. They blank out the fact that the common people, especially those in the cities (in the European Middle Ages, these were the merchants, craftsmen, and artisans), who are the traditional driving force of the free market. These are the producers.

But under mercantilism or state capitalism, the government interferes with the market (case in point: the desperate and increasingly futile flailings of the US Federal Reserve as it tries to stop the economic depression the Fed itself started), creating a breed of capitalist courtier (or courtesan: political whore) among managers and financiers that goes to sometimes extreme lengths to get something for nothing, generally at the expense of the taxpayer (through corporate welfare). If the free market is populist, then state capitalism is elitist, since its financial basis is not individual trade but political pull.

There are libertarian elitists. These are the people who preach freedom but practice war and corporate welfare. There's a lot of those in, say, the Libertarian Party.

Likewise, socialism too has its elitists and populists. Socialist elitists make up those small cabals of "nomenclaturists" who oppress the working class in the name of the (alleged) supremacy of the working class. These are the Stalinists and fascists. Socialist populists believe that only the working class can overcome political oppression, economic inequality (extremes of wealth and poverty), and repressive social traditions.

The same goes for liberals and conservatives, and other political stances.

Elitism is based on the assumption of the inherent inferiority of the masses and the alleged enlightenment assumed to inhere in high positions within social hierarchies. Populism trusts the people's ability to rule their own lives and change for the better. In the libertarian populist view, the modern era's moral and ethical advances over the barbaric Middle Ages are due to the trust created by peaceful trade among individual people and the prosperity this creates.

Naturally, since the interests of the people and the elites who rule them are generally at odds, populism and elitism are incompatible and must necessarily clash. This gets into the concept of class struggle. But that's the subject of another post...

Introduction

I should have started blogging years ago.

Sometime around 2000 or so, I found out about something called a "blog" which was the hot new thing on the Web. I'd been writing journals since 1985 and writing a series of "Project Notebooks" since 1992. Surely I should take to the blogosphere like the proverbial fish to water. But no. I was still strictly a lurker. Until this year, that is.

I realized that I'm past forty and not getting any younger. My life was already approximately half over, and I hadn't yet done anything in my life. I was still very much the professional slacker. This couldn't go on. I had been working on a comics series very halfheartedly since '92, the year I joined a Japanese animation club, but nothing came of it but a lot of procrastination and self-kicking.

In the spring of 2006, I discovered the perfect excuse to get off my passive butt and start writing some of the stories in my head. The book was called No Plot? No Problem!, and it introduced me to something called National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. The first time I tried writing a novel, I couldn't finish it. But I'm still working on last year's novel. NaNoWriMo has a sister contest called Script Frenzy; this year comics scripts are allowed, and that gave me e perfect excuse to start work on the comics project I've been working on since 1992. And so I'm getting ready to retire from the slacking business and become the writer/artist I've long wanted to be.

For the last couple years I've been writing notes in my Project Notebooks, and this quiet little voice (the voice of reason?) keeps telling me that I should have written it in a blog. It was only now, when my novel Bad Company and manga Spanner are on their way to being published, that I actually built up the nerve to create a blog of my own. A few, actually. I'm dedicating one strictly to my writing and art projects, and another will be more personal.

This blog, however, will be my soapbox, my venue for all the politically incorrect opinions that I've developed over the years. That's why I'm calling it (for now) "The Outside View" -- apparently a fairly common name for blogs, since I couldn't use any variation as my blog site name. I've always been an outsider, having grown up as a misfit (I was the weird kid in school). I'm usually on the outside looking in, so I'm likely to have a more objective view than someone who's inside whatever. I don't expect everybody to agree with me; nobody ever agrees with everybody. This is my view.

I should start off by stating my position. I'm mainly a left-wing libertarian, though I have some respect for certain socialist views. So I like freedom, and I don't like government. By the classic libertarian principle of "war is the health of the state", that means that of course I'm against the ever escalating series of wars that are bankrupting the US and dragging the world down with it. I've learned to think dialectically, so my conclusions may be strange even to some people who share my basic political outlook(s). I'm an odd combination of idealist and cynic, and one of those rare people who actually grow more radical as they get older. There's more to it, but that's the basics of it, whether people like it or not.

It's been a long time. But now I've stopped just lurking, and started putting my views out for the world to see. I'm now a blogger. I should have been one eight years ago.

When I put my other blogs up, I'll post the links here. [Note: The links to my other blogs are now in the "Links to My Sites" in the sidebar.]