Li Haimo / Young Associate Research Fellow, School of International Relations and Public Affairs, Fudan University
As we all know, one of the characteristics of conservative thinking in the United States in recent years is to merge with populism. Traditionally, conservatives should have been distrustful of gangster behavior, but conservatives in contemporary America have embraced the grassroots and what they call "folk common sense." Many scholars have explored this phenomenon differently, and recently Dr. Antti Lepistö, a major in history, culture and communication studies at the University of Oulu in Finland, wrote The Rise of Common-Sense Conservatism: The American Right and the Revival of the Scottish Enlightenment The Reinvention of the Scottish Enlightenment, University of Chicago Press, 2021) is a book that gives us a fresh perspective. The book is full of populist ideas brought about by Trump, to neoconservatism in contemporary America, and all the way to the Scottish Enlightenment in the 18th century. The book is a revision of the author's doctoral dissertation submitted to the University of Helsinki in 2019.
Trump's unexpected election in 2016 was largely due to the support of white forces in the Midwest, who see themselves as representatives of the simple and pure "common man" values of the United States, who are determined to fight to the end against the so-called "elites" in the coastal media circles. Lepistö's book attempts to show that this idea of grassroots "simplicity" is actually a precedent, and that the original origin of knowledge was not in the United States.
Trump
The book selects representative figures of neoconservative thought in the United States, including Fukuyama, Irving Kristol, Gertrude Himmelfarb, James F. Kennedy, and James W. Bush. Q. Wilson et al. Lepistö found that the most influential of these people's basic claims was their description of the personality and temperament of the so-called "common man" (the common man). And the roots of this obsession with the "common grassroots" are the Scottish Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. As so-called "culture warriors" who charged forward in the "culture wars", these neoconservative thinkers "weaponized" the ideas of philosophers such as Adam Smith, Hume, Thomas Reid and Francis Hutcheson of the Scottish Enlightenment, and they did not hesitate to use this weapon to attack the liberal elite. Educational institutions and social reform activists. From the 1980s to the early 2000s, neoconservatives often ridiculed the expert and intellectual elites, claiming that the "common sense perceptions" of ordinary people were higher than academic analysis, and that the sensory mood of the masses was higher than that of academic research. They argue that academic research is not only too elitist, but also highly susceptible to and subordination to popular fashionable theories, while the sensory mood of the general public derives from simple moral perceptions and is therefore more reliable. The efforts of these neoconservatives eventually led to a particular emphasis on American political conservatism to "the common sense of the common man."
The so-called Scottish Enlightenment refers to an event that took place in the 18th century in Scotland where new thinkers joined forces. Western academic circles generally summarize the four basic characteristics of the Enlightenment. The first is a questioning of the rationalist and Leibniz paradigm theory of the "unified field model", the second is the emphasis on the so-called human sensory perception, the third is a special emphasis on empirical, experimental or observation-based exploration, and the fourth is the determination to explore human nature. The second of these four points, which is relevant to the thrust of the book, includes both the so-called "morals" and the emphasis on the so-called "philosophy of common sense" that flourished in Scotland in the 18th century. Many thinkers in the Scottish Enlightenment believed that the "common sense" was the starting point of human knowledge, and it was through these "common senses" that we were able to access certain "truths" that could not be revealed and known through reason, which are sometimes referred to as "Scottish realism".[1] Many scholars believe that the Scottish Enlightenment and Kant thought are in opposition, because Kant believes that human reason is the highest and should no longer need to seek external objects, but Scottish thinkers emphasize empirical knowledge from experience accumulation and long-term observation, so the Scottish Enlightenment seems to have an innate conservative character.
According to the description of this book, the Scottish Enlightenment and its moral philosophy have a unique construction of the so-called "common sense" concept held by ordinary people, and the American neoconservatives in the late twentieth century used this concept to explain a series of problems in American society, including family problems, crime problems, racial problems, poverty problems, multicultural problems, etc., and their final conclusion is that the real problem in the United States lies in the crisis created by the elite. The real solution lies in the daily cultural practice of the general public. They argue that the general public has an almost intuitive instinctive perception of "right and wrong," and that the self-righteous elites are either morally corrupt or have no moral values at all, and american culture is corrupted by these elites.
However, the author also points out that the Interpretation of the Scottish Enlightenment by American neoconservatives can probably only be regarded as a deliberate misreading, or a deliberate "reconfiguration". The reason they make this misreading is to prove that the "general American populace" is right and that the liberal elite is wrong. By doing so, they ultimately evoke the rise of right-wing populist ideologies. Lepistö's judgment here is accurate, for example, Thomas Reed argues that the prevailing opinion of the masses should not be allowed to be the only criterion for testing truth, but that a channel and mechanism of dialogue should be established between the grass-roots people and the intellectual elite. In addition, Reed's "common sense senses" and judgment are actually unconditionally given to all men by the Author of Nature, on which people depend on themselves, so that not only grassroots people have them, but also the so-called "elites".
Another key detail is also explained in this book. Neoconservative thinkers mostly hate Trump and his followers, these two forces are sometimes at odds with each other, looking at each other (Owen Christo's son Bill Kristol is a fierce "anti-special" person), according to the analytical framework provided by this book, although the neoconservatives hate Trump, But Trump's path to the peak of power is inseparable from the early knowledge construction of neoconservatives, so the rise of Trump is in a sense, the neoconservatives "inadvertently willow". The unintended consequences, or at least the result, is that Trump has taken advantage of the efforts of the neoconservatives. Lepistö argues that the rhetorical rhetoric of the "ordinary grassroots", invented by the American neoconservatives based on the legacy of the Scottish Enlightenment, is very powerful and has been used repeatedly, and in this sense, the arguments of these neoconservatives even have a certain "collusive nature" with the rise of Trump.
In a sense, the study of this book can be described as quite profound. In general, scholars tend to think that the founding father of contemporary political conservatism is the British thinker Edmund Burke, but if we carefully deduce Burke's political ideas, we will find that it is incompatible with the right-wing populism of the Trump paradigm in the United States today, not only with a completely different focus, but also with a very different basic tone. Burke is not known for exaggerating the power or purity of the grassroots populace; burke, in contrast, has taken a more elitist line (with the aristocratic Whigs as the political backbone of the leadership). And Burke is the most traditional, emphasizing the organic life connection between the deceased, the present and the future, so that everything in the world should not be violently transformed by the preferences of a momentary populist. If Burke is not the source of political conservatism in America today, the analytical framework provided in this book makes more sense.
The book's emphasis on sensory perception can also be validated by another study. Research by scholar Rodrick P. Hart points out that what really sent Trump to the White House in 2016 was not his partisan position, policy selling point or economic factors, but the real point is that Trump knows how to manipulate how to make a large number of voters feel comfortable, useful, and emotionally inspired (Trump and Us, Cambridge University Press, 2020).
If the book is insufficient, I think a major potential problem is that from Adam Smith and Hume, to Fukuyama, to Trump and the right-wing grassroots populists in the United States, this line (in the original words of the author of this book, called "unusual lineage") spans hundreds of years, it is inevitable that it is too long, the longer the timeline, the lower the authenticity, and Trump and his supporters "Liu Xiang did not read books", probably even fukuyama who these people are, may not know, let alone Adam Smith and Hume. At the same time, Trump's political personality and political stance before 2016 are relatively vague, and he even has a honeymoon period with the Democratic Party [2]. The author feels that Trump is a typical American vulgar utilitarian, as long as he finds that value can be used by him, he will not care what kind of vein and what kind of genealogy. And it is the general character of contemporary politicians in the United States, not only Trump, as the scholar Lauren Mattioli pointed out, even if Biden basically abandoned the Trump-like line, he still chose to embrace some of Trump's populist legacy (especially in the treatment of illegal immigration and other issues). The Financial Times went so far as to say that Biden was engaged in nothing more than "the controlled populism."
Therefore, from a completely positivist point of view, it seems that the book's argument may not really be completely true. The part that says neoconservatism "paved the way" for Trump and the right-wing populist trend may be more tangible and true than the part that goes back to the Scottish Enlightenment. But in fact, a similar argument about "paving the way" has been pointed out by commentators as early as 2016 (such as Michael Lind and Jim Lobe and others), and even the Scottish Enlightenment part, the scholar Walter Russell Mead, has already mentioned a similar statement in 2011. The Scottish Enlightenment thinkers were not monolithic, for example, there was a great divergence of opinion between Thomas Reed and Hume (reed's thought had many elements influenced by Locke). In addition, the book seems to be inadequate in its description of contemporary American left-wing populism and so-called "Progressive Populism" represented by Sanders and others. And if the wave of populism in the United States can be traced back to the Scottish Enlightenment, is it also true that populism in Europe today also originated in Scotland? Does the emotional atmosphere of Brexit also follow this mechanism?
Statue of philosopher David Hume on the Royal Mile of Edinburgh, Scotland, England
On another level, the current right-wing populism in the United States may not have accumulated so much intellectual and intellectual significance, as the scholar Tom Nichols pointed out in his recent research, the current right-wing populist trend in the United States is largely rooted in the common and popular "unchecked narcissism" and the rejection of necessary changes (Our Own Worst Enemy, Oxford University Press, 2021). Academic Alan I. Abramowitz argues that the key to the rise of the Trump wave is the unprecedented regroupment of the United States in terms of race, religion, geography, and ideology, that is, the ideological field is at best one of them (The Great Alignment, Yale University Press, 2018). With another point being that by the time of Andrew Jackson (1829-1837) at least, the United States already had a distinct tradition of grassroots populism (and even as far back as the anti-Federalist community of the founding era of the United States), is it possible that the neoconservatives are not primarily borrowing from the "foreign debt" of the Scottish Enlightenment, but more of an inherently indigenous resource rooted in American political thought? And according to the description of the scholar Arthur Herman and others, Jackson's thought is quite influenced by Scottish culture.
Moreover, as the scholar Robin Grey's research points out, as early as the young age of the American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), he had already adopted the so-called "common sense sense" of the Scottish Enlightenment philosophers, that is, more than a hundred years before the contemporary neoconservatives, the concept of "common sense" in the Scottish Enlightenment had already entered the United States. Scholars such as Roy Branson and Forrest McDonald have even argued that Scottish Enlightenment ideas have potential implications and relevance to the founding generation of the United States (especially Madison and Jefferson) and the basic constitutional order of 1787-1788 in the United States. The scholar Nicholas W. Drummond's research adds to this link, because he points out that Madison's political philosophy is related to contemporary populism in at least three ways: 1. Republican paradigms based on civil society; 2. The transmission and continuation of responsibility between the ancestors, our generations and the descendants; 3. Warning that too much "pluralism" may lead to social division, tearing, and struggle, and finally form a chaebol-type gold power rule. Yes, we can draw a line from the Scottish Enlightenment to Madison, and then directly from Madison to contemporary American populism.
Research by scholars Charles J. Holden and others argues that the vanguard of Trump's populist line is not the neoconservative intellectuals, but the first executives at the level of practical political operation, especially in the behavioral paradigm of Spiro T. Agnew, a Republican who served as vice president of the United States from 1969 to 1973, and Agnon is also prone to "grassroots ordinary people" Political discourse of everyman (Republican Populist, University of Virginia Press, 2019).
There is also a potential problem, scholars such as Pippa Norris and Douglas Kellner have defined Trump's ruling style as "Authoritarian Populism", if the emphasis on the so-called "common sense of ordinary people" character is derived from the Scottish Enlightenment, then where does this "authoritarian paradigm" character come from?
Of course, this book undoubtedly provides a very novel and unique analytical and explanatory framework for the ideological origins of contemporary American right-wing populism. The book's argument is particularly interesting given some of the potential differences between the Scottish Enlightenment and the English political tradition (and broadly speaking, the Scottish independence movement today is also far more relevant to this). In 2018, scholar C.B. Bow edited a book, Common Sense in the Scottish Enlightenment (Oxford University Press), which would help to understand it more deeply if read with Lepistö.
In addition, this book can also be regarded as digging up a bunch of "black history" of Fukuyama and other "top" intellectuals, because this book only says that Fukuyama and others misinterpretEd Adam Smith and Hume, but does not specifically say that Trump misused/abused the concept wave caused by Fukuyama and others. Overall, this book basically takes the upper route of "Yangchun White Snow", taking this book and the "Lower Riba" paradigm J.D. Reading Vance's Hillbilly Elegy (Jiangsu Phoenix Literary and Art Publishing House, 2017 translation) may add a little more flavor.
exegesis:
1. For a specific introduction to the Scottish Enlightenment, please refer to Professor Li Hongtu of Fudan: https://www.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_1533380 and http://www.cssn.cn/sjs/sjs_dqgbs/201406/t20140616_1212953.shtml
2. Please refer to the author's old article: https://helda.helsinki.fi/handle/10138/288709
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