>In summary, populists offer the following points
>of superiority relative to some would-be marxists:
>
>they do not cede monetary policy to elites;
What kind of political environment would it take to get your kind of guy running the Fed? Wouldn't it take a near-revolutionary state of mobilization?
mbs: Who knows? Are you making a general case against ambitious or far-reaching demands? A demand can't be too radical and not radical enough at the same time. Which is it? If too radical, shouldn't you be working with me in the ADA?
>they do not oppose free trade with futile,
> imaginary internationalist rhetoric;
How about non-futile, non-imaginary, non-rhetorical internationalism (e.g., some actual support by the UAW for independent Mexican auto unions)?
mbs: I'm for that too. One does not preclude the other.
>they do not fetishize "capital" in a way that
> narrows the working class;
This is unusually murky for you; what does this mean?
mbs: I mean I would not make what I see as arbitrary separations between wage & salaried workers, proprietors, and the self-employed. I would not counter allusions to the working class, broadly defined, with complaints about the need to target "capital," which seems to mean business persons in general.
>they acknowledge the legitimate role of enterprise
> in a social economy;
This too. Social as in the German social market economy? Enterprises owned & controlled by whom?
mbs: individuals, employees, cooperatives, communities, federal state and local governments, and rentiers.
>they recognize trade unions as works-in-progress,
> not things that are essentially this or that.
I'm no essentialist, so you must be talking about someone else.
mbs: fine.
>they are comfortable with a notion of class that
> encompasses race and gender, rather than
> being somehow co-equal with them;
What is a class relation that isn't also somehow raced and gendered? Haven't race and gender figured importantly - both historically and still today and probably tomorrow - in one's role in the labor market and one's access to property?
mbs: workers v. capital, where race & gender do not play important roles (quite often, I would think, though not always). Yes to the second q. I'm really thinking about the outrage manifested here some time back at my reference to universality, which inspired all manner of charges of race & gender bias.
>they would rather err on the side of pragmatism
> than on the side of doctrinal purity.
Nothing doctrinal about pragmatism, for sure.
mbs: 'err on the side of' is not doctrinal. Always being pragmatic is.
mbs