Most people aren’t interested in politics, because most people aren’t interested in most things. Most people are interested in a few things. For some people, it’s politics. For others, it’s home renovation. I’m personally not into home renovation. I mean, my interest would suddenly increase a lot if my pipes started leaking, but if not, it just doesn’t interest me much.

Like leaking pipes and water damage, political crises — like that of he mid-late 2000s Bush administration — get otherwise politically apathetic people to care about politics. That is the window of opportunity for populism (or progressivism, radicalism, etc). What happens when the masses rise in populist revolt, throw out the financial nigromancers and other villains, and install a regime that truly has the public interest in mind?

I don’t think they’ll stay politically engaged in the long term. I don’t think most of them will want to. They want politics to be taken care of, so that they can focus on what they’re interested in: fixing up vintage cars, helping their kids through troubles understanding trigonometry, reading Dostoyevsky in the original Russian, spending time with their ailing parents — the thousands of other things that consume our time.

So when the Good Guys have won, and the malefactors have been overthrown, the majority of people, politically engaged by necessity thanks to the state of crisis, return to political apathy. Perhaps its a different type of apathy — for instance, perhaps the ancien régime fostered an apathy of despair (“We’re ruled by bandits, but what can a serf like me do about it?”) which the populist reformers have turned into an apathy of contentment (“The ship of state’s in good hands. I don’t need to worry about it.”) — but at any rate, I doubt most people will stay engaged.

What do the Good Guys do, then? Well, possibly, with most people’s attention elsewhere, the minority who are still politically engaged includes disproportionate political influence from the well-connected, leading to ever-increasing rule by special interests, starting the whole cycle over again. Even more optimistically, though, I think that the when the mass engagement that enabled the populists in the first place ends, the new leadership turns into administrative, managerial elites: perhaps the sort of people Brad DeLong likes, but a bit further to the left, and a bit less likely to be econ Ph. Ds.

I guess I can’t see how the type of populism you seem to envision can be anything more than temporarily successful. It can survive a long time while it’s thwarted. Once it succeeds, though, I have a tough time imagining that the large fraction of the populace which it engages — who are engaged mainly because of the manifest unacceptability of the current goverment — will stay engaged.

Do you think that I’m too pessimistic from a civic perspective, and that if our politics served ordinary people more effectively, that ordinary people would become more engaged in politics on a permanent basis?

I know bunches of them! They benefit from Federal or Military retirement, and often they are double-dippers. Lots of them work the disability scam, too.

Don’t worry, Emerson. We’ll understand it all by and by.

The phrase “malefactors of great wealth” came from the Republican progressive Theodore Roosevelt, and LaFollette used similar language. Progressives trusted the people less than populists did, and some were elite technocrats, but some of them were firebreathers too.

Radical politics and progressive politics both rely on adversarial popular movements, and labor and progressive politics often do to. At this point the Democrats have decisively rejected the first two and are only grudgingly willing to accept the second to under certain limited conditions.

Frankly,if any of the other three varieties of independent, popular politics were firmly in place, I probably wouldn’t be talking about populism. But the typical Democrat is neither radical nor populist, only very weakly progressive, and in many cases not even pro-labor.

And as far as I’m concerned, elitist progressivism without a popular outreach will be stillborn.

That’s really where I think the contemporary dividing line between a sort-of-progressivism and a sort-of-populism is. Does the rejection of elites extend to all elites? Or are people willing to believe that scientists actually know something about physical and biological science? Because that last is something we can’t afford to give up.

Any kind of populism we get from the contemporary American people is probably gong to be reminiscent of the early 20th century in more than just name.

What would be wrong with that? The Populists were defeated, but they put a lot of issues on the table and got a certain amount of response from the Democratic Party.

I give Obama credit for having a ground game, but his promise of an end to partisanship was not conducive to strong policymaking. I find it hard to be impressed by his passage of the disaster relief stimulus package, given that it was an inadequate response to an unprecedented emergency, and that he made concessions to please a bunch of zombie fanatics who didn’t even vote for it. (The imbecile Blue Dogs, 20% of the Democrats, are lying in wait next, and he seems to have already made concessions to them).

I don’t see how Obama will be able to govern well or successfully without being oppositional to the same malefactors of great wealth the populists and progressives both opposed, but he can’t go oppositional without going to the voters and getting popular support, and if he went to the voters to get support for an oppositional program of that type, that would be populism. But Democrats are opposed in principle to that and incapable of doing it anyway, so it’s not going to happen. Obama has even frozen out the weenie progressives on the internet.

I suspect that, besides misreading populism, you guys are also misreading the new religious right. A big chunk of them are educated, smug, and upper-middle class. They’re not populists, they’re prosperity Christians blessed by God. Racism might work with them, but populism wouldn’t.

Bu as I’ve said, I’m always willing to recognize that the game is over. If you think I was grumpy before Obama was elected, watch me now.

http://podz.wordpress.com/

It contains a test to see if Akismet is blocking your comments. If it is, they recommend that you contact “akismet support,” but I don’t think they provide a link or an e-mail. I remember I found an e-mail easily enough through Googling, though, and as you can see, here I am, commenting away (though it took several days and two attempts by the akismet support guy).

The first is populism as a political tactic – as something that would win elections. I’m agnostic on this question, mostly because I don’t see any Democrat actually succeeding as a populist. Jim Webb? Kind of, I guess. What kind of campaign did Franken run?

In presidential politics, Edwards came the closest, and he never got off the ground, despite the considerable advantages that attach to being a white guy.

Then there’s the question of populism as a tactic of governance. Would Obama be more effective if he stirred up populist resentments? Again, I’m agnostic.

As a tactical matter, it’s hard to criticize Obama, who, after all, won the election, and who keeps winning on policy, in the sense that he seems to be getting more-or-less the things he wants.

Then there’s the substantive question of policy: Should our policies reflect more anger at elites? I think I can sign on for this – there are a lot of people I think should be in jail – but I share Emerson’s belief that the Democratic Party ain’t interested.

Moreover, this country isn’t like the old DFL Minnesota. I think Rich is right:

Any kind of populism we get from the contemporary American people is probably gong to be reminiscent of the early 20th century in more than just name.

Any modern populism, for example, is likely to be profoundly racist – and therefore something that would be pretty difficult for Obama to exploit.

As I think we all agree, the case for liberal populism – on merit and as a tactic – becomes stronger as the economy melts down. I’m still hoping that things can be straightened out short of societal collapse, though.

Some populists were racists, and some became racists, but the same is true of the progressives, and of every other goddamn group in the US, including abolitionists, all the way back to Plymouth Rock. In Minnesota the populist-left FL party had heavy Jewish involvement in its upper leadership, and favored an end to segregation, and it was destroyed to a very considerable extent by Republican Jewbaiting.

Hofstadter was a slime artist as far as I’m concerned. His three books have misinformed people about populism until the present day and control the Democratic orthodoxy. Populism == racism is the conventional wisdom.

Roosevelt needed the populists and progressives in his first two terms, but many of them opposed WWII, and for that reason were purged. John Dewey counts a progressive and he opposed the war and wasn’t listened to much from then on.

As I say: Republican populism is fake, Democratic elitism is real. I’m also convinced that one of the main reasons why Democrats reject populism (besides the apparatchiks’ worry that they’ll lose control of the party if they let popular movements in) is that Democrats are repelled by the idea of associating with people who eat boring food and wear tacky clothes.