It began, as I noted before, with McCarthyism, which was a phenomenon of the extreme Right. Each of the consensus thinkers agreed, however, that the paranoid, red-hunting suspiciousness of the 1950s was in fact a descendant of the democratic agrarian Left of the 1890s. In this view, all discontent that is expressed via mass movements of ordinary people is equally vulgar and fraudulent and irrational and scary. The original Populist movement, wrote the famous historian Richard Hofstadter in 1955, “seems very strongly to foreshadow some aspects of the cranky pseudo-conservatism of our time.” In 1958, the sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset described McCarthyism as a “recent expression of populist extremism,” reasoning that the two were the same since McCarthy vilified “the traditional enemy of populism, the Eastern upper class.” The historian Peter Viereck went further: “McCarthyism is actually a leftist instinct behind a self-deceptive rightist veneer.” 5
“Populism” was thought to incorporate many sins in the eyes of the liberal consensus, but most of them were attributed to the same perceived error that conservatives had identified in decades before: a refusal of deference. Populism was egalitarianism taken to such an extreme that it rejected legitimate hierarchies along with wrongful ones—legitimate hierarchies being, of course, the ones that the intellectuals themselves had climbed, the hierarchies of scholarly achievement. Populism represented the denial of their expertise. As Daniel 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.” 6
We have heard several versions of this view already. That democracy means the overthrow of all standards of excellence is the baseline fear of the anti-populist tradition going back at least to the 1890s if not to the French Revolution. But Bell didn’t acknowledge that he was part of any such tradition. Nor did he name any actual Populists when he made the above statement; he just asserted it and moved on. As we shall see again and again with the consensus intellectuals, they seemed to believe they could say whatever they wanted about populism without any obligation to prove it—a suspension of the rules of academic engagement that would lead to tremendous confusion in years to come.
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ONLY ONE OF the leading consensus thinkers seemed actually to know who the Populists were. Richard Hofstadter, the most famous American historian of his day, retold the story of the 1890s People’s Party in his enormously influential 1955 book, The Age of Reform . Hofstadter had, of course, read much of the Populist literature and he clearly understood the nineteenth-century context in which they rose up. For all the romance of the third-party effort, however, Professor Hofstadter ultimately flunked the Pops for what he saw as a tendency toward the paranoid and the irrational.
Specifically, he accused the Populists of losing faith in progress, instead looking “backward with longing to the lost agrarian Eden” from which the country had fallen. He argued that the Populists despised immigrants—indeed, that “everyone remote and alien was distrusted and hated” by them. Also, that they were “profoundly nationalistic and bellicose,” even though they often said they weren’t. Furthermore, the Populists understood history by referring to crackpot conspiracy theories having to do with bankers and gold, he charged, and they were “chiefly” responsible for anti-Semitism in America, blaming Jewish bankers for the farmer’s problems. 7
The Populists believed all this nonsense, Hofstadter explained, because they were not people of the city, “the home of intellectual complexity.” What’s more, farmers of the 1890s were a group that was on the way down, “losing in status and respect” in comparison to successful, upwardly mobile city folk. Losing status made them anxious, and anxiety, in turn, made them reach for irrational explanations and embrace the politics of resentment. 8
Hofstadter returned to the subject of Populism again and again in the course of his career, always singling out this particular reform movement for its sins against academic and cultural respectability. In a 1953 speech on anti-intellectualism, for example, Hofstadter declared the Populists to have been enemies of higher learning, since they supposedly “raised hob with the University of Kansas” when they were in the majority in that state. * In his famous 1964 essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” he again highlighted the Pops’ fondness for the language of conspiracy. A few years later, Hofstadter had the honor of being the sole representative from North America at the very first academic conference on what we now call global populism studies; he took that occasion to emphasize, one more time, Populist naivete in the face of sophisticated international markets. 9
Hofstadter’s psychoanalysis of the People’s Party was hugely influential in its day, powerfully reinforcing elite fears of grassroots movements and relaunching “populism” as the generic name for the familiar political specter that always haunts the respectable. Few of the details in the historian’s dark portrait stood the test of academic scrutiny, however. Many of the items I mentioned above turned out, upon investigation, to have been based on either a tendentious reading, or a whopping exaggeration, or else an outright error.
Looking back from sixty years on, the motives behind Hofstadter’s war on the reformers of the 1890s appear to have been both petty and distinctly of-their-time. What I mean by this is that Hofstadter seems to have chosen Populism as a proxy in his lifelong personal war against a previous generation of scholars, the so-called progressive historians, who cherished memories of Populism but whose symbols and theories had degenerated into patriotic clichés by the 1950s. 10 What better way to spite them than to revive the old anti-populist stereotypes of the 1890s?
The central idea of the progressive historians’ vision of the past had been social conflict, Hofstadter later wrote, meaning a struggle that always featured the same two sides, changing form but recurring throughout our history: radical versus conservative, farmer versus capitalist, the heirs of Jefferson versus the heirs of Hamilton. Thus when we find Hofstadter accusing the Populists of oversimplifying the political struggle in which they were engaged, imagining it as a war between “the people” and the “money power,” we understand that he is also criticizing his scholarly predecessors, who said similar things all the time. 11
But by 1955 that older generation of historians was gone. In putting Populism behind us, The Age of Reform was meant as a sort of manifesto for the new breed, with their faith in pluralism, * professionalism, and benevolent, administrative capitalism. Hofstadter sifted through the nation’s reform tradition, dismissing things that were no longer useful—mass movements, for example—and celebrating what he felt had paved the way for the post-ideological present. So while crusading mass movements like Populism were said to have achieved little for the farmer, the historian strongly hinted that modern-style corporate lobbying outfits like the Farm Bureau got the goods. 12
When reform came from the bottom up, in other words, it was moralistic, demagogic, irrational, bigoted, and futile. When reform was made by practical, business-minded professionals—meaning lobbyists and experts who were comfortable in the company of lobbyists and experts from other groups—prosperity was the result.
Another consequence of The Age of Reform , important for our purposes, was the mutation of the word “Populism” from a reference to a specific political party to a general term that could apply to anyone—what Hofstadter called “a kind of popular impulse that is endemic in American political culture.” The People’s Party may have been its most prominent example, but “Populist thinking,” the historian continued, “has survived in our own time, partly as an undercurrent of provincial resentments, popular and ‘democratic’ rebelliousness and suspiciousness, and nativism.” 13
Reviving the 1890s depiction of social protest as a species of resentment and unreason turned out to be exactly the thing to do in 1955. The Age of Reform perfectly captured the rationality-worshipping tenor of its times. It won the Pulitzer Prize. It has been described as “the most influential book ever pu
blished on the history of twentieth-century America.” 14 And it transformed “populism” back into a term of top-down abuse … a move that raises hob with us still.
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ANTI-POPULISM BEGAN TO change sides as well. Now it was prominent academic liberals who regarded mass movements as dangerous dens of demagoguery, and who began to use “populism” as a generic term for an ugly, down-market political sensibility. Using the tools Hofstadter provided them, American intellectuals quickly built anti-populism into a towering structure of liberal social theory.
Before the consensus generation started on its work, the political theorist Michael P. Rogin tells us in a 1967 study of this period, “McCarthyism meant something like character assassination, and Populism was the name of a particular historical movement for social reform at the end of the nineteenth century. Through their influence Populism has become an example of and a general term for anomic movements of mass protest against existing institutions—the type of movement typified by McCarthyism.”
The most memorable effort along these lines was The Torment of Secrecy , a 1956 study of McCarthyism by the sociologist Edward Shils. Over the course of his career, Shils would pile up an awesome record of scholarly attainment—prizes and professorships and prestigious appointments—but when he turned to populism, the sociologist did not proceed empirically as Richard Hofstadter had done, combing through Populist books and manifestos. Instead, he advanced on his target by means of assertion and stereotype; indeed, it is not clear from his writing on the subject that he knew what the People’s Party had been. *
“Populism proclaims that the will of the people as such is supreme over every other standard,” Shils announced at the opening of his chapter on populism, defining populism as a form of nihilism that respected no institutions except public opinion. This was, of course, the same old fear of democracy-as- anarchy that we saw during the Democracy Scares of 1896 and 1936, and Shils proceeded to establish that populists held these views in the same way that his predecessors had: simply by saying so. When Shils asserted it, however, it was not the same as when a conservative Republican asserted it in a pamphlet with a hysterical title like The Platform of Anarchy . What Edward Shils wrote was social science. It was scholarship. 15
Shils advanced then to the next logical step in his program: asserting that populism was the shared ingredient in each of history’s worst moments. “Nazi dictatorship had markedly populistic features in its practice, in its constant invocation of the will of the people,” he wrote. “Bolshevism has a strand of populism in it too.… In the United States, populism lives on in persecutory legislative investigations,” by which he meant McCarthyism. 16 It was as if the nightmares of the Liberty League in the 1930s had actually come to pass. All the villains were united by a common thread: Nazis and Communists; reds and red-hunters, all cherishing the same Satanic faith in the common man.
Before long we come to Shils’s real concern: the threat populism posed to intellectuals like him and his colleagues. Obviously the danger was substantial: “When populism goes on the warpath, among those they wish to strike are the ‘overeducated,’ those who are ‘too clever,’ ‘the highbrows,’ the ‘longhairs,’ the ‘eggheads,’ whose education has led them away from the simple wisdom and virtue of the people.” Shils knew that populists did things like this because those are things that Joe McCarthy did, and in the example of that renowned demagogue, the eminent sociologist assured us we could clearly see the Populist of the past, “the ‘grass roots’ prophet assailing the aristocratic battlements of pure learning which have despised the wisdom of the people.” 17
As a description of the actual Populist tradition this was nonsense, but Shils sailed right on, enlarging the populists’ supposed hatred of learning into a hatred of quality and refinement in general. “Populists, whether they are radical reformers or congressional investigators,” he wrote, “are all extremely suspicious and hostile towards the more sophisticated person.” In Shils’s system, populism is the name one gives to any situation in which “there is an ideology of popular resentment against the order imposed on society by a long-established, differentiated ruling class.” 18 In other words, any objection that ordinary people might have to any system of domination is in fact little more than nihilistic demagoguery and the rejection of all standards.
The populist, Shils went on in his bombastic way, “denies autonomy” to any institution of government. Populists hate bureaucracy. They despise the justice system and politicians in general. They hate learning. They deny the right of privacy. But oh, they love bullshit: this is the definition of the species. “Populism acclaims the demagogue who, breaking through the formalistic barriers erected by lawyers, pedants and bureaucrats, renews the righteousness of government and society.” 19
It’s kind of a peculiar experience to see someone defending intellectualism so ferociously while engaging in intellectual practice of the kind that would score him a flat “F” were The Torment of Secrecy turned in as a sociology term paper. Virtually nothing in Shils’s denunciation of populism is tied to supporting evidence. Individuals and even institutions are sometimes accused of being tainted with populism simply because they come from “the Middle West.” The book was basically a Democracy Scare unto itself, with accusations of world-historic fiendishness thrown down one after another, unsubstantiated by anything besides the imaginary target’s imagined views on some abstract subject—the highbrow equivalent of a Bircher conspiracy theory, you could say.
Still, The Torment of Secrecy was another influential work. This was where the word “populist” left the historical rails and began its long career wandering hither and yon, haunting the scholarly mind. This was the missing link where the anti-populist stereotype built up for six decades by American conservatives was adopted by the theorists of liberalism and then spread into every corner of the international world of scholarship.
The reason for the book’s influence is clear enough: it flattered the powerful. What Shils meant to do with his attack on populism was build support for a liberal democratic system where political actors wisely limit their ambitions to what he calls “gradual increments of change.” To achieve such a system, what was required from working-class people was acceptance of hierarchy, meaning “deference” toward “those who govern,” like in Britain. 20
What was required from those who ruled, meanwhile, was a certain chumminess toward one another—“a sense of affinity among the elites,” as Shils put it. People on top, he pleaded, must respect others on top. 21
From this nifty hierarchy “only extremism is excluded.” Only populists are to be ostracized.
Perhaps you recognize what Shils is describing: It is the current liberal ideal of Washington, D.C. It is the philosophy of mainstream American journalism. It is the strategic model for the cautious, scholarly, consensus-minded Clinton and Obama administrations, extending their hands in friendship to fellow elites in Wall Street and Silicon Valley. This is where it all begins.
* * *
TO DECLARE THAT the people were the problem with democracy was to make a spectacular break with the Jeffersonian tradition, but the strictures of social science required more. One had to be precise. Which group of people, specifically, was the problem?
The answer was provided by the sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset. In 1959 he discovered that the great danger to self-government was what he called “working-class authoritarianism.”
Lipset was perfectly candid about this. What he called the “lower-class individual” was not really suited to democratic self-government. The “norms of democracy,” he wrote, could only be appreciated by someone with “a high level of sophistication and ego security.” Working-class people weren’t “sophisticated” by definition, and this led to all sorts of problems: they fell for demagogues, they hated minorities, they were suspicious of intellectuals, and so on. 22
The reality that working-class organizations often promote complex ideas that are the opposite of nativ
ism or anti-intellectualism was something Lipset considered and dismissed. That meant nothing, since “the fact that the movement’s ideology” might be “democratic does not mean that its supporters actually understand the implications.” 23 The way to judge those supporters was with the metrics of social science, not their own words. The scientific facts were straightforward: low-status people held low-status views—authoritarian views. That’s simply the way things were. The authoritarianism of working-class people was baked in, psychologically determined by their social position.
“Populism” was one of the terms Lipset used to describe this unfortunate psychosocial situation. Indeed, the word was a kind of shorthand for a whole understanding of the latent authoritarianism of all working-class movements. In Populism’s original incarnation, Lipset continued (following Hofstadter), its partisans could be seen to despise immigrants and Jews; and “latter-day” vehicles like the Ku Klux Klan also represented the populist impulse. Its most recent “expression” was, of course, McCarthyism. 24
Tellingly, Lipset introduced his findings about “working-class authoritarianism” not as useful information in its own right but as “a tragic dilemma for those intellectuals” who had once believed in ordinary people. In the world of the consensus it was intellectuals who mattered, and Lipset merely wanted to draw their attention, in a collegial and scholarly way, to the fact that when they said noble things about “the proletariat,” they were making an unfortunate mistake. 25
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