Yesterday, in Quick Hits, Mark Matson linked to an article at the American Prospect, "Forget Populism", which is, essentially, a direct attack on one of the Prospect's founders, Robert Kuttner [who is singled out by name], and which would be far more at home in the New Republic. The article, by one Kevin Mattson, reads like your typical, standard-issue anti-populist screed: populists are angry; anger is bad; angry people can get elected, but they can't govern; the people are stupid, and I'm smart; so go back to sleep; nothing to see hear; move along.
Such screeds are invariably deeply dishonest. For one thing, they are everything bad that they accuse populists of being, except that they use a different linguistic mode. But if one looks beyond the style to the substance, one finds all the demonization commonly attributed to populists, and virtually none of the sober-minded, responsible rationalism claimed as a birthright by their critics. They invariably refuse to take populism seriously, resorting to sneering just when they ought to be thinking [emphasis added]:
Populism's simplicity is its central fault. Its philosophical premise -- if there is such a thing -- is that "the people" are the embodiment of virtue, uncorrupted by power and wealth the way elites are.
But, of course, this sneered-at premise is almost self-evidently true in the sense that populists express it. The original populists of the 1880s and 1890s did not cause the severe and systemic economic distress that afflicted them, and so much more of the nation: The elites did, even though they did it mostly unwittingly, babbling along about the wonders of they system even as it impoverished millions of the most hardworking people it was supposed to benefit. Not all members of the elite were responsible, of course, but the elites of business, politics and civic affairs all collectively failed as a class to ensure that the Constitution's mandate was fulfilled: to promote the general welfare.
However much self-congratulatory anti-populists prattle on about their own superiority, they never seem to get around to grappling with the objective failures that give rise to populism in the first place. Nor do they even use a consistent standard when they argue that populism is a failure. Typically, Mattson argues that populism didn't work, because Populists failed to gain political power. Following some quotes of Populist rhetoric, he writes:
Good stuff. Yet it didn't work, not even back then. The Populist Party won slim margins in 1892 and suffered the fate of most third parties in America (in this case fusing with the Democrats before crumbling); Bryan lost the 1896 election.
He then pretends to go beyond this crass dismissal:
But let us imagine for a moment that the Populists had won. Would their rhetoric have saved them from the difficulties that lay ahead, allowing them to institute reforms in the interest of the people?
However, he never actually answers the question, instead indulging in a brief moment of pondering, "what is populism, anyway?" and then deciding it's irrelevant, because of the emergence of rightwing populism after left-wing populism had crushed or coopted. The intellectual dishonesty of this argument is breathtaking--but surely almost invisible to the likes of the author and his class:
Historians have debated the meaning of the original populist movement for years. Some, like Larry Goodwyn and the late Christopher Lasch, believed populists were democratic yet reactionary, hoping to block progress and preserve petty-bourgeois ownership against the onslaught of modern industrial capitalism. Others, like the late C. Vann Woodward and Charles Postel, depicted populists as rational and forward-looking. As Postel points out in The Populist Vision, populists believed in planning and took as their inspiration for government's effectiveness and power the success of the American postal system (not exactly a model ripe for replication today, of course).
These distinctions are important for historians, but they're largely academic. Once America moved from being a small, rural society to an industrial and then a post-industrial high-tech society, populism veered rightward.
What this neatly overlooks is just how much of what the original Populists argued for has come to pass--either at the hands of early1900s progressives, 1930s New Deal Democrats, or the final cruel ironies of the economic system itself. They were against unbridled corporate power and related political corruption, against an utterly insular unelected Senate, against the gold standard (take that, Ron Paul!), against vast concentrations of wealth in the hands of a few while millions teetered on the verge of starvation. Morally and politically, the Populists were 100% right on all the big issues that caused them to mobilize themselves. It is only by totally otherizing them, divorcing their ideas and their influence from the rest of American history that Mattson and others of his ilk can sustain the pretense of their irrelevancy and failure.
On the other had, skipping forward a couple of generations, suddenly Mattson is attentive to the complexities of policy, in order to discredit populism:
Recent attempts to paint Harry Truman as a raging populist ignore significant portions of his presidency, such as his willingness to let the Office of Price Administration wither, his argument that Joseph McCarthy's populist attack on the State Department (the senator's demonization of the silver-spoon, Ivy League elite) was dangerous, his building of the national-security state, and his dislike for labor unions in times of crisis. At one point, he talked of shooting John Lewis, president of the United Mine Workers.
The reality is that knowledgeable critics know that Truman was a machine politician, remarkable primarily in that he was not visibly corrupt. His forced discovery of his populist voice--which turned back the rising GOP tide in the 1948 election--draws praise not only because it was politically successful, but also because it was unexpected, which is why it's plausibly suggested that Obama could do something similar himself, notwithstanding the many facets of his rule that would clash with it, just like Harry Truman.
If you dig down into the bowels of this article, it eventually becomes clear what's going on here. It's already apparent that Mattson doesn't really know much about history or political philosophy--at least not as they apply to populism. But he does know about trying to campaign as a populist, when you're really an elitist neo-liberal. And that usually doesn't go too well:
When I worked on the John Kerry campaign in Appalachian Ohio, we struggled with the fact that Kerry was no man of the people. When we were sent flyers from national headquarters showing Kerry duck hunting, I thought at first, sure, here's a good pitch -- this man won't take your rifles away (and more abstractly, Democrats protect public hunting lands better than Republicans, a message few voters seemed to absorb). But then I thought more realistically about my region: There were deer hunters in abundance, but there were no duck hunters -- that's so New England. As I distributed these flyers, I realized voters found the idea of John Kerry as a potential hunting buddy to be shameless pandering. This is anecdotal experience, yes, but still, fair warning.
It's fair warning, all right. Fair warning that Mattson is looking at everything through the wrong end of the telescope, viewing the entire world through the experiential framework of campaign tactics. Which, of course, is SOP for Versailles. Everything exists only in relationship to their own very limited life experience. The Bubble is all they know.
