The Populist Persuasion

...Kazin foreshadows populism's "migration from left to right" in the 1940s with a compelling profile of Father Charles Coughlin, the radio priest who began by electrifying and energizing millions of Americans and ended a disgraced pro-fascist: "[His] loss of political strength was accompanied by the wail of lost ideals...

...Joseph McCarthy, natural heir to much of Coughlin's constituency, who represented "the best chance to close the gap between ideological conservatives and white working people (especially Catholics) that the Depression had opened up...

...At stake was a rich harvest of voters...

...You young people seem to know a lot of four-letter words," Wallace said...

...is author of The Kumquat Statement (Cowles) and The Impudent Snobs (Arlington House...

...I cherish the traditional convictions of the non-Communist Left," he writes, and he never veers from them...

...Clinton, who understands the words and where they come from, can't stay on key for any length of time...

...Just as Reaganism is resurgent in the new Congress, New Leftism has been institutionalized in the agencies of the executive branch, the public interest and environmentalist media, and campuses across the country, where tenured radical professors hold sway...

...I do take exception, however, to his dismissive treatment of Spiro Agnew, whose role in turning the Republican Party into a refuge for disaffected Democrats is central to the populist resurgence Kazin describes...

...Thus, in the 1970s, "the Grand Old Party turned itself into a counter-elite and a welcome home for white refugees from the liberal crackup...

...What Kazin has done is provide context, continuity, and direction to one of the main streams of American politics and thought—and to do so in lucid, evocative, and elegant prose...

...who knows what to say...

...Tom Watson...

...The Republican right meanwhile enjoyed another advantage that Wallace lacked—a "normative vision...

...Elegant, evocative prose...

...A fter Reagan, Kazin seems to feel, the populist beat went badly out of sync...

...Kazin's history begins with an analysis of the antebellum roots of populism, personified by Jefferson, Jackson, and Lincoln, each of whom "enabled post-bellum reformers to claim legitimate descent from a glorious past while they railed against those who wielded power unjustly in the present...

...Kazin's misfortune is to have finished his book a few months too soon: before the elections of 1994...

...Coughlin increasingly strummed the chords of a mournful Americanism at odds with both the mainstream version and his own sanguine past...

...Kazin's general analysis of the period is sound...

...From the mid-1970s on, the rhetorical defense of hard-working American against the liberal elite was yoked to a discourse of values that were considered 'traditional' as well as middle class...

...In his treatment of Wallace, Kazin comes suspiciously close to admiration: "Wallace was the first serious presidential candidate in the twentieth century who identified himself as a working man...

...Therefore, "as liberalism crumbled, astute minds in the party recognized that the defense of middle-class values—diligent toil, moral piety, self-governing communities—could now bridge gaps of income and occupation that the GOP had been unable to cross since the Great Depression...

...Witnessing a Congress shaped by surging young Republican conservatives, led by a speaker routinely called "populist," Kazin would have come to different conclusions...

...As Kazin points out, Wallace "courted this elegant loathing," delighting in attacks on bureaucrats, intellectuals, "pointy-headed college professors who couldn't park their bicycles straight," and the young New Leftists who tried to disrupt his rallies...

...And although Kazin identifies himself explicitly with the New Left (he was a volunteer in the Venceremos brigade, traveling illegally to Cuba to cut cane for Fidel), his narrative is remarkably free of bias...

...Perot could hum the tune, but never quite convinced anyone of his conviction...

...By the end of the sixties, says Kazin, "whether one earned a wage or owned a small business, carried a union card or chafed at the restrictions imposed by labor was often less important than a shared dislike of a governing and cultural elite and its perceived friends in the ghettos and on campus...

...While his personal involvement lends poignancy to his section on the New Left, however, that involvement causes him to exaggerate the magnitude of the left's defeats in the 1970s and '80s...

...and William Jennings "Boy" Bryan, whose cause and rhetoric seem so distant and musty today...

...This is the subject of the book—the politicians who have presumed to speak for us in the idiom of populism, "a language whose speakers conceive of ordinary people as a noble assemblage not bounded narrowly by class, view their elite opponents as self-serving and undemocratic, and seek to mobilize the former against the latter...

...ward, in a narrative complemented by finely drawn portraits of such populist leaders as Ignatius Donnelly, philosopher, scientist, and author of a utopian novel now read only by American literature majors...

...But his cause enjoyed widespread political support, and the panic he created among hisintellectual opponents opened a deep cultural schism in the Democratic Party, which eventually became a chasm that contributed to the success of George Wallace, the rise of McGovernism, and the capture of the Democratic Party by increasingly exotic groups and interests in 1972...

...Among American working people, says Kazin, quoting the sociologist Jonathan Rieder, the liberalism that once defined the Democratic Party had become identified with "profligacy, spinelessness, malevolence, masochism, elitism, fantasy, anarchy, idealism, softness, irresponsibility, and sanctimoniousness...

...Such battlefields may well be where the heirs of Ronald Reagan and the New Left remnant fight it out to see who, finally, shall speak for the people...

...His] natural home would seem to be a seedy hotel with a lot of people in the lobby, and his relaxation a cheap dinner...

...M ichael Kazin begins The Populist Persuasion with questions first posed by Carl Sandburg: Who shall speak for the people...

...As we all know, he didn't...

...That working definition does just fine in laying out the conflicts that the book will address: producers versus parasites, common folk versus elitists, Middle Americans versus the Intellectual Establishment, us versus the impudent snobs...

...But I have two . . . you don't know: S-O-A-P and W-O-R-K...

...He is perhaps also too pessimistic about the future of his own team...

...T he question had become one of alternatives...

...who has the answers...

...T his is true even of Kazin's sec- tion on Sen...

...In 1972, although Wallace commanded a majority of primary delegates in a crowded field when he was shot on May 15, "the Wallace campaign seemed a disgruntled cry of protest rather than a fresh groundswell of formerly silent citizens The American Spectator July 1995 73 demanding redress from an unyielding system...

...Republican roots were always among middle-class voters...

...But that's another story...

...However, there was another alternative—the Republican Party, which since the Goldwater campaign had increasingly become a refuge for those who wanted no part of a third party but couldn't return "to a political fold controlled by their sworn enemies...

...The speeches that Agnew gave in New Orleans, Harrisburg, Des Moines, and elsewhere in late 1969 and early 1970 permanently altered the terms of the national debate, especially those areas involving the national media, so that the media and the message became entangled in a way that has resulted in a steady diminution of network influence and hegemony...

...He quotes Elizabeth Hardwick, writing in the New York Review of Books—flagship publication of both the old and new left—describing Wallace and his supporters "with a contempt that bordered on the pornographic": Wallace in his plastic-like, ill-cut suits, his greying drip-dry shirts, with his sour, dark, unprepossessing look, carrying the scent of hurry and hair oil: if he were not a figure, a star, he would be indistinguishable from the lowest of his crowd...

...For the first three decades of this century, Kazin's sweep is generally leftJohn R. Coyne, Jr...

...Can a former truck driver married to a dime-store clerk and son of a dirt farmer be elected President?' asked his 1968 campaign literature...

...Wallace, argues Kazin, drove critics into reactions that cut to the center of what was devouring the Democratic left: elitist snobbery, all the more devastating because it was unconscious...

...With Buchanan, there's the fortissimo problem...

...Bush couldn't master the music and probably never understood the words...

...In the end, however, like many of the "maverick politicians" before him who lit populist fires, Wallace stretched his appeal to its limits...

...where is the sure interpreter...

...As a result, Kazin reckons that populism is in deep decline...

...McCarthy managed to do just that, says Kazin, although his ultimate success depended on being able to "avoid the kind of scandalous slip-up to which maverick politicians are so vulnerable...

...And in the end, that's what makes this fine and informative book such a pleasure to read—even for someone who was Vice President Agnew's chief writer on October 10, 1973...

...0 74 The American Spectator July 1995...

...From there, Kazin moves to the nineteenth-century People's Party, which called for a graduated income tax, unlimited coinage of gold and silver, nationalization of the railroads, and an attack on monopolies...

...For Kazin, this accounts for the resounding victories for Nixon in 1972 and Reagan in 1980 and 1984...