Our Divided Political Heart (32 page)

“
I do not contend that my subjects
were
populists
, in the way they were unionists or socialists, Protestants or Catholics, liberal Democrats or conservative Republicans,” Kazin wrote. “Populism, more an impulse than an ideology, is too elastic and promiscuous to be the basis for such an allegiance. Rather, my premise is that all these people employed populism as a flexible mode of persuasion.”

America’s populist rhetoric, Kazin argues, blends two traditions, “
the pietistic impulse issuing from the Protestant Reformation
” and “the secular faith of the Enlightenment, the belief that ordinary people could think and act rationally, more rationally, in fact, than their ancestral overlords.”

“
It became a convenient label for left, right, center
, and anyone simply out to make a profit,” Kazin observed, “a handy way to signify that one was on the side of the
real
people—those with more common sense than disposable income—and opposed to their elite enemies, whoever they might be.” Kazin made clear how far contemporary right-wing populists are from the 1890s variety. “
Activists who blame an immoral, agnostic media
for America’s problems,” he wrote, “have little in common with those who indict corporations for moving jobs overseas.”

The “
major alteration
” in American politics, Kazin argues, began in the 1940s “when populism began its journey from left to right.”

The rhetoric once spoken primarily by reformers and radicals
(debt-ridden farmers, craft and industrial unionists, socialists attempting to make their purposes sound American, even prohibitionists eager to wipe out the saloon interests) was creatively altered by conservative groups and politicians (zealous anti-Communists, George Wallace, the Christian Right, and the campaigns and presidential administrations of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan).

It was a remarkable shift. The vocabulary of grassroots rebellion now served to thwart and reverse social and cultural change rather than promote it.

What emerged, “
gradually and unevenly
,” was “a conservative populism that pledged to defend pious, middle-class communities against the amoral governing elite.” This was a strange development. It turned Populism from a relatively coherent set of egalitarian ideas into a collection of impulses, a strategy rather than a philosophy, a form of rhetoric and not a program.

The diverse and contentious approaches to Populism among historians matched the confusion in the political world over what it took to be “populist.” The Tea Party was willing to embrace the label, even if it would see the actual nineteenth-century populist program as “socialistic,” which in certain respects it was. Indeed, many in the Tea Party proposed to repeal the very amendments to the Constitution (authorizing the income tax and providing for the direct election of senators) that the Populists had fought for. If the Tea Party regarded itself as “populist,” these were small-
p
populists against Populism. Liberals, in the meantime, were torn. Some, still influenced directly (or perhaps unconsciously) by Hofstadter, assumed that Populism was tinged by anti-intellectualism, narrow-mindedness, and bigotry. Other liberals such as Molly Ivins, Jim Hightower, and a significant pro-labor contingent in Congress were proud to make the cause of Populism their own, continuing to regard it as a democratic and egalitarian call to battle.

The frustration on the left over liberalism’s ceding of Populism’s power to the right exploded in one of the most important political books of the Bush years,
Thomas Frank’s
What’s the Matter with Kansas?
It carried the subtitle:
How Conservatives Won the Heart of America.
Frank located his story in Kansas for personal reasons and also because the state had been part of the original Populism’s heartland. In the past, he noted, the state’s “
periodic bouts of leftism
were what really branded Kansas with the mark of the freak.” While “
every part of the country in the nineteenth century had labor upheavals
and protosocialist reform movements,” Kansas was special because in Kansas, “the radicals kept coming out on top.” There is intentional irony in Frank’s title, which is drawn from an 1896 essay by the famed Republican journalist William Allen White, who hailed from the Kansas town of Emporia. For White, the state’s radicalism had been “what was the matter with Kansas.” It was a place, White said, that wanted “
more men . . . who hate prosperity
, and who think, because a man believes in national honor, he is a tool of Wall Street.” Frank focused on the opposite problem, which was why Kansas
wasn’t
Populist anymore.

Frank used Kansas as the prototype for the rise of right-wing populism. “
Today’s Republicans are doing what the Whigs did in the 1840s
,” he wrote, “putting on backwoods accents, telling the world about their log-cabin upbringings, and raging against the over-educated elites . . . Hence the situation in Kansas, where the most prominent conservatives, themselves an assortment of millionaires and lawyers and Harvard grads, lead a proletarian uprising against . . . millionaires, lawyers, and Harvard grads.”

But Frank’s real scorn was directed against Democrats
who “no longer speak to the people on the losing end of a free-market system
that is becoming more brutal and more arrogant by the day.” The Democrats’ problem, he argued, was not that they “are monolithically pro-choice or anti–school prayer; it’s that by dropping the class language that once distinguished them sharply from Republicans they have left themselves vulnerable to cultural wedge issues like guns and abortion and the rest whose hallucinatory appeal would ordinarily be far overshadowed by material concerns.” The Republicans, he concluded, “
talk constantly abut class
—in a coded way, to be sure.” Democrats, on the other hand, “are afraid to bring it up.”

All this represented, in an odd way, the triumph of Hofstadter’s argument. It’s not surprising that Hofstadter’s most enthusiastic moment of personal political activism was on behalf of Adlai Stevenson’s 1952 and 1956 presidential campaigns. Stevenson’s urbane persona and style led to the popularization of the word “egghead,” and his rejection by the electorate came, as Hofstadter saw things in
Anti-Intellectualism in American Life
, after a campaign in which “
intellect and philistinism
” squared off, and philistinism won. Hofstadter mourned what he saw as a “
national distaste for intellect
.” By the time Frank wrote, Democrats were more likely to be identified with intellectuals than with Populists—they were more Stevenson than Bryan. And this, as Frank argued, often produced disastrous results.

There is much to Frank’s insistence that something is badly awry when those who are, in principle, committed to greater economic equality become wary of identifying with the very people their program is designed to benefit. The rejection by some Democrats and liberals of their Populist gene also accounted for how slow the Obama administration was to appreciate the dangers of too close an association with the banks and Wall Street. It should not have taken the Occupy Wall Street movement to awaken the administration to both the problems inherent in its position and the political potential of a more forceful response to financial abuses.

It is also strange that partisans of movements stoutly defending inequalities, strenuously opposing higher taxes on the wealthy, and passionately critical of labor unions become more eager than anyone else in politics to proclaim themselves “populists.”

But something else is going on here as well. Contemporary liberalism’s problem was not just the reluctance of some in its ranks to speak a populist language of class injustice or its failure to offer a plausible program of economic uplift for those caught in the downdrafts of the global economy, though the latter poses a deep and enduring challenge. Liberalism also suffered because from the end of World War II—and especially since the 1960s—it had “
a weaker connection with the idea of community
than most of the progressive and reform traditions that preceded it,” as Alan Brinkley observed. Conservatives, even highly individualistic conservatives, profited from speaking in unapologetic terms about faith, family, neighborhood, and nation. Partisans of liberalism and the left, who are in principle community
builders, gravitated in the postwar years to an individualistic language focusing on rights and entitlements. Yes, there was much honor in the willingness of liberals to take losses among socially conservative voters because they spoke up for racial and religious minorities and for equal rights for women, gays, and lesbians. But they also lost ground among more moderate traditionalists not so much because of what they said about family, faith, and community but because they seemed reluctant to talk about these things at all. For many years, conservatives were able to occupy this ground by default. This is why the communitarian correction among liberals described in
Chapter 4
was an urgent necessity, and why communitarian language has appealed so much to politicians such as Clinton and Obama. They understood that there was a hole in liberalism left by the absence of community. Eventually, a similar logic may finally lead conservatives toward second thoughts about shearing off their communitarian wing. Many who think of themselves as conservative revere the unregulated economic market far less than they do the ties of church, neighbors, and kin.

Here again, history is instructive. The original Populism was suffused with the language of community. It did not shrink from class warfare, but it was not about class struggle for its own sake. Populism spoke of building a “cooperative commonwealth” and, as McMath wrote, “
developed among people who were deeply rooted in the social and economic networks
of rural communities.” Many of the activities of the Populists “
took place within membership organizations
—voluntary associations such as churches, fraternal organizations and agricultural societies.” Populists built a political movement. They also nurtured a community.

Similarly, the Progressives who rose after the decline of the original Populist movement are often accused, as we’ve seen, of being relentless centralizers more interested in the scientific management of public problems than in deepening democracy. There is truth in this critique, especially since Progressives sometimes sought to limit the franchise in the name of cleaning up politics. Yet there was a side of Progressivism linked to the community building of the Settlement House movement and to a Christian left whose great spokesman, Walter Rauschenbusch, looked forward to the “
evolution of a cooperative economic organization
as wide as society.” Progressives made common cause with Rauschenbusch’s Social Gospel Christians,
who sought to build
a “beloved community”
, later a pivotal phrase for Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement. Jane Addams echoed the prophet Micah in calling on settlement house workers to “love mercy,” “do justly,” and “walk humbly with God.” She insisted, as the historian Eugene McCarraher notes, “
that the Christian spirit lay not in the manger
of organized religion but in a recognition of mutuality that sought ‘simple and natural expression in the social organism.’”

And while the New Deal did “
contribute in significant ways to the creation
of the rights-based liberalism that has been so much in evidence in the last half century,” as Brinkley observed, it “was also deeply committed to the concept of community—both to the restoration of local communities and to the strengthening of the overarching national community.”

“
From the beginning of his administration, Franklin Roosevelt’s rhetoric
was suffused with images of nationhood, of interdependence, of community,” Brinkley said. In his first inaugural address, Roosevelt “never once used the words ‘liberty,’ ‘individual,’ or ‘equality.’” The early New Deal especially “was, above all else, an effort to find concepts of community capable of transcending the bitter struggles dividing groups in the economy and the society from one another.” It sought “to temper the brutality of the industrial economy, to insist on national standards of ‘community interest’ amid the brutal competitive struggle of capitalism.”

A year and a half into the Obama administration, Tom Frank was not enamored. He was as frustrated with Obama as he had been a few years before with other upper-middle-class Democrats. He saw Obama not as a transformative leader but as a technocrat obsessed with process. “
It should not surprise us
,” he wrote when he was still the lively house dissident on the
Wall Street Journal
op-ed page, that Obama “values process so highly and that in the health-care and financial regulation debates he has chosen complex solutions over simpler, better, but more ideological ones.” After all, “the Democratic Party itself is shifting away from its blue-collar roots toward professionals and well-educated voters. It is an obvious reflection of the way his party is heading.”

Despite the seemingly transformative campaign of 2008, Frank did not see the story line as having changed much since
What’s the Matter with Kansas
. “
The people now flocking to the Democratic Party
might eat artisanal foods and zealously sort containers for easy recycling,” he wrote in June 2010, “but they also know that regulation causes more problems than it fixes and that sophisticated people don’t use Thirties-style phrases like ‘economic royalists.’” Again, he highlighted the links between the intellectual assumptions and the class affiliations of the non-Populist liberals, noting that “
while it is fun to trash new-style Democrats
for their Ivy League ways, let us also remember that, should you happen to study economics at one of those Ivy League colleges, you will likely imbibe a kind of free-market orthodoxy that would not be out of place in a Wall Street boardroom.”

Frank wrote more than a year before the rise of the anti–Wall Street demonstrations, but he captured their sensibility quite accurately. Polls showed that while most of the Occupy demonstrators were Democrats or leaned that way, they were frustrated over the ambivalence within the Obama administration about populism. They were troubled that practices within the financial industry that had enriched a small number at the expense of the economy itself had not faced either the scrutiny or the condemnation (or the prosecution) they deserved. The Occupiers did not see nearly as much change in the government’s relationship to the financial world as they felt Obama had promised during his campaign.