The Two Faces of Populism

Once again, America has discovered the power of populism. Patrick J. Buchanan will probably not capture the Republican nomination--the “extremist” label has been affixed to him. Still, he has already illustrated how vital--and frightening--the old language that seeks to stir up anti-establishment fervor can be.

Mainstream pundits and reporters have been amazed at how skillfully their onetime media colleague combines an often bigoted defense of “traditional, patriotic” values with fiery blasts at “corporate butchers.” It seems a luridly innovative attempt to address fears of a nation in decline. But, throughout U.S. history, populist voices have spoken to both the fears and the hopes of ordinary people--the great bulk of them white.

The wish to separate the sunny aspects of populism from its darker side is understandable. Unfortunately, it ignores the fundamental nature of this critical American idiom. Populism is as promising and as troublesome as democracy itself.

To accuse a tiny, privileged elite of taking wealth and power from “the people” can stimulate public debate and hasten needed changes; yet, it also invites conspiracy thinking. And preaching that civic virtue resides only among hard-working, God-fearing American citizens suggests that recent immigrants, the dependent poor and non-Christians do not belong to the great and good majority. Buchanan also seems to have an inordinate fondness for erstwhile concentration-camp guards and followers of David Duke. But, as an anti-elitist rhetorician, he is more traditionally American than both his fans and his foes may realize.

Andrew Jackson, the first president to rise from humble origins, did much to create populism’s dual personality. In the 1820s and ‘30s, he rallied small farmers and craftsmen to take part in the political process--an act that nearly all the founding fathers, believers in “a natural aristocracy,” disdained. But Jackson was also a dedicated racist. He justified slavery and threw the Cherokees off their ancestral lands.

And “Old Hickory” was fond of demonizing his rivals. When Congress renewed the charter of the Bank of the United States, Jackson vetoed it, arguing that the bank was a “monopoly” controlled by wealthy and well-born Philadelphians. His veto message harped on the fact that “more than a fourth part of the stock” was owned by “foreigners.” Jackson knew a growing economy needed bankers. But his rhetoric portrayed them as parasites, using the money of industrious people to make a fortune for themselves

In similar fashion, the third party of the 1890s that gave populism its name promoted both grass-roots democracy and the inflated notion that “plutocrats” in top hats and diamond stick pins were gleefully impoverishing average Americans. The People’s Party wanted to transform a system where railroads charged farmers as much as they could bear, and the federal courts helped employers bust unions and escape any regulations. But the populists’ thundering charge against “the money power” was almost Gothic in tone: “A vast conspiracy against mankind has been organized on two continents and is rapidly taking possession of the world.”

The party also had its own version of America First. Its platform advocated a total ban on alien ownership of land; and many populists, who came overwhelmingly from the rural and Protestant South and West, viewed big Eastern cities as evil places--peopled as they were by immigrants who frequented saloons and prayed in a Babel of tongues.

Four decades later, the Great Depression inspired an energetic renewal of rhetorical assaults on the monied and the privileged. Champions of ordinary folks, their goodness and wisdom assumed, ranged from industrial unionists, on the left, to Jew-baiters, on the right. Most tried to alleviate the pain of the jobless and the malnourished. The nation owes such reforms as the Social Security Act and the minimum wage, in part, to their zealous cultivation of the grass roots.

However, those who stirred mass democracy routinely lapsed into demagogy. Father Charles Coughlin told his radio audience of 30 million that “international bankers,” such as the Rothschilds, had planned the Depression “to create an artificial scarcity of money.” Louisiana’s Huey Long promised to make “every man a king and woman a queen” simply by confiscating, through taxation, the savings of the very rich. And both liberal Democrats and leaders of the militant CIO accused anti-union industrialists, including Henry Ford, of being quasi-fascists. A New Deal Southern senator, Theodore G. Bilbo, vigorously denounced “rich corporations” and “paid lawyers” for exploiting “the farmer, the soldier and the laboring man,” even as he insisted that black Americans were inferior to whites and should never be allowed to vote.

The postwar conservative movement that spawned Buchanan updated these rhetorical habits. It exposed a new conspiracy against the average man and woman: Big Government. From Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s charge that “bright young men who are born with silver spoons in their mouth” were “selling this nation out” to House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s notion that “the liberal elite” is the enemy of “normal Americans,” the right made the welfare state appear to be the antithesis of every self-reliant, productive instinct in the land. The growing power of multinational corporations--favorite bogeymen of earlier populist tribunes--seldom get mentioned. Whatever his sins, Buchanan has reminded voters that big money can wreck working lives at least as painfully as federal bureaucrats can regulate them.

Is populism, continually reinvigorated to chill a fresh elite and warm a new coalition of ordinary folk, a language we should shun? In the whirlpool of America’s perceived decline, populism does encourage the dispirited and the vengeful--angry white men spoiling for a fight and candidates who substitute venom for vision. Its assertion of divisive sentiments based on class and cultural status makes it harder to talk as if the nation still served as a vast melting pot.

Yet, the desire to transcend populism is shortsighted. At its core, whether practiced by left or right, there exists a supremely optimistic and quite patriotic faith: Entrenched elites and upper classes are, by definition, un-American; the “people,” once mobilized, can topple the haughtiest of foes. The populist impulse persists because it continually draws attention to the gap between American ideals and those institutions and authorities whose performance betrays them. No major problem can be solved unless members of what a Jacksonian politician called “the productive and burden-bearing classes” participate in the task.

Such citizens, many of whom are now frustrated and confused about their future and the nation’s, have always brought along their prejudices and self-interested myths. But, then, so have the people who ridicule or patronize them, who guard a not-so-secret wish that ordinary people were as rational and tolerant as they imagine themselves to be.

When an attack of condescension masked as civility strikes, one might recall the response labor leader Samuel Gompers gave, at the turn of the century, to an employer who complained about the “undiplomatic” behavior of steelworkers in his firm. They had gone on strike to protest abuse by their foremen. “We don’t raise diplomats,” snapped Gompers, “at 15 cents an hour.”

Like the American dream itself, populism dwells too deeply in the fears and expectations of citizens to be trivialized or replaced. We dare not speak solely within its dichotomous terms. But, without it, we are lost.