American populism

...Some serious and sympathetic Clinton Democrats— Robert Reich and Laura Tyson are among them—have been struggling to revive majoritarian politics...

...The black movement was going through a scalding series of arguments over anti-Semitism, "street" radicalism, and related cultural issues that, among other things, left the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in a shambles...

...Still, in its efforts to embrace even more old-time Democrats and the "gee-whiz," high-tech suburban young, Gingrichian populism bears watching...

...Even more symptomatic of the left's current state (especially in the academy) is the admixture of anti-majoritarianism and populist currents that casts the United States and the world as a congeries of folkish cultural particularisms...

...Otherwise, the left-wing populist impulse has looked like a marginal exercise in bewilderment and nostalgia, full of the old moral righteousness but increasingly defensive and rhetorical...

...Surveys show that Americans distrust conservative business leaders as much as (or even more than) they do liberal political leaders...

...Likewise, there are signs, especially in the academy and on its fringes, that at least some left-of-center Americans are weary of the multiculturalist vogue and of the inbred, 152 • DISSENT Right Turn insulated "progressive" politics that have led nowhere, year after year, for more than two decades...

...And on economic issues, they exploit the rampant populist mood by fanning the antitax flames and actually delivering on income-tax and business-tax reductions (quietly paid for either with state borrowing or with huge hikes in local property taxes...

...We may have our differences with some of their premises and conclusions (although who's to say, given the shaky state of our own...

...and, when the chips are down, they, and not the left-wing populists, deserve our support...

...If these efforts fail, the only populism that will matter will be the populism of our worst political foes...

...Still, the left as a whole has no reason to be proud of its performance over the past two years...

...Limbaugh may rail against the counterculture on behalf of what he calls the cultural majority but he does so with a knowing, self-referential wit not unlike David Letterman's...

...Now, however, a more convincing GOP centrist wing is in place, in tune with the right-wing populist mood...

...So where was everybody when the talking was over and push came to shove...

...More important, when faced early on with the task of co-opting Perot's populist supporters, Clinton laid aside his more ambitious campaign promises about stimulating the troubled portions of the economy and turned instead to deficit reduction...

...The agony of moderate Republicanism was most evident in the career of one of its last scions on the national political scene, George Bush—a man who, despite all of his craven pork-rind posturing, could never quite win the hearts of the right-wing populists...

...Whatever can be said about the flaws and compromises of Clinton's health care initiative, for example, it amounted to the boldest effort at humane social legislation since the days of the Great Society...

...The 1890s Populists, at their best, exemplified the first current...

...There are, in fact, several right-wing populisms at work today, some old, some new, some still in development...

...Today it appears that an awful lot of Americans fancy themselves as populists, the angry defenders of the many — "us" (whoever "us" happens to be)— against "them," the privileged, parasitic, deeply entrenched few...

...liberal voters, meanwhile, began losing faith in the New Covenant...

...Organized labor turned out, but had already spent some of its best efforts fighting Clinton over the North American Free Trade Agreement...

...For much of the 1970s and 1980s, it appeared as if what had once been the centrist wing of the Republican party—call it the Rockefeller wing or the Ripon Society wing—had all but disappeared...

...But unlike the old-line, uptight cranks and pulpit pounders, the best of the new sensations possess a slick, satirical irony that makes their messages entertaining to babyboomer and post-baby-boomer audiences...

...Elsewhere on the left there has been a withdrawal from politics in favor of a kind of left-wing cultural populism (sometimes mistaken for a refurbished modernism)—one that praises art and literature and music either for their "transgressive" qualities or for their alleged popular authenticity, but rarely on the grounds of aesthetic excellence...

...Apart from their attacks on the satanic media, none of these populists complains about the economic status quo...

...In fact, they hate anything liberal...

...The last hurrah of the old left-wing populist tradition may well have been Jesse Jackson's failed Rainbow Coalition...

...In combination, these factors reduced the rainbow's voting base largely to a single color...

...The traditional right-wing philistinism that promotes Norman Rockwell as a great American painter now has its left-wing counterparts in the hip-hop craze, in "womyn's art," and in endless postmodern noodlings about Madonna, Geraldo, and the rest of the idiot culture...

...But Jackson had his liabilities—the SPRING • 1995 • 151 Right Turn lingering effects of the "Hymietown" disaster, his unreconstructed third worldist views, his links with Louis Farrakhan, his egotism...

...And in the very early days of his tenure as Speaker of the House, Gingrich's flaky original choice for official House historian showed that his Brain Trust plan had holes in it...

...and a cultural populism of the right, directed against liberal elites and cultural minorities, and relatively tolerant of big business...

...Even Bill Clinton (by nature a technocrat and a conciliator, not a populist) made sure to deliver some populist sound bites during his run for the presidency in 1992...

...And on the basis of that agreement, the right wins the political battle every time...

...They love Rush Limbaugh...

...Since the 1930s, populist rightwingers in various guises have had a strong presence on the radio dial...

...Surviving elements of the old Catholic right (led by Patrick Buchanan) have worked easily enough with the newcomers...

...They hate the smug, liberal cultural elite...

...On the one hand, Perot is the most combative of the deficit hawks, a businessman who preaches the values of big business and who assails government because it does not run like an efficient, profit-maximizing corporation...

...Too often, Clinton has appeared to be a highly intelligent policy manager of mostly decent intentions but of uncertain principles and judgment...

...It is conceivable, even likely, that had health care passed the Congress, Gingrich and Company would not be where they are today...

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...the long succession of American nativist and racist movements, dating back to the 1830s, has exemplified the second...

...A generation ago, the fashionable academic wisdom held that Americans were all, at heart, liberals...

...The academic left, having retreated into identity politics, was virtually silent—as if health care reform was of secondary consequence to impoverished blacks, pregnant teenagers, and people infected with HIV...

...Once again, ironically, left and right end up mirroring each other—for both sides agree on what the American norms actually are...

...More surprisingly, so have the neoconservativespeople who, while defending high culture and Western values against the multicultural left, have also aligned themselves with the creation scientists, eugenicists, and other charmers of the populist right...

...rather, it is the irreligious, internationalist liberal elite and its sinning minions—the homosexuals, the feminists, the welfare slackers—who are the Enemy...

...Left-wing populism, in short, has turned into a credo of political escapism, a vehicle for liberals and leftists to opt out of real-life politics while feeling tragically virtuous...

...Jerry Brown (with his reconnected 1-800 number) attacks corporate greed and praises the working man and working woman, but provides little in the way of substance about dealing with the realities of a post-Keynesian global economy...

...Although he never called himself a populist, Jackson's best efforts went into defending working people of all colors and backgrounds against the business elite, in phrases that were sincere and, at times, moving...

...The purest expression of traditional cultural populism, in all its anti-intellectual ferocity, comes today from the right-wing Christian fundamentalists, led by such preachers as Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and Donald Wildmon...

...Beneath it all there seems to lie little more than a burning desire to give big business an unfettered hand, beginning with the defense industry establishment...

...This pervasive populist sensibility is a byproduct of our democratic heritage...

...Then there's Pataki —and more generally the so-called "moderate" Republican governors 150 • DISSENT Right Turn like Christine Todd Whitman of New Jersey and William Weld of Massachusetts, who have lately made such a splash...

...Many of those who fall under the populist spell get lured into various doomed political enterprises, whether in organizing some new left-wing third party or fourth party or in hoping that Jesse Jackson will finally get his act together...

...and he exhibits an awareness of what's happening in popular commercial culture, especially in his love for rock 'n' roll—easy enough for a man who started out as a rock dee-jay...

...Finally, there is the wild card of conservative politics—Ross Perot's schismatic United We Stand America, with its admixture of traditional Republican economics and certain strains of the old economic populism of the left...

...Even more striking are the cultural permutations of the GOP's answer to Lenny Bruce—the eternally pissed-off libertarian rocker, Howard Stern, who in the last election championed the death penalty panacea and helped elect George Pataki to the governorship of New York State...

...Meanwhile, ample room remains to develop a different sort of majoritarian politics, relevant to the global order of the 1990s (not the 1890s, or 1930s, or 1960s) and focused on the glaring and growing inequalities that divide the rich and powerful from the rest of us...

...His administration's own PR efforts have hovered between the lackluster and the disastrous...

...Yet even Kazin, who writes with authority, could not have fully anticipated the growing complexity and the inventiveness of the right-wing insurgency as it has picked up momentum over the past couple of years...

...The magnitude of the populist fervor caught some liberal Democrats off guard in November, but the populist mood has actually been building for many years—across the political spectrum...

...Organized labor fights back against those realities with an outmoded protectionist nationalism not unlike Perot's or Buchanan's...

...Even more remarkable, over the past couple of years, has been the arrival of fresh varieties of right-wing populism...

...On the other hand, he has distanced himself from the cultural swamp fevers of the populist right, has attacked (with consummate hypocrisy) the big-business lobbies and special interests, and has stuck up for the little guy with his nationalist-protectionist line on trade...

...Some important distinctions, to be sure, need to be drawn among different kinds of American populism...

...Failing to sustain such an appeal can be politically fatal—as the Hoover Republicans discovered sixty years ago, as Michael Dukakis ("competence, not ideology") discovered in 1988, and as other post-sixties Democrats and liberals are only just learning...

...Thus far, despite their numerous contradictions and strange alliances, they have managed to hold themselves together under the aegis of the Republican party...

...Still, these Democrats recognize that without some fundamental structural reforms, the nation's cities and its industrial base will continue to disintegrate, with disastrous consequences for working people and the nation at large—and they are trying to do something about it...

...Allergic to the cultural fulminations of the fundamentalist right, the new moderates' moderation consists largely of staking out specific issues on which to be more liberal (usually with a prochoice stance on abortion...

...Talk about wishful thinking...

...They hate taxes, big government, and spending on the poor...

...The Republicans, after all, did not exactly win a thumping majority of the electorate's votes last November, even from those voters who bothered to go to the polls...

...Having been brought together in the 1970s with the neoconservatives and the National Review conservatives, the Christians effectively created their own mass constituency within the GOP, as demonstrated at the fire-and-brimstone Houston convention in 1992...

...Since the days of the original populist crusader Andrew Jackson, credibility in American politics has usually required cultivating some sort of majoritarian appeal, delivered on behalf of the virtuous people against a supposedly corrupt minority (be it businessmen, slaveholders, Yankee reformers, party bosses, immigrants, segregationists, or welfare cheats...

...They hate the Washington political establishment...

...In its knee-jerk way, the left has preferred to regard itself in heroic, populist terms that, more and more, partake of sentimental fantasy...

...They need all the help they can get...

...From George Will and William Bennett (unlikely populist types) to Jerry Brown and Jesse Jackson, populism has become a sort of master rhetorical trope, available to all and sundry...

...The shift, on Kazin's view, began in the late 1940s, with the onset of the cold war and the advance of a liberal state that seemed more SPRING • 1995 • 149 Right Turn interested in the welfare of minorities than in that of any populist majority...

...The person held most responsible is, of course, the president, and not entirely without cause...

...In his new book The Populist Persuasion, Michael Kazin describes how left-wing populism, the dominant current over much of the nineteenth century, has been supplanted in recent decades by its right-wing counterpart...

...And far from being a know-nothing yahoo, the ex-college teacher has pulled together something of a Brain Trust headed by his guru, the futurologist Alvin Toffler...

...The firebrand Newt Gingrich, intrepid cultural foe of Big Bird, George McGovern, and the National Endowment for the Arts, now turns out to be an admirer of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (or so he says...

...ikewise, the talk-show populists bear listening...

...Against this many-sided, right-wing juggernaut, recent liberal and leftist political efforts have looked scattered and anemic...

...But Whitman, Pataki, and others give the populist right enough red meat by noisily endorsing the death penalty...

...As the historian C. Vann Woodward has constantly reminded his colleagues, there is no simple American populist lineage: a world of difference separated the down-and-out, democratic Southern dirt farmers who formed the Populist movement of the 1890s from the aggrieved partisans of George C. Wallace in the 1960s...

...Thereafter, the so-called "white backlash" of the 1960s, coupled with the deepening anti-Americanism and third worldist romanticism of large portions of the left, all but destroyed left-wing populism's legacy...

...The Perotians, by all appearances, weren't terribly impressed...

...they need our best advice and criticism...

...Whereas liberals and leftists once at least aspired to speak for the great masses of American working people, today's multiculturalists have acquired a stubborn determination to speak as victimized minorities, projecting a weird combination of resentment and celebration at being the Other, outside the white-straight-male American cultural norms...

...It may not be too late to salvage and modernize the nobler traces of the old populist tradition for the next century...

...Broadly speaking, there have been two main currents in the populist heritage: an economic populism of the left, directed against business and financial elites and relatively tolerant of ethnic and racial differences...

...In its place, conservative, big-business Republicans latched on to a new majoritarian appeal, delivered on . behalf of the patriotic, pious, hardworking, tax-paying middle class against an unpatriotic, godless, pampered, tax-collecting liberal elite and its lazy, leeching political clients, above all, blacks on welfare...

...Here's a start: Dissent cordially invites Jerry Falwell to comment on George Pataki's flack Howard Stern and on the New Year's Eve orgy that Stern aired on pay-per-view...

...And there are endless possibilities to expose and widen the fissures in the GOP coalition...