The return to populism:

...Republicans have tried to be anti-establishment by criticizing Washington while going light on their big business allies...

...Hightower, who has endorsed Jesse Jackson for president, mocked the party's neo-liberals...

...The primary producers in mining, timber, energy, and particularly farming have been caught in a vicious double squeeze...

...If any candidate has paid a price for taking populist positions it is Dick Gephardt...

...The Gephardt candidacy was ended by the congressman's third-place finish in Michigan...

...Jackson has, in short, brought his black base into an electoral alliance with the party's left wing...

...Super-Tuesday asked voters how they would respond to a hypothetical election in which the only thing known about a candidate was his race...

...But increasingly even the devoted free traders of the Reagan administration complain of being "nickled and dimed" by the Japanese...

...In addition, the administration's victory over inflation had the ironic effect of restoring confidence in government...

...The cheap dollar, which so far has done little to improve the trade deficit, has allowed foreign interests to come in and buy up American businesses at a rate that is alarming even to Wall Street giants like Felix Rohatyn...

...Critics of the retail approach note that the threat posed by Gephardt's Iowa commercials attacking Korean auto prices led not to endless negotiations but to an immediate 20 percent drop in Korea's high import duties...

...In 1988, populism has been a tonic for the Democrats' campaign...

...Jackson is tough on the corporate bureaucrats, but positively applauds the Washington variety when they impose their racial blueprints on schools and hiring...

...We have been lacking," he said, "the courage to respond on really economic populist grounds...

...Jackson's victory in Michigan is put in some perspective when we remember that the reason Michigan has a caucus is that the last time the state had a primary-in 1972-the winner was George Wallace...

...The difference was that nearly 400,000 more voters came out in '88...

...Imagine, for instance, how much more painful the restructuring of the economy would have been if there weren't a Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to protect the unlucky people who put their savings in one of the many Texas banks that has gone belly-up...

...And to judge by the television coverage of the very favorable responses Jackson has gotten when speaking to white workers and fanners, one might get the impression that Jackson has also won a substantial share of their vote...

...Gephardt seemed surprised by the near universal hostility he unleashed in the press...

...In the manner of the Oscar Wilde character who could resist anything but temptation, Republican officeholders managed with great success to front for big business's subsidies behind rhetorical flourishes extolling the majestic impartiality of the free market...

...In the end, the Democratic party's populism, genuine or not, is limited by the very programs the Democrats have put in place since 1929...

...The opening for the Democrats to return, at least in part, to these economic roots was made possible by the Republican failure to escape theirs as the party of big business...

...FRED SIEGEL, author of Troubled Journey: From Pearl Harbor to Ronald Reagan {Hill and Wang), teaches in the humanities department of The Cooper Union in New York City...

...But populist themes never moved center stage and they played no part in Walter Mondale's staid 1984 presidential effort...

...Different polls indicate that anywhere between one-third and one-half of all registered voters have a strongly negative response to Jackson...

...It's not surprising then that pollster Stanley Greenberg reported in 1986 that "the principal obstacles blocking the move of voters from Democratic to Republican was the feeling that the GOP was in bed with big institutions and big corporations...

...No sooner is one trade dispute with the Japanese settled after extensive negotiations, than another breaks out...

...And what the suffering of the family farmers would be like without federal price supports...

...Their hope for a free-market populism, critical of both big government and big business, failed the test of practical politics...

...But the trade issue is, in one form or another, likely to provide a focal point for populist resentment...

...Some of the candidates wear the populist mantle more easily than others, but it is surely a sign of the times when a buttoned-down candidate like Michael Dukakis takes, as he did in Illinois, to wearing hard hats and affecting working-class poses...

...But race alone isn't holding Jackson back...

...Jackson has done far better among whites than he did in 1984...

...One-third of those hostile to him in a Time magazine poll admitted as much, and we can assume that the real total is higher...

...But there is less here than meets the eye, particularly if we remember that Democratic primary voters are the most liberal section of the population...

...In this game of alternating antipathies, each side tries to mobilize the population's resentments against the other's vested interests...

...His inability to bring in large numbers of new officeholders on his coattails in the 1984 election, and his unwillingness to expend his enormous personal popularity on behalf of specific Republican policy proposals, gave the tender shoots of populism some room to grow...

...Jackson's talk of "economic violence'' and corporate "barracudas'' has helped set the tone of the campaign...

...The party has come close to defining itself by its opposition to the fears and aspirations of ordinary citizens...

...Eight percent of the white voters said that with this information alone they would prefer the black candidate...

...He is writing regularly for Commonweal on the presidential election...

...The result has been a steady rise of public belief in the government's problem-solving abilities...

...What the press has been reluctant to note is that Jackson's courting of Wisconsin-he campaigned there off and on for five years-also produced an enormous anti-Jackson vote...

...Gephardt's harshest critic, Dukakis, has, like the Reagan administration, emphasized the reta.il or lawyerly case-by-case approach to trade issues...

...But the Democrats' "return to populist themes began before Jackson adopted his current political persona and it has far broader roots...

...For twenty years they have wandered in the political wilderness with a culturally defined agenda, focused on issues like abortion, no-growth economics, busing, and capital punishment...

...Moderation, said Hightower, was a dead end, "because there's nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos...

...In Wisconsin, a state with a long populist tradition, which includes the LaFollettes on the left and Joe McCarthy on the right, Jackson succeeded for the first time in drawing in a significant number of blue-collar workers, some of whom had been Wallace supporters...

...And then there is President Reagan's contribution to the Democrats' new opportunity...

...Recent Harris polls record a sharp rise in public resentment of corporate America...

...Instead, he has pursued a frankly class-based, biracial economic appeal...

...Jackson's appeal is limited by racist sentiments...

...The Wall Street Journal poll of likely Super-Tuesday primary voters found that 71 percent were more likely, only 15 percent were less likely, to vote for a candidate "who says the United States must get tough with its foreign trading partners...

...Congress increasingly refused to cut domestic social programs and by 1986, it was rejecting a higher percentage of administration legislation than at any time since the waning months of Jerry Ford's presidency...

...Populist rhetoric surfaced sporadically during the 1982 elections held in the midst of a severe recession...

...In Connecticut, for instance, two-fifths of his white supporters had done post-graduate work...

...The Missourian's economic nationalism was lambasted in editorials on the pages of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and countless other newspapers...

...Like Gephardt, Preskowitz wants to deal with Japanese neo-mercantilism, not case by case, but by frankly "managing" the overall Japanese-American trade relationship...

...Jackson's total of 285,000 votes was actually a few thousand more than Gary Hart secured, winning in 1984...

...And Richard Darman, a frustrated populist who left the Reagan administration, says, "Big government isn't what is bugging everyone these days...

...The pattern is uneven, but through most of the South the crossover vote was kept below 10 percent while white turnout increased...

...One by one, led by Jesse Jackson, the Democratic presidential candidates have embraced what southerners like to call "little man economics...

...The flag-bearers of the new spirit were farm state populists like the newly elected senator from North Dakota, Kent Conrad, and Texas agricultural commissioner, Jim Hightower...

...For Michael Dukakis, however, the winner of the Wisconsin primary by a twenty-point margin, the numbers were revealingly reversed...

...Wallace's 800,000 votes out of 1.6 million cast were more than twice as many as the second-place finisher, George McGovern...

...But while in 1960 the Democrats had no organized left wing, today the Reverend Jesse Jackson has given them one...

...They see green, green, green...

...Gephardt's populist message didn't fail...

...Jackson has dropped most of the black nationalist third worldism that led him to praise Castro's "moral leadership" and describe the Cuban dictator's Isle of Youth indoctrination center as ' 'one of the most magnificent expressions of God in the world today...

...THE RETURN TO POPULISM DEMOCRATS TRY HARDER . . . AGAIN FRED SIEGEL Populism runs through America's political bloodstream: Nothing mobilizes American passions, left and right, faster than the sense that an establishment-the figurative heirs of King George-is conspiring against the common folk...

...For many of these voters Jackson has not yet lived down his past and nothing short of a photograph of his future intentions is likely to reassure them...

...They don't see red, white, and blue...

...For the first time the defiantly low-key governor did better with those who had the least education...

...Frustrated Reaganites like Clyde Preskowitz have called for moving beyond the simplicities of free-market rhetoric...

...In the face of declining real wages, America's failure to compete in the world market is increasingly laid at the doorstep of management...

...The Wisconsin outcome suggests the limits of Jackson's success...

...Jackson, like the failed populists of the Republican party, is held back by the ambiguous nature of his anti-establishment appeal...

...The great pride of the Reagan administration is its success in stifling inflation...

...A Roper survey taken before...

...But even more important than Reagan's failures were his successes...

...The political upshot of this is that the same kind of deflationary pressures which often accompany a Republican administration (the 1920s and 1950s, for example) has produced in parts of the country today the kind of economic pressures associated with the populist rebellions of the nineteenth century...

...That confidence plus the backlog of serious social and economic problems produced a turning point in 1985...

...The first electoral sign of a shift of the political winds within the Democratic party came in the 1986 primaries when self-described populists captured the primaries in Wisconsin, Georgia, New York, and Pennsylvania...

...By contrast, the emphasis in this election on economic populism allows the Democrats to jump into the trenches on the same side as their constituents' prejudices and real needs...

...Most of these went to Dukakis, a hitherto uninspiring candiate, whose chief asset appears to have been the fact that he was the candidate best positioned to defeat Jackson...

...This is a theme that plays well in the South which still thinks of itself as a developing region and where the Democrats' no-growth economics of the 1970s played poorly with both blacks and whites...

...The political analysts' favorite analog for the 1988 race is the 1960 election when, after an era of conservative government, the country "wanted to get moving again...

...One of the few bright spots of 1984 was the victory of Iowa Democrat Tom Harkin in unseating an incumbent Republican senator...

...There was a widespread fear among Democrats that, faced with what hopeful Republicans described as a choice between participating in "the liberal or in the conservative primary," large numbers of white southern Democrats would opt to vote in the conservative Republican contests...

...It's the fat cat managers with their golden parachutes, the 'bloated risk-averse' 'corpocracy' which is stirring anger...

...Democrats had long warned of racial divisions, but the '86 message, played out against the backdrop of declining middle-class income and the loss of manufacturing jobs, was increasingly of economic and regional divisions...

...And look at Wall Street: In the wake of the October 19 stock market crash, the arch-capitalist Wall Street Journal, without a hint of irony, was able to assure its readers that the Keynesian interventions of the federal government- something the Journal has opposed for fifty years-would be there to save the economy...

...It is one of the great ironies of this administration that the policies of the heartland's hero, Ronald Reagan, have had a devastating effect on his core supporters, while his cultural foes, the Eastern establishment, have been thriving...

...In Alabama, he jumped from 1 to 6 percent of the white vote, and in Florida he went from 1 to 7 percent, which was roughly his share of the overall southern white vote...

...Two black candidates, Douglas Wilder in Virginia and Tom Bradley in California, polled 46 and 44 percent of the white vote respectively running statewide...

...It is one of the paradoxes of the welfare state that the American public has to be protected from the vagaries of the international economy, which has been created in the name of the free market, with the un-American device of government bureaucracies, which so arouse, but in the end soften, the public's ire.he end soften, the public's ire...

...American financiers and manufacturers have been delivering on that wish...

...Jackson's Iowa campaign has been given credit for forcing the other candidates to focus on the gut-wrenching costs of the internationalization of the American economy...

...Neo-populism bore its first presidential fruits for the Democrats on March 8 with Super-Tuesday's southern primaries...

...Harkin, a self-styled populist, set the keynote for what was to follow when he told his fellow Democrats that they had been "missing the boat...

...Despite the support of many party notables, Dukakis failed to garner substantial blue-collar support and ran a distant second to Jesse Jackson...

...But even in Wisconsin, Jackson drew a larger percentage of supporters from those who had done post-graduate work than from those without any degree at all...

...Innovative Republicans like Congressmen Newt Gingrich, Jack Kemp, and Trent Lott spoke of a Conservative Opportunity Society in which the Republican party, freed of its ties with big business, would represent the promise of mobility for all...

...Did Dukakis suddenly generate mass appeal...

...It's like we forgot what our roots are as Democrats...

...But the costs of that achievement have been borne disproportionately by farmers dependent on the flow of cheap credit...

...By galvanizing the left with his hard-hitting message, Jackson has done best in caucus states like Alaska where he won and he has done very well with upper-income white voters in New England...

...The disparity between the wild excesses of corporate "compensation" for the executives of waning companies, like General Motors, and the human cost of America's declining position in world markets has produced a backlash...

...In a state like Michigan where the voters were familiar with all the candidates, Governor Dukakis's free-trade position cost him dearly...

...In the 1970s, environmentalists and the proponents of a no-growth economy wanted to phase out industrial society...

...Nonetheless, populists have had, at certain moments, a profound impact on the nation's political agenda...

...At the same time as Paul Volker's actions at the Federal Reserve were vastly increasing the farmers' costs, the Fed and the financial community were cutting off one of the farm states' primary markets, Latin America...

...Jackson's triumph, by contrast, where he beat Dukakis two to one, involved 200,000, or one-eighth as many participants...

...Gephardt, for lack of money, failed to get his candidacy associated with the winning ideas...

...While the East and West Coasts and their financial markets were booming and the executive class was getting to play out the fantasies of the "Life-styles of the Rich and Famous," the heartland was suffering...

...In Illinois, where Jackson won only 7 percent of the white vote, with most of it coming from the highly mobilized gay community, white voters gave far greater support to the black state comptroller and Chicago's black city treasurer...

...But with the instructive exception of Wisconsin that hasn't happened...

...Voters, after all, have almost as much fear of giant private bureaucracies as they do of the one in Washington...

...Though there was a marked growth in the number of southerners voting in the Republican primaries, the crossover vote never materialized...

...A survey of network news shows indicates that Gephardt's economic views garnered him far and away the most negative television coverage of any of the Democratic contenders...

...If we look at Jackson's 8 percent, we find that, rather than being the horny-handed sons of toil, they were the same kind of up-scale professional voters who were at the heart of the losing McGovern campaign...

...Probably not...

...The economic messages the Democratic candidates rehearsed in '86 have become the prime-time themes of the '88 presidential primaries...

...More generally the Democrats benefited from trie message of economic growth broadcast by all the candidates...

...But the populists have never been able to capture the national body politic: Neither the nineteenth-century populists, nor their legatees in the twentieth, such as George Wallace, have ever been able to take power...

...Perhaps, as political analyst Jim Chapin has suggested, Gephardt thought his patent insincerity would save him...

...The multinationals," stresses candidate Jackson-sounding for all the world like Richard Gephardt-' 'fly above the flag...

...Its economic message, admirable as it was in its concern for the desperately poor, took on a distinctly paternalistic tone that alienated wage-earners struggling with inflation and rapidly escalating taxes...