Thomas Frank has a simple thesis: populism has been mischaracterized by its enemies, since its birth at the end of the 19th century, as a “one-word evocation of the logic of the mob”.
In our own time, it has been skewered as “the secret weapon” behind the wildly unlikely selection of Donald Trump as president.
The Guardian contributor and author of What’s the Matter with Kansas? points out that Trump’s triumph was only made possible by an “anti-populist instrument from long ago”, the electoral college. “But that irony quickly receded into the background.”
As a president whose policies have almost exclusively benefitted the top 1%, with vast tax cuts for the rich and – at the moment – not one more cent from Trump’s Senate allies for the economic victims of the pandemic, our benighted leader is actually the pure opposite of a true populist.
Frank writes that populism has been continuously misidentified by elites, so much so that the liberal Center for American Progress made an extremely unusual alliance with the rightwing American Enterprise Institute to co-author a report denouncing “authoritarian populism”.
True populists, Frank writes, the adherents of the People’s Party who adopted the word in 1891, were those who supported “a specific list of reforms designed to take power away from ‘the plutocrats’” while advancing the “rights and needs, the interests and welfare of the people”.
They were protesting “unbearable debt, monopoly and corruption … forcing the country to acknowledge that ordinary Americans who were just as worthy as bankers or railroad barons were being ruined by an economic system that in fact answered to no moral laws.”
Which of course is a perfect description of the version of American capitalism which reigns unfettered today.
Frank bows to no one in his determination to highlight “racist, rightwing demagogues and figuring out what can be done to defeat them”. Opponents of the right, he writes, “should be claiming the high ground of populism, not ceding it to guys like Donald Trump”. He proclaims himself “flabbergasted anew every time I see the word abused in this way. How does it help reformers … to deliberately devalue the coinage of the American reform tradition?”
Denunciations of populism come “from a long tradition of pessimism about popular sovereignty and democratic participation”, a “tradition of quasi-aristocratic scorn” that has “allowed the paranoid right to flower so abundantly”. Anti-populism’s “most toxic ingredient”, Frank writes, is “a highbrow contempt for ordinary Americans”.
He has particular contempt for experts, including most of the academic establishment. “Millions of foundation dollars have been invested”, he writes, to promote the canard that populism is a “threat to liberal democracy … Your daily paper, if your town still has one, almost certainly throws he word ‘populist’ at racist demagogue and pro-labor liberals alike”.
“Populism,” he adds, “was about mass enlightenment, not the empowerment of a clique of foundation favorites or Ivy League grads.”
These are the people he holds responsible for failing to prosecute any bankers after the housing bubble fiasco, negotiating “disastrous trade agreements” and “prosecuting stupid wars”.
The best argument Frank makes for populism lies in the record of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who he correctly identifies as “the most consequential president of the 20th century”, a leader who didn’t “merely talk in a populist way”, but delivered.
“FDR bailed out farmers and homeowners, he protected unions, he pulled the teeth of the Wall Street wolves, he smashed oligopolies, he took America off the gold standard and … he was roundly condemned by the nation’s respectables as the most dangerous demagogue of them all, a sort of one man mob-rule.”
For modern progressives, Roosevelt’s attacks against Wall Street have the greatest resonance. In 1936 he declared: “Government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob … Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me – and I welcome their hatred.”
According to Frank, “painful though it may be for liberals to acknowledge nowadays, it was Roosevelt’s willingness to disregard elites” that revived America after the Great Depression.
Frank also offers a strong section on Martin Luther King Jr’s understanding of the populism of the 1890s and how Southern plutocrats helped to destroy it, enacting laws “that made it a crime for negroes and whites to come together as equals at any level”. The poor white man was given “a psychological bird that told him no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than the black man. And he ate Jim Crow.”
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
