THE NEW POPULISM

...Populists might well conclude that the convulsive rise of Senator Gary Hart in the Democratic Presidential primaries provides instructive evidence of widespread but unfocused discontent with the traditional liberalism symbolized by Walter Mondale...

...to create, thereby, a third party as a workable vehicle for popular advocacy, and, finally, to bring about basic changes in the American economy...

...The Populist goals were related, sequential, and specific: to recruit the mass of the nation's farmers...

...Journalists and professors use it to characterize any mode of popular assertion whose sources they do not know, do not understand, or do not like...

...Unfortunately, the historical portrait of the Populists bears little resemblance to the images summoned up by modern users of the term...

...A hell-raising tradition waits to be reborn BY LAWRENCE GOODWYN Populism" is a uniquely American linguistic phenomenon—a word used to describe a variety of bizarre and conflicting political urges...

...Historical Populism evolved logically out of a process of political organizing to produce a distinctively new vision of social possibility...

...It is, instead, a mask for resignation...

...The word "demagogic" is now a commonly attached modifier...

...they were ridiculed as cranks and dismissed as socialists...

...Clearly, somewhere along the path of Twentieth Century cultural development, some conceptual footings were washed away...

...As routinely cited today in The New York Times or Time magazine, contemporary populism means, on the other hand, provincial rebellion by malcontents who do not understand the real world...

...It has taken a while for the word to acquire the all-purpose vagueness it enjoys today...

...Americans sometimes dream about the former...

...Populists would focus, instead, on the potential constituencies in America that are demonstrably ready for a more authentic politics...

...In the last three generations, the populist label has been affixed to Theodore Bilbo, Huey Long, Joe McCarthy, George Wallace, Ronald Reagan, Claude Pepper, and any number of New Deal members of Congress whose political proclivities ranged from moderate to radical...

...The veterans of the Populist cooperative experience, numbering almost two million by 1892, were able to set up their "People's Party" and to spread to their organic constituency an understanding of the party's goals...

...some have been noticed only long enough to be the objects of puzzlement or condescension...

...But that was as far as the Populists managed to go...

...The style of the Mondales and Harts is, at root, anything but sophisticated...

...Populism grew out of a voluntary social formation, a self-help cooperative movement that farmers in the South and West organized among themselves...

...The full name of the Alliance made evident the ultimate Populist intention—to build a nationwide farmer-labor coalition that might overcome the encrusted resistance to democratic innovation within "the two old parties...

...They advocated democratizing the nation's monetary system (in the process vastly restricting the power of bankers and other money-lenders) and nationalizing the railroad and communication monopolies...

...Populists would say it is high time for such a topic to become a subject of national discussion...

...It should not require the sagacity of an old-time Populist to note that Mexican central bankers—not just radical guerrilla leaders—have used the phrase "economic imperialism" to characterize the terms New York bankers are now exacting for the "roll-over" loans that have become the means by which an inherently exploitive world economic order seeks to maintain itself...

...All Americans are losers because of this trivialization of serious politics, and all of us experience the Populist fate: One can elect to be serious but unsanctioned, or one can gain sanction by dismissing serious discussion as fanciful...

...Populism" has come to mean something quaint or primitive or, possibly, potentially dangerous...

...As this issue of The Progressive demonstrates, some modern Populists are at work across the continent...

...But the gap between the original Populism and modern populism is wide enough to impose sober trepidation on anyone—such as the contributors to this issue of The Progressive—hoping to achieve a calm and orderly discussion of the subject...

...After some false starts in the early 1880s, they settled Lawrence Goodwyn teaches history at Duke University...

...indeed, it affords an interesting perspective on the contemporary world of Gary Hart, Walter Mondale, and today's Democratic Party...

...The original founders soon learned a sobering lesson: Bankers and the commercial world instinctively opposed the cooperatives and mobilized their influence in both major parties to erect effective bulwarks against the rise of "anarchistic agrarianism...

...somehow to enlist the nation's urban working class and elements of the suffering or sympathetic middle classes...

...They failed to penetrate the largely immigrant urban working class...

...Indeed, with due attention to all the attendant ironies, the original Populists would make it their first order of business to secure the major plank of their 1892 platform: measures to bring the nation's banking system under democratic influence...

...But resignation is not a democratic response...

...The original article, the Populists of the 1890s, were able to define their political advocacy in precise terms...

...He is the author of "Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America" (Oxford University Press, 1976) and, in condensed version, "The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt" (Oxford University Press, 1978...

...Unlike Hart, they would doubtless endeavor to address those constituencies in a Populis-tic way—concretely, and in a manner that deals with questions of real power in America...

...That discussion should begin with the people who decided almost a century ago that there was need for some serious alterations in the structure of the American economy...

...Reversing the telescope—looking at contemporary politics from a Populist perspective rather than the other way around— illustrates this fundamental point rather clearly...

...Given their hopes for America, Populists would find modern liberalism to be little more than a genteel pact with power, a way by which decent citizens could dissociate themselves from certain offensive features of their society without challenging its sources of political and economic influence...

...Populists would perceive devotees of the modern Democratic Party as people engaged essentially in a politics of self-mystification...

...For those whose daily lives are no longer in touch with the genuine needs and continuing aspirations of millions of economically and psychologically embattled Americans—and who, because of this distance, cannot draw sustenance from their aspirations—the sources of modern political resignation are real...

...they routinely act out the latter...

...In the realm of authentic popular democratic politics, such responses are to be expected...

...It was an effective mechanism of recruitment, and it enabled their institution, which they called the National Farmers Alliance and Industrial Union, to spread across the cotton and corn belts...

...Many of them are unknown within the cultural and political mainstream...

...The banking issue, among many others, illustrates the contrast between earlier forms of democratic striving in America and the limp sophistication of modern electioneering...

...Unwittingly, the farm cooperatives began to convey some surprising insights about the relationship between mainstream political institutions and the emerging influence of "concentrating corporate capital...

...The logic undergirding their analysis seems to be, in retrospect, neither bizarre nor complex...

...they were subjected to systematic assaults in the nation's press...

...The historical Populists would have understood— without any strain at all...

...on a system of large-scale credit cooperatives...

...The tortured history of the Twentieth Century has mocked the hopes of socialist and capitalist theorists alike...

...The Populists' own "National Reform Press Association"—some 1,000 newspapers, largely weekly and almost entirely rural—provided insulation against the vituperation of the mainstream press, but reached only the organic constituencies that had produced the cooperative movement and the party itself...

...A populistic—that is, democratic-agenda for 1984 would deal with the fact that the financial "austerity" imposed on the developing world by the U.S.-domi-nated International Monetary Fund has become one of the most telling ingredients fueling revolutionary movements across the Southern half of the globe...

...Most Americans, reading hometown press accounts, had to conclude that there was something wrong-headed about Populism...

...In sum, third-party advocates were culturally walled off from reaching those sectors of the population they had not touched through grass-roots organizing...

...Indeed, the label has been employed so indiscriminately as to be ideologically meaningless...

...As Populist stump speakers were apt to put it, the goal in an era of large-scale industrial concentration was to bring a measure of "economic fairness to the plain people of America...