This was the winning hand in 1936: not that reform threatened liberty, but that tycoons and bankers and newspaper publishers—the people who ran the country into the Great Depression—were using “liberty” as a fig leaf for their privilege … and it was their privilege that constituted the real issue. 38 As Roosevelt himself put it in his State of the Union address in 1936, “they steal the livery of great national constitutional ideals to serve discredited special interests.”
The language the president used to describe his adversaries at the Democratic convention that summer was even more explosive. “These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America,” he thundered. “What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power. Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power. In vain they seek to hide behind the Flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the Flag and the Constitution stand for.”
A few days before Election Day 1936, continuing his “crusade to restore America to its own people” in a speech at Madison Square Garden, Roosevelt attached the most damning label of all to “business and financial monopoly”—they were “the old enemies of peace.” What Americans learned during the years when such forces dominated the government, he continued, was that “Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.” And now organized money wanted its Government back.
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.
* * *
EXPLAINING THE POLITICAL results of 1936 feels like an exercise in obviousness. Anyone could see that regulation of banks wasn’t mob rule—given what had happened during the 1920s, it was common sense. Calling FDR a mentally unhinged, would-be dictator was flatly preposterous: he had been in the White House for several years by that time and ordinary people could see the president was no Hitler and that their prospects had improved considerably during his tenure.
Still, it is important to note the broad outlines of what happened that year: the elites of this country came together in an extraordinary united front against the New Deal; they embraced all the traditional elements of the anti-populist ideology—one that is again in vogue in our own time—and they fell flat on their faces.
The distinguished professors, the captains of industry, the lords of the press, the grandees of Wall Street—Americans no longer respected them. “The election of 1936 brought out the fact,” wrote the New Dealer Thurman Arnold, “that a very large number of people, roughly representing the more illiterate and inarticulate masses of people, had lost their faith in the more prominent and respected economic preachers and writers of the time, who for the most part were aligned against the New Deal.” 39
Writing on the same subject a few years later, President Roosevelt himself declared that, throughout American history, two “schools of political belief,” liberals and conservatives, had fought endlessly for primacy. Regardless of what it was called at any particular moment, he wrote, “the liberal party … believed in the wisdom and efficacy of the will of the great majority of the people, as distinguished from the judgment of a small minority of either education or wealth.” 40
What Roosevelt could not have foreseen was a party system in which the divide fell not between the few and the many, but rather between the small minority of wealth and the small minority of education, in which the captains of industry were at odds with the distinguished professors and the lords of the press, and in which each group had captured control of one of the political parties. In other words: the system that has prevailed for the last few decades, in which the public is invited to choose between the candidate of resentful oil billionaires on the one side and the candidate of enlightened private-equity billionaires on the other.
* * *
IN 1896, ANTI-POPULI ST contempt helped carry the day for William McKinley.
In 1936, anti-populism went down with a resounding crash. In the aftermath, Republicans moderated their defense of the pre–New Deal order; they accepted regulation and the welfare state. In succeeding decades, their presidential candidates—from Wendell Willkie to Dwight Eisenhower to Richard Nixon—would campaign as economic moderates, swearing to protect the signature achievements of the New Deal and even out-liberalizing the Democrats from time to time. They would not again attack the existence of the regulatory state until many administrations had passed—until they had perfected their own form of pseudo-populism, a story we shall read in chapter 7.
For corporate America, snarling anti-populism was an obvious dead end. There were friendlier ways to make the sale. In the mid-thirties, as the business historian Roland Marchand has put it, ad agencies and PR firms began “translating corporate imagery into the vernacular,” explicitly aiming their sales pitches at working-class people. The DuPont company, whose principals had underwritten the American Liberty League, tackled its dreadful public image by taking to heart the cultural populism of the day. Beginning in 1935, the company began broadcasting a radio program called The Cavalcade of America , in which incidents from history were excitingly dramatized, often with individuals chosen from what the company magazine called “the common mass,” ordinary Americans who were supposed to illustrate “heroism, virtue, ingenuity and public service.” 41
Not all conservatives would choose to mimic populist language. The famous libertarian Albert Jay Nock would advise his readers to forget “the masses” and focus on the “remnant” of worthwhile people; neoclassical economists would learn to speak in math and would set up exclusive societies where they perpetuated their ideas; and, of course, there was that novelist who would fantasize about a hidden valley in the Rocky Mountains where righteous billionaires might retreat from the world, set up a gold standard of their own, and await the inevitable collapse of the liberal order.
The only important anti-populist survival on the right that I’m going to describe here was Herbert Hoover, who was not chastened by the back-to-back (-to-back-to-back) Democratic landslides and who spent the rest of his life carping bitterly about Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. In 1948, nine days after yet another shocking, populist-flavored Democratic victory, Hoover phoned in to a gathering at Wilmington College in Ohio to deplore what he called the “cult of the common man” and to strike a blow for the forgotten men of quality and talent.
“Let us remember,” Hoover intoned, “that the great human advances have not been brought about by mediocre men and women. They were brought about by distinctly uncommon men and women with vital sparks of leadership.” He saluted higher education for producing such excellent people and saluted students for “striving to become uncommon men and women.” 42
What makes these banal sentiments interesting is how universal they have become in the years since—universal among liberals, I mean. These days Democrats are the ones who give commencement speeches saluting the graduates of fancy schools for the innovations they will one day contribute and the enlightenment they will bring to the land. These days it is liberals who arise, like Herbert Hoover, from the ranks of the white-collar meritocracy, who deplore the reverence shown to the common man, and who take the views of highly educated professionals to be revealed wisdom itself.
* * *
ONE FINAL LESSON I wish to take from the politics of the 1930s is this: The Los Angeles Times was not wrong when they described the New Deal as an attack on “the consensus of eminent scholarship.” Those hundreds of economists I described above were not mistaken when they depicted the New Deal as a risky experiment. But they were wrong to think that its embrace of new ideas meant the New Deal would fail. Orthodox economics had led the world into the Great Depression. Orthodox economics would never have permitted the measures that got us out of it. But Roosevelt knew somehow that orthodoxy was wrong. The thinkers who stood outside the professional consensus were the ones who turned out to have the corre
ct answers. Just as in 1896, the cranks turned out to be right.
The New Deal succeeded precisely because it, too, was outside the consensus. Franklin Roosevelt was able to do what he did because he was willing to close his ears to “men of established reputations.” Had he handed over the task of recovery to the best and the brightest, this country might never have recovered. Discontent would have mounted, the forces of “entrenched greed” would have drilled their private armies and stockpiled their machine guns, and their moment would eventually have come.
At the Democratic convention in 1936, President Roosevelt described himself as a worker for a “great cause”—the cause of “the people.” He allowed that in other lands, leaders had given up on that cause and on democracy itself. But “here in America we are waging a great and successful war. It is not alone a war against want and destitution and economic demoralization. It is more than that; it is a war for the survival of democracy. We are fighting to save a great and precious form of government for ourselves and for the world.” Painful though it may be for liberals to acknowledge nowadays, it was Roosevelt’s willingness to disregard elites that won that war. These were the reasons the New Deal succeeded and democracy lived. If the heroes of those days were cranks, then thank God for cranks. Thank God for populism.
5
Consensus Redensus
Once World War II was over—once the energy behind the New Deal had dissipated and agrarian radicalism had disappeared, a peculiar thing happened: populism went into the academic interpretation machine and came out as something different, something sinister.
What I have been calling “anti-populism” changed as well. Up until this point, its prime constituency had been comfortable and conservative business interests lashing back at radical troublemakers. But now anti-populism was taken up by a new elite, a liberal elite that was led by a handful of thinkers at prestigious universities.
This group translated anti-populism into the language of theory and built it into a full-blown system of big, intimidating ideas. It continued to serve the same function as always, rationalizing the power of the powerful. But now anti-populism did its work by means of psychology and social theory.
In short, the highly educated learned to deplore working-class movements for their bigotry, their refusal of modernity, and their borderline madness. The single word with which they expressed that finding: “populism.”
* * *
THIS PART OF our story begins in the mid-1950s, a time of confidence and unprecedented middle-class prosperity. The economic collapse of the Depression was behind us, and the abiding faith among American intellectuals was that economic collapses in general were behind us, having been permanently solved by the managerial state and the managerial corporation. Even more obsolete were the vast political struggles of the preceding decades. Huge public fights over ideology need never happen again, American intellectuals agreed; thankfully, the era of mass mobilization had given way to a political system of interest groups and experts, of plenty and of contentment.
A famous book described this new era of pluralism and consensus and managed affluence as the “end of ideology.” * Other scholars argued that ideology couldn’t have ended because it had never really existed in America in the first place. A much-read work of history implied that, whatever their purported differences, all American politicians had pretty much believed the same things. From its very beginnings, another prominent historian maintained, America had always been a land of Lockean liberalism, permanently given to pragmatic experimentation within constitutional limits. Americans were said to be untroubled by the peculiar ideas and wild politics that roiled the rest of the world. We did not go for abstract systems of political theory, and we never had.
The “liberal consensus” is the name that is sometimes applied to this smug worldview, and until it went up in flames in the late 1960s, it was the orthodoxy of the age. Whatever problems the country had, it was thought, were on their way to being solved. Civility was the rule in political speech; pragmatic dealmaking was the political method; and pluralism was the unalterable political fact of the day. “The problems of modern America were no longer ideological but technical and administrative,” American thinkers agreed, according to a history of the period, and the way to address these was “by knowledgeable experts rather than by mass movements.” 1
“Knowledgeable experts” enjoyed something of a boom in the 1950s. Universities expanded dramatically. All the smart young men had good paying jobs at some center for advanced something, or were introducing modern management techniques to a federal department, or were working as “systems analysts” in some giant corporate bureaucracy.
Consensus thinkers were obsessed with the social position of the expert. After all, you couldn’t have stability and prosperity without them. So intellectuals cheered when white-collar professionals rose through the ranks and booed when they were criticized. In a once-famous 1962 essay, sociologist Daniel Bell, the author of The End of Ideology , hailed the “technical and professional intelligentsia” who had ascended to the top echelons and the “new system of recruitment for power” that had wisely plucked them out of the mass. Even the military, Bell marveled, was now in the hands of this deserving cohort. As he put it, “the problems of national security, like those of the national economy, have become so staggeringly complex that they can no longer be settled simply by common sense or past experience.” Bell went on to narrate the rise of a new generation of “technicians and political theorists” who had come to rule the Pentagon under the visionary leadership of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. 2
There was a wonderful coincidence behind the intellectuals’ newfound faith in consensus: those who now organized and administered the great administrative organization were people exactly like them—highly educated professionals. The consensus thinkers saw American society as stable and harmonious because they were now part of its elite, members of the insiders’ club just as surely as the press lords and steel magnates of the past.
* * *
THERE WAS A second coincidence behind consensus theory—this one kind of frightening. The early 1950s saw the rise of Wisconsin senator Joe McCarthy, whose name became synonymous with a particularly abusive form of red-hunting; he was cheered on by millions of average Americans as he accused innocent people willy-nilly of being Communists. Under the influence of this bullying Republican demagogue, America became hysterical with fear. It indulged in a carnival of persecution that was largely aimed at intellectuals—authors and college professors, for example. In response, intellectuals began to believe that paranoid hatred of the educated elite was a permanent threat lurking always just beneath democracy’s surface. Open societies like ours, they concluded, were in constant danger of convulsions of intolerance brought on by the uneducated rank and file.
So: intellectuals in the fifties were more respected and prosperous than ever. At the same time, they were the targets of a spasm of manufactured hate that (as they saw it) had clouded the minds of the country’s lower orders.
The effect of McCarthyism was to turn the country’s intellectuals against ideology even more forcefully. Acting out of both complacency and alarm, they pushed toward a theory of democracy in which the passions of the millions were muted in favor of stability or “equilibrium”—a form of democracy in which everyone accepted that the real power lay with professionals like themselves.
“Pluralism” was the name the intellectuals gave this model, but the name was misleading. The key to the pluralist system, as the consensus thinkers imagined it, was not people from different walks of life having their say; it was the leaders of different groups coming to agreement quietly around a big mahogany table somewhere. Forget angry crowds marching in the streets by the millions: what you needed to make democracy work was a bunch of professional interest-group leaders, representatives who were highly civilized and who got along well with one another. These leaders and representatives were the key. They would reach across the aisle
. They would compromise and make deals. They would find and inhabit the warm and “vital” center. 3
“Representative government,” wrote Daniel Bell in 1956, was the only way to put “a check on the tyrannical ‘popular’ majority.” It was the only way to “achieve consensus—and conciliation.” 4
You could trust representatives. They were professionals. What you could not trust were ordinary citizens coming together in mass movements. The men of the fifties knew that nothing good could ever result from such a thing. Mass movements were unstable and given to extremism. Mass movements did not listen to intellectuals. Their grievances were irrational—expressions of declining status or psychological maladjustment or bigotry or something even worse. Mass movements were swept along by moral passion to do terrible things. Herd average people into mass political groups, expose them to demagogues, and they became … a mob. Awful developments followed inevitably: McCarthyism today, perhaps fascism tomorrow.
Then came a peculiar turn. The specific mass movement that the gentlemen of the consensus fixed upon as an example of everything that was foolish and destructive about democracy was the farmer-worker rebellion of sixty years previous known as Populism. Of its name the consensus thinkers forged a generic noun for the unreasoning folly of mass democracy. “Populism” became their pet term for the opposite of themselves—the “ism” that we use to describe demagoguery and intolerance and the crazy passions of the crowd.
* * *
THIS UNDERSTANDING OF Populism was not entirely new. In its essential points it was the same bill of hysterical accusations that had been leveled at reformers in 1896 by men of eminence and social standing. It also owed more than a little to the anti–New Deal propaganda generated by outfits like the Liberty League. Neither of these obvious forebears, however, was ever acknowledged by the thinkers of the 1950s. Instead they retrieved pieces of a long-forgotten conservative stereotype, tricked them out with the fashionable academic jargon of their era, and launched the result as a shiny new diagnosis handed down by the well-adjusted administrative mind. From there it grew to become the vast academic-journalistic enterprise that today holds “populism” to be the source of all that is wrong with modern politics.
The People, No Page 13