All the King's Fans
Understanding Huey Long's appeal to the populist right
"Long, like Caesar, saw the rot in Rome, saw the petty princes of his day…”
- Pedro Gonzalez
“The Kingfish is making a comeback,” proclaims Ellen Carmichael at the beginning of her recent National Review piece on the long-deceased Huey Long’s resurgent popularity. While Carmichael herself spends the rest of the article explaining why she laments this development, one can imagine a populist commentator saying those words with glee.
To Carmichael’s credit, she does pose a good question: Why has Huey Long made a comeback? And why are so many of his posthumous admirers on the political right?
Grappling with Long’s Economic Agenda
Long’s governorship was defined by his opposition to business interests in his state, particularly the oil industry. He raised taxes on corporations and the well-off and invested the proceeds in basic infrastructure, schools, and hospitals. As a United States senator and presidential aspirant, his signature proposal, the Share Our Wealth Plan, was far to the left of anything Bernie Sanders has proposed and included a hard cap on personal wealth, as well as a number of generous entitlements.
While much of the right has softened in its devotion to market fundamentalism, an embrace of Longist economics seems like an enormous overcorrection. In truth, right-wing admiration for Long is best thought of as a reaction against libertarianism. After years of hearing that any economic approach to the left of Calvin Coolidge was tantamount to socialism, many right-wing populists began to take a perverse pleasure in shouting back, “Every man a king!”
Most praise for Long’s economic agenda is three-quarters ironic, but that isn’t to say there aren’t cases of legitimate, substantive overlap. The populist right really has become open to the idea of a more interventionist public sector, and many of Long’s new fans feel genuine admiration for his efforts to improve the lot of Louisiana’s poor and to modernize the state.
Long as an Archetype
“If the government of this state for quite a long time back had been doing anything for the folks in it,” asks the narrator of Robert Penn Warren’s novel All the King’s Men, “would Stark… be having to make so many shortcuts to get something done and make up for the time lost all these years in not getting something done?”
The character Willie Stark - a corrupt, ambitious governor who sincerely loves the people - is generally believed to have been based on Long. In a series of flashbacks, we see how he built his political machine on a foundation of graft, blackmail, and patronage jobs. At one point in the novel, he articulates a philosophy of life and governance that might have mirrored Long’s own:
“Dirt’s a funny thing… Come to think of it, there ain’t a thing but dirt on this green God’s globe except what’s under water, and that’s dirt too. It’s dirt makes the grass grow. A diamond ain’t a thing in the world but a piece of dirt that got awful hot. And God-a Mighty picked up a handful of dirt and blew on it and made you and me and George Washington and mankind blessed in faculty and apprehension. It all depends on what you do with the dirt.”
According to Pedro Gonzalez, this conception of politics is the main thing populists admire about Long. He writes that the populist movement should:
“… strive to create its own army of bureaucrats and capture offices, and though it need not embrace a carbon copy of Long’s redistributive program, it should embrace his method, his spiritedness, his willingness to fight dirty against corrupt elites who only yelp for civility and constitutionalism when they’re losing.”
Donald Trump’s early rhetoric and political style invite comparison with Long’s messaging, but the contrasts between their approaches to governing reward close study. Long’s power rested, in large part, on the loyalty of an “army of bureaucrats.” Trump sometimes declined to fill key posts, and those appointees that he did manage to install often undermined him. Long targeted Louisiana’s financial elites with confiscatory taxes. Trump did the opposite. Long’s antagonism towards Standard Oil never cooled, perhaps because he believed that they would never forgive him for his earlier opposition. Trump hired Wall Street executives who would never in a million years have supported him. Unlike Hannibal, and perhaps unlike Trump, Long used his victories as skillfully as he had won them.
Long’s modern admirers see in him a strong, energetic leader, unbound by the sort of ideological pre-commitments that they feel have paralyzed their own side - the sort of leader that they had hoped to find in Trump.
A Different Kind of Administrative State
Of course, this approach to governance, perhaps even more than Long’s economic interventionism, is what Carmichael objects to, saying, “He appointed cronies to plush taxpayer-funded roles he created, all the while summarily removing anti-Long or Long-agnostic government officials from their posts.”
Embedded in this criticism is the assumption that political appointments are an inferior mechanism for selecting people to serve in government. The truth is, there’s much to be said for the high degree of alignment between executives and their subordinates that comes with politically-driven selection processes. There’s also value in extending the political accountability to which the elected executive is subject to those who serve elsewhere in government. Finally, once you’ve removed the political considerations that might be brought to bear on questions of selection, there’s no guarantee that what remains will be any more meritocratic. In a recent article on the shortcomings of the modern administrative state, the editorial board of the New Conservatives Blog writes:
“Those running our state on a day-to-day basis have a defined culture reinforced through the elites occupying entertainment, media, big unions, and big business. This rule by the minority constitutes the advent of a genuinely un-American aristocracy reinforced by a compliant regime, occupied by the same people, in alignment with generally the same presuppositions.”
We’ve developed an undue, implicit faith in the selection and promotion mechanisms of our key institutions. Even a summary glance at these mechanisms threatens to shake this faith. Do we really trust the university system to train and assess people, government hiring practices to select the right ones, or government promotion policies to assign them responsibility?
There may well be a tradeoff between mitigating corruption and promoting responsiveness and accountability in government. Long’s political machine was unacceptably corrupt, but when we make that judgment, we’re obligated to ask whether the modern administrative state isn’t unacceptably rigid, slow-moving, and resistant to change.
Longism without Long
Returning briefly to Long’s economic agenda, it’s worth considering that his public works projects aren’t necessarily suitable for imitation. Most populists endorse some increased level of infrastructure spending, but the returns on the sorts of investment that Long pursued were much higher in his era. Improving existing roads in rural areas won’t have the same impact as building the first roads there. We won’t fix education simply by building new schoolhouses, nor will we repair our healthcare system just by building new hospitals. Reform is more complicated than construction, and Long’s solutions can’t be our solutions.
Still, aspirational figures can be hard to come by, especially in our era of defeatism and managed decline. Huey Long is worthy of our admiration, and I mean that unironically.
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