The Quest for Competent Populism

Harry Truman didn’t like pretension. Competence and honesty coupled with dedication to duty — these he respected. George Marshall, who served him both as Secretary of State and then as Secretary of Defense, commanded his complete respect. He called him “the great one.” (READ MORE: George C. Marshall: The Berlin Wall and the Nobel Peace Prize)

But Truman sang a populist song as well. He saw himself as an outsider to the entrenched powers. He fought hard and won elections when others had counted him out, most memorably, his 1948 victory over the heavily-favored Thomas Dewey. (RELATED: From RFK to Donald Trump: 50 Years of American Populism)

The media experts of the day had written Truman off. They didn’t pay much attention to the lively, raucous reception he was getting on his whistle-stop, low-rent campaign tour. Dewey looked all polish and competence, playing it safe, waiting to claim what was his. Despite the fact that Truman was deserted by both the left and the right in his party (Henry Wallace ran a third-party campaign for the Progressive Party and Dixiecrat Strom Thurman took away the electoral votes of the Deep South), Truman won.

Winning an election is only half the battle. One then has to govern. And here, he fought with the entrenched powers of the administrative bureaucrats who had been there before him, who could not be held accountable in elections by the public, and who owed Truman nothing. Truman felt strongly that the power to set policy had to be in the hands of the one elected by the People to run the Executive. 

In his autobiography, Truman wrote:

The difficulty with many career officials in government is that they regard themselves as the ones who really make policy and run the government. They look on elected officials as just temporary occupants. Every President in our history has been faced with this problem: how to prevent career men from circumventing government policy.

Progressivism and Expertise

The Progressive movement stressed the idea of competence in government. They maintained that people continuously involved in getting themselves elected can’t gain enough knowledge to deal intelligently with the complex issues that societies now face. They won popular support because they effectively contrasted themselves with the corrupt patronage machines that often ruled. Voters dislike incompetent government and Progressives built on the popular clamor for such reforms as merit-based civil service. They turned over the writing of law to experts, so that by today, the bulk of federal legislation is just a skeletal structure and unelected officials make the actual rules that citizens must abide by.

People want competence, not the corruption of the spoils system. Yet people respond to the populist message again and again when they find out that an elite governing class starts to ignore them. Andrew Jackson gave voice to the new states west of the original thirteen. A man of the people, he revolutionized American politics and created the modern Democrat Party. Jackson was the first president not from Massachusetts or Virginia, not from America’s own upper class. His manners pleased voters in the rough west. The polished bearing of the gentlemanly presidents who had preceded Jackson spoke to the Westerners of a contemptuous uncaring attitude towards them, and that’s how they voted.

Truman had a bust of Jackson in the Oval Office and considered him his political hero. He possessed none of the patrician airs of FDR and none of his sly, duplicitous ways of managing the people around him. Truman was, for the most part, straightforward to a fault. He was not afraid to overrule even great people in his administration — most notably, Secretary of State George Marshall, who advised against recognizing the new-born State of Israel — or firing them, as in the case of Douglas MacArthur. 

Populism has its own faulty tendencies; it is no panacea. Cronyism, corruption, and chaos have often been its result. Jackson dismissed most of his Cabinet for the worst of reasons. His dishonoring of treaties with the Cherokee left an enduring stain on our nation. Truman appointed old friends who sometimes were not up to their high positions. His seizure of the steel mills was forcefully rebuked by the Supreme Court. Trump’s Cabinet seemed to have a revolving door, and as chaotic as others made it, he often added to it himself. But when too many Americans sense that their immense government is estranged and contemptuous of its citizens, of their values and their freedom, the country predictably takes a populist turn.

Join Populism With Competence

Yet there is in the end no reason why the two virtues of competence and closeness to the people must cancel each other out. There is no reason why competence and respect of the people’s sovereignty can’t be joined. 

That was the vision of the American Founders. Madison wrote in Federalist 53: “No man can be a competent legislator who does not add to an upright intention and a sound judgment a certain degree of knowledge of the subjects on which he is to legislate.” This need for knowledge and competence Hamilton balances (in Federalist 35) with another kind of knowledge and competence:

Is it not natural that a man who is a candidate for the favor of the people, and who is dependent on the suffrages of his fellow-citizens for the continuance of his public honors, should take care to inform himself of their dispositions and inclinations, and should be willing to allow them their proper degree of influence upon his conduct?

In our national search for a more perfect union, we need to seek, both in ourselves and in those we vote to represent us, a sense of wholeness that governs both our private and public lives. We need not settle for either incompetence or elitism. We stand united in our nation with our fellows; we seek the fullest development of our own unique competencies for both ourselves and them.

Why should we make the case for one virtue to the exclusion of the other? They are both necessary; without the other, it will spiral out of control.

Sundering wholeness for selfish advantage is a cardinal political sin. The cultural sickness of woke genderism is only the most stupefying manifestation of denying the complementarity of our human life to its very core – we need difference and togetherness both. We need to love and pair with that which is always different from us or we both lose. 

We need the vision of complementarity in our lives, both in our homes and in our nation as a whole. Listen for those who see and speak to the wholeness of the virtuous person and the virtuous government that our Founders set as our goal.

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