What is Populism? (Part II)

2009 October 17

by John Emerson

Last week’s post, “What is Populism and Why are Democrats Afraid of It” set off a heated but productive discussion. This week I’m basically just expanding, clarifying, correcting, and even repeating what I said there in the comments.

WHAT IS POPULISM?

“Populism” is the code word within the Democratic Party, and it's something that most wonks and pros oppose. When Democratic pros talk about populism, they normally take the worst examples (e.g. Glenn Beck) as typical. This attitude toward populism is entrenched in Pol Sci 101, and many or most normally well-educated people blindly accept it. Democrats depend heavily on interns and low-paid staffers — usually well-off kids from elite schools who can afford to work for nothing, Some of these interns go on to become party pros, perpetuating the anti-populist bias as well as the accompanying incomprehension of and disdain for people of the middling sort.

I define populism as participational politics by ordinary citizens, working either inside or outside the major parties but almost always against the party leadership, which opposes big business and finance in the interests of the majority and which proposes specific policies to that effect. Between 1870 and 1940 groups of this type (including farmers’ groups and unions) provided most of the progressive energy in American politics, but since about 1950 the Democrats have shunned populism in favor of nonconfrontational “win-win” politics: “a rising tide lifts all boats”. At the same time, many rank and file Democrats have populist sympathies, and these voters are contiunually baffled and angry when the Democrats end up supporting business rather than the common interest.

WHAT AM I LOOKING FOR?

Populism isn’t just rhetoric, attitude, or a way of campaigning. Both Democrats and Republicans often make populist appeals, but their serious policy proposals are always pro-business and pro-finance – unsurprisingly, since both parties are slaves to their big-money donors.

At the same time, while populism isn’t just a change of style, a change in style is part of what I’m hoping for. Alan Grayson isn’t necessarily the best Congressman we’ve got, but he’s got a rare willingness to go on the attack.Michael Moore is consciously a populist, as is Ed Schultz on MSNBC — and then there's Bartcop. A key populistic feature which too few Democrats share is the willingness to go directly to the point and speak pungently, righteously and naively. Wonk Democrats have a fatal tendency lecture comndescendingly, carefully explaining things to people in their cool, professional above-the-battle way, and while this kind of politics may have worked at some point in the past, it really doesn’t any more.

There’s a special reason why populist politics is especially necessary now. Even at the top of the cycle, the economic roller coaster of the last twenty years or so has failed to help the economic bottom half of the population, and the most recent crash seems much more serious than the earlier ones. The ill effects of this crash — job losses, lost homes, failed businesses, and ruined retirement plans — have already reached a lot of people, and there is good reason to expect that we haven’t seen the worst yet.

In situations like this anger is normal and politicians have to be able to speak to that anger, but the present crop of Democrats, starting with Obama, is opposed in principle to even trying to do that. Partly this is because of habit, training, and institutional bias, and partly it’s simply because the Democrats have been bought. But the way things are going, the Republicans (who are equally bought off and equally implicated, but more skilled at attacking, and more shameless) stand a good chance of taking over again in two to four years. At the moment they’re struggling and their numbers are low, but eventually they’ll come up with an effective, plausible demagogue, and if Obama doesn’t turn things around quickly (which might not be possible), he’s going to be the one blamed.

What I hope to see in left-of-center American politics, inside or outside the Democratic Party, is a more aggressive attitude, a post-neoliberal “anti-business” stance, direct appeals to the voters without the Democrats characteristic air of cool technocratic superiority, and policy proposals which actually benefit most people at the expense of the malefactors of great wealth. But this can only come from an insurgent movement independent of the corrupt and useless Democratic leadership, or else from non-party and third-party groups.

The rest of this post will deal with a few specific questions rising from last week’s discussions.

WHO AM I TRYING TO CONVINCE?

Mostly dissident rank and file Democrats and independents. Not the party pros, who are mostly hopeless. Not the 30% Republican hard core — according to Gelman’s Rich State, Poor State, Red State, Blue State, most of the Republican hard core are, contrary to general opinion, rather prosperous Not especially to the South — there's too much hardened reaction there. Not really to rural folk — 115 years ago most Americans were farmers, but those days are long gone, and even factory workers are much fewer than they used to be.

I’m especially talking to two groups. One is what I call the wonk demographic. A high proportion of Democratic voters are well-educated, middle-class folk who identify with the present leadership and dabble in free-lance, amateur wonk thinking of their own. Instead of making demands, which is the proper role of the rank and file, these Democrats kibitz the process, trying to guess in advance how the struggles will turn out and mimicking the pros who are really playing the game.

This kind of cagy seventeen-dimensional process politics is the politics of the weak, and it's often a loser even when played by experts (except when the experts are bought off, and the whole game is a dog and pony show anyway.) But when the rank and file try to play the insider game instead of making demands, they cripple themselves and make themselves susceptible to bluffing. The Republicans don't play that way. Since at least 1992 they have aggressively parleyed very small majorities into dominance, and just now they leveraged 40 Senate votes into control of the health plan. When wise sophisticates go up against ignorant brutes, the brutes win.

I might add that over the last couple of decades a lot of educated wonk Democrats – MDs, lawyers, schoolteachers, PhDs, scientists – have found out that they are, in fact, just workers and peasants. This situation is not going to turn around. Management and finance run everything, and the rest of us, no matter how smart we are, don’t count. Many of us still think of ourselves as part of the finer class of people, but as the economy continues to struggle, more and more of us will find that we aren’t.

The second and ultimately most important target is discouraged voters. Voters are discouraged because they think that no one speaks to them and no one has anything to offer them. This is OK with the parties. The Democratic party bosses, by and large, don’t want new voters because they might make inconvenient demands, and as for the Republicans, voter discouragement and voter intimidation are a big part of their game. Democrats have responded very weakly to this; partly because they have their donors to thinki of. (The Democrats' failure to defend ACORN, and their general coolness to Jesse Jackson a couple of decades back are a couple of cases of this — though it isn’t just a black thing).

And yes, recruiting discouraged voters is damn difficult, but it’s pretty much the only hope there is. If we can’t do that we should just quit.

THE OLD POPULISTS WERE BACKWARD-LOOKING AGRARIANS, FUNNY-MONEY CRANKS, ANTI-INTELLECTUALS, ANTI EVOLUTIONISTS, PARANOIDS, AND BIGOTS

I keep postponing my history of the actual Populist Party, but let me run through a few points.

• During the Populist era something like half of all Americans were farmers, and that was the party's main constituency. However, they had good relations with labor, and in 1894 the Populist John McBride was elected President of the AFL (Gompers’ only defeat).

• The Populists’ belief that they were being exploited by monopolists and a deliberately deflated currency was accurate. Most Populists were greenbackers, and the greenbacker system they proposed anticipated the “fiat currency” system we now have. The “sound currency” goldbugs were the cranks.

• The Populists were forward-looking and strongly supported education and the modernization of agriculture. Populist economic discussions were quite sophisticated, though that can't be said of the advocates of free silver.

• William Jennings Bryan, the anti-evolutionist prosecutor in the Scopes trial (remember “Inherit the Wind”?) was a silver Democrat, albeit with Populist sympathies. It was the defender of evolution, Clarence Darrow, who had been a Populist activist. And the cynical pro-evolution journalist, H. L. Mencken, was an anti-Semitic right-winger who hated FDR and had trouble making up his mind about Hitler.

• Populist rhetoric was and heated and violent, but so was everyone’s during that era. Those were the days.

• The charge of racism is valid, but an investigation of this topic just reminds you of how racist America has always been — it’s hard to find cases when the Populists were more racist than the Democrats. It was after the Populists had collapsed that the Republicans and the Democrats cooperated to deny the franchise to black voters in the South, creating a solid Democratic South that protected segregation until 1965. During the Populist era all three parties competed for black votes, and this had a beneficial effect even though the Populists did accept white supremacy.

• And in a positive sense, let's not forget that many progressive policies were proposed by the Populists decades before they were put into effect: the forty hour week, the progressive income tax, regulation of monopolies, voting rights for women, unionization, and the secret ballot.

• More here.

YOUR DEFINITION OF POPULISM IS TOO NARROW AND BIASED, AND FAILS TO RECOGNIZE THAT THE NEGATIVE SIDE OF POPULISM

The word “populism” covers a lot of ground, and I don’t advocate that we model ourselves on every populist that there ever was anywhere. My main target is the Democratic taboo on populism (which is hand in glove with its dependency on big money). An equally important target is the Pol Sci 101 definition of populism with which, it seems, virtually every Democratic wonk and half the Democratic electorate have been indoctrinated. The general impression that miseducated people have is that populists are people like Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh – hysterical, ignorant, dishonest, bigoted, militarist, and lacking in positive policy proposals. The negative aspects of the worst populism have been written into the definition of the word, to the extent that any demented anti-elitist is now called a populist. A big part of what I’m trying to do is to rescue the idea of populism from misrepresentations which have been institutionalized in the Democratic Party since about 1950.

“Populism” didn’t used to be a common noun. As late as 1983, Websters' frequently-updated New Twentieth Century Dictionary defined “populism” and “populist” in terms either of the American Populist Party or of the unrelated and very dissimilar Narodniks in Russia of a slightly earlier era.In the “Introduction” to Populism: Its National Characteristics, a 1969 anthology he edited which tried to come up with a general definition of populism applicable across national boundaries, Ernest Gellner wrote “There can, at present, be no doubt about the importance of populism. But no one is quite clear what it is….. Does it have any underlying unity, or does one name cover a multitude of unconnected tendencies?” Two hundred pages later, in the conclusion to this book, Peter Worsley writes “The penumbra of meanings surrounding this term need not frighten us into fearing that we have here some peculiarly spongy concept”– which isn’t exactly reassuring, especially since the various populisms discussed in the book don’t really seem resemble American populism much.

I’m convinced that the generic and mostly negative definition of populism traces back to Richard Hofstadter, especially in The Age of Reform, but also in Anti-intellectualism in American Life and The Paranoid Style in American Politics. (Hofstadter also contributed to Gellner’s anthology). Hofstadter was more a man of letters than a historian, as he himself said, and his poorly researched, biased book was shaped by the political situation of his time. In his own mind he probably thought that he was responding to Joe McCarthy's demagogic, anti-intellectualism, but I don't read it that way. By the time Hofstadter published the first of these books, McCarthy had already been censured, and shortly afterwards he died. Furthermore, if McCarthy had lived Hofstadter’s accusation wouldn’t have harmed him, since the Populists were still admired by many.

But worst of all, this smear ended up validating the populist claims of Lou Dobbs, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and dozens of other of demagogic corporate shills. Hofstadter’s real target was populism, not McCarthy, and what he (and others) were trying to do was to reconstitute the Democratic Party as a gentlemanly party of elite experts on the British model. In this he and they were, unfortunately, by and large successful.

The generic, common-noun definition of “populism” only goes back fifty years or so, and it was polemical in origin. I think that the time is ripe for rehabilitating the Populists and reclaiming the word “populist” as a positive term. There are a lot of fake populists: mercenary demagogues, perhaps secretly funded by business, who use anti-elitist populist rhetoric but do not make, much less intend to put into effect, any specific policy proposals that would harm business and finance.

And then there are the real, non-fake right-wing populists. But as I said, I don’t think that Democrats should model themselves on every populist that there ever was.

POPULISM HAS BEEN TRIED

I’ll just throw this one out. In the last chapter of The Populist Persuasion, Kazin points out that ever since 1980 or even earlier, everyone has wanted to be a populist, and that in most cases it didn’t work. Against this I would argue, first, that populism can't be just an electoral strategy or a style, but a movement with real political goals. Most of the populisms he mentioned were crippled or corrupted either by the lack of real goals (Perot), cults of personality (Nader, and Perot again), or conflicts of interest (most of the Democrats, all of the Republicans).

And second, Kazin is absolutely right that the populism of the future should not mimic the methods and rhetoric or target the demographics of the populism of the past.” If at first you don't succeed, try, try again.