Our Divided Political Heart (31 page)

“
Populism was hardly ‘status politics,’
” Woodward argued, “and I should hesitate to call it ‘class politics.’ It was more nearly ‘interest politics,’ and more specifically ‘agricultural interest politics.’” Woodward was polite in his choice of words, but he was insisting that Populism was what it was, not what midcentury New York academics
thought
it was.

And both Woodward and Michael Paul Rogin, a political scientist and the author of
The Intellectuals and McCarthy
, vigorously disputed the easy link that Hofstadter and his allies made between Populism and McCarthyism. Sam Tanenhaus, the editor of the
New York Times Book Review
, nicely captured the implications of Hofstadter’s position in a 2006 essay: “
[William Jennings] Bryan’s authentic heir wasn’t Roosevelt
, the Dutchess County squire. It was Joe McCarthy, who even delivered—in Wheeling, W. Va., in 1950—his own cross of gold speech, a carnal roar against subversives, real and imagined, recipients of ‘all the benefits that the wealthiest nation on earth has to offer—the finest homes, the finest college education and the finest jobs in government.’”

Rogin carefully analyzed election returns and found little connection between those who supported McCarthy and those who had backed progressive reformers or agrarian populism. McCarthyism, Rogin insisted, had far more to do with the agendas of Republican and conservative politics. (It’s another case of, it was what it was.) And as Brown reports, Woodward made a similar point in a letter to Hofstadter. “
In the McCarthy movement
,” Woodward wrote, “I believe a close study would reveal a considerable element of college-bred, established-wealth, old family industrial support.”

If history sometimes repeats itself, so do historical errors. Seeing McCarthy as the heir to Bryan or Tom Watson was much the same as seeing
members of the Tea Party—a largely middle-class group with right-wing views—as successors to the Populists. Both comparisons mistake form for substance and fail to take seriously what movements and their members actually say and believe.

At heart, the debate about Populism is a debate about the nature of our democracy, about political and economic equality, and about the role of average citizens in politics. It is also a debate within liberalism itself. Linking the New Deal closely to Populism, as those who wrote in Hicks’s tradition did, had important implications for how contemporary liberalism should be understood. Populism’s sympathizers saw the New Deal as part of a broad Populist-Progressive egalitarian tradition. Hofstadter, on the other hand, sought to distance the New Deal from this past. “
The difference I hope to establish
,” he wrote, “is that its indignation was directed far more against callousness and waste, far less against corruption or monopoly, than the indignation of the Progressives.” The “
inspiration
” behind the New Deal “was much more informed by administration, engineering and economics, considerably less by morals and uplift.”

As a matter of history, Alan Brinkley observed, Hofstadter “
clearly underestimated the degree to which progressive ideology
had influenced New Deal policymakers.” On the other hand, Hofstadter was right to see that “in the course of more than a decade of political and ideological pulling and tugging, new ideas had slowly and haltingly emerged in response to the failure of old ones to deal with pressing realities.” A decade after he wrote these words, Brinkley described how New Deal thinking changed in the course of Roosevelt’s tenure
in a book whose title
,
The End of Reform
, echoed Hofstadter’s.

Scholarship about the Populists did not stay still. The Populists enjoyed a historical renaissance with the publication in 1976 of Lawrence
Goodwyn’s
Democratic Promise
:
The Populist Moment in America
. The first full-scale study of Populism since Hicks’s work more than forty years earlier, it cast Populism (in Brinkley’s words) as “
coherent, enlightened, and fundamentally democratic
.” The product of the interest of New Left scholars and civil rights veterans in mass democratic movements, Goodwyn’s account portrayed Populism as the creation of a movement culture and its supporters as people transformed by the very experience of organizing
against injustice. “
To describe the origins of Populism in one sentence
,” Goodwyn wrote, “the cooperative movement recruited American farmers, and their subsequent experience within the cooperatives radically altered their political consciousness. The agrarian revolt cannot be understood outside the framework of the economic crusade that was not only its source but also created the culture of the movement itself.”

For a generation of progressive historians and activists, Goodwyn’s account was liberating. In her 1996 column taking Hofstadter to task, Molly Ivins praised Goodwyn for understating populism “
as the self-empowering fulfillment of real democracy
that it was at its best.” Ivins’s view of Populism was pure Goodwyn:

Populism was up-from-the-bottom politics
, a system of alliances and sub-alliances and alliance halls where people met and talked over their problems and shared ideas and solutions. They took on the largest institutions of their day: the railroads and the banks. They allied with the Knights of Labor and fought “replacement workers” . . . They used the boycott and the strike and the ballot.

As Goodwyn himself put it: “The thing to remember about the historic connection between 19th century populism and modern politics is that populism can be understood as an attempt to create popular democracy, an attempt to enrich the popular democratic input into the American system of governance.”

This view has continued to be influential. Robert C. McMath Jr.’s
American Populism: A Social History
, published in 1993, concluded that “
most studies of the last quarter century have depicted American Populism
as a movement that advanced a serious critique of monopolism and offered alternative visions of democratic capitalism.” Reflecting the continuing relationship between the study of Populist history and the development of democratic aspirations, McMath concluded:

Neither proto-fascists nor proto–New Dealers
, the Populists fashioned a powerful movement out of the cultures of nineteenth-century reform and out of their own shared experiences. In the end,
they failed to bend the forces of capitalism and technology toward humane ends, and many of them shared with other Americans of their time a myopic view of equal rights, one still distorted by racism and sexism. But for all their failures and limitations, the Populists fashioned a space within which Americans could begin to imagine alternative futures shaped by the promise of equal rights. There is a legacy waiting to be fulfilled.

More recent scholarship has forcefully challenged
the idea that the Populists were either anti-modern or anti-intellectual. In
The Populist Vision
, published in 2007, the historian Charles Postel argues persuasively that the Populists were not “Don Quixotes tilting at the windmills of modernity and commercial change.” Rather, they were forward-looking, much taken by science and education—they were known as a “reading party” and a “writing and talking party”—and much affected by the late nineteenth century’s “ethos of modernity and progress.” They sought to use government as a “counterbalance” to “corporate and financial power” in their quest for “fair access to the benefits of modernity.” Postel is fully alive to the Populists’ shortcomings, yet he is right to remind the reformers of our day that Populism gave birth to “one of the most powerful independent political movements in American history.”

No wonder so many later political movements have claimed lineage to the Populist tradition. While the negative image of Populism created by the pluralist intellectuals of the 1950s has had real staying power (as Molly Ivins mourned), political activists with views quite distant from those of the 1892 People’s Party have been more than happy to take up the name. And this continues to sow confusion. A striking and quite typical example: in a commentary published in the
Huffington Post
in February 2010, the actor Alec Baldwin declared that Sarah Palin’s performance at the Tea Party convention a few days earlier marked her as an “
incurious, phony populist
.” But two days later in the
Washington Post
, the late David Broder, his age’s premier political reporter, concluded that Palin was offering “
a pitch-perfect recital of the populist message
that has worked in campaigns past.”

Phony or pitch-perfect? With populism, it seems, all things are possible.

When Hofstadter, Daniel Bell, Seymour Martin Lipset, and other intellectual critics of Populism linked it to right-wing movements and even “right-wing extremism,” they were doing so to cast doubt upon a creed that earlier generations of liberals had viewed with some sympathy. This skeptical view was a consistent subtheme
in
The Radical Right
, an important collection of essays
published in 1963. (It was an expanded version of a
book published eight years earlier as
The New American Right
.)

“
Social groups that are dispossessed invariably seek targets
on whom they can vent their resentments, targets whose power can serve to explain their dispossession,” Bell wrote. “In this respect, the radical right of the early 1960s is no different from the Populists of the 1890s, who for years traded successfully on such simple formulas as ‘Wall Street,’ ‘international bankers,’ and ‘the Trusts’ in order to have not only targets but ‘explanations’ for politics.” Lipset pointed out that the Populists were no friends of intellectual freedom, noting that they “
discharged many university professors in state universities
in states where they came to power in the 1890s.” (Lipset acknowledged that Republicans, in turn, “
dismissed teachers who believed in Populist economics
.”)

The irony here is that while a certain kind of liberal was using Populism’s alleged right-wing tendencies to discredit it as a disposition, right-wingers themselves were eager to make the same argument in reverse: that conservatives now had the most legitimate claim on Populism, since liberal “elitists” were denigrating the religious beliefs, ethical commitments, and day-to-day values of ordinary people.

From the late 1940s on, the Populist form, if not the substance, was indeed most popular on the right. Less than a decade after Joe McCarthy came George Wallace, whose rhetoric was about race but whose favorite targets were elite groups—the “
so-called experts
,” the “so-called intellectuals,” “the sociologists,” “the pointy-headed bureaucrats with thin briefcases full of guidelines.” His oratory was addressed to the aggrieved. “Yes, they’ve looked down their nose at you and me a long time,” he said. “They’ve called us rednecks—the Republicans and the Democrats. Well, we’re going to show, there sure are a lot of rednecks in this country.”

The great civil rights historian Taylor Branch quotes an “awestruck” Alabama reporter who decoded Wallace’s technique. “
He gave every hearer a chance to transmute a latent hostility
toward the Negro into a hostility toward big government,” the reporter said. As Branch observed, “The reporter recognized that Wallace’s power began in rhetorical innovation. Without harping on racial epithets, as everyone expected him to do, Wallace talked all around race by touching on the related fears of domination, coining new expressions such as ‘forced busing’ and ‘big government,’ which were anything but common clichés” at the time he invented them.

It is insufficiently appreciated that the style largely invented by Wallace still shapes the rhetoric of right-wing populism. Wallace’s use of the “law and order” theme became a staple of Richard Nixon’s 1968 campaign and had a powerful impact long after, notably in 1988, when George H. W. Bush used the crime issue to defeat Michael Dukakis. Ads showing the face of an African American criminal in attacks on Dukakis’s prison furlough program in Massachusetts were a signal event in that contest. The linking of law and order to racism had the unfortunate side effect of discouraging liberals from grappling with legitimate public concerns about rising crime rates, a problem Bill Clinton in the White House and Joe Biden in the Senate tried to remedy with their crime bill in the 1990s.

Wallace’s impact continued to be felt even after conservative populism sought to distance itself from all but the most veiled references to race. (Obama’s rise, of course, brought forth a troubling resurgence of racial and racist themes.) The politics of the 1960s and after created a large new cast of elitist villains, many of them identified first by Wallace. Viewed as a whole, it was truly an awesome list of malefactors: scruffy, privileged college students protesting the war in Vietnam, a few of whom tarred the rest by burning American flags; dissenting college professors easily painted as “arrogant” and “out of touch”; a larger “new class” of upscale professionals whose social liberalism was said to put them at odds with the values of ordinary Americans; a related group of “secularists” or “secular humanists” accused of trying to drive God and religion out of the public square; feminists, homosexuals, and libertines intent on destroying the two-parent heterosexual family; powerful bureaucrats and politicians in Washington seeking to use federal power to impose such defective values on unwilling
states, cities, and towns around the nation; a “liberal media” determined to ignore, distort, or mock the views and arguments of the patriotic, the God-fearing, and the traditional; and a cosmopolitan elite that encompassed many of these groups and was so internationalist (or “globalist” or “multi-lateralist”) in its outlook that its members were indifferent or hostile to the very idea of American patriotism. This last sentiment was nicely encapsulated in the 2004 presidential campaign by conservative snickers that “John Kerry looks French.”

The historian who best described the migration of the populist approach rightward is Michael Kazin. His 1995 book,
The Populist Persuasion
, saw populism as a deeply rooted American
method
—which is quite different from viewing it as a program or a set of ideas. Populism became a way of communicating, “
a language that sees ordinary people as a noble assemblage
not bound narrowly by class.” Its supporters view “their elite opponents as self-serving and undemocratic, and seek to mobilize the former against the latter.”