Our Divided Political Heart (29 page)

I have laid heavy stress on the stories of Hamilton, Clay, and the arguments of their time to underscore that in the republican tradition to which both the Whigs and the Jacksonians sought to be faithful, the lines between the public and private sectors were neither as clear nor as sharp as they are today. This is important because what advocates of laissez-faire and radical individualism claim as the “American way” does not go back to the country’s origins. It was an innovation of the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s.

As the historian Sidney Fine has noted, it was in the “period between Appomattox and the accession of Theodore Roosevelt to the presidency, in 1901,” that “
laissez-faire was championed in America as it never was before
and has never been since.” Conservative individualists are thus trying to convert a 35-year interlude into the norm for 235 years of American history.
Brian Balogh is persuasive in seeing
the Gilded Age, which gave birth to the nation’s great corporations, as unusual both in the intellectual influences that held sway in society and in the legal theories put forth by the era’s Supreme Court. Both were enormously influenced by the social Darwinism of Herbert Spence and William Graham Sumner, which extended the idea of “survival of the fittest” into social and economic life. One reason for the great Populist William Jennings Bryan’s objection to Darwinism in general was his proper moral revulsion at social Darwinism in particular.

The Supreme Court, under the intellectual leadership of Justice Stephen J. Field, pioneered theories that today’s economic libertarians now revere. As Balogh explains, Field “
insisted that restraining government action
in spheres best left to the market would ensure the integrity of both public and private spheres.” This truly was judicial activism, since “the very effort to parse private and public was itself an historic intervention into social relations by the court, and a groundbreaking expansion of the national judiciary’s penetration into matters previously left to state and local government.”

Two decisions in particular marked a jarring break from the old republicanism. In its 1886
Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad
decision, the Court held that “
corporations are persons within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment
.” This extended unprecedented rights to corporations
(which would have horrified rank-and-file Jacksonians) and vastly restricted the ability of government to regulate what the corporations did (which would have bothered many activist Whigs). As Balogh writes, the decision left public concerns in “
a distinctly subordinate position
” to private concerns. And in the 1905
Lochner
decision, the justices invalidated a New York labor law that limited the workday of bakers to ten hours. The Court, as Balogh wrote, “
rejected the argument that unequal bargaining strength justified state interference
with the sacred freedom of contract principle.”
Lochner
was effectively overturned by the Supreme Court in 1937, but we are still living with the strange doctrine of corporations as persons, as the
Citizens United
case so recently reminded us.

Another sign that the Gilded Age, not the Founding period, had become the true north of conservatives in the second decade of the twenty-first century was that
Lochner
had became the object of what George Will called “
a robust new defense
” during the Obama years. Will cheered this development, arguing that
Lochner
was “
the liberals’ least favorite decision because its premises pose a threat
to their aspiration, which is to provide an emancipation proclamation for regulatory government.” He added: “The rehabilitation of
Lochner
is another step in the disarmament of such thinking.”

The
Lochner
and
Santa Clara
decisions were more, however, than a blow to progressive liberalism. They were also a departure from a much older American republicanism. They represented, as the historian James Kloppenberg argued, “
the eventual replacement of ethics by economics in liberalism
.”

“
Although vestiges of civic humanism continued to surface
in the rhetoric of Jacksonians chastising corruption, Whigs clamoring for order, and Republicans denouncing slavery,” he wrote, “the ideal of the virtuous republic was sacrificed in exchange for the ‘main chance.’”

Yet almost as soon as the United States had broken with the republican tradition, the country began to sense what it had lost. Those who organized against this counterrevolution worked under many labels, but they ultimately came to be known as Populists. And if we are now confronting the reemergence of radical individualism and our own version of the Gilded Age, the way home will inevitably require a new engagement with
our nation’s Populist tradition. At its best, this tradition has always pointed us toward a politics that takes seriously both the dignity of every individual and the majesty of a democratic commonwealth that looks after the interests of the community.

“Populism” is one of the most overused, and misused, terms in American politics. It is invoked with great passion, the subject of both lavish praise and a fearsome skepticism. Many claim for themselves populism’s mandate from heaven, knowing—as George Bancroft observed early on—that legitimacy and even sanctification in American politics arise first from
identification with “the people.”
In
The Populist Persuasion
, the historian Michael Kazin cites Ralph Waldo Emerson: “
March without the people, and you march into the night
.” Kazin argues that “the language of populism in the United States expressed a kind of idealistic discontent” and “
a profound outrage with elites
who ignored, corrupted, and/or betrayed the core ideal of American democracy.” American progressives have succeeded in improving the “
common welfare
” only when they “talked in populist ways—hopeful, expansive, even romantic.”

Yet “populism” is also regularly used as an epithet to accuse politicians of pandering to popular prejudices. It is often linked to a politics of unreason rooted not in thought and analysis but in feelings and impulses, often arising from prejudice. The mid-twentieth-century conservative writer Peter Viereck saw American populism in the darkest terms, and he was joined in his view by many other intellectuals, liberal as well as conservative, during the 1950s. “
Beneath the sane economic demands of the populists
of 1880 to 1900,” Viereck wrote, “seethed a mania of xenophobia, Jew-baiting, intellectual-baiting, and thought-controlling lynch-spirit.”

Part of the problem is that as a free-floating concept—as distinguished from its origins in the particular historical movement associated with the People’s Party of the 1890s—populism has no discernable ideological direction. Right-wingers, left-wingers, and centrists have all, at different moments, labeled themselves “populists.” The historian Leo Ribuffo reports that William Z. Foster, one of the earliest leaders of the American Communist Party, traced his progression “
from [William Jennings] Bryan to Stalin
.” Perhaps only in America is the idea of a populist Stalinist even possible. “
Tradition lies in the eye of the beholder
,” Ribuffo noted dryly, “and politicians across the spectrum claim posthumous endorsements from departed statesmen.”

George Wallace, in his longest phase as a rabble-rouser on race in the 1960s and early 1970s, used the thoroughly populist slogan “Trust the people.” Wallace could be a confusing figure. At times he spoke in a New Deal idiom of class solidarity, and by the end of his life he had renounced racism. Yet it was as a tribune for white racial backlash that Wallace found his greatest political success.

Many contemporary figures of the left have embraced the populist label, including Jim Hightower in Texas, former senator Fred Harris of Oklahoma—when he ran for president in 1976, Harris’s slogan was “The issue is privilege”—and, more recently, senators such as Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Byron Dorgan of North Dakota. The Occupy Wall Street movement is unmistakably populist, pitting the top 1 percent of Americans against the remaining 99 percent. Television and radio host Ed Schultz, a man of the left, thinks of himself as a populist, and so does Pat Buchanan on the right. Schultz and Buchanan can sound quite alike in their intonation at times and even occasionally—as when they discuss trade—in their substantive views. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, such leaders of the New Right as Richard Viguerie and Howard Phillips wanted to be called populist, proudly distinguishing themselves from stuffy Burkeans. When the writer Kevin Phillips (no relation to Howard) listed the issues that motivated the New Right, his list had little in common with the old Populists’ pantheon of concerns inspired by a reaction against monopolists, concentrated wealth, and economic injustice. Phillips spoke instead of
“
public anger over busing, welfare spending, environmental extremism
, soft criminology, media bias and power, warped education, twisted textbooks, racial quotas, various guidelines, and an ever expanding bureaucracy.”

And in 1992, along came a populism of the center defined by a multi-millionaire named Ross Perot. Perot managed to make the nation’s budget deficit a populist concern, linking the deficit to unhappiness over free trade and a backlash against the two major parties. In certain respects, Perot’s worldview actually
was
a classically American populist mix. He combined a critique of high finance with strong criticism of free trade’s costs to blue-collar Americans (“
that giant sucking sound
” of jobs being drawn south of our border to Mexico) and a classic critique of political parties as representing privileged interests.

In our time, no movement has been more eager to claim the populist mantle as its own than the Tea Party. And both media analysts and pollsters were happy to grant the movement its wish. Conservative pollsters Scott Rasmussen and Doug Schoen argued in
Mad as Hell: How the Tea Party Movement Is Fundamentally Remaking Our Two-Party System
that the Tea Party was primarily a revolt against a “political elite” that had been unaffected by the Great Recession. While the Tea Party’s supporters suffered, they argued, this elite continued “
to be upwardly mobile, to send their children
to expensive and exclusive schools, and to believe that the country is heading in generally the right direction.”

“
The right-wing populism we are experiencing today is significant
,” they wrote, “because it represents the conjoining of three separate, distinct, and not easily reconcilable strands of conservatism: economic conservatism, small-government libertarians, and social conservatism.” Of course, there was nothing new about what Rasmussen and Schoen were describing. They were simply listing the three wings of garden-variety conservatism—the same coalition that had brought Ronald Reagan to power—and endowing it with a new label. As we’ve seen, most Tea Party supporters were nothing more (or less) than Republicans who happened to be more upset than most people about Barack Obama’s victory in 2008 and the failures of the Bush years. Nonetheless, a conservative movement that can claim to be “populist” carries more public legitimacy than a big-business conservatism
offering precisely the same platform. And the Tea Party saw its approval ratings decline as its champions in Congress became more closely associated with the movement’s actual policies, including tax cuts for the wealthy.

Larrey Anderson, a conservative philosopher who had been an Idaho Republican politician, offered the intriguing view that the Tea Party represented “
Populist constitutionalism
.” This certainly had a plausible connection with what actually happened at Tea Party rallies. “
I have attended several local Tea Party gatherings
(and addressed a couple of them),” he wrote. “There is one document that is ubiquitous at these events: the
Constitution for the United States of America
. People hand out copies of the Constitution like
hors d’oeuvres
that are served at . . . a
de rigueur
tea party.”

“
Love and respect for the Constitution
is driving the movement,” he concluded. “Sharing the document, and then discussing its meaning, purpose, and ideas—that is the process that is taking place as a result of this love and respect.” One might argue that the very content of the book you are now reading, with its focus on the foundational ideas of our republic, is a tribute (if of a rather critical sort) to the success of the effort Anderson described. But was it
populism
?

Chris Cillizza, the
Washington Post
’s popular political blogger, offered a distinctive take on Tea Party populism, centered on one of its principal figures. Writing of Michele Bachmann’s disclosure that she had to “
weather the sorrow of a miscarriage
,” Cillizza noted that her revelation meant she was running “as a sort-of personal populist—someone who not only feels your pain but has lived it.” Cillizza was certainly right about the natural sympathy that flowed to Bachmann over her loss and the link her story allowed her to forge with “
millions of families
.” Personal populism seemed like a new concept. But it was as old as the 1840 “log cabin and hard cider” campaign in which the Whigs cast William Henry Harrison and their party “as paragons of plain rustic virtue” even though, as Sean Wilentz observed, Harrison was in fact “
a native Virginian and scion of a great Tidewater family
.”

This kaleidoscope of populisms underscored what Leo Ribuffo, with generous understatement, called the “
methodological imprecision
” of our
discussions of the meaning of Populism in both casual political analysis and historical debate. If the Tea Party’s rise demanded a reengagement with the meaning of our Constitution and the earliest periods of American history, it also required a new seriousness about what Populism meant for our past, and means for our present.