THE PEOPLE, NO
A Brief History of Anti-Populism
By Thomas Frank
ECONOMIC DIGNITY
By Gene Sperling

Is the central truth of the 2016 election that Donald Trump won by capitalizing on the racism, xenophobia and fear of cultural displacement of older white voters? Or is it that he saw more clearly than others the frustration and anxiety of those who had been left behind in a globalized, winner-take-all economy? Democrats have not arrived at a clear answer, which is why the last two candidates left standing in the primaries were Joe Biden, who promised to restore the status quo ante, and Bernie Sanders, who promised to overthrow the forces that oppressed and immiserated American workers.

Biden may have won the nomination but he did not win the battle of ideas. According to Sanders, the centrists who have dominated the Democratic Party for the last generation have sold out the party’s base — and the working-class whites who became Trump’s base — to the forces of reaction. In “The People, No,” the historian Thomas Frank, very much in the Sanders camp, traces that story yet further back, to the first popular cries against the dominion of Wall Street. Frank describes an indigenous radical tradition that descends from Jefferson and Paine and stretches forward to Franklin Roosevelt and Martin Luther King Jr. He insists that the proper name for that tradition derives from the agrarian radicals of the late 19th century who form the core of his narrative: populism.

Why does it matter what we call it? Because, Frank says, the rise of Donald Trump, and of figures like Viktor Orban in Hungary and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, has turned “populism” into a scare word. In a raft of books written since 2016 (including my own, “What Was Liberalism?”), populism has come to be understood not as an ideology of the left (or the right), but rather as a means of marshaling an imagined “people” against “others,” whether political opponents, racial or ethnic minorities or elites. The “core claim of populism,” as the political scientist Jan-Werner Müller writes, is that “only some of the people are really the people.” Populism is a kind of heresy of democracy.

Those are fighting words for Frank, who championed the populists in a well-known earlier book, “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” He regards “antipopulism” as itself an ideology, one that “always serves as a tool for justifying unaccountable power.” In the most compelling passages of “The People, No,” Frank unearths the populists from the rubble piled atop them by historians like Richard Hofstadter, who used the movement as evidence not of native radicalism but of native paranoia and protofascism. In fact, Frank writes, the populists were not reactionaries, protectionists, obscurantists, xenophobes or racists. He quotes the Georgia populist Tom Watson addressing Black and white farmers: “You are kept apart that you may be separately fleeced of your earnings.” In sickening detail, Frank describes the ruthless assault that Republicans launched against this threat to white hegemony and free-market ideology in the 1896 presidential election.

But there’s a problem with this narrative: Watson would later go on to help refound the Ku Klux Klan, though you won’t learn about that here. Frank mentions “the South Carolina demagogue Ben Tillman” without noting that only a few years earlier, Pitchfork Ben had stood high in the populist pantheon. He writes glowingly of William Jennings Bryan, the Democrat whom the Populist Party endorsed for president in 1896, but does not remind the reader that Bryan ended his career ranting about the evils of modern science in the Scopes monkey trial. Demagogy may not have been the populists’ “true” nature; their heroism, and tragedy, were real. But how, given this history, can one wholly dismiss the kinship between the populists and the followers of Orban and Trump? Is it really a sign of elitism and hostility to democracy to regard invocations of “the people,” whether by right-wing nationalists or left-wing activists, as dangerous invitations to exclude the not-people?

Frank’s purpose here is explicitly polemical: He wants to realign history in order to force us to reimagine the present. The great cleavage of the past century, he insists, is not between “progress” and “reaction,” or “liberal” and “conservative,” but between “ordinary people” and the elite of both parties. Thus Franklin Roosevelt was a populist while “progressive” Teddy Roosevelt was an agent of reaction — even though Franklin traced his own ideological descent to Teddy as well as to Jefferson.

In Frank’s view, Bernie’s with the people, and the Democratic establishment — the Biden faction — is in the pocket of the fat cats. The bottom line is class. But this poses another problem for Frank, because even before our Black Lives Matter moment much of the activist left cared less about class than about issues of identity. Frank treats identity politics as yet another species of elitism. Who, then, are “the people”? Are they the older working-class African-Americans who put Biden over the top in the Democratic primaries? Apparently not. But it was the white working class that provided Donald Trump with his margin of victory in 2016. How could that be? These Trump voters were, Frank explains — as he did in his earlier book on Kansas — beguiled by the “phony populism of the right.” By bad populism, not good populism.

Yet many of the Democratic leaders and policy experts whom Frank accuses of antipopulism now agree that liberal centrism has reached a dead end. The combination of the calls for racial justice that have filled our streets and the need for enormous government intervention in the face of the coronavirus pandemic will only hasten that leftward movement. Exhibit A would be Gene Sperling, a former senior economic official in the administrations of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. In “Economic Dignity,” this consummate insider lays out an agenda closer to Sanders than to Biden. Sperling writes of “forces of domination and humiliation” that define the lives of many low-wage earners. Unorganized workers, he argues, need labor rights and the full panoply of social protections; unionized workers need a voice in corporate affairs, as they enjoy in places like Sweden. Though Sperling prefers direct payments to people suffering dislocation to a wholly universal basic income, in most respects he has gone full Nordic.

Sperling does not thoroughly explain, or even acknowledge, his own conversion; he appears to be one of the many centrists who were shaken out of their neoliberal faith in the marketplace by the 2016 election. In seeking some orienting principle beyond economic growth and incremental redistribution, Sperling has landed on the idea, unavoidably amorphous, of “dignity.” Liberals tend to look on talk of “values” as a cynical distraction from matters of economic justice; that is, in fact, the central theme of “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” Yet Sperling makes a forceful case that only by speaking to matters of the spirit can liberals root their belief in economic justice in people’s deepest aspirations — in their sense of purpose and self-worth.

What would a focus on “economic dignity” entail? Sperling takes issue with conservatives who claim that free-market competition offers each of us the opportunity for self-realization. Does an Uber driver barely making enough to pay the rent have a sense of self-worth? In a true “compact of contribution,” Sperling asserts, an activist state would “support and give every opportunity to every American to experience the sense of dignity that comes from adding value and pursuing purpose.” The state must help the market provide employment for all, and that employment must be “meaningful.”

Sperling does not seem to have a theory of change. He is content to suggest that “Congress could” pass this or that among his proposals. But it might not, even under a President Biden. Frank would tell Sperling that his ambitious agenda cannot be enacted without directly challenging entrenched interests. The movement to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, for example, succeeded through street activism and strikes. Since Sperling praises the movement, I suspect he would agree. It is a cheering thought that the gulf between the populists and the antipopulists may not be quite so great as Thomas Frank supposes.