If there was ever a time for pitchfork populism, it’s right now. Unemployment is past 8% and still rising, and most people have seen a third to half of their retirement money disappear, and this was all the result of multimillionaires’ financial machinations. But so far we haven’t seen much public rage.
Partly this may be because, so far, only the unemployed and the people who know them have directly experienced the problem. Certainly it’s in large part because the media and both political parties are so close the malefactors that they don’t want the electorate to figure things out. This is the result of twenty years of bipartisan deregulation, freemarketism, and financial utopianism, and the culprits obviously don’t want us to think about it.
Someone is going to be blamed, and the Republicans have figured out who: Clinton and Obama. But the Democrats are staying above the battle and refuse to “play the blame game”. This responsible, patrician, professional approach hasn’t worked for the Democrats for thirty or forty years, not even during normal times, and it’s certainly not going to work now. But the Democrats don’t realize this, and they’re so committed to their cool, professionalism that are unlikely to be able to deal with the politics of the impending disaster at all.
It’s only in the last decade or so that I’ve learned how absolutely anti-populist the Democratic Party is. At all levels within the party, from the leaders down to the up-and-coming young pros, populism is identified with racism, bigotry, ignorance, conspiracy theorists, lynch mobs, and the like. (The pros also claim that populism loses elections, though considering their own knack for losing elections I don’t know why anyone should listen to them about that.) The result is that, by now, populist rage is — rather improbably, if you think of Phil Gramm, for example – a Republican monopoly.
As I’ve said many times, Republican populism is fake, but Democratic elitism is real. So that’s my problem: figuring out how the “party of the common man” became elitist. *1
THE PARTIES
Between 1870 to 1932, the Democratic Party was no further left or more liberal than the Republican Party, and it was often more conservative. Even after 1932, many Democratic regulars opposed Roosevelt — Al Smith, the Democratic Presidential presidential candidate in 1928, campaigned for the Republican candidate in 1936 and 1940. The two parties were sectionally and ethnically defined (basically Northern Protestant Republicans versus Northern Catholic and Southern Protestant Democrats), and both of them were totally controlled by finance, manufacturing, and monopolies like the railroads. There were a few token issues they consistently disagreed on (prohibition and tariffs), and members of the establishment would play one party against the other for specific purposes, but labor and poor farmers in general (altogether as much as 70% of the population) had no advocate in government. In effect, that meant that the Eastern middle and upper classes ran the show: the rest were divided by ethnicity and geography and received no reward for their party loyalty.
The two parties were interest groups in their own right and were completely non-ideological. Party pros delivered votes to the party’s candidates and were rewarded with plum government jobs which they used to enrich themselves and buy more votes. Government resources were delivered selectively to loyal voting blocs, and during elections the big policy questions were often not a concern at all. Of course, once they were in office and it was time to govern, politicians did deal with the serious questions: they delivered big favors to the business concerns who lined their pockets.
As a result, between 1860 and 1940 most of the creative political work was done by third parties and extra-party pressure groups: the Farmer’s Alliance, the Greenbackers, the Populists, the LaFollette Progressives, the Farmer-Laborites, the Nonpartisan Leaguers, the Farmers’ Holiday, the Knights of Labor, the AFL, the CIO, the Socialists, the Communists, the Trotskyists, and so on. There were dozens of these groups — some of them existing only on paper or during one election in one state, some of them with millions of members, and some enduring for a decade or more. Sometimes they ran their own candidates, sometimes they took over one of the major parties via the primary system, and sometimes they cut a deal and supported a friendly major party candidate – e.g., William Jennings Bryan (a Democrat). Groups of this type were the first to call for many things we now take for granted: women’s suffrage, the secret ballot, open primaries, the graduated income tax, social security, minimum wage, the eight-hour day, unemployment insurance, trust-busting, the regulation of business, and paper money. (The Greenbackers, often thought of as rustic lunatics, pioneered monetarist economics). The most progressive Republicans and Democrats during that era — Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and the unsuccessful Bryan — stole third party ideas when their parties were under pressure from the left.
The difference between then and now is that we don’t have any third parties any more. The two parties have professionalized and are no longer dependent on graft in the strict sense of the word, but the party pros are still non-ideological mercenaries chasing after the dollar. The dollar they’re chasing is overwhelmingly corporate, and the parties themselves have converged on pro-business, pro-war centrism. Campaigning tends toward peripheral wedge issues and “baffle them with bullshit” rhetoric, exactly as it did in the past — except that the Southern Democrats and the Eastern Republicans have switched places, Tweedledum-Tweedledee style.
In short, it’s just as it was during Boss Tweed’s era. The Democratic pros are against populism and radicalism because they would interfere with their influence-peddling. They get more money losing a centrist campaign than they would winning a populist or radical campaign.
WE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN AT WAR WITH EURASIA
The New Deal was divided by Pearl Harbor into two parts: the liberal, quasi-left, quasi-populist period before the war, and the military, technocratic, managerial period during the war. During the first period Roosevelt relied heavily on third parties, left-wing groups, and populist extra-party movements to help him ram his domestic program past Republicans, conservative Southern Democrats, and machine Democrats. Politics was turbulent, frightening, and uncontrolled in that era, with many Communist and near-fascist groups active, but more was accomplished than could have been during a more orderly period. As WWII approached, however, many progressives, populists, and leftists (but after June 22, 1941, not Communists) stuck to their neutralism and resisted and opposed the war, and some of the populists (following Gerald L.K. Smith and Father Coughlin) veered off in a fascist direction.*2
Pearl Harbor changed everything. Most of the anti-war voices fell silent, voluntarily or otherwise, and those who didn’t were marginalized. Roosevelt had a much freer hand than he had had during peacetime, and ironically, the Keynesian spending he had not always been able to do during peacetime became possible during the war. Roosevelt had always had a “Brain Trust”, but during the war it was no longer balanced by popular movements, and government relied increasingly heavily on university expertise in a wide variety of areas. Both government and the university were massively transformed by this: government became more technocratic, and the university became more bureaucratic, more administrative, and more involved in government policy. These transformations worked strongly against populism and popular politics generally; increasingly electoral politics became a separate technical specialty separated from governance called “engineering consent”: “Why should anyone care what an orthodontist thinks about foreign policy?”
With the professionalization of Democratic politics, the Democratic Party is now staffed mostly by freshly-scrubbed Ivy-Leaguers of various ages. One problem with this, which I will not go into in detail here, is that people of that sort lack street smarts and initiative and have several times succeeded in throwing elections to the Republicans despite general popular support for the Democrats on the issues. (Karl Rove had one year of undergrad education at a second-rank school, but he kept on winning). But the main problem is that persons of that sort are incapable of empathizing with commoners in a non-condescending way — even if they went to Harvard from a plebian background, they spent at least four years of their lives, and often as many as ten, forgetting their past and learning to present themselves successfully in elite circles. Professionals are successes and have organized their whole lives around success, and by their standards most voters are losers. (This is also a problem in areas like medicine, education, and counseling.)
In 1936 Roosevelt was strongly neutralist and refused to aid the Spanish Republic. As WWII approached, Roosevelt increasingly tilted toward war, but before Pearl Harbor he was held back by strong neutralist sentiment. On December 7, 1941 our entry into the war (in alliance with Stalin, and with the full support of American Communists) became inevitable.
Within three years of the end of the war, the four-decade-long Cold War (and our alliance with fascist Spain) began, and in another two years we were in a hot war in Korea. But during the war a certain proportion of Americans had developed a degree of sympathy with our Soviet and Chinese Communist allies, including many who had worked directly with them, and not all of them were nimble enough to switch allegiances in a hurry. Considering our three-year alliance, McCarthy’s claim that our government was infested with Communist sympathizers could hardly have been completely false.
The about-face had a double effect. On the one hand, everyone who had supported WWII reluctantly felt vindicated, but at the same time furious and demoralized: it’s hard to motivate ordinary people to give the last full measure of devotion in the service of a strategic alliance. On the other hand, the technocrats running the government had an additional reason to be wary of popular politics: managing the twists and turns of great-power foreign policy requires a lot of cynicism, and it’s risky and difficult to have to deal with public opinion every step of the way. The anti-popular theory of democracy had always been strong (e.g., with Walter Lippmann), and it became increasingly dominant within the Democratic Party. In 1964 Lyndon Johnson campaigned as the peace candidate even though he had already made up his mind to go to war in Vietnam, and four years later the Democratic Party and Hubert Humphrey immolated themselves in support of that war. (Judging by the response to Bush’s Iraq War, “Support All Wars” seems to have become the Democratic conventional wisdom.)
Orwell’s 1984 is usually read as an anti-Communist tract, but it also portrays the demoralizing effect of a heavily propagandized, aggressive, cynical foreign policy.
RICHARD HOFSTADTER *3
If you ask well-educated Americans about Populism, unless they are American history specialists what you’ll get is regurgitated Hofstadter. The Populists are usually thought of as angry, ignorant anti-intellectual, sometimes-murderous rural white racists and anti-Semites who were living in the past and who reacted with blind rage to a world which they didn’t understand. Tom Watson, William Jennings Bryan, Huey Long, Gerald L. K. Smith, Father Coughlin, George Wallace, and other undersirables are thought to be characteristic Populists. Very few contemporaries are even aware that much of the New Deal simply put into effect 50-year-old Populist proposals, or that much of the support for the early New Deal came from populist groups, or that Roosevelt’s administration would have been much more conservative (and less successful) if it had not been for populist and leftist pressure from outside the Democratic Party.
Hofstadter’s criticisms of the populists were not really about the populists at all; they were motivated by issues nearer to him in time. For him Joe McCarthy was the representative populist — quite a doubtful judgment considering that McCarthy was a conservative Republican who appealed to a non-populist demographic and became Senator by defeating an actual progressive / populist. Hofstadter took McCarthy’s antisemitism to be evidence of populism, but in America antisemitism was found in all classes, but above all in McCarthy’s Republican Party.*4 Similarly, while the Populists did have a mixed and in a few cases horrible record on civil rights in the South, Democrats of Hofstadter’s era were hardly in a position to point fingers at them. The refusal of many populists and progressives to support WWII has to have been another of Hofstadter’s motivations, though this does not jibe at all with Hofstadter’s accusation that the populists were militarists.
Hofstadter was a “consensus historian” who wanted to minimize conflict, both analytically in history and in the reality of his own time, and he was a strong advocate of the continuation of the post-ideological, post-popular, non-adversarial, technocratic rule by experts that had been developed during WWII. There was no place in this consensus for popular movements, whether progressive, populist, or leftist, so Hofstadter could not possibly write affirmatively about past American movements of that type. His view of populism quickly became dominant within the Democratic Party, and after the 1988 election it became stranglingly so, as it remains to this day.*5
GEORGE WALLACE, MARTIN LUTHER KING, AND THE HIPPIES
Less than a decade after Hofstadter’s book was published, the Democratic Party was faced with three more or less populist mass movements, and as a result it was crippled for a generation. The first was the civil rights movement, which is not usually counted as populist, but was: religious, bottom-up, mass involvement, outside the parties. (The Kennedy Administration supported the civil rights movement only very reluctantly, though in the end their support and LBJ’s was substantial and meaningful). The second was the anti-Vietnam War movement, which also was atypical in membership even though it was populist in organization. The third was George Wallace’s racist presidential run with the American Independent Party in 1968. And the combination of the three (two of them in conflict with the other) was deadly.
What are the lessons of 1968? It might merely be the fatalistic one that in America, race ruins everything: this was the story of the original Populist party, or at least a big part of the story. Another might be that war politics trumps domestic politics, and also tends to ruin things: both WWI and WWII destroyed a lot of popular movements. (I still wonder what would have happened if LBJ hadn’t listened to the generals in 1964 – and according to report, so did LBJ). But by and large the lesson the Democrats took from those events was Hofstadter’s: popular movements are just no damn good. And by this they delivered populism permanently to the Republicans.
POPULISM TODAY
At this point I have to ask myself: Is my interest in populism just nostalgia? Even if you count late movements like the LaFollette Progressives and the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party, populism was dead before I was born. In 1930 or 1940 the average American was dirt poor, whereas Ruy Texeira and others have concluded that the contemporary “poor” demographic is relatively small and hard to mobilize. Furthermore, a high proportion of middling Americans have decided — actively or passively, explicitly or tacitly, for better or worse — that they’re in on the game, and that they shouldn’t rock the big-money boat. (America has been economically successful enough to produce a demographically significant group that thinks of itself as “elite”).
All I can say is that that is going to change. High finance has done its work, and we’ll be paying the costs of their financial collapse for a decade or more. Right now, except for the unemployed and their families, we’re still just talking about numbers on paper rather than personal disasters: 30-50% declines in net worth, trillions of dollars slopped out to the malefactors who caused the problem, and so on. As the years pass we’ll increasingly feel the effects in our daily lives.
Someone is sure to demagogue this issue — certainly someone should — and the brain-dead party of Phil Gramm has already started. Rationally and objectively the Democrats are in a slightly better position than the Republicans to go on the offensive, but none of them seem capable of it. They’ve spent the last fifty or sixty years deliberately destroying their populist and radical wings, and now they’re going into battle with no weapons except slogans, good feelings, claims of competence, lesser-evil policies, and pleas for bipartisanship.
Hopefully, if they can’t or won’t do the job, a third party will. And maybe this is just as much of a hopeless dream as is the revival of the Democratic Party, but without these fantasies, America is a fantasy too.
(Notes Below at the “More”)
NOTES
1. Yes, the Democrats still do get more poor-people votes than the Republicans (from those who vote), but it’s on a paternalistic, “Where else will they go?” basis, and the Democrats are unwilling and unable to make a populist appeal.
2. Father Coughlin was a populist only in the broadest sense of the term. Rural, anti-urban nostalgia, Southern and Western provincialism, and anti-Catholic sentiment are among the major items in the indictment against populism, but Coughlin was an urban Catholic priest who relied heavily on Papal encyclicals. He’s better categorized as a right-wing or fascist Catholic activist of a type very common in Europe.
The word “neutralist” is fairer than “isolationist”. Rightly or wrongly, the non-engagement policy proposed by the American opponents of WWII was the same neutralism that was actually followed during the war by Sweden, Switzerland, and Ireland, and for geographical reasons, America would have been far less implicated in Nazi policies that those three countries were.
I say this because both in WWI (when they arguable were right) and WWII the opponents of war were pilloried either as Nazi or German sympathizers, or as silly and unrealistic fools. But what was at stake in both cases was primarily America’s place in the world system, and all the way back to the Spanish-American War a high proportion of progressives, populists, and leftists opposed the idea that America should become a world power — a fact that Hofstadter egregiously misrepresents.
3. Someday I’ll do a detailed critique of Hofstadter, but this time around I’m just going to present a polemical and malicious summary of Hofstadter’s The Age of Reform — a summary which does pretty accurately represent the standard liberal reading of the book. My methodology will be appropriately Hofstadterian: polemical from the point of view of the present, questioning Hofstadter’s motives with no attempt to be fair. Hofstadter is, or course, only one of several authors who might be blamed for the neutering of the Democratic Party (to say nothing of the objective forces of historical dialectic) — Arthur Schlesinger (The Vital Center) or Daniel Bell (The End of Ideology) could also have been named.
Call it metonymy, with the word “Hofstadter” standing for a generation or two of similar folk.
I’ve looked up the Amazon rankings of Hofstadter’s three polemical anti-populist books and compared them to a number of more recent, more sympathetic, and more accurate books on populism. Hofstadter’s fifty-year-old books are now classics, and all three of them outrank all of the other books but one. My guess is that the absolute sales numbers would show an even more striking difference:
Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, #52,151; Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style In American Politics, #183,250; Goodwyn, The Populist Moment, #198,000; Hofstadter, The Age of Reform, #226,136; Kazin, The Populist Persuasion, #329,547; McMath, Populism: A Social History, #344,776; McKenna, American Populism, #481,499; Postel, The Populist Persuasion, #507,813; Pollack, The Populist Response to Industrial America, #1,000,000+; Nugent, The Tolerant Populists, #5,000,000+.
4. Hofstadter minimizes establishment antisemitism, something which grates on me, since Minnesota’s populist Farmer Labor Party, the group with which I am most familiar, was destroyed in 1938 by Republican Jew-baiting.
5. Wiki: “As a consensus historian, Hofstadter rejected Beard’s interpretation of history as a succession of conflicts. Hofstadter believed that a historical period could be understood by an implicit consensus, shared by apparent antagonists.”
WORTH READING
Millard Gieske, Minnesota Farmer Laborism, Sheldon Hackney, Populism: The Critical Issues, John Earl Haynes, Dubious Alliance, Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform, Robert Johnson, The Peace Progressives and American Foreign Relations, Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion and A Godly Hero, Robert McMath, Populism: A Social History, Norman Pollack, The Populist Response to Industrial America, Martin Ridge, Ignatius Donnelly, Lyman Tower Sargent, Extremism in America*, Richard Vallely, Radicalism in the States, Wikipedia, Richard Hofstadter, C. Van Woodward, Tom Watson and Thinking Back.
*NOTE: Sargent’s book is included as a horrible example. To represent Populism he actually chooses something from Coxey’s Army, which is OK though imprecise, and something from David Duke’s faux-Populist Nazi group of the 1980s. This is actually a respected academic book recommended by eminent scholars, and shows you how influential Hofstadter’s misrepresentation has been.
April 24, 2009 at 8:31 am
The pitchforks do seem to be coming out. Oddly, the torture memos seem to be galvanizing people–why that? That of all things? The energy seems to be spreading: the big banks are incredibly unpopular. But it’s hard to say how the storm will blow. If there’s a popular movement in the offing, so far it has no major leaders, no nationally popular figures. Well…maybe Paul Krugman. Talk about your unlikely heroes! By rights he should be as much an elitist bastard as his former cow-orker, Larry Summers. But he is not. But Krugman’s a theoretician and a visionary, not a leader. So, who…?
April 24, 2009 at 9:59 am
My take on the current Democratic party and populism is that liberalism (in the modern American sense) can not be populist, it’s impossible. It’s too mushy, it has no anchor, no clear enemies, it’s based on a mixture of ideas.
I suspect that most liberals themselves don’t know what they are; look at that Michael Walzer guy after 9/11 2001, for example: one relatively minor incident turns him into a raving loony nationalist.
April 24, 2009 at 11:53 am
Krugman is center-right, so it won’t be him. Probably the Democrats will let Glenn Beck lead the revolution.
Abb1, I don’t see the mushiness problem with liberalism at all. They have a pretty good set of ideas with some defective spots: managed capitalism, technocracy, welfare state, economic growth, personal freedom, secularity, a capitalist world order. But pretty weak in the solidarity area, and too dependent on political passivity and economic success.
April 24, 2009 at 1:14 pm
See, capitalism and welfare-state are two contradictory concepts; what the liberals are offering is a delicate compromise that has to be explained in the ‘on one hand/on the other hand’ sort of way – and that’s an anathema for any populist movement. Populism is all about ‘long live!’ and ‘down with!’. You need some sort of a good-vs-evil dichotomy.
April 24, 2009 at 2:05 pm
People should actually read something about the Populists and various other third party movements. There’s a short bibliography at the bottom in the “more” section. Most of the populists were temperate and rational, but they firmly rejected the political and economic order that they lived under and had specific alternatives.
In my piece I played with the hostile caricature of populists, which Heilbroner took at face value. Perhaps I should have more clearly dissociated myself from it.
By now, racism, nationalism, anti-elitism, and rage are sufficient to count as populism, even by people who want to be populists, but that’s highly inaccurate.
One of the books I listed actually chose David Duke’s 1980s fake Populist Party to represent populism. I’ll have to leave an annotation to that effect.
April 24, 2009 at 2:33 pm
You guys are philosophizing a bit too much, and spewing cliches into the bargain. I’m talking about specific movements in American history and what they actually did, and speculating about whether anyone will bother to represent the losers in the disastrous financial scam we just experienced. You can’t do that without taking an adversarial, anti-elitist position, but no one seems willing or able to do that so far.
April 24, 2009 at 3:02 pm
Define “elite” in terms the populace would understand.
April 24, 2009 at 3:25 pm
That’s not a really difficult question. Finance, billionaires, management, etc.
As I’ve said, for quite awhile many or most people have believed that their best chance was to suck up to the people richer and more powerful than they were. Often they’ve believed that they’d reach the heights themselves one day. But they were never confused about who “the elite” was: it was the people they were sucking up to.
The premise of this piece is that these people are going to have their eyes opened in the next few years. This doesn’t mean that they’ll automatically come to the right conclusions; just that it will become possible to talk to them.
No one except Republicans has really tried to talk to the populace for quite some time. The Democrats for the reasons I’ve said, and the left because the left is now a purely cultural movement.
One of the things that came up in my reading is that around 1910-1920 The cultural left went its own way and ditched the corny populist types. Then critical theory came along after WWII and developed a principled anti-political politics, and the corny labor types were ditched too. Racial minorities are actually just as corny most of the time, but multi-culturalism gives them a pass, so they’re still nominally cool.
April 24, 2009 at 4:16 pm
Krugman’s more radical than you think. Conservative left, at least. And he might yet surprise us all. Because he follows his economic insight where it leads, and if that is radical, so be it. But, still not a leader. See also Simon Johnson’s call for populist action, all the while decrying populism.
It’s interesting (in that sort of, well, I’m terrified, but damn if I can figure out what to do interest) how radicalizing these times are. You get former IMF policy-makers decrying the US economic elites, and comparing them to the Russian oligarchs.
April 24, 2009 at 4:20 pm
Oh, and I still advocate making voting a duty of citizen, as in Australia, improved balloting procedures (IRV, range voting, etc.), and proportional representation in state legislatures. These are, I think, populist–in the sense of getting electoral results that more accurately reflect the will of the people–programs. But these are long-term solutions. In the short-term, who’s going to lead?
…perhaps Obama can be persuaded that his best bet is to stand for the people?
April 24, 2009 at 5:13 pm
It’s possible that Obama can be turned around, the way Roosevelt was. But he seems terribly invested in the cool expert schtick.
April 24, 2009 at 5:16 pm
Hesitate to comment, but …
To speak from my personal experience — I got into the environmental movement from its most “populist” element, the people who organized Love Canal. These were white lower-to-middle-class suburban homeowners, basically, although they later were pretty good with black renters in factory towns. They were as radical as people in the environmental movement got. For instance, there was a little-known impromptu incident when the Love Canal people grabbed up weapons and took the EPA people who’d been sent to reassure them hostage. (Luckily, the hostage-takers were white, and they were dealing with Carter, or they would have been shot.)
I don’t think that they were rejected by party activists etc. as populist, therefore crazy. On the contrary, they brought a certain amount of radical authenticity that was valued. (I was about to write, out of proportion to their actual political power. But maybe not. After all, they passed Superfund.) But *structurally*, there wasn’t a way they could easily tap into the existing conduits of money. I think that your explanation over-emphasizes ideological rejection of populism and under-emphasizes the way in which greater corporate money flowing into the political system required money to counter it that isn’t available to the non-professionalized groups. Of course, corporate /e lite money had always sough to control politics, but the changes of the sixties and seventies required that it learn how to participate in the political arena in more than the early more obviously thuggish ways.
April 24, 2009 at 5:46 pm
The corporate control and centralization of the most powerful communications is an enormous factor. A lot of the insurgent politics of the past was done by publishers of small newspapers (who were often job printers on the side). Another enormous demographic was freelance lawyers. By now whenever I first read about a new populist or radical politician I make a note of whether they were one or the other.
The internet could function politically as the newspapers did, but it’s terribly vulnerable to central control. That’s why net neutrality is a big deal.
One thing about your Love Canal example — any future populism would mobilize people who are in some sense middle class. But that was the Marxist criticism of Populism too — the small, destitute farmers supporting the Populists were kulaks, or petty bourgeois landowners, and not a revolutionary force.
April 24, 2009 at 6:00 pm
Around 2003 I developed the idea that Bush had a fascist game plan. 1. Engineer a backloaded fiscal-financial-budget crisis, to take effect after Bush he office. (Done). 2. Put together a fanatical eliminationist popular movement motivated more by hatred of some groups of fellow Americans than by any serious policy issue. (Done.) 3. Beef up the legal and police tools for dealing with domestic insurgency. (Done, with lots of Democratic help).
April 24, 2009 at 6:47 pm
What about Ralph Nader; what he’s been doing, isn’t it a sort of left-populism?
Although I get the impression that he’s been targeting mostly politicians and corporations, rather than billionaires.
Corporation is a great anti-populist invention; not so easy to hate GM or GE, it takes an effort.
April 24, 2009 at 7:24 pm
Nader was more like a Progressive. He was so anti-party that he didn’t even pay any attention to the Green Party, much less the Democrats. He had a very odd approach to politics, sort of John Galtish.
Definitely though the Democratic purge of the DFHs is a lot of the problem today.
April 24, 2009 at 9:26 pm
Nader was the archetypal technocratic elitist. That’s what he did as an activist before he became a political candidate. That’s where his anti-party bit came from. I never expected that the Greens would get any good out associating with him (as indeed, he seems to have wrecked whatever electoral path they might have had).
April 25, 2009 at 7:27 am
I don’t know, I thought his rhetoric was fairly populist, especially in the last 10-15 years. He’s even been accused of antisemitism and that’s a sure sign (yes, in a caricature sort of way, but nevertheless).
April 25, 2009 at 4:12 pm
Anyone can use populist rhetoric. But Nader has a managerial, regulatory approach which is part of the problem. Around 1920 some of the progressives (e.g. Minnesota’s Charles Lindbergh Sr.) started moving toward in a more radical, more populist directions. Lindbergh joined the new Farmer-Labor Party and would have a major figure in it if he had lived.
April 26, 2009 at 3:57 pm
[...] John Emerson (h/t Avedon): If there was ever a time for pitchfork populism, it’s right now. Unemployment is past 8% and still rising, and most people have seen a third to half of their retirement money disappear, and this was all the result of multimillionaires’ financial machinations. But so far we haven’t seen much public rage. [...]
April 26, 2009 at 6:05 pm
The analysis has a major flaw presuming that the only system that works is 2-party binary Janus.
You start by analyzing the non-difference between Repub & Dem, saying both have been controlled historically by industrial and wealthy interests, and both have been manipulated by false disagreements used to distract the populace.
From there you talk about how The Donkle now is run by Ivy League douchenozzles, and that part is correct, but you then say how the ILDs “throw elections to Republicans.” By saying this, you are suggesting that if we just got rid of the ILDs, we would see the Donkle win a few elections.
The problem is that the Donkle will still be funded and run by industry, commercial corporate interests, and the very wealthy.
So I agree with the call for pitchforks, but I don’t think it’s good to imagine remaking the Donkle, it’s not going to tolerate a revision of any sort, not without immense wealth to unseat the pullers of the strings of money power, which would essentially mean totally destroying the party and rebuilding it.
It’s a whole lot smarter to talk about jettisoning the entire Fed Govt and setting up a parallel govt, and leave the phony no-action crap to the ILDs and their fawning admirers.
Is it possible for any bloggers out there to imagine this? Or are all of you too afraid of abandoning a failed system?
April 26, 2009 at 7:06 pm
The analysis has a major flaw presuming that the only system that works is 2-party binary Janus.
No, I suggested third parties as an option. But institutionally our whole political system is stacked against third parties. It’s not a subjective failure of imagination on the part of individuals.
It’s a whole lot smarter to talk about jettisoning the entire Fed Govt and setting up a parallel govt
You make it seem so easy.
April 27, 2009 at 3:59 pm
Oddly, the torture memos seem to be galvanizing people–why that? That of all things?
Americans have been indoctrinated to accept oligarchy. Malefactors of great wealth are “winners,” not mustachio-twirling villains.
Torture, however, is still widely considered evil, despite the oligarchy’s best efforts. The Republicans years ago stopped trying to conceal their service to Capital, but even Bush felt the need to deny torture.
April 27, 2009 at 4:08 pm
As the political parties become more democratic, opportunities for populism are stronger within the parties than without. Moulitsas gets it.
April 27, 2009 at 7:37 pm
I fully support the primary challenges.
I’ve even toyed with Republican Party primary challenges — just go where the Republican Party is weak and win their primary. That’s what LaGuardia did. (Vito Marcantonio, the last Red Congressman, began his career as a Republican).
There are institutional changes making the third party tactic more difficult, though — in many states primary challengers are forbidden to also run in the general under a different designation or as an independent.
April 27, 2009 at 7:45 pm
Tell that to the non-Obama supporters during last year’s Democratic national primary system.
Tell that to the allied political organizations who have been told to stand down after Obama’s election, so his staff and his outreach networks can broadcast his messages without dissent.
Tell that to the vast majority of Democratic voters who rose up to oppose TARP, *before the election*, who were told by Obama and McCain that bailing out the banksters had to happen NOW NOW NOW without any practical oversight and certainly no limitation on bonuses or salaries.
The Democratic party is now more crippled after success that it was in 2004, in defeat, and the only people happy about this are the people who spent the cash to buy it outright, at last.
April 28, 2009 at 8:15 am
cgeye, I’m pretty sympathetic to Obama – who could plausibly become the best president of my lifetime and ought not be worse than second-best – but his example provides only limited support to my argument. I’m talking about what’s possible here, and not what’s been done.
No plausible political movement can exist if it doesn’t have a viable plan to become, or at least influence, a majority. The institutional barriers to influencing policy are significantly lower if you are a Democrat or a Republican than if you are not, and there is no evidence that there are compensating advantages for running outside the parties.
April 28, 2009 at 2:27 pm
I actually date back to the waning days of Eisenhower, but yep, faint praise. Still, I think it’s important to remember that this election has had significant, if insufficient, results.
There has been a tendency on the left to make all-or-nothing arguments, and belittle actual success – even once-in-a-lifetime success. One of the key indicators of liberal success, and a harbinger of future success, is that it is now the Republicans who are unwilling to compromise in the interest of gaining a majority.
As for third parties, I don’t dispute your history, but times have changed, which I think you recognize. Non-party actors – the megachurches, Kos, the think tanks, the media – remain important and influential – but at the national level, that influence is going to be exercised in one of the two political parties, or not at all.
The thought of, say, a Religious Right third party fills me with glee, not fear. (Heck, the actuality of a Religious Right second party has, so far, worked out pretty well.)
It’s all about gaining a majority, or influencing that majority. I’ve yet to see someone propose a modern-day scenario in which a third party accomplishes something useful for the constituents of that party – unless you were proposing such a scenario with your comparison of Tweed to the modern Democrats. As an analogy to illuminate the potential modern-day relevance of third parties, I don’t think that works.
April 28, 2009 at 3:32 pm
PF, I’m by no means optimistic. Trollblog is my last stop before walking away from the whole pile of shit. And I don’t have a lot of faith in the American people. I’ve given up on Democratic Party is all, and think that it would be worth while taking a try at going directly to the electorate without running everything through Schumer and Rahm Emmanuel, which I regard as entirely hopeless.
PF, as far as “times have changed” (not a powerful argument): Well, maybe they’ll change again. Unless I’m wrong, in the next 2-3 years many tens of millions of people are going to find out that they’re not successful any more and that Obama is not on their side. I can’t see a mild crash. Economists seem to be faking it and whistling in the dark.
And my reading of “the left” is different than yours. “The left” has dwindled into obscurity, and the centrists have gained entire dominance of a Democratic Party which is terrified of the Republicans even now (when did we elect Susan Collins President?) and which since 1948 has been firmly opposed to having any dealings with the left. Left advocacy within the party counts as quixotic purism and is squashed, but it’s not because the left is playing its cards wrong, it’s because the left is left, because the left has been beaten, and because the Democratic Party is controlled by high-class Tweeds who are not going to budge.
April 28, 2009 at 3:37 pm
I’ve given up on Democratic Party is all
Not an intellectually disreputable position, but tantamount to giving up, period.
April 28, 2009 at 3:51 pm
First of all, PF, if you read what I’ve written, it’s not pure third-party advocacy. It means working through non-party organizations, whose activities might include taking over the party through the primary system (though that’s much harder to do than it was.)
As far as “giving up” goes, lesser evil politics is giving up too, especially when it means a continued imperial foreign policy, a continued drug war with disastrous racial and civil liberties consequences, and a fiscal policy entirely dominated by Wall Street even after Wall Street wishfulness, arrogance, fraud and incompetence have brought us to the worst financial disaster in almost 80 years.
During my entire adult life people have been hoping for the Democrats to clean up their act, and it’s been getting worse instead of better. Each new Democratic President accepts and affirms a bit more of the Republican transformation of America.
April 28, 2009 at 4:37 pm
Pseudothyrum, you’re reading Reich all wrong. Reich is one of the few Democrats who looks out for labor and the average man, and he got bounced from the Clinto Administration for that reason. Here’s what he says about populism (about what I say):
Democrats should be angry populists, given their traditional role of protecting and championing the underdogs in American politics, and especially considering the absurdly wide gap that’s opened up between the rich and everyone else. But in recent years Democrats have ceded the mantle to Republicans, who now mimic the faux populism of Sean Hannity and other right-wing talk show demagogues.
He opposes David Duke fake populism just as I do, though judging by your site (which I have delinked), you may disagree.
For the record, there’s nothing wrong with being Jewish, and the average American is now urban and is more likely to be coastal than either Midwestern or Southern.
April 28, 2009 at 5:33 pm
Pseudothyrum’s site that I delinked was a white pride site. I didn’t have to leap to any conclusions.
April 28, 2009 at 5:53 pm
As far as “giving up” goes, lesser evil politics is giving up too,
I wasn’t knocking “giving up.” If a modest level of mitigation of evil is insufficient over the next decade or so – as it well might be – then I truly give up. My only point is that such hope as there is exists within democratic institutions, as channeled through the existing political parties. This belief is completely compatible with the belief that there is no hope.
As for how should we measure success, we’re just coming back to my 38:
There has been a tendency on the left to make all-or-nothing arguments, and belittle actual success – even once-in-a-lifetime success.
April 28, 2009 at 6:50 pm
Perezoso, seriously. Cut the personal abuse and cut the anti-Semitism, here or elsewhere.
April 28, 2009 at 9:20 pm
I’m taking my sorry ass elsewhere.
April 28, 2009 at 9:24 pm
[...] there are various arguments advanced about the possibility of a resurgence of reality-based populism – one in which the populace rebels [...]
April 28, 2009 at 10:08 pm
He’s right, actually. Today in the US of A and Europe you can’t agitate against the elites without being accused of antisemitism.
Being a leftist is now itself a form of antisemitism; this is how the concept evolved. That is very sad indeed, but it’s just a fact of life. You can’t fight it, so, I think, you just have to accept it.
And if you can’t take it, forget populism.
April 28, 2009 at 11:00 pm
Antisemitism is the socialism of fools, as they say.
Perezoso has been around for a long time, and on Unfogged and elsewhere he makes many grossly insulting comments about individuals, including anti-Semitic comments. I’m always happy to be mistaken for a Jew, but not when Perezoso does it.
Opposition to Israel is mistaken for anti-Semitism less and less, in my experience. I believe that Israel lost its blank check sometime during the Bush Administration.
If my populist schtick hasn’t lost me Jewish internet friends, it’s certainly cooled a couple of friendships, and I’m very sorry about that.
As I said in my post,the local populist movement with which I identify, the Minnesota Farmer Labor Party, was led by a Yiddish-speaking Swede and had many Jews in the leadership, and it was destroyed by Republican anti-Semitic attacks. So I’ll keep that as my point of reference.
April 29, 2009 at 6:25 am
That’s a bad point of reference.
Your Minnesota Farmer party is what – 1930s? Those days in the US elites and their lackeys were predominantly Anglo-Saxon, Jews were an oppressed minority, antisemitism was real and it was used to distract and derail populist movements. These days it’s pretty much all the opposite.
And I’m not talking about Israel. There are many vocational groups in the US organized as ethnic mafias. For example, you can’t attack corrupt law-enforcement establishment in New England without being perceived as anti-Irish. That’s just a fact of life.
April 29, 2009 at 12:43 pm
I’m aware that saying certain things will be thought of as or characterized as anti-Semitic, and that there are people who think that “Being a leftist is now itself a form of antisemitism”. In the same way, David Duke and Hofstadter think that Naziism is just advanced populism.
Obviously I am not willing to go that way, even if there’s some historical truth to it. I choose my models elsewhere.
One author (James Youngdale) divided populists into “Tory populists” (angry white people), radical populists, and “radical neo-mercantilists”, which is the area overlap. Radical neo-mercantilists wanted government interference with the free market on behalf of the commoners, the way conservative neo-mercantilists (Alexander Hamilton) wanted government interference in favor of big business.
In any case, my piece is mostly about the absence of populism among the Democrats, as manifest in the party’s servile response to the present financial collapse. Whatever I said about actual historical populists was just to defend them against Hofstadter and his ilk, and to partly explain how the Democrats became so servile.
In other words, I’m not proposing to imitate the past and revive agrarianism, or as far as that goes, prganize a radical factory workers union in the auto industry and the steel mills. Just to find a way not to be slavishly obedient to finance.
But the media and many Democrats will call that “populism” and oppose it, whereas Republicans call Rush Limbaugh “populist” and support him.
April 29, 2009 at 2:01 pm
As this thread demonstrates, Mr. Trollblog’s just another confused Zionist-liberal, Abby. Note the continued reference to David Duke, as if all these people who dare insult a Feinstein or Emanuel, etc are really meeting in bunkers, chanting Mein Kampf, klan handshakes so forth. Sad, at one time I mistook Emerson for an intelligent courageous person.
April 29, 2009 at 2:21 pm
Why faux-populist? I’d define populism as involving the circumvention of established channels of authority with a direct appeal to the people. That’s Duke, no?
How are you defining populism to exclude Duke? (Or how are you defining Duke to render him a faux-populist?)
April 29, 2009 at 2:49 pm
But the US is not only post-agrarian, it’s mostly post-industrial as well. It’s a service economy.
April 29, 2009 at 5:02 pm
Abb1, did you bother to read my comment? What I said was: In other words, I’m not proposing to imitate the past and revive agrarianism, or as far as that goes, organize a radical factory workers union in the auto industry and the steel mills. You responded to the first half of that terribly long sentence.
PF: maybe your definition is no good, and was designed specifically in order to smear populists as Nazis. For example the strict-sense Americas Populists worked entirely legally and within the system, except that they worked mostly outside the two-party system> To you this in nihilist rage, I guess. The two-party system is firmly entrenched, but there’s no harm or offense in working outside it, and as I said, during the period 1860-1940 almost all the creative work was done outside the two-party system. (And then there was the 1860 Republican fourth party).
Hofstadter, PF, and David Duke believe that the Nazis were populists, and I disagree.
Perezoso, no one here or at Unfogged likes or admires Rahm Emmanuel or Diane Feinstein, but we don’t make Jew jokes about them. Wellstone and Feingold are/were Jews too.
April 29, 2009 at 5:11 pm
BTW, PF, considering that you’re one of the very few people paying attention to me, you’re certainly doing a damn good job of convincing me to hang it up.
Much of what I’ve written so far was intended to come up with a more sympathetic description of populism, and after I’ve written literally five thousand words, you’ve just parroted back to me the Hofstadter view.
They won’t take your goddamn credentials away of you disagree with Hofstadter, you know. He’s all dead and shit.
April 29, 2009 at 5:12 pm
I should say, a more sympathetic, more empirical, and more accurate view.
April 29, 2009 at 6:43 pm
Well, John, I wouldn’t want to do anything to discourage you, because I find your take on this stuff interesting.
However, I find your view of Duke difficult to understand, and I sought an explanation. My assumption was that my lack of understanding was the result of either a different definition of the word “populism,” or a different view of Duke’s actual work. So I invited you to explain.
I think you tried to explain it, but I’m still not getting it. And I think you are working hard to impute to me views that I do not hold: I do not believe that third parties are inherently non-productive. I make a specific case about 2009, saying that today, productive work isn’t likely to be done nationally in third parties. I may be wrong, but that’s the argument I’m making.
And despite my view of third parties, I do not believe that work “outside the two-party system” is nonproductive in 2009. I have, in fact, explicitly stated otherwise, with examples.
Your explanation of Duke and populism, likewise, seems to want to impute to me views that I do not hold:
PF: maybe your definition is no good, and was designed specifically in order to smear populists as Nazis.
I don’t care about my definition. I only provided it to clarify a potential area of confusion, and to propose that you might want to provide an alternative definition. As best as I can tell, though, you are using the same definition I am. But I’ll ask again:
How are you defining populism to exclude Duke? (Or how are you defining Duke to render him a faux-populist?)
Also, you say this:
For example the strict-sense Americas Populists worked entirely legally and within the system, except that they worked mostly outside the two-party system
Right. That seems entirely compatible with my definition of populism. How is that materially different from Duke’s behavior? Do you regard Duke as someone whose behavior was, in relevant ways, illegal? (He did do jail time.)? Do you regard him as someone who worked primarily within the two-party system? (He did run as a Republican.) I’d downplay the relevance of the parenthetical parts, but maybe you just regard Duke’s crimes and his Republican Party membership as being more relevant than I do. Is that it?
April 29, 2009 at 6:47 pm
Duke was a Nazi who picked up the Populist name and a lot of Populist rhetoric. In Hofstadter world that makes him a populist. I imagine if he’d called himself a Jeffersonian, that would make him a Jeffersonian.
April 29, 2009 at 6:54 pm
Race was always Duke’s main message. None of the Populists made a primarily racial appeal while they were populists. Some made secondary racial appeals (not central to their argument). In this they were like most of the rest of the United States, including establishment figures and Republicans, North and South. (It was not Populists who tried to keep Jews out of the professions and the Ivy League schools.) Others were relative racial liberals or (in the case of the Minnesota Farmer Labor Party) absolute racial liberals.
But by now, not only is racism regarded as essential to populism, it’s almost regarded as sufficient to prove Populism. (Coughlin, for example, had few of the Populist traits — Catholic, eastern, urban, anti-union. But he’s reflexively classified as a populist because he was anti-Semitic.)
Might I ask what your knowledge base is?
April 29, 2009 at 6:55 pm
And I was going to say, some of them became racists after they’d given up on populism.
April 29, 2009 at 7:46 pm
Might I ask what your knowledge base is?
None worth mentioning. I read newspapers. And blogs. And books. I’ve got a bachelor’s degree from a state university, and I haven’t made much of a systematic study of anything in life.
If you tell me that populism necessarily excludes political actors whose primary motivation and appeal are racist, then I agree that Duke is clearly not a populist. This is responsive to my question.
April 29, 2009 at 8:54 pm
I suppose I should apologize for being so bristly, but it’s depressing to find the Hofstadter interpretation of Populism so deeply entrenched. “Populist” = “Racist”. Q.E.D.
April 30, 2009 at 12:39 pm
I’m not sure whether you view technocratic administrative politics and populism as intrinsically antithetical to each other, or whether you simply think that the administrative technocrats have waged an arbitrary and unnecessary war against populism because of their collective pet peeves and prejudices as a class, even though sometimes populists and administrative technocrats theoretically could get along alright (if not in a 100% harmonious relationship).
As you know, I’m not exactly a pitchfork populist myself. However, I’m wondering if there might be something that party hacks halfway disillusioned with Obamanomics (like me) and populists (never illusioned about Obamanomics in the first place) could agree on. A basic principle I’d like to see: trickle-up economics.
Where the US has previously insured financial assets via FDIC, FSLIC, PBGC, etc, do what it takes to cover those losses. Other than that — other than those discrete cases where help was federally promised in advance — no help for investors or the financial sector.
Money goes directly into the real economy, through aid to the poor, public services, and projects. The financial sector can eventually get some of the benefit of this. If someone has public health coverage, and thus doesn’t have to declare bankruptcy in the midst of being treated for breast cancer, and thus can pay off her debts rather than defaulting, then the financial sector benefits from that, as a secondary consequence of the well-being of its customers.
Or maybe not. Maybe the wealth won’t trickle up any more than it trickles down. Either way, they’re on their own, unless a financier actually becomes poor enough to qualify for assistance by the same criteria as, say, a Wal*Mart greeter.
Okay. Not exactly pitchfork populism — it’s not about punishing the warlocks of Wall Street so much as cutting them loose and focusing on higher priorities. However, as a principle, I think it could cut across a number of different lines: there’s the populist-lite aspect of repudiating TARP-style bailouts. There’s the free market orthodox aspect of saying that finance should make its money by providing its services to an improved overall economy, rather than dealing directly with the federal government. There’s the mushy administrative liberal aspect of wishing the rich well and not wanting them to lose their wealth, but thinking the poorer have a stronger claim.
Is “trickle-up economics” a servicable meme for populists, loyalist Democrats who’ve only drunk half a cup of Obama Kool-Aid, and others on the broad non-right-wing of American politics?
April 30, 2009 at 2:23 pm
I’m not sure whether you view technocratic administrative politics and populism as intrinsically antithetical to each other
During the New Deal there was a back and forth between the two, but during the war era and after the Democrats cut off the populist-radical wings and went almost entirely technocratic. (Populists are not necessarily idiots, either. After all, in 1870 they were free-traders and monetarists).
It was really institutional rather than psychological, and it worked until 1968.
The specifics of your post are the kinds of things people should be talking about. What you require confronting finance directly, though; they wouldn’t go quietly. And that could be best done if there were a loud populist movement threatening something even worse.
May 1, 2009 at 1:20 am
what other books/sources have informed your views emerson?
May 4, 2009 at 1:09 pm
Why do you censor people’s posts? Afraid of free speech, eh?
May 5, 2009 at 12:35 am
I like what Julian Elson says. why not all those things? Of course the problem is how to disseminate the ideas, how to build support, organizations, action plans? I’m not sure, in this long splendid post, whether JE ever suggests that populist pressures succeeds by influencing one of the two parties, or whether it has to take the form of a third party. That would be a very complex and sophisticated path, which might be difficult to sell to a popular base. If, by pitchforks, you’re suggesting full-blown overthrow, then you have to deal with all the tactical challenges that Marxists have haggled over for 100 plus years.
May 6, 2009 at 7:31 am
CENSOR THIS: The person censored specializes in inane, stupid, offensive personal attacks on individuals. He rarely makes these attacks here and can be quite interesting, but at some point his attacks on another thread became too disgusting to ignore.
Senecal, we should just realize that the Democrats are Ivy Tweeds who take money for delivering votes and go from there, and are in no way “us”. They’re “them”. So what should we do?
May 14, 2009 at 2:01 am
Thank you very much for the bibliography. I have just read this post on Open Left and was hoping that Paul or someone would provide a list of books about populism which were not Hofstadter. I saw The Populist Persuasion in the notes for Freedom From Fear and am glad to see it namechecked here as well.
May 14, 2009 at 2:08 am
In the accepted political map, it is not that there are no populists in the Democratic Party. It is that these populists are not liberals. The quick negative image of a populist which I have is Dick Gephardt, about whom my mom said, “He never was a liberal in his life”. Fortunately he retired before my parents had to vote for him.