“Anti-establishment populism has been the most important force in our politics for the last twenty years. It is neither liberal nor conservative. Politicians on both sides have used it effectively. American populism has three important characteristics. It is ideologically ambivalent. And it has displaced progressivism as the dominant motif of American Politics. Elites tend to be rich and well-educated, hence, economically conservative and culturally sophisticated. Populism is anti-elitist and therefore just the reverse—left wing on economic issues and right-wing on social and cultural issues.”
--Political analyst William
Schneider, 1986 (1)
Writing nearly a quarter
century ago that America was nearing the ‘boiling point’, conservative political
strategist Kevin Phillips, author of Richard Nixon’s 1968 ‘Southern Strategy’,
documented the agony of America’s middle class as it writhed in pain under the impact
of Reaganomics. Little could he have
imagined that the Middle Class would continue to endure the pressure cooker for
more than another two decades. Phillips, in his initial work “The Politics of Rich and Poor” and his sequel
to “Boiling Point”, “Arrogant Capital”, documents
not only the pressures and decline of the contemporary middle class in the
United States, but puts the present conundrum in the context of previous ‘populist’
revolts that have served to correct the abuses of wealth in this country. His reference here to the observation of
contemporary political analyst William Schneider that American populism is a
schizophrenic affair in that it is economically liberal and socially
conservative is both illuminating and not new.
Historian Richard Hofstadter, writing more than a quarter century before Schneider and Phillips in his work “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life” (2) had many of the same observations regarding previous eras of political reform. The historical record reveals that all ‘populist’ movements are a mix of liberalism and conservatism, specifically in the United States the Greenback and Progressive movements of the late 19th and early 20th century have always been a complex mix of liberal and conservative, intellectual and anti-intellectual elements struggling for dominance in an effort to give political definition and produce political remedy to the challenges of their times. Therefore, it was the ‘prairie fire’ coming out of the plains of Kansas and Nebraska, as well as from the Deep South, that drove the revolts of the late 19th century organized around the Grange and the Greenback movements and thrice nominating the scourge of Wall Street, Democrat William Jennings Bryan for President of the United States.
And it was the same impetus from the same regions added to the industrial unrest in the Mid-West that fueled the revolts producing the great Progressive upheaval of the early decades of the last century and thereafter the New Deal. But make no mistake about it, the same political forces that gave us the 8-hour work day, ended child labor, won for women the right to vote, re-instituted a federal income tax and eventually produced a ‘progressive’ graduated income tax, enforce anti-trust and broke up the cartels, instituted referendum, recall, and the direct election of the U.S. Senate, was the same movement that created and enforce Jim Crow in the South, restricted immigration, resisted attempts to end lynching’s. Even as late as the 1930’s to the 1960’s, efforts to move a ‘progressive’ agenda depended on working with or getting around the mossbacks of conservatism, congressional committee chairmen almost all of them from Southern States. Just as FDR had to make his deals with the likes of Arkansas Senator Joseph Robinson who ,as Senate Majority Leader, he would have to rely upon in order to herd much needed New Deal Legislation through the Senate , so LBJ would have to wheedle his way past the staunch opposition from the likes of Senate Judiciary Committee chairman James Eastland of Mississippi, Eastland’s fellow Mississippi Senator John Stennis, Georgia Senators Richard Russell and Herman Tallmadge, as well as Strom Thurmond and a host of others that held powerful committee and sub-committee chairmanships and all signers of the ‘southern manifesto’ hell-bent on stopping the civil rights initiative of the Johnson administration in its tracks.
Socially conservative but economically liberal, these representatives of the American ‘heartland’, would regularly enough line up to support federal programs like the TVA but would stand in stalwart opposition to any attempt to extend their progressive agenda to minorities. Indeed, it was Lyndon Johnson’s attempt to do that very thing—that is extend the benefits of the New Deal to those that were left behind—that brought about the unravelling of the New Deal Coalition. The ‘populist’ movement broke apart into its constituent elements with ‘populist’ economic liberals joining fellow social liberals and ‘populist’ social conservatives aligning themselves with emerging religiously based ‘Moral Majority’ joining forces with the main-line eastern moneyed interests and in the process forming a new governing coalition that would, with some slight interruptions, dominate American politics for the next half-century.
Historian Richard Hofstadter, writing more than a quarter century before Schneider and Phillips in his work “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life” (2) had many of the same observations regarding previous eras of political reform. The historical record reveals that all ‘populist’ movements are a mix of liberalism and conservatism, specifically in the United States the Greenback and Progressive movements of the late 19th and early 20th century have always been a complex mix of liberal and conservative, intellectual and anti-intellectual elements struggling for dominance in an effort to give political definition and produce political remedy to the challenges of their times. Therefore, it was the ‘prairie fire’ coming out of the plains of Kansas and Nebraska, as well as from the Deep South, that drove the revolts of the late 19th century organized around the Grange and the Greenback movements and thrice nominating the scourge of Wall Street, Democrat William Jennings Bryan for President of the United States.
And it was the same impetus from the same regions added to the industrial unrest in the Mid-West that fueled the revolts producing the great Progressive upheaval of the early decades of the last century and thereafter the New Deal. But make no mistake about it, the same political forces that gave us the 8-hour work day, ended child labor, won for women the right to vote, re-instituted a federal income tax and eventually produced a ‘progressive’ graduated income tax, enforce anti-trust and broke up the cartels, instituted referendum, recall, and the direct election of the U.S. Senate, was the same movement that created and enforce Jim Crow in the South, restricted immigration, resisted attempts to end lynching’s. Even as late as the 1930’s to the 1960’s, efforts to move a ‘progressive’ agenda depended on working with or getting around the mossbacks of conservatism, congressional committee chairmen almost all of them from Southern States. Just as FDR had to make his deals with the likes of Arkansas Senator Joseph Robinson who ,as Senate Majority Leader, he would have to rely upon in order to herd much needed New Deal Legislation through the Senate , so LBJ would have to wheedle his way past the staunch opposition from the likes of Senate Judiciary Committee chairman James Eastland of Mississippi, Eastland’s fellow Mississippi Senator John Stennis, Georgia Senators Richard Russell and Herman Tallmadge, as well as Strom Thurmond and a host of others that held powerful committee and sub-committee chairmanships and all signers of the ‘southern manifesto’ hell-bent on stopping the civil rights initiative of the Johnson administration in its tracks.
Socially conservative but economically liberal, these representatives of the American ‘heartland’, would regularly enough line up to support federal programs like the TVA but would stand in stalwart opposition to any attempt to extend their progressive agenda to minorities. Indeed, it was Lyndon Johnson’s attempt to do that very thing—that is extend the benefits of the New Deal to those that were left behind—that brought about the unravelling of the New Deal Coalition. The ‘populist’ movement broke apart into its constituent elements with ‘populist’ economic liberals joining fellow social liberals and ‘populist’ social conservatives aligning themselves with emerging religiously based ‘Moral Majority’ joining forces with the main-line eastern moneyed interests and in the process forming a new governing coalition that would, with some slight interruptions, dominate American politics for the next half-century.
Ideologically
ambivalent, profoundly anti-establishment, anti-elitist and—according to
historian Hofstadter—more than occasionally deeply paranoid Populism has today emerged as a
full-blown political upheaval. No longer simply “ideologically ambivalent” but
spanning the entire political spectrum from the ‘political revolution’ offered
by the candidacy of Senator Bernie Sanders on the American left, to the deeply
paranoid, anti-intellectual, the populist revolt now underway in the United
States is now systematically about the business of rejecting the ‘political
elite’ in an effort to free itself from the yoke of what the middle classes
view as a governing ‘class’ that in Reagan’s haunting words are ‘the problem’.
It is worth noting here
that of the candidates offering themselves for consideration in the present
election nearly all with any discernable experience in governing have been
summarily jettisoned by the electorate.
Gone is Rick Perry of Texas, the nation’s longest serving governor and
the first to make his exit, followed by the Governors of Wisconsin and New
Jersey, Senator Lindsay Graham of South Carolina and one John Ellis (JEB) Bush,
leaving now the Real Estate Tycoon with the bad hair, the former Detroit
neurosurgeon, the neophyte Senator from Florida and one Ted Cruz of Texas who,
Senator Graham has informed us, if he were to be shot and killed on the Senate
floor his assailant, were he to be tried by Cruz’s fellow Senators, would be acquitted
and set free.
We have been here
before. A century and more ago our
ancestors likewise rose in revolt against what Phillips now refers to as arrogant capital. Rising in revolt against the excesses of the Gilded Age our ancestors managed to
harness the pain, the anxieties, and the anger of those being exploited by the
dominant economic elites by taking control of the language, controlling the
debate, and marshalling the political energy by forging a truly Progressive movement. As Gore Vidal once observed about Roosevelt
and the New Deal, “it could easily have gone the other way”, meaning that the
movement could have degenerated into a crypto fascist affair. The outcome, as the experiences of twentieth
century Europe attest, is neither reliably progressive nor a foregone
conclusion.
This, it seems to me is
what lies at the heart of this election.
The question isn’t simply a battle for the soul of the Democratic Party. It isn’t simply a question of progressives wresting control of the
party from the clutches of the mossbacks in the form of the remnants of Bill
Clinton’s old DLC cabal; it is a struggle for control of the larger populist
movement now transcendent across the political spectrum.
Bernie Sanders is quite
right. Donald Trump’s supporters are Bernie’s natural constituency inasmuch as
Bernie is addressing the economic issues that so belabor the working classes—those
remnants of the ‘Reagan-Democrats” cum ‘Teabaggers’
whose protest is largely over economic rather than social issues and for
whom the Republican alliance with big business and Wall Street are anathema. These people have no interest in dismantling
the New Deal, they have no interest in savaging the safety net, or in cutting
education, road building or any of the rest of the agenda of groups like the
Heritage Foundation and the Club for Growth.
And they are now exercising enough power to send the pre-emptive ‘establishment’
favorites—the Scott’s, the Bushes, the Christies—packing.
The question before us
in this election is who is going to lead
this revolt? Who is going to give
definition to the movement? Will it be the Republicans or the Democrats? Will it be the Liberals or once again the
conservatives? The last time such a
revolt occurred nearly half-century ago in 1968 it was the conservatives that
gave definition—Nixon’s Southern strategy and his “Silent Majority”. Will they once again steal the floor and
become the voice of the discontent?
It is worth repeating
here. When Robert Kennedy was
assassinated in June of 1968, many of his followers—especially in the old
populist regions of the country (the South and plains) moved their support to
George Wallace. On its face one wouldn’t
link these two political figures in American politics. But Wallace, stripped of his avowedly racist overtones,
was like his precursor Huey Long a populist.
Stridently anti-elite railing against ‘brief-case toting beaurocrats
and ‘pointy-headed intellectuals’ Wallace was, as was Long who waged war
against the dominance of Standard Oil and other major interests in Louisiana
politics, nevertheless a stalwart defender of the economic interests of the
middle classes.
The present revolt of
the Middle Classes, now spanning the entire political spectrum, is pregnant with
possibility and fraught with danger. As
the ground beneath us begins to tremble and the earth begins to move beneath
our very feet the question before us is “where
will the new political center fall?” and “what will be the nature of the coalition that emerges that will govern
this country for the foreseeable future?” These questions are not left to
chance. These questions are solved by
political organization and advocacy, translating themselves into political
agendas and votes; about which I have two observations:
First, the political ‘left’
or what passes for the political left in this country is late to the
table. Groups like the ‘Freedom
Foundation”, Billionaires like the Koch Brothers and others, and conservative
stink-tanks like the Heritage Foundation and Club for Growth, have been working
for years on developing agendas and building political organizations. They, heretofore, have determined the
language and, therefore, the terms of the debate. Liberals have been slow to recognize this
resulting in the wholesale losses of seats in state legislatures,
governorship's, and seats in the U.S. congress. A great deal of ground must be made up in a
real hurry if we are to marshal the political energy engendered by the revolt
into constructive public policy.
Secondly, for the above
reasons it will be a complete disaster if the Democrats were to nominate
Hillary Clinton for president of the United States. Hillary, the ultimate ‘insider’, Wall Street’s
and the Walton Family’s favorite Democrat, is hardly in a position to tap the
current rage against the political elite’s that have created this economic and
national catastrophe. Indeed, her continual
insistence that she is the one with ‘experience’ while it may win her the
nomination, is as ham-handed and tone-deaf as JEB Bush insisting that the
remedy for our current angst is for people to ‘work harder’. For it should have long since been obvious
that the public’s rejection of the most experience candidates on the Republican
side as well as the remarkable success of the insurgency of outsider Bernie
Sanders that the public does not and will not respect the dictates of the ‘elites’. And why should they? What did all that experience produce? Longer hours, less pay, more money being
funneled to the investor class.
The question, as
previously formulated is who is going to lead this revolt? If the Dems nominate Clinton, the beneficiary
is Trump and the conservative movement just as the nomination of Humphrey in
1968 benefited first Wallace and then Nixon. The political center, as in 1968, shifts to
the wrong. If the Dems nominate Sanders,
then liberals have a real chance at claiming the votes not only of large
numbers of independents but also of that part of the Republican base that has
no interest in social conservatism at the price of sacrificing their own
economic interests
.
This much is certain: The
political center has given way; it no longer holds. No one is interested in
Obama’s third term or, given that Obama surrounded himself with the likes of Geithner,
Summers and a host of Wall Street contributors and advisers from Bill Clinton’s
administration, Clinton’s fifth term. It’s
so passé, so late 20th century.
________
(1). See Phillips, Kevin
P. “The
Boiling Point”. Random House, New York 1993 page 58
(2) Hofstadter, Richard.
“Anti-Intellectualism
in American Life” Alfred A.
Knopf, New York
1970 434 pages.
