For the last four years the American commentary class has been in a state of sustained hysteria over what they call “populism”. As our experts use the word, “populism” refers to the peculiar views of Donald Trump, or those of the leaders of Hungary and Brazil and Poland. More formally, “populism” is said to be the nightmare “ism” in which racist authoritarians attack the news media and ignore the authority of the learned.
I welcome anyone who wants to join the fight against conservatism, a movement that will celebrate the 40th anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s presidential triumph this November. But whenever we hear our designated authorities and opinion leaders use “populism” as a synonym for everything that is wrong with that movement, we should remember that the word was originally invented to designate precisely the opposite sensibility.
Unlike other political terms, we know almost exactly where, when, and why the word “populism” came to be. It was coined in May 1891 by a group of Kansas politicos riding on a train between Kansas City and Topeka; a “populist” was to be a shorthand expression for supporters of a third-party movement then beginning to challenge the shibboleths of 19-century politics and economics.
The Populist party, as it came to be known, was part of a leftwing flowering then happening around the world, the rough American equivalent of the labor parties and social-democratic unions springing up in other lands. “Populism”, as its adherents saw it, was a fine and hopeful thing, a mass movement of farmers and industrial workers demanding action by the government to improve the economic situation of ordinary people and, while they were at it, a war on corruption as well. In an extremely unusual move for the time, the populists tried, in the movement’s early days, to enlist black farmers alongside white ones in the south in their fight for economic reform. (It didn’t end well.)
American elites of the day were unanimous in their fear and loathing of populism. They used the movement’s name as a different sort of shorthand, meaning all the pathologies that upper-class people thought characterized the lesser orders.
According to America’s leading editors and men of letters, populism represented the irrational resentments of society’s losers and rural ignoramuses, who brayed for silly things like the income tax, a fiat currency and a crackdown on monopolies. Populism was said to be a kind of collective madness afflicting these lower orders, in which sinister demagogues – often female – beguiled the simple-minded people of the interior. Because populists questioned the gold standard – then the sacred bulwark of academic economics – elites reviled them as ignorant and anti-intellectual. Populism, in their thinking, was the class war come to America. In a climate of unhinged journalistic hysteria, America’s ruling establishment of the 1890s proceeded to beat populism down. (If you’re curious, you can peruse a selection of anti-populist political cartoons from that era on my website.)
For a few decades in the first half of the 20th century, American historians thought highly of populism, seeing it as the beginning of the reform tradition that eventually came into its own in the administration of Franklin Roosevelt.
Then everything changed. In the 1950s, American intellectuals soured on reform movements made up of working people. Led by the most famous historian of the period, Columbia University’s Richard Hofstadter, the eminent thinkers of that contented era painted populism as the great example of the scary things that could happen when society’s lower orders got organized. Rather than heroes, the pops were now seen as backwoods cranks who had risen up against a sophisticated economic system they simply could not understand. The men of mid-century rationality redefined populism as a generic shorthand for everything they themselves were not: bigots, xenophobes, anti-intellectual, anti-science, paranoid. “Populists” were people who were uncomfortable with complexity and out of step with modernity.
Although these “consensus” intellectuals never acknowledged it, their psychological reinterpretation of populism was pretty much the same bill of hysterical accusations that had been leveled at reformers by conservatives in the 1890s.
There was something else that should have been familiar about the mid-century attack on populism: as in the 1890s, it served to justify the rule of society’s upper echelons. The consensus intellectuals of the 1950s, like the propagandists of the 1890s, were defending a new social order in which they were now the elite: this was the dawn of managerial liberalism, with its respected experts, its gigantic research universities, its Organization Men, its collegial interest groups, and its Univac-minded administrators. In the enlightened 1950s, everyone knew that mass protest movements had no place in a period which Daniel Bell smugly characterized as the “End of Ideology”. Uprisings of working people were not how you achieved reform or prosperity; such blessings could only come through the empowerment of the highly educated personnel who now ran our great corporations and our defense establishment.
And so the consensus thinkers redefined populism as a catch-all noun denoting not merely the farmers’ movement of the 1890s but any situation in which democracy is out of control or in which ordinary people refuse to genuflect before social standing or scholarly attainment. As Bell put it in The End of Ideology, “populism goes further” than merely rejecting economic status: “That some are more qualified than others to assert opinions is vehemently denied.” An eminent sociologist, Edward Shils, asserted in 1956 that the populist “denies autonomy” to any institution of government. Populists, he wrote, despise the justice system and politicians, scorn learning and deny the right of privacy. More desirable by far was a deferential order in which the public accepted hierarchy. Also: “a sense of affinity among the elites”.
Hating populism quickly became a standard posture of mid-century academic liberalism. But there was something curious about the 50s generation’s scholarly attack on the people who originally invented the word: it was wrong.
Hofstadter, whose 1955 book on populism triggered the redefinition of the word, eventually came in for brutal punishment at the hands of his fellow historians, who enthusiastically demolished his psychological interpretation of the long-ago reform movement. Populism, they found, wasn’t any more backward-looking than any other movement that protested capitalism. It wasn’t against industrialization. It wasn’t hostile to education or learning. It was significantly less nativist or xenophobic than other groups of the time; in fact, the populists competed successfully for immigrant votes. Nor was the movement irrational or given to scapegoating: by the standards of the day it was well-informed and it kept its attention focused on economic issues.
But here’s what’s crazy: none of those facts seem to matter. Academic anti-populism lives on in almost precisely the same form as it did in the 1950s. Indeed, it thrives. Today, seemingly every well-educated person in America and Europe knows that populism is the name we give to mass movements that are bigoted and irrational; that threaten democracy’s norms with their anti-intellectual demagoguery. Out of this famous scholarly mistake of the 1950s – which was descended in turn from the noxious reactionary propaganda of the 1890s – now grows the common sense of global liberalism.
Why is this? Because anti-populism is an essential part of a political myth that is dear to a certain class of people. Hating populism is the built-in corollary to this group’s grand vision of how society ought to be directed: which is to say, by responsible professionals, meaning they themselves, always concurring prudently with one another, always doing their best to steer the world through complex problems. The core of this myth, as the political theorist Michael Rogin once put it, is “the hope that if only responsible elites could be left alone, if only political issues could be kept from the people, the elites would make wise decisions”.
Unfortunately, elites have been making decisions of seismic foolishness for many years now: bank deregulation, Wall Street bailouts, deindustrialization, the opioid epidemic and the Iraq war, to name but a few. Besides, the context of cold war complacency is long gone. Self-assured liberalism crumbled decades ago. Consensus is an ideal that no longer beguiles the academic mind: it’s all about conflict today. But somehow the old 50s faith continues to play right through it all, tootling its one-note song of anti-populist indignation even as the rightwing night falls.
I doubt that any effort of mine will suffice to rescue the word “populist” from its modern-day abusers. But what I am absolutely certain of is that instructing Americans to show more respect to their enlightened betters – scolding the public on behalf of some great consensus of the learned and the virtuous – will only cement the right’s grip on power.
The only real answer, to Trump and plutocracy both, is a mass movement of ordinary people, hailing from all different backgrounds, joined together by a common desire to understand and dismantle the forces that make their toil so profitless. Which is to say that the answer both to rightwing fraud and liberal elitism must come from us – from the democratic public itself.
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
