But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security….. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.
In political science the distinction between the politics of governance and the politics of consent is universally accepted. In practice two different groups of people do these two jobs for any given team, and the campaign people often have little idea what the candidates and their appointees really plan to do once in office. It’s also taken for given that many of the goals proclaimed during the campaign will be forgotten once the election is won. If this bothers you, you’re an untrustworthy idiot who just doesn’t get it.
Most of the liberal heavies agree that direct democracy is a bad thing and that public opinion should have essentially no influence on actual policy; ideally, the electorate should just choose betwen two competing slates of experts. E. g., Walter Lippmann and Richard Hofstadter; Karl Popper, Daniel Bell, Edward Shils and the other technocrats; Strauss and the neocons; Hayek and the bipartisan neoliberals (per Mirowski: The Road from Mont Pelerin) — who did I leave out? Anti-democracy is liberal dogma*. The whole argument for the Federal Reserve System is that it will shield financial policy from democratic politics. The range of expert opinion on foreign and military policy is confined to different flavors of liberal interventionism.
Being a political insider always involves being able to tell when X really means not-X. But most people are outsiders, and every once in awhile they find out that insider games that they didn’t know about have ruined their lives. And they tend not to be good sports about this — though their understanding of what just happened can be wildly wrong, and often they blame the wrong people.
So while the exotic conspiracy theories are usually crap, in a democratic society anyone who takes what their political leaders say at face value is a chump and a likely victim. Everyone in the biz knows this. Especially, above all, more than anyone else, the people who ridicule conspiracy theorists know this, because they’re almost always insiders and almost always have a stake in the insider game.
The anti-conspiracy theory message is “Sit down and shut up. You don’t understand, you’ll never understand, trust us!”
As it happens, I’m an admirer of the American Populists, the original conspiracists smeared by Hofstadter et al. As far as I can tell the Populists were mostly right. For almost two decades there really was a deliberately deflationary policy (“sound currency”), and the tariffs really were rigged against them, and the rail monopolies really were cheating them, the milling monopolies really were cheating them, and the federal, state, and local governments really were part of the scam.
Now, every once in awhile an insider will slip and let give the game way. In the case of the Populist wheat and cotton farmers, it is sometimes argued that this exploitation was a good thing, since by squeezing the farmers until they croaked, the US was able to industrialize instead of becoming an agricultural colony of Britain.
But this isn’t a refutation of the conspiracy theory, it’s a justification of the conspiracy. Sometimes denying that something is happening amounts to supporting it. There are contemporary examples of this.
* Conservatives are anti-democratic too, of course, but liberals have tipped their hand so blatantly that conservatives are able to pick up cheap populist votes for almost nothing.
Adapted from a comment I made at Dsquared Digest
Trollblog 
June 20, 2011 at 5:05 am
[…] If you’re not a conspiracy theorist some of the time, you’re a sucker By John Emerson TROLLBLOG […]
June 24, 2011 at 10:55 pm
John, here is a long comment on Populism I recently made in a Crooked Timber thread that I think is a fair summary, and I would be interested in knowing what you think. The specific groups as those mentioned by Steven Attewell in the thread, so I was working off someone else’s list. If you want the context, the thread is http://crookedtimber.org/2011/06/19/marxism-without-revolution-class/#more-19716
Greenback Party Platform
1.pro fiat currency
2.pro women’s right to vote
3.pro 8 hour day
4.anti-monopoly
5.pro power to strike
6.anti private police and militias
7.government rather than bank control of currency, i.e., anti-privatization, also anti the current Ron Paul position
8.pro graduated income tax
9.anti speculation (in land primarily)
All would basically be regarded as left or liberal (American sense) views today. All or almost all are more progressive than Democratic Party positions of the time. 1, 2, 7, and 8 in particular, far from being reactionary, are major elements of 20th century political modernity, which would have to be called accurately futuristic from a 19th century perspective.
Where they ended up: The Greenback issue lost salience after the battle for that particular fiat currency had clearly been lost. Fused with Democratic Party in many states. Some ended up in People’s Party.
The Grange
1.Railroad regulation (I.e., anti-monopoly)
2.Pro-cooperatives
3.Pro regulation of private business in public interest (grain warehouses, but also an important court precedent for the principle)
4.Pro liberalized farm credit through government intervention.
5.Pro woman’s vote
6.Pro direct election of Senators
7.pro prohibition
8.Members included FDR and Truman
8 not an issue position, though telling. 7 not a left or right position intrinsically, but not well-regarded historically. Other positions clearly on the left. 5 and 6 very important for democracy.
Where they ended up: Still extant, but much diminished. More of a charity fraternity today. Also influenced Farmer’s Alliance and Greenback Party.
Farmer’s Alliance
1.Anti-monopoly
2.Pro partial government control of “free market” in public interest, especially banking and communications
3.Silver as well as gold standard (bimetalism)
4.Pro income tax
All but 3 leftist positions, 3 debatable, though the intention was anti-deflation, today an uncontroversial position, though how much inflation is desired is controversial within narrow but significant bounds.
Where they ended up: they were cobbled together from previous groups, some of which, primarily in the South, were racist, though the Alliance also had a large Northern anti-racist contingent. They were soon broken up by pressure from the economic elites they opposed, and by the desire for some but not all groups to form an alliance with the Colored Farmers’ National Alliance and Cooperative Union, as well as the more clearly left-wing Knights of Labor. Despite some racist elements, the fact that racism was controversial within this group, and many were actively fighting it, looks pretty favorable in contrast to the Democratic Party of the day, particularly in the South where this was a major issue.
The Knights of Labor
1.Strongly pro-labor though not socialist.
2.pro 8 hour day
3.Grew directly from labor movement and sometimes functioned as labor union.
4.After some reluctance, participated in strikes and boycotts
5.Anti child and convict labor
6.Advocated for black inclusion in politics in the North, but tolerated segregation in the South.
7.Excluded some professionals, as well as liquor makers, because considered unproductive members of society.
8.Inclusive of women.
9.Supported exclusion of and violence against Chinese, resulting in riots.
6 shows that racism again was an internal conflict. 7 is debatable as a left-wing position. Rest are left positions, other than 9, of course. This is the primary example of major racist action by one of the populist groups Attewell named, and there is no excusing it. Worth mentioning, however, that the Knights of Labor were also one of the groups that founded and gave many ideas to the Wobblies. Even the Wobbly slogan is derived from the Knights, and the Wobblies were the group endorsed as a contrast to the reactionary and ineffective forces of populism.
People’s Party (19th century edition)
1.Anti-gold standard, pro fiat currency or at least bimetalism (varied somewhat, bimetalism imposed by alliance with Democrat Bryan)
2.Regulation of business
3.Farmer chapters excluded blacks because of influence of South
4.Direct election of Senators
5.graduated income tax
6.8 hour day
7.government control of railroad, telephone, and telegraph
8.Allied with Democrats outside the South, but with Republicans within it. That is to say, with the most progressive party in either case, given local conditions.
9.Supportive of power for women
10.Many of its issues, which were also issues for the other populist parties, taken up by Democrats around the turn of the century.
11.Rallied behind Bryan, a Democrat who adopted some of their issues, after great internal debate. This destroyed the party in the South where it had been allied with the Republicans. Democrats used racist attacks on the Populists after this
12.Many members ended up in the Socialist Party as supporters of Debs.
How did it end up: In the 1892 election, they tried to form an alliance between Southern blacks and poor Southern whites as an electoral base. Some Southern whites resorted to racial violence to try to prevent this. In 1896, the party supported the Democrat William Jennings Bryan, who lost narrowly. After the failed alliance with the Democrats, the party disbanded, but Tom Watson, one of its leaders, later re-established another version of it, and ran for President under its banner. Although Watson had earlier fought Southern racism, arguing that the elites used race to divide the poor, he embraced it at this time. Leftists going to the right in later life is a familiar pattern. In any case, the reconstituted Party went nowhere and soon died.
Overall, the issues that seem common to most or all of these groups were:
1.An end to the gold standard in favor of fiat currency or bimetalism.
2.Greater government control of business, particularly speculators, natural monopolies like railroads and communications, and the financial industry.
3.Greater political power and participation for women.
4.Pro 8 hour day.
5.Pro labor rights.
6.Graduated income tax.
7.Government-directed monetary policy that opposed deflation.
Racism was generally controversial within all groups, save the Knights of Labor when attacking the Chinese, and the People’s Party when reconstituted. This compares favorably to the Democrats of the day, and anyone whose special concern is prejudice should give the populist groups due credit for their feminism. On most other issues, they were far more progressive than either major party. Far from being backwards, many of the things they advocated that seemed way-out at the time are accepted as modern today, at least by liberals – in particular, fiat currencies, women’s suffrage, graduated income tax, non-deflationary monetary policy, and government regulation of the market, particularly the financial industry and natural monopolies. Some did err by backing prohibition, but so did most of the other suffragists, and no one seems to hold it against them. There was certainly racism, but, there was also opposition to racism – for the most part, racism was more strongly the domain of the Democrats, late Watson notwithstanding. Otherwise, there is little here that is petty or vicious, and it is majoritarian in a good sense, unless you oppose the woman’s vote or the direct election of Senators.
As institutions of power and relevance, they were short-lived, other than the Grange, which was not entirely political. Given that much of their platform was eventually achieved, it is not clear that they can be called “failures” on this basis. As for how they ended, they mostly flowed one into another and into other leftist groups, such as Deb’s Socialists and the Wobblies, as the situation developed. Only the People’s Party can be said to have destroyed itself with racism, and that wasn’t even the original party, which destroyed itself by allying with Democrats.
For a long time, American politics had the odd feature that the party of Big Money was also the party that abolished slavery and opposed racism. This meant the ecological niche available for the other party included racism. So a new force emerges defined primarily by opposition to Big Money, or at least the unfettered liberty of such, but also including support for women, anti-deflation, labor rights, some other things. Logically, it is playing for the ecological niche of the Democrats (and expressly so in many cases), as the other is not available by virtue of its basic mission. So there is a strong structural impetus towards racism. Even stronger than the Democrats, in fact, as the major parties in those days largely succeeded over patronage, not ideology. The populists, of course, never acquired enough power for this, so they had to appeal with pure ideology. Despite all this, the populists were usually less racist than the Democrats.
Now, things are different. The racists have found their way to the Party of Big Money, and Big Money was always the primary populist enemy. Like the Democrats, populists no longer have to make such alliances, and basically no longer can. Big Money and racism share a home in the Republican Party, and, if you oppose Big Money, you will not find many racists flocking to you because they are thoroughly indoctrinated and already spoken for. A big part of the purpose of the Republican Party is to convince people who may be motivated by racism, militarism, religion or other things that pro-Big Money sentiment is essential to whatever they favor. The Republicans are very successful at this. And the Republicans are actively playing to the racists too, especially anti-Muslim and anti-latino sentiment, the current hits, but oldies like anti-black bigotry too, especially against Obama. They give the racists no reason to abandon them.
Note also that much of the classic populist platform leans socialist by contemporary standards. How many racists do you find these days embracing such ideas? You will also notice that the Tea Party platform, covertly corporate-funded and consisting basically of Republican cliches stripped of the veneer of reasonableness, has very little in common with “populism”. Even the Paulites, with their gold standards and deregulation do not fit at all with historical populism.
June 24, 2011 at 11:06 pm
I’ve just skimmed through your post but I’m in agreement with everything I saw. We seem to be on the same track.
I think that the KofL-Greenbacker-Populist-Prairie Progressive lineage is the best thing American politics has produced. I’d also patch in the pre-Leninist Socialist and the Civil Rights movement. I think that the liberal technocrat / cold warrior takeover of the Democrats may have killed American Democracy, not immediately but by now. I hate Hofstadter, Schlesinger, and Shils with the heat of a thousand suns.
Things to do this moment, but later.
June 29, 2011 at 5:10 am
If interested, you may read some extensive remarks on this post (mixed in with a lot of other material) in a long post here. (Most of the material relevant to this post comes near the beginning).
January 20, 2012 at 10:26 am
what news is more important ?
religious / conspiracy theory news like ;
1. government corruption
2. financial collapse
3. freedoms under jeopardy
or
mainstream news like :
1. lindsay lohan jail time
2. mosque in new york
3. birdman getting a veyron
religion and spirituality
May 13, 2012 at 2:17 am
YOW! Thank you Martin Bento. Nice catalog. I’ve been calling myself a “Greenbacker” (all the other progressive/populist parties started to wimp out on the money issue) for a while now.
The real death of these parties was when many of their positions were co-opted by Woodrow Wilson, who combined them with virulent authoritarianism and massive racism, buying off a lot of the former supporters *and* sparking a counterreaction (leading to the Harding/Coolidge/Hoover nightmare). The final death blow came from the adoption of the New Deal, which was good enough to eliminate most of the radical sentiment.
The cold-warrior takeover of the Democrats was a later disaster; but it was more of a disaster because the two-party system (not just due to Duverger’s Law, but also due to deliberate entrenchment) made it hard for people to flock to a new party or organization as they did in the 19th century. I think we’re about to get some very interesting 19th century style history, but activity at the national level (though not the state and local level, where history is starting to happen) is “on ice” until 2016 due to the personality cult of Obama.