I don't think that anyone has defined it that way. I think the populist idea is that good political ideas can come from below, from unsanctioned, unofficial, uncredentialed oppositional groups. The Democratic Party leadership does not believe this.
Populism involves some degree of breaking down the barriers between citizens and government. The Constitution was designed to suppress direct democracy in favor of representative democracy via checks and balances, the separation of powers, federalism, and the other stuff you learned about in eighth grade civics. The two-party system puts another intermediary in there, the party, and usually the parties and the candidates work through still another layer of vote-contracting intermediaries, the organized interest groups and the mass media. Populists want to get rid of some of those layers. (Populists are sometimes portrayed as Jeffersonian constitutionalists, but they generally advocated more simplified procedures and spent a lot of time fighting the Supreme Court, and that interpretation is incomplete at best.).
When elitist liberals or socialists get upset upon finding that their representatives are lying and unresponsive, they're populists whether they know it or not. Elitism is institutional, not intellectual. To a political player, a Nobelist is one vote, the way a HS dropout is one vote, and a famous Nobelist is an opinion-leader, on a par with a comparably famous stoner celebrity (and far outranked by a really serious opinion-leader like Bill Kristol.)
The difference is that when they're lied to, populists know what's happening and get mad, whereas left intellectuals are baffled and mostly just whine. My mission in this world is to convince liberal intellectuals that they are People too, salt-of-the-earth folk scorned by the powers that be. But most intellectuals find this offensive -- they think of themselves as unappreciated elite units, like princes switched in the cradle and raised by peasants. They're sure that some day they will be recognized and restored to their rightful status.
Our political elite is well-educated but tough-minded. The Democratic Party's pious renunciation of ideology, populism, and demagoguery has been accompanied by a rehabilitation of graft, corruption, and subservience to big money. (The post-WWII pluralists and consensus theorists were fairly open about this). What we have now is a spiffy, modern, Ivy-educated Tweed Ring*. And Boss Tweed and the others, when the chips were down, were reactionary servants of big money ("Bourbon Democrats".) They used part of the graft to help out their voters, but they supported policies which hurt these same voters), and they made sure that whatever help the voters got was controlled by vote-contractors and received only by reliable supporters.
The suffering PhD masses have nothing to lose but their chains, but they're mired in the toils of servility and ancient prejudice. An unpromising lot indeed, but be they ever so humble, we cannot afford to write off even the least of our brethren.
* The Moonies have Ivy-educated leadership now. The Mafia and the drug cartels send their kids to the best schools. Ahmed Chalibi, Ted Kaczynski, Jerome Corsi, Bill Kristol -- all PhDs from the best schools. We humble folk just don't know what to think.
Most people probably at least vaguely remember Inherit the Wind, the 1960 movie about the Scopes trial, with Spencer Tracy as the gruff liberal (Clarence Darrow in real life), Fredric March as the pompous Christian anti-evolutionist (William Jennings Bryan in real life) and Gene Kelly as the cynical newspaperman (H. L. Mencken is real life). In the movie, the Bryan figure represents the past, blind religious belief, and ignorance, whereas the other two men represent progress, science, and freedom. The standard contemporary Democrat's image of the populist is along the lines of the film's Bryan figure (Matthew Jefferson Brady): an ignorant anti-intellectual full of hot air and self-righteousness.
The facts of the matter are quite different. Bryan was a Democrat, not a Populist, and while the Populists did support him in 1896, Bryan never even acknowledged his Populist support. The defender of evolution, Clarence Darrow, was the real Populist in the room: Darrow had actually been a Populist stump speaker back in the day.
But I'll mostly be writing about the cynical reporter, H. L. Mencken (E.K. Hornbeck in the movie), because one large chunk of the Democratic Party is Menckenesque (as Christopher Lasch has already noted). Mencken offers a window into the cultural politics of that era, which I believe has a considerable continuity with the cultural politics of today.
Sarah Palin is so incredibly small-time. She's being blackmailed by stoner Levi Johnston, and she deserves him. This is reality-show People-magazine self-help pyramid-scam rehab-Christian politics. The two of them are both good looking and that's all they've got. Sarah got a bunch of dirty old men aroused for the first time in awhile, so they nominated her for VP.
Nothing new there, but WTF are conservatives and Christians thinking? They want one of the most ignorant people in the world to hold the nuclear trigger. It's like an Abbie Hoffman mindfuck with live ammunition. Is shameless, heedless nihilism now a necessary constituent of conservativism?
Sorry, this is all old hat but the Levi Johnston interview just tore off the scab. I'd numbed myself, as we all have, and I'd forgotten what's really happening. It's like waking up from a bad dream and finding out that it's real. We have a Presidential candidate who's one degree of separation away from the Alaskan petty crime scene, and millions of miles away from reality.
I've been there too, more or less, and I've always thought that that is one of the reasons why I'm not a Republican Presidential candidate. But I was so wrong.
Conservatives should all be wearing paper bags over their heads. They did this.
It isn't really surprising that the Democratic Party only thinks about electioneering -- that's where the pros in the biz make their money. The pros are all very prosperous people, and they're pretty well disconnected from the effects of policy (as long as they get their payoffs.)
At election time we're often told that a bad candidate at least has a "D" beside his name. And now that it's policymaking time, we're being told that if Obama doesn't get some kind of "W", his Presidency will be crippled. (That's how Obama himself seems to think).
If the medical care bill is bad policy and bad politics, everyone loses but Obama and the pros. We shouldn't care. That "W" will be worthless in the real world.
The Baucus bill, which was really the Obama bill, was bad policy and bad politics. The Snowe bill, which is apparently the new Obama bill, is also bad policy and bad politics. Screw that.
It's trivially true that you need the W's, but that can't be the only idea you've got.
There's been a blogger response to my recent "What is Populism" posts, and the authors of a couple of relevent books have also shown up in comments, so I thought I'd post about that.
Last week’s post, “What is Populism and Why are Democrats Afraid of It" set off a heated but productive discussion. This week I’m basically just expanding, clarifying, correcting, and even repeating what I said there in the comments.
WHAT IS POPULISM?
“Populism” is the code word within the Democratic Party, and it's something that most wonks and pros oppose. When Democratic pros talk about populism, they normally take the worst examples (e.g. Glenn Beck) as typical. This attitude toward populism is entrenched in Pol Sci 101, and many or most normally well-educated people blindly accept it. Democrats depend heavily on interns and low-paid staffers -- usually well-off kids from elite schools who can afford to work for nothing, Some of these interns go on to become party pros, perpetuating the anti-populist bias as well as the accompanying incomprehension of and disdain for people of the middling sort.
I define populism as participational politics by ordinary citizens, working either inside or outside the major parties but almost always against the party leadership, which opposes big business and finance in the interests of the majority and which proposes specific policies to that effect. Between 1870 and 1940 groups of this type (including farmers’ groups and unions) provided most of the progressive energy in American politics, but since about 1950 the Democrats have shunned populism in favor of nonconfrontational "win-win" politics: “a rising tide lifts all boats”. At the same time, many rank and file Democrats have populist sympathies, and these voters are contiunually baffled and angry when the Democrats end up supporting business rather than the common interest.
Just so they don't get buried. The first is my own Populism bibliography. The second is a post responding to my October 10 post "What is populism and why are the Democrats so afraid of it?"
Michael Moore's latest film and Alan Grayson's "die quickly" speech in the House have revived interest in an old question: What is populism, and why is the Democratic Party so afraid of it?
Populism is politics which opposes wealth and power in the name of the common folk. It takes both left wing and right wing forms and sometimes degenerates into bigotry and attacks on minorities. Populism can be faked, and that is being done right now - e.g., Limbaugh and Beck. Populist appeals can be made by spokesmen for special interests who have no intention of fulfilling their democratic promises, but who are just opportunistically faking populism as part of an attack on some enemy. (As I never get tired of saying: Republican populism is fake, but Democratic elitism is real).
Since the Fifties the Democratic Party, whose populist wing was critically important during the New Deal, has avoided and repressed populism. Individual populists such as Paul Wellstone have occasionally been elected, often in defiance of the party machine, but they have never had much influence in the party. The Democratic strategy has been cooperation with big business, and their slogan has been "a rising tide lifts all boats" -- "win-win" solutions where everyone wins and nobody loses. This worked pretty well until about 1970, when business started to pull away from the deal, and since that time it's been mostly downhill for the Democrats, for labor, and for the average American.
When they made their deal with big business, the Democrats became a wonky party of technocrats and expert administrators who balanced all the various interests and came up with the answer which was best for everyone, and they distanced themselves from their earlier party-of-the-common-man pretensions. Rather than to represent the majority of the electorate, they increasingly defined their constituency as a hodgepodge of special interest. Political parties inevitably do represent plural interests, as the Democrats certainly had done ever since the Civil War, but the post-Fifties Democrats made a fractionated constituency a deliberate goal and did everything they could to avoid majoritarian appeals and to marginalize majoritarianism within the party.
As part of this transformation of the party, the Democrats needed to misrepresent populism. Since then there's been an almost unmixed stream of slanders coming from both parties, until by now anyone counts as a populist as long as they're abusive, ignorant, racist, and dishonest. (The Nazi David Duke sometimes calls himself a Populist, and he was allowed to get away with it). Almost everyone comes out of Pol Sci 100 knowing that the Populists were bad guys, and the Pol Sci 101 attitude is pervasive among party leaders, wonk staffers, and a big chunk of the Democratic electorate.
However, during most of the period since the Civil War, however, progressive energy in this country has mostly come from movements of the Populist typeworking outside the parties or against the party leadership: Greenbackers, Progressives (three kinds), Socialists, Farmer-Laborites, Nonpartisan-Leaguers, and independents -- to say nothing of unions, farm organizations, and civil rights groups. (Martin Luther King's movement was essentially populism, albeit minority populism).
Below I will sketch the history of the Democratic Party in its relations with the Populist Party, small-p populism, and the various sorts of progressivism during the period from about 1890 to the middle of the 1950s, and suggest that many of the problems the Democrats have now can be traced back to the redefinition of the Democratic Party that took place at the end of this period.
The best judgment at the time, according to Brad Delong, was that a trillion dollar stimulus would be about right -- though new information makes that now seems too low. But everyone knew that a trillion would be too much for Congress, so what they asked for was 800 million, and what they actually got was 600 million.
Rahm seems like a tough guy, but only when he's talking to liberals. Otherwise he's just like any other Democrat.
Democrats always start the bidding with their final offer. They're scientists of politics, after all, and they know that the future is written (as it says the the Koran) and that "negotiations" are epiphenomenal and illusory. That's what game theory is for -- why waste time playing games when science can tell you what the final score will be?
But the vulgar, stupid, brutish Republicans keep on fighting, wrongly believing that you can accomplish something that way. Bad Republicans!
Allan Grayson's recent "Die Now" speech got me thinking again about one of my favorite topics: the Democrats' refusal to use "populist" language.
Decades ago the Democratic committed itself to a weird form of cool, unemotional, above-the-battle wonk politics. It's a weird mix of Gandhi, Orwell, genteel mugwumpery, value-neutral ideology, and trust in manipulative administration by experts. Democrats think that they're 17-dimensional Zen chess masters who can defeat their enemy without moving a muscle. Which they might be, for all I know, except for the winning part.
Since 1968 that strategy hasn't worked at all well, and since the coronation of Speaker Gingrich in 1992 it hasn't worked at all. The Republicans have been having tremendous fun teasing Democrats with lies and insults to see if they'll stamp their little feet and start crying in frustration , or maybe send a stiffly worded letter.
Historically, most of America's progressive energy has come from borderline demagogues who often worked outside and against the two parties. FDR started off planning to be a horrible president, but he didn't get his way.
P.S. Lest I seem unsophisticated, the onset of the Democrats' weird mental deficiencies coincided with their decision to cozy up to big business and ask for money -- "Liberals are not afraid of bigness", as Hofstadter said.
The party pros are actually tough guys who're getting theirs. It's the rank and file who are weenies.
(Another in John's series on the dark side of party politics. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
Indispensable Enemies, Walter Karp, Franklin Square Press, 1993 / 1973
Indispensable Enemies is a wild ride, and very few will want to stay on all the way to the end. Karp has no respect for either of the major parties, and his low opinion extends to such Democratic heroes as Woodrow Wilson, FDR, JFK, LBJ, and even McGovern. He was politically unaffiliated, but identified with the Progressive and Populist traditions, and nowadays he seems to be admired mostly by paleocons and right-libertarians. But his insights into the two-party system can help dissidents of any stripe understand what's wrong with our political process, and more specifically, what's wrong with the Democratic Party.
The basic idea of the book is that when you're trying to understand American politics, you don't want to start with the candidates and elected officials, or with the voters and public opinion, or even with the lobbyists or with the media, but with the political parties. Karp overstates his case considerably, but there are few who could read his book without learning something from it.
The parties and the pros work for themselves first, last and always, and a party's ruling group would always rather maintain control of a losing party than win and lose control. Parties do not depend on elected officials for funding. Quite the opposite: elected officials who don't have their own organizations and who can't self-finance are pretty much dependent on the party. (This is especially true of low-seniority members of the House, who are little more than but peons.) The party gets its funding from donors, and donors give money as often to prevent action asthey do to get action: sometimes all they want is nothing.
By and large party leaders do not want reform, progress, or change, since anything new makes their job harder and threatens to bring in new and competing leaders. The two party oligarchies support one another against the dissident forces in either party, and often their disputes are choreographed dog-and-pony shows leading, like pro wrestling, to foreordained conclusions -- as we have seen with free trade, tax reduction, and deregulation, often the two parties are in agreement on the issues.
Some examples of what party leaders will do in order to keep control:
A. Sabotage a popular candidate of their own party, either because he is in some way dissident on the issues, or just because he seems likely to try to take over the party organization.
B. Concede small or large areas to the "opposition" party, ensuring a standoff whereby the leaders of the two parties are able to broker deals at the expense of their own supporters. After the Civil War the Republicans conceded the whole South to the Democrats by accepting the disenfranchisement of black Americans. In many states, the party machines divide the state on an urban-rural basis. Once the nation or the state is stabilized that way and a standoff achieved, the leaders of the two parties can happily do business.
C. Split their own party so that one faction can be played off against the other. For decades, even during periods when liberal Democrats and moderate Republicans had the votes to end segregation, the Democratic leadership (by honoring seniority rules, the filibuster, etc.) allowed the Southern Democrats to block progress. The sacred rules of Congressional procedure are nothing but the devices by which the party leaders manipulate and control Congress. None of them have the sanction of law, and many of them aren't even very old. The plain fact is that before LBJ the party leadership, including the northerners, never wanted to end segregation and were perfectly happy to let the South run the show.
D. Build campaigns around wedge issues, peripheral to the real business of government, which set a bloc of voters in one party against a bloc in the other party. Wedge issues aren't a Rove invention: for decades after the Civil War, the most visible issues were prohibition, foreign-language schools, and anti-Yankee or anti-Reb sentiment. Wedge issues cost little or nothing, and if the level of animosity can be kept high enough they're the gift that keeps on giving.
For example, the Republicans have been flogging abortion for three decades now without delivering much of anything. They do not really want to win, because if they do, they'll not only anger their own moderate voters, but will also lose their leverage with anti-abortion voters. Peripheral issues of this kind are decoys allowing allow the two parties to quietly achieve goals that they really care about.
E. Neglect or sabotage outreach. The party pros do not want enthusiastic new supporters if the new supporters seem likely to make new, inconvenient demands. What they want is predictable, tried-and-true party regulars making specific, limited demands. Voter enthusiasm is not a good thing, but rather a problem to be solved: often the party must figure out how to fail in a non-obvious way, without angering its voters.
The two parties, and the liberal and conservative wings of each party, often secretly cooperate with one another by killing inconvenient measures that their adversaries need to seem to support, but do not want to see passed. When you see support for a popular bill mysteriously evaporating, or when you see factional disputes within the dominant party or faction delivering victory to the weaker one, this is often what has happened.
F. Bipartisanship. Need I say more? The bosses deal, and Broder rejoices.
Karp makes one point that I can't develop here, but which is dear to my heart. He asks the reader to assume that political players are agents and know what they're doing, so that if the players' actions don't make sense in terms of their professed goals, we should conclude that their actual goals are different. This goes against fifty years of lumpen-wonk truisms about how politics works. Wonk Democrats seem to be fanatically committed to the idea that blind forces decide everything and that no one ever really knows what they are doing or why, and they automatically accuse anyone who believes that politicians do things for reasons of being a paranoid conspiracy theorist.
This is very strange, because the same wonks who so strongly claim to believe in blind forces also believe that the wise Democrats they support are doing magical things behind the scenes, and that we should just stand behind them without asking what it is that they're doing. It's almost as if the wonks are putting up a smokescreen of conspiracy-theory accusations specifically for the purpose of diverting our attention from their own backroom politics.
Karp makes a vivid case, and every reader has to decide how much of it he accepts. It's partly outdated: his book was published in 1973, and since then our politics has been transformed by think tanks, talk radio and TV, the conservative colonization of the serious media, PACS, and so on. I'm not sure that the Gingrich-Delay-Rove Republicans fit into the pattern described by Karp, and the fact that today's Democrats do seem to fit the pattern might be evidence that they're living in the past and still haven't figured out what hit them.
I strongly recommend that everyone read this book. This post gives you only a very sketchy idea of what Karp has to say, and in the book itself he provides a wealth of concrete examples of the kinds of things that I have only been able to summarize.
Various reasons have been suggested for the peculiar lameness of Obama's approach to health care reform, which perfectly fits a pattern of Democratic lameness going back at least two decades. None of these reasons is entirely wrong, but several are weak and useless ways of understanding of the problem and should just be dropped. I'll begin with the weak ones and move on to the stronger ones, which I'll discuss in more detail later. My overall conclusion will be, first, that we need to bypass the party organization and change the incentives working on elected Democrats, and second, that Democrats have to get rid of the corporate, anti-popular, expert-administrator model which has made it difficult or impossible for them to enlarge their base.
ONE
The Democrats aren't stupid, progressives are stupid. The Democratic leadership is following a wise strategic plan which will become clear if we're patient and don't fuck things up.
I don't see how anyone older than 25 could believe this one -- the leadership has let us down too many times. They've been keeping their powder dry for so long that most of it is past its expiration date.
TWO
The Democrats aren't stupid, progressives are stupid. The country's more conservative now, and so is the media, and progressives are going to have to get used to that and quit whining.
First, often the polls show wide support for a progressive position which then fails in Congress anyway -- without a fight and without any Democratic leadership support. But more important, the Democrats are horribly passive in the face of public opinion. Too little energy is spent on developing issues, getting progressive ideas out there, and changing people's minds, and too little energy is spent on recruiting new supporters among non-voters and independents. Instead, everything is dedicated to big media buys every two years - media buys which strengthen the network media, who are among our worst enemies. (By and large, Democratic electoral campaigns leave nothing behind; they're just money down the drain. The party has even devised tricks to systematically divert money legally earmarked for party-building activities into the campaign of the moment.)
THREE
Democrats are stupid.
The word "stupid" should be removed from the Democratic vocabulary. If the Republicans are so stupid, why did they beat us so many times? If we think the voters are stupid and they know that, how can we ever persuade them of anything? And as far as the big-time Democrats go, if a leader's words and actions seem stupid to you, it's probably because their goals are different than yours and they're just stringing you along. (There are a fair number of genuinely stupid people in the business, but they're just stooges. The real players -- e.g., Rahm Emmanuel -- are smarter than you and me, but they're not on our side and they aren't going to give us anything.)
FOUR
Democratic leaders are timid and cowardly.
There's some truth in this one, and I'll pick up on it again below: the Democratic Party does not seem to understand bargaining, bluffing, or fighting, and seems addicted to splitting the difference and finding ingenious win-win situations. But the problem is mostly just that the leadership's goals are different than ours, and mostly short-term and small-time. Political pros don't really care much whether they accomplish anything or not by our standards. Taking risks might upset their own little applecarts, so they rarely take any. They'll fight if their own interests are threatened, but they're not going to fight just for us.
FIVE
They're all really just conservatives.
In effect, that's often more or less true, but only because of their limited goals -- if there were an opportunistic advantage in being progressive or radical, they'd all be progressive or radical. It's true, however, that when a Democrat says "the people won't accept that, it's too liberal", what they usually mean is that their donors won't accept it. They don't necessarily know or care what "the people" will or won't accept.
SIX
They're all rich and don't care about ordinary people.
This's true of politicians in general and is a significant factor, but politicians who are not rich when they are elected can be among the worst -- they need the money. But in general by the time someone reaches power, they're far removed from ordinary people, about whom they often have stereotyped and mostly negative ideas.
SEVEN
They've all been bought.
This is pretty much it, and the what I'll say below will mostly just elaborate on that. The enormous amounts of money required to buy media time and pay for campaigns put everyone in Congress at the mercy of the donors and fundraisers, and this also puts most Congressmen, especially the new ones, at the mercy of the party machine. House members in particular are virtual peons until they get some seniority and a solid local power base. (Needless to say, as far as corruption and conservatism go, Republicans are worse than Democrats. But for them, what we call corruption is actually a good thing: privatization).
The best is yet to come:
CONCLUSIONS: WHAT CAN WE DO
(Given the current state of angst over the direction of the Democratic Party, I think it's great that John is doing this series to give us some historical perspective, and the chance to reason together over what it all means. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
(Over the last many months I've been studying the history of the Democrats and the American Party system, and will be publishing the results piece by piece here. I am not coordinating these pieces with the news of the day, and you shouldn't jump too quickly to conclusions about what my point really is. My source today is Horace Samuel Merrill, Bourbon Democracy of the Middle West, 1865--1896, Washington, 1953.)
Between the end of the Civil War and the New Deal the two parties were, by our standards, about equally conservative; on racial questions the Democrats were the more conservative. Between the New Deal and the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act in 1964 and 1965, many Democrats were still very conservative -- not only on race, and not only Southern Democrats. (The Democrats' 1928 Presidential candidate, Al Smith of New York, supported the Republican candidate in 1936.) The conservative Democrats have always been there, and while the two parties are more polarized today than they have been in a long time, if ever, that's mostly because the Republicans have driven out all of their liberals and moderates (and many of their sane conservatives) -- not because the Democratic Party as a whole (as opposed to some of its members) is more liberal.
Merrill's book tells the story of the Midwestern branch of the "Bourbon Democrats", the dominant Democratic faction during the three decades following the Civil War. "Bourbon Democrats" may sound like fun, but they were nothing but a coterie of wealthy, corrupt wheeler-dealers whose only interests were feathering their own nests and keeping small farmers and labor out of power. The Bourbons did not need to win, and seldom did; they only needed to keep control of the party.
Grover Cleveland, the only Democratic President in the 47 years between Appomattox and the election of Woodrow Wilson (and one of the most anti-labor Presidents of all), was a model Bourbon on policy questions, though he differed from the rest in being less corrupt and was nominated for that reason.
All day long the Obama team's pre-spin on the public option was that it's only one small part of the whole plan, maybe 10% or 20%, and he repeated that in the speech.
That's simple-minded, childish thinking. Supporters of the public option believe that it's necessary if the plan is going to work, since it's the only thing in the plan to keep costs down and to keep the bill from being no more than a big gift to the medical monopolists.
They seem to think that the health care plan is a bulk product like gravel. It's true that 90 tons of gravel is almost as good as 100 tons, but 90% of a car is not almost as good as the whole thing. Depending on which 10% is missing, 90% of an automobile is most likely just a pile of useless junk.
Second, besides "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good", let's add "don't start the bargaining with your final offer". Not as snappy a slogan, but essential. Single payer should have been the bargaining chip, but that was given away before the negotiations even started.
Democrats at every level can be the stupidest fucking people this side of Doug Feith, They all think that they're deep strategists, and they compete to explain to their leaders, out loud and in public, what the deep negotiating strategy should be. Then, in their inimitably toolish way, the likes of Dave Gregory and Chris Matthews help the process along, sothat by the time the negotiations start, the final compromise is all over the media.
It's like Democrats try to figure out the score of the game before it's played, and then aim for that instead of trying to get as big a win as possible.
I blame education. Ignorant Republican hacks consistently whip the Democrat's asses. That's because poker, adultery, and shady business deals are good training for politics, whereas a genteel Ivy League education just isn't.
(There are very good reasons for some to feel thoroughly disgusted with the Democratic Party right now. Rather than infighting among progressives over this, I'd like to see us think creatively about ways people can work creatively outside the box that others would put us in. I'm working on a diary about this myself, so I was pleased to see this one as a natural part of the same general conversation. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
Like almost everyone here, I have frequently asked myself why the Democratic Party tends to be so worthless. even though many individual Democrats are pretty good.
The answer is this: Loyalty is always punished, and betraying the voters is what political parties are for. The Democratic Party is not us. The Democratic Party is a billion-dollar hierarchal bureaucracy made up of careerists with axes to grind. For them we're just a resource. It's our job to learn to deal with them; they've already figured out how they're going to deal with us.
Supporting a candidate or joining a political party is not like falling in love or finding Jesus. It's like making a high-risk, high-stakes business deal with someone who cannot entirely be trusted. You have to keep your eyes open and protect your leverage -- once you've lost your leverage, you've lost everything. Liberals can beg and whine forever, and all Rahm will ever do is laugh. We need to learn deal with Rahm (and Obama) as coldbloodedly as they deal with us.
No one should ever be surprised, shocked, hurt, or heartbroken when a Democrat doublecrosses them. That's what politicians do. Being doublecrossed the same kind of thing as losing a hand of poker. You should figure out what, if anything, you did wrong and get ready for the next hand.
If there was ever a time for pitchfork populism, it's right now. Unemployment is past 8% and still rising, most people have seen a third to half of their retirement money disappear, and this was all the result of multimillionaires' financial machinations. But so far we haven't seen much public rage.
Partly this may be because, so far, only the unemployed and the people who know them have directly experienced the problem. Certainly it's in large part because the media and both political parties are so close the malefactors that they don't want the electorate to figure things out. This is the result of twenty years of bipartisan deregulation, freemarketism, and financial utopianism, and the culprits obviously don't want us to think about it.
Digby, I almost always agree with you, but you're 100% wrong about populism. If you look at the issues that the small-p populists pushed 1880-1940, they include most of the progressive issues -- women's suffrage, anti-monopoly, debtor relief (through currency policy), progressive taxation, unionization, environmentalism, social security, and so on.
The left-populist alternative to Social Security and unemployment insurance proposed by Farmer-Labor Senator Ernest Lundeen of Minnesota was far superior to Roosevelt's proposal, because Lundeen's version was specifically designed to include African Americans, and Roosevelt's was specifically designed to help them as little as possible -- he needed the South. (The populist Farmer Labor party also included many Jews in leadership positions, and never recovered from the 1938 election, which featured intense Republican Jew-baiting.)
Southern populists either began as racists or ended that way, but guess what? Every goddamn thing in the south was racist. Some populists were racists, but so were a lot of people.
During the thirties the New Deal was partly populist, but the populists split on WWII (some were isolationists), and from about 1941 on the Democratic Party was purely technocratic and administrative. Populists wanted a two way dialogue between the government and the populace, but administrative liberals think of voters as idiots to persuade and problems to be solved.
During the fifties Daniel Bell, Arthur Schlesinger, and Richard Hofstadter smeared the populists, and their opinion has become an orthodoxy, above all among Democrats.
The Democrats are now the party of cultural, educated and credentialed elites, plus minorities, and they are competing with the party of the business and moneyed elites. By training and conviction Democrats are unwilling and unable to even try communicate to the lumpen, so fake Republican populists get a lot of free votes.
The worst of it is this: I've spent about the last six years trying to convince liberals and Democrats to get mad and roll up their sleeves, but it's been almost impossible. Democrats are rule-followers and organization men (persons?), and for them moralism is just plain bad, anger is just plain bad, and you can never really be sure who's right or wong. Every professional and every academic knows these things.
Obviously demographic changes mean that the old reliance on small farmers and factory workers won't work any more, but there are plenty of people with no money and crappy jobs (including, but not only, illegals who can't vote), and Democrats need to learn to represent them.
I'm not a "the-worse-the-better" guy, but I expect that during the next ten years a lot of fine people are going to find, (once they too are ruined, as a lot of high tech people already have been) that they are just peasants in the eyes of the people who actually own this country. Maybe things will change then.
