Fair Game

...In primaries, candidates in search of identifiable qualities and partisan rallying cries don't mind being called populists...

...In the old American dispute between enthusiasm and enlightenment, populism has invariably come down on the side of the former...

...They were alternately jingoistic and isolationist...

...Both Old and New Left are famous for pumping out political analyses and slogans that bear scant relationship to the realities of life in this country...

...All bad feelings will then be directed at the System, as they should be...

...Nineteenth-century Populism had a powerful and beneficial influence on the reform programs of the Progressive Era...

...Perhaps it does not much matter whether one calls a movement populist or liberal or radical, so long as the necessary alliances are made and the necessary reforms are brought about...

...the choice of hatred as a kind of creed...

...The blue-collar youth and the college student will understand that all that separates them is the System...

...They readily became tools of benighted leaders, preachers of ignorance and bigotry, not to say crooks and kooks...

...They hold that the liberal innovations merely saved a discredited system, permitting the fat cats to hold fast and thrive...

...But once the gravy is pushed aside, most of the dish looks a lot like the meat-and-potatoes served up for so long by liberals and radicals without populist credentials or aspirations...

...Do not banks and insurance companies wield too much power...

...Are not the regulatory agencies in thrall to the industries that they are supposed to keep in order...

...Perhaps only thus can some of us assuage our shame at not having been born in a sharecropper's cabin...

...Today's populism combines elements of the Old Left and the New: the Old Left's half-earnest, half-manipulative mouthings about the Common Man...

...Are migrant workers not abominably abused...

...The black youth will understand that it is not the Irish cop who is pushing him around, but the System...

...Ah, the aroma causes the nostrils to tingle, the heart to swell, the blood to race...

...churchgoers and freethinkers will embrace...

...They will be removed like phosphates from detergents, by a method not yet completely worked out in the labs, so that one's ideology will emerge gleaming clean and no pollutants will enter the nation's waters...

...But this has little to do with 19th-century Populism, a movement that so often managed to combine the cry for economic justice with a narrow vision, a mean spirit and a rigid set of mind...

...The Populists were regionalists??their sympathies for the exploited did not extend very far from home...

...Still, what we are witnessing here once again is the readiness of a part of the Left to wax romantic over The People as a way of scoring off effete liberaldom, and to whistle up the hates and fears that are never far below the political surface in the delusion that these can be controlled and directed at ordained objectives...

...It has other, less attractive faces...

...The original Populists were brought together in large part by hate and fear of the outsider...

...Every breathing politician, with the exception of Richard Nixon, has laid claim to at least a breath of the populist heritage??and knowing the President as we do, we can be certain that should the occasion demand, he will turn out to be the biggest populist of them all...

...Well, they do sense, correctly I believe, that a considerable part of the nation may be ready again, as in the '30s, for a shaking-up of institutions...

...What charm can the fundamentalism and xenophobia associated with populism hold for its current publicists, Easterners with college degrees who could count on being run out of town by any Populist band in high spirits...

...some prettier than others...

...Gleaming Clean Politics The New Populism, we are promised, will be rid of such deplorable traits...

...Just now, it is populism...

...though what makes McGovern less of a liberal and more of a populist than Hubert Humphrey is not crystal clear to me...

...the New Left's disdain of history, its adventurist proclivities, and its tendency to see all issues in moral terms...

...That, I fear, is a defensible position...

...Hardhats and longhairs will link arms...

...The New Populists are, I think, right to emphasize the importance of economic issues as opposed, say, to the issue of race which has so dominated the national consciousness in the past decade...

...The New Populists have no confidence that liberal leadership will respond adequately or effectively to fresh opportunities...

...the current advertisements for populism are in that tradition, supported by neither the lessons of political history nor the laws of human behavior...

...They send forth a manifesto...

...Within the ranks of the Populists, one could typically find about as much concern for civil rights and civil liberties as among the Bolsheviks...

...Alas, the history of populism teaches a somewhat different lesson...

...Populism likes blood??and institutions do not bleed...

...in national elections, they find it more useful to be known as centrists...

...And the liberal who answers them but cannot bring himself to follow the consequences of his conclusions, who lacks the heart to begin to do what must be done to change the prevailing conditions, has forgotten the message that John Dewey gave us in the 1930s: "If radicalism be denned as perception of need for radical change, then today any liberalism which is not also radicalism is irrelevant and doomed...

...The white family man will understand that it is not the black addict who makes the streets dangerous, but the System...

...Today's publicists are operating on the doubtful premise that the garments of the authentic populist George Wallace can be dry-cleaned for use by the nice populist McGovern...

...Its present champions will be lucky if the word does not become reality...

...Friendly observers of our political arrangements have not failed to pay tribute to the genius of the fathers of the Republic in creating defenses against both suppression from above and explosions from below...

...And they are also right to chide the more frenetic spirits of the New Left for their infallible knack of alienating everybody who crosses their path...

...They knew enough of the world to understand that tyranny can take various forms and can come from diverse directions, most assuredly from The People...

...Liberals, I would argue, did rise to that challenge in the '30s and did introduce radical changes??without violence, without erosions of freedom, without the curtailment of democratic processes...

...Perhaps the word populism will fade back into disuse after it has been waved about for this campaign, with no harm done...

...Up with People...

...As Richard Hof-stadter wrote, America has seen a recurrence of "the demand for reforms, many of them aimed at the remedy of genuine ills, combined with...

...Populism, as its present-day promoters concede, cannot be fully defined by its impulse toward economic egalitarianism...

...its appearances, however, were marked not only by suspicion of banks and insurance companies, but by distrust of the stranger, the foreigner, the Jew, the Catholic, the city dweller, the black, the intellectual, the expert...

...The showing of Senator George McGovern??good luck to him??stands as evidence...

...Up with Persons Many alliances are possible on the Left today...

...the lambs, united, will rout the wolves...

...For the most part, they were friends only to those underdogs who closely resembled themselves...

...Is not the income tax skewed in favor of the very rich...

...Many on the Left would take issue with that possibly sanguine opinion...

...They were more experienced and wiser than those who today can recognize assaults on liberty only when they originate in the Justice Department, and are prepared to excuse the most vicious and destructive actions when they are committed by a street mob...

...They could never pass the scrutiny of the Federal Trade Commission...

...A sturdy old-fashioned democratic hatred cut across economic and ethnic lines...

...This argument is not novel, and more than one course to salvation has been offered the nation and the world over the vears...

...Do not lobbyists for our big corporations carry far too much weight in Congress and in the Executive departments...

...that the times called, and still call, for something quite different, more radical, more exhilarating...

...Liberals have long since learned that the politician who claims to speak for The People more often than not turns out to have no great regard for persons...

...The New Populists do not offer a program...

...The farmer and the worker will understand that their apparent differences are the fault of the System...

...Anyone who has trouble answering such questions is assuredly no liberal...