The People, No: A Brief History Of Anti-Populism
by
Thomas Frank

1896 Democratic Party Platform.

We may have lost sight of the specific demands of the Populist’ Omaha Platform, but the populist instinct stays with us; it is close to what we are as a people.

“There are those who believe that, if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through on those below.” But [William Jennings Bryan] proposed an alternative: “if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, then prosperity will find its way up through every class which rest upon them.” p. 55

Of course, the Democratic Party was not really made up of anarchists, nor had it been captured by the Populists. Still, its shift to the Left was real enough, with huge potential consequences for the country’s financiers and investors. Their fear was a tangible thing.

Republican leaders pulled out all the stops. Their candidate, the famed protectionist William McKinley, waged an avuncular front porch campaign from his home in Ohio. But behind the scenes, McKinley’s friend Marcus Alonzo Hanna, the Cleveland Tycoon, organized a bare-knuckle offensive in the great showdown between the classes. If [Democratic Party Party presidential candidate William Jennings] Bryan represented the producing masses of the country, as the Democrat claimed, Hana would counter his appeal with Trump-like promises of prosperity-through-tariffs. He would enlist American business and the whole vote-for-hire political system of the nineteenth century to suppress the eloquent challenger.

In this war, Hanna was “a political generalissimo of genius,” the historian Matthew Josephson has written., “risen suddenly from the councils of the leading capitalists, to meet and checkmate the drive of the masses by summoning up the berserk fighting power latent in his class.

The dynamic Hanna set about raising and spending enormous sums for the GOP effort, even going door-to-door to the headquarters of the great American corporations soliciting funds to put down the Nebraska upstart. There were few campaign finance rules back then, and what levied was what Josephson calls a political assessment—which is to say, a private Republican tax—“upon corporate wealth.”

Armed with an unprecedented treasury, Hanna proceeded to crush Bryan under a mountain of money. He summoned up a blizzard of alarmist anti-Populist pamphlets—-120 million [Nearly twice the nation’s population at the time, JH] of them, according to Josephson, distributed wherever Bryan’s message seemed to have the most traction. A squad of Republican orators followed Bryan as he moved across the country. There were parades, mind-numbingly long and noisy and expensive. Every shady Election Day practice of the era was deployed; every last possible hireling was provided with generous outlays. Toward the end of the contest, business rolled out its ultimate weapon: coercion, allegedly threatening to shut down factories or cancel deals if Bryan won. Matthew Josephson’s summary is chilly but exact: “Moral enthusiasm was to be beaten at every point by a machinelike domination of the actual polling.” And so it was. pp. 60-2

Political sculptures of William Jennings Bryan. p. n67

Here is [Kenneth] Burke’s key insight [in a 1935 speech to a left-wing writer’s group]: “We convince a man by reason of the values which we and he hold in common.” The alternative Burke pointed out, is to scold your audience, to assume “antagonistic modes of thought and expression” and to “condemn” the unenlightened. What we ought to be doing is not scolding but persuading, trying to “plead with the unconvinced.” p. 98

The problem, the anti-populist maintained, was excessive democracy. Just as in 1896, the right order of things was menaced by mob action, by a rising up of the ignorant. Government by the people had become a threat to property, to the Constitution and hence to democracy itself. p. 117

Arthur Schlesinger put it well: “The spectacle of the rich men of the nation declaring that America was in the grip of revolution because the servants were no longer content with their wages was not one that deeply moved many of their fellow countrymen.

This was the winning hand in 1936: not that reform threatened liberty, but that tycoons and bankers and newspaper publishers—the people who ran the country into the Great Depression—were using liberty as a fig leaf for their privilege… and it was their privilege that constituted the real issue. As Roosevelt himself put it in this State of The Union address n 1936, “they steal the livery of great constitutional ideals to serve discredited special interest.” p. 140-1

A liberal elite that was led by a handful of thinkers at prestigious universities translated anti-populism into a full-blown system of big, intimidating ideas. It continued to serve the same function as always, rationalizing the power of the powerful. But now anti-populism did its works by means of psychology and social theory. p. 147

When reform came from the bottom up, in other words, it was moralistic, demagogic, irrational, bigoted and futile. When reform was made by practical business-minded professionals—meaning lobbyists and experts who were comfortable in the company of lobbyists and experts from other groups—prosperity was the result. p.157-8

The leaders of this movement began awakening the poor white masses and the former Negro slaves to the fact that they were being fleeced by the emerging Bourbon interests. Not only that, but they began uniting the Negro and white masses into a voting bloc that threatened to drive the Bourbon interests from the command posts of political power in the South. p. 169-70

What King hinted at, others stated directly. Michael Harrington, the democratic socialist author, was in the audience in Montgomery that day and set down the message for readers of the New York Herald Tribune on 28 March 1965: this movement was not going to stop with civil rights. “King and the others made it clear that they look, not simply to the vote, but to a new coalition of the black and white poor and unemployed and working people,” Harrington wrote. “They seek a new Populism.” p. 172

“Emulating the labor movement, we in the South have embraced mass actions,” King said to the National Maritime Union in 1962, “boycotts, sit-ins and, more recently, a widespread utilization of the ballot.” Martin Luther King, All Labor Has Dignity, ed. Michael K. Honey (Beacon Press, 2011), p. 70. p. n173

Our needs are identical to labor’s needs: decent wages, fair working conditions, livable housing, old-age security, health and welfare measures, conditions in which families can grow, have education for their children, and respect in the community. That is why Negroes support labor’s demands and fight laws which curb labor. That is why the labor-hater and labor-baiter is virtually always a twin-headed creature spewing anti-Negro epithets from one mouth and anti-labor propaganda from the other mouth. —Dr. Martin Luther King, address to an AFL-CIO convention in 1961. p. 174

[King] charged that America “takes necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes. p. 175

King’s statements on economic issues often reflected the thinking of his close associate Bayard Rustin, the political strategist who had helped put together the 1963 March for Jobs and Freedom. p. 177

As the 1962 Port Huron Statement explained, “participatory democracy” meant:

that decision-making of basic social consequence be carried on by pubic groupings. That politics be seen positive, as the art of collectively creating an acceptable pattern of social relations.

All of [Port Huron Statement] flew straight in the face of the cardinal doctrine of modern anti-populism—that the people are far too ignorant to manage their own affairs p. 183.

Protest degenerated into “street theater;” “radical style” camp to trump “radical substance,” as the historian Christopher Lasch put it; a satisfying sense of personal righteousness became the ultimate end of political action. —Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism, (p. 83) p. 188

The radicals missed the point then, and everyone misses the point today. The social stereotypes of the sixties have stuck with us. Like the geriatric Rolling Stones, they chug along imperturbably though they are decades past their rightful retirement. We cannot shake them. When we recall that King and Rustin and Walter Reuther hoped for a grand alliance of ordinary people, we have trouble imagining what they might have had in mind. But white working-class people as enemies of progress—oh, that we understand. p. 189

Among the artifacts of this brief period of blue-collar possibility is a forgotten book from 18=972 called A Populist Manifesto, which proposed a grand plan for the seventies generation: “a pact between the have-nots.” The manifesto’s authors zeroed right in on the essential populist idea: “The key to building any new majority in American politics is a coalition of self-interest between blacks and low- and moderate-income whites,” they declared. That was because “the real division in this country is not between generations or between races, but between the rich who have power and those black and whites who neither power nor property.” This was not a description of an existing movement, however; it was a blueprint for a new populism that might be called into being—“a platform for a movement that does not yet exist. p. 200

This was the teaching of Democratic Promise, Lawrence Goodwyn’s landmark 1976 history. The book aimed to do nothing less than turn history’s conventional understanding of progress upside down. The Pops, Goodwyn insisted, had a sense of democratic engagement that was better developed than our own; their movement, he wrote, made “the fragile hopes of participants in our own twentieth-century American society seem cramped by comparison. p. 201

“Elitist” was the word A Populist Manifesto used to describe emerging centrist liberalism; a stylish politics for people bedazzled by experts but contemptuous toward their blue-collar countrymen. Populism, as the authors imagined it, “mistrusts the technocrats from the RAND corporation and the Harvard Business School.” Lawrence Goodwyn, for his part, called “rule by experts” a “Leninist paradigm” that justifies itself by expressing its “impatience with mass human performance.”

“People are smart enough to govern themselves” is how Fred Harris put this fundamental article of faith. Also, “Experts are always wrong.” Where they were most wrong, he continued, was on foreign policy questions, which had for decades been directed by elites from business and academia, and which Harris proposed to democratize: “you have to open that thing up, level with people, let them in on things.” Harris said these words in 1975, by which time the disasters of Vietnam were familiar to all. He added: “when you do, you can no longer justify most of what is going on.” p. 203-4

All through the 1970s, the Right had been sharpening its own populist appeal, coming up with all sorts of ways to express its outraged hostility to affectation and privilege—none of which, mirabile dictu, ever got in the way of their equally unrelenting efforts to roll back liberal economic achievements. p. 207

The disgust I felt that [1988] Election Day made me physically ill, and so I hope you will excuse me if I skip over all the preposterous variations on the populous theme worked in the years since than by such flag-waving champions of the working man as Oliver North, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin; or by George Bush’s son, Dubya; or by the NRA, or by Fox News, or by Rick Santelli and the TEA Party movement. I am sick of them all.

Still, let us genuflect before the superhuman perversity of the thing. Tax cut, union busting and deregulation—the historic achievements of right-wing populism—have led us straight back to the massively skewed economic arrangements of the 1890s. It takes a hallucinatory bravado to call yourself a populist which cracking down on workers and ignoring anti-trust laws, which the Reagan administration and its successors did. It’s like a banker calling himself a freedom fighter because he likes Basque cuisine. It’s like a slumlord signing his eviction notices, “Yours in solidarity.” p. 214

When the Post asked [Pat Buchanan] how Trump should proceed with his presidential campaign, Buchanan came back with a reply that should have rung every alarm bell in Washington: “After securing the party base, go for victory in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin, by campaigning against the Clinton trade policies… and on a new Trump trade agenda to re-industrialize America.”

What they failed to understand is what centrist Democrats have persistently failed to understand since the 1970s: technocratic competence isn’t enough, especially when that competence somehow means never improving the lives of working people. Just because the imbecile Trump denounced elites doesn’t mean those elites are a legitimate ruling class. Just because the hypocrite Trump pretended to care about deindustrialization doesn’t mean deindustrialization is of no concern. Just because the brute Trump mimicked the language of proletarian discontent doesn’t mean working people are “deplorables.” p.222

Hillary Clinton herself put it a year after the election was over, “I won the places that represent two-thirds of America’s gross domestic product… the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward.”

What is missing from this vision of exuberant, future-minded liberalism is labor, the driving force of so many reform movements since the 1890s. p. 230-1

But there is light at the bottom of this vortex. Today, both elite liberalism and right-wing demagoguery stand before us utterly discredited. The fraudulence of the Right’s bait and switch is so plain it feels like a waste of space even to describe it. Instead of redeeming our communities and taking down the elites, as the Republicans promised, they found yet more ways to make the rich richer. Instead of draining the swamp, they have given us government-by-lobbyist; government-by-polluter; government-by-general. Under the stupid, swaggering leadership of our current commander in chief, it is not just the executive branch in Washington that has been corrupted; it is all of us. Lying is normal, Trump has taught us; it is natural for officeholders to line their pockets; incompetence at the top is the American way; justice is for the wealthy; bigotry is no big deal; money and power are the only things that matter.

The exhaustion of centrist, post-partisan liberalism is just as obvious. The disappointing experience of the Obama years made it clear that the ruling clique of the Democratic Party lacks the fortitude to confront the plutocratic onslaught of the last few decades. Even the most high-scoring meritocrats, we learned, will not take on the hierarchy to which they owe their exalted status.

The technocratic faction’s other selling point—that they alone can check the rightward-charging Republicans—lies in a million pieces on the floor after 2016. Not even when the GOP backed the least competent and most unpopular presidential candidate of all time could the Democrats’ consensus-minded leaders defeat him.

A joyless politics of reprimand is all that centrism has left: a politics of individual righteousness that regards the public not as a force to organized but as a threat to be scolded and disciplined. p. 245-6

There is another way dear reader. As we have learned in these pages, there is a tradition that trusts in the people, that responds to their needs, that turns resentment into progress. That same populist tradition is and has always been at war with monopoly, with corporate authority, with billionaire privilege, with inequality. It insists and has always insisted that “too few people control too much money and power,” as the modern-day Texas populist Jim Hightower described it to me. p. 247

The demand for economic democracy is how you build a mass movement of ordinary people. And a mass movement of ordinary people, in turn, is how you achieve economic democracy. Which is to say that the answer both to Trumpist fraud and to liberal elitism must come from us—from the democratic public itself. p. 247

The last point I want to make is this: populism wins. Not only is populism the classic, all-American response to hierarchy and plutocracy, but it is also the naturally dominant rhetorical element in our political tradition.

I make this claim even though the Populists themselves didn’t get what they were after for many decades, even though the labor movement in the thirties never organized the South, even though Martin Luther King never saw the Freedom Budget get enacted into law.

Still, populism has a power that technocracy and liberal scolding and Trumpist bullshit do not because populism is deep in the grain of the democratic personality. Americans do not defer to their social superiors: we are natural-born egalitarians. Populism is the word that gets at our incurable itch to deflate pretentiousness of every description. [A trait, Eric Blair might suggest, we inherited from the British, JH] p.

In political contests in most parts of America, the candidate who captures this refusal of deference is, more often than not, the candidate who wins. This is a crude and sweeping simplification, but nevertheless it is usually true. Understood the way I have I have defined it, populist protest against the economic elite is what made the Democrats the majority party for so many decades. p. 252-3

But we are learning. Thanks to insurgent campaigns like the one mounted by Bernie Sanders for the presidency in 2016, we know fairly precisely what a modern-day populism looks like. It would focus, of course, on economic reform—ambitious ones, not technocratic fine-tuning. It would aim to put those reforms on the national agenda not by the strength of one candidate’s popularity but by bringing together a movement of working people, by mobilizing millions of people who don’t vote and don’t participate and don’t ordinarily have a say. It would be financed almost entirely by small individual contributions, in the classic Fred Harris manner. And it would aim to enlist millions of embittered voters—Republican voters even—with far-reaching proposals of the kind we haven’t heard for many years: universal health care, no more grotesque student debt, banking reform, a war on monopolies, a reimagining of our trade policy.

This is not just a plan to win the presidency. As Sanders himself used to say, it is a blueprint for a “political revolution,” a complete reversal of the direction in which the country has been traveling for decades. And the key to making it work is movement-building on a massive scale; enlisting millions of ordinary people who have lost their faith in democracy. p. 254

It is an idea whose time has obviously come, and the place it must come first is the Democratic Party. The party of technocrats and consultants—of calculating triangulation and fans of smoke-filled rooms—must eventually give way to the populism that we must have. Thus will the Democratic Party learn once again to breathe hope into those who despair. p. 255