The People, No

by Frank, Thomas

  Eventually the romantic populism of the early 1960s drained away completely. It happened in movement politics and it happened in the larger culture. “The Sixties,” as middle-class Americans remember it, began with a folk-music revival; with a thousand super-authentic performances of blue-collar despair; with “The Ballad of Hollis Brown” and all those different versions of the sad, sad story of “The House of the Rising Sun.” The way it ended was with anger, with the Jefferson Airplane yelling, “Up against the wall, motherfucker.”

  By the time the clock ran out on the New Left, its activists had come to believe that the American people were not the protesters getting fire-hosed by the police in Birmingham, Alabama; the American people were now seen as the ones turning the fire hoses on those protesters. The people were not the would-be beneficiaries of progressive reform; they were the enemy , facilitators of the evil Amerikan empire.

  “Working people” here in the USA were not anything special, a 1969 SDS manifesto declared; just another “particular privileged interest” bought off with imperialist plunder. The only “people” who mattered by then were the “oppressed peoples of the world,” the peasants of Vietnam and the Third World, and with them the white New Left boldly declared its solidarity. SDS was a “Revolutionary Youth Movement” now, an armed ally of the global people’s uprising in whose eyes all Americans (with the exception of African Americans) were suspect. 24

  This, at any rate, was one of the movement’s great, lasting legacies. The New Left succeeded in stripping the aura of nobility away from what the Pops called the “producing classes,” and in inventing an understanding of radicalism in which politics was no longer really about accomplishing public things for the common good. Instead, politics was becoming, at least in part, a path to personal fulfillment or healing. Protest degenerated into “street theater”; “radical style” came to trump “radical substance,” as the historian Christopher Lasch put it; a satisfying sense of personal righteousness became the ultimate end of political action. 25

  It was the opposite of what King and Rustin were after, what populism is always after: a grand coalition of social forces that would reform capitalism in the interests of the great majority. That was lost in the late sixties—drowned in the muddy Mekong or clubbed to the pavement on Michigan Avenue.

  * * *

  I DO NOT want to judge the New Left too harshly. I wasn’t there. To those who were, the horror of the Vietnam bloodbath was overwhelming and in bringing it to a stop, extreme measures must have seemed justified. Also, SDS was right about the exhaustion of liberalism, and they were right, in part, about the traditional institutions of the Left. Liberals were indeed too cozy with corporations and with imperialism. Many unions were indeed bureaucratic and un-progressive back then—after all, there were no more solid supporters of the Vietnam War than the top brass of the labor movement.

  Not all working-class leaders were so hidebound, however. Walter Reuther, the president of the powerful United Auto Workers and a veteran of the CIO campaigns of the thirties, spent the sixties marching in civil rights demonstrations and looking for ways to join forces with the New Left. He was slow to turn against the war, out of loyalty to President Lyndon Johnson. But in 1970 he was able to look back over the history of his union and claim, with justification, that no organization in the world had done more “to place human rights above property rights.” 26 This was an insight the protesters of that era missed: organizations of ordinary working people are often a force for democratic progress by their very nature, regardless of the ignorance or bigotry of individual members of those organizations.

  The radicals missed the point then, and everyone misses the point today. The social stereotypes established in those last awful years of the sixties have stuck with us. Like the geriatric Rolling Stones, they chug along imperturbably though they are now decades past their rightful retirement. We cannot shake them. When we recall that King and Rustin and Walter Reuther hoped for a grand alliance of ordinary people, we have trouble imagining what they might have had in mind. But white working-class people as enemies of progress—oh, that we understand.

  The big counterculture think-book of 1970, The Greening of America , described “blue-collar workers” as “those arch opponents of the new consciousness.” This was stated matter-of-factly; the author assumed that everyone knew what he meant by then. The book’s twist was that it exhorted us to have pity on these monstrous proles. “Look again at a ‘fascist’—tight-lipped, tense, crew cut, correctly dressed, church-going, an American flag on his car window, a hostile eye for communists, youth, and blacks.” You might hate this stock blue-collar character, but his life is really quite sad:

  He has had very little of love, or poetry, or music, or nature, or joy. He has been dominated by fear. He has been condemned to narrow-minded prejudice, to a self-defeating materialism, to a lonely suspicion of his fellow men. He is angry, envious, bitter, self-hating. He ravages his own environment. He has fled all his life from consciousness and responsibility. He is turned against his own nature.

  And so on. Maybe all “he” really needs is to be slipped a dose of youth culture. 27

  The Greening of America is dedicated to “the students at Yale,” where its author taught in the Law School. That the stereotype the book did so much to bolster might have been a straightforward expression of his cohort’s structural antagonism to working-class people appears not to have occurred to its author. In hindsight, however, it is obvious: in 1896 the young gentlemen of Yale heckled working-class champion William Jennings Bryan; in 1970 their votary trolled the white working class generally for its lousy consciousness. And somewhere in between this myth was blithely cemented: The Ivy League elite were not only society’s rulers, but also society’s rebels and revolutionaries, its designated conscience. The successful were not only more capable than those who toil; they were morally superior as well. The reasoning had been flipped but the conclusion remained the same: the ruling class ruled because it deserved to rule.

  Think of the enlightenment that clouded the mind of the celebrated author Terry Southern, who wrote parts of the 1969 movie Easy Rider —another accolade for the counterculture—and who described its horrifying final scene as “an indictment of blue-collar America, the people I thought were responsible for the Vietnam War.” 28 Which is to say, Southern thought the people serving in the Vietnam War were the people who got us into the Vietnam War. Hollis Brown and the Masters of War had turned out to be one and the same.

  And now think of that scene itself, the ultimate expression of the decade’s anti-populist sensibility. Easy Rider , a motorcycle adventure movie starring and produced by Peter Fonda, has often been described as a generational answer to The Grapes of Wrath , which starred Fonda’s dad, Henry. And in that final scene, the glamorous young bikers with the awesome rock ’n’ roll soundtrack are brutally and pointlessly shot to death by a pair of heavily accented, obviously impoverished rednecks riding in the cab of an old pickup truck. Who are these villains? As the sharp-eyed historian Jefferson Cowie points out, “It is almost impossible to not see these characters as a quote from The Grapes of Wrath .” 29

  In other words: they were the Joads, the very symbols of resilient thirties populism, reimagined for the sixties and for the decades to come as murderers … as pigheaded killers of everything that is fun and joyful and enlightened and tolerant and cool in American life. As fascists.

  * * *

  IN THIS WAY the consensus school’s anti-populism was elevated by its enemy the counterculture into wisdom for the ages. The consensus view on nearly everything else—mass movements, post-ideology, the sanctity of the university, and so on—was shattered by the sixties, but this essential bit of class profiling was set in stone. Working-class whites were reactionary and authoritarian. The university president in his three-piece suit believed it, in his quiet, scholarly way—and so did the long-haired student who had just trashed his office and chugged his sherry: democracy is a system mea
nt for enlightened people like them.

  The 1968 third-party run for the presidency by the Alabama segregationist George Wallace represented either the final confirmation of this thesis or a backlash against it, depending on your perspective. Touring northern cities as well as his familiar southern haunts, Wallace denounced hippies and journalists and Hollywood celebrities and liberal college professors, always from a position of long-suffering averageness. White working people from every corner of the nation briefly rallied to Wallace’s message of hardscrabble anguish, his savage resentment of the high-minded and the well-educated. And so a man straight out of the southern-demagogue tradition came to be seen as an honest expression of the average American’s new sense of bitterness.

  “Populism” was the noun journalists started using to categorize that southern-demagogue tradition. Thanks to the labors of Richard Hofstadter and the others described in the last chapter, writers everywhere knew that this was the exact word for Wallace’s venomous combination of racism and his appeal to the “great silent American Folk,” as one account put it. Besides, Wallace was said to be vaguely liberal on economic questions, and he was running as a third-party candidate. So the p-word seemed to make sense. Although Wallace apparently never used it to describe himself—indeed, he objected to it—journalists depicted him as the ne plus ultra of populism as he went about his mission of political disruption. 30

  In retrospect it was clearly a misnomer. Alabama was capable of producing left-wing, man-of-the-people politicians in the 1960s, but George Wallace wasn’t one of them. Where populism had once been defined by its transracial aspirations, Wallace was the nation’s champion segregationist, a mouthpiece for the very sort of people who terrorized actual Populists in the 1890s. Wallace was no rebel: he was the authority under whom Alabama officers beat and hounded civil rights protesters so many times in the 1960s, perhaps the ultimate anti-populist act. 31

  Nor was Wallace’s snake oil much of a tonic for working people. The United Auto Workers, guardians of the flame of CIO populism, poured enormous resources into a campaign against him in 1968, reminding their members of how very little racism had achieved for working people in Wallace’s Alabama. His economic concern for the little guy, they pointed out, was a total fraud. The union campaign succeeded, beating back what had at first appeared to be a powerful Wallace surge in the industrial districts of the North. 32

  But the p-word stuck as a description for working-class reaction. And while it is perhaps an exaggeration to say that Wallace’s sneering, upside-down populism defeated the hopeful, traditional version, it is undoubtedly true that the Alabama governor’s characteristic set of grievances became a kind of checklist for generations of resentful politicians of the Right. And it was in this way that the optimistic, liberal sixties ceded the stage to an angry counter-sixties of the Right, a pseudo-populism that honored ordinary, put-upon Americans who were fed up with all the protests and the revolution-talk and longed merely for law, order, and a little respect for Old Glory.

  * * *

  ONE OF THE earliest converts to this new sensibility was none other than Richard Hofstadter, the historian who had spent his career assailing the original Populists—and constructing the definition that scholars and journalists use today.

  The particular ivied fortress from which Hofstadter had lobbed his missiles at populism was Columbia University in New York, an institution that he liked to idealize in the noblest terms. He had been shocked and deeply antagonized by the student protests there in April 1968, and when he spoke at Columbia’s graduation ceremony that year, many of the students in the audience stood up and walked out on him.

  Two years later Hofstadter paid them back in kind. In an interview with Newsweek magazine published a few months before his untimely death in 1970, he referred to the sixties as “the Age of Rubbish” and criticized left-wing college students for an “elitism” that was “based on moral indignation against most of the rest of us.” When he referred to the vast numbers of Americans who “intensely dislike young people—college students mainly,” Hofstadter was describing what he saw in society, but as he talked on it was clear that he was referring to himself. He resented students for their precious radicalism and for their “moral indignation” against the society that had raised them, and he cast this resentment in stark, class-based terms.

  The activist young operate from elitist premises which they themselves aren’t aware of, but which working people are acutely aware of. The kids ask for two weeks off for conducting political activities, or to go on a pass-fail basis at the end of the term because so few of them have completed their work. People who work in offices and on assembly lines can’t negotiate such arrangements, but if they could, they’d certainly have to sacrifice their salaries. The kids implicitly assume a certain kind of indulgence that other types of people in this society don’t get. This is intensely resented. The kids dislike the idea that they’re thinking and acting as an elite, but they are. 33

  As the larger world came to embrace Hofstadter’s suspicion of mass movements, Hofstadter himself became a populist, of exactly the embittered kind he had spent his career analyzing.

  7

  The Money Changers Burn the Temple

  In the early seventies a fog of grievance settled over the land. Never have Americans hated authorities like they did after the Vietnam War turned sour; after Watergate taught us the incorrigible venality of our elected leaders. Big government seemed omnipotent and yet incompetent; it possessed the world’s greatest military machine but it couldn’t do anything right. In the long list of groups it aimed to serve, We the People always seemed to come last. This snarling mood of disillusionment was the characteristic sensibility of the decade: the “wellsprings of trust” had been “poisoned,” two self-designated populist authors wrote back in 1972. 1 They are still poisoned today.

  The whole country was mad as hell, to use a favorite catchphrase, and the discontent seemed to go in every direction at once. It was economic, it was political; it was racial, it was cultural; it was liberal, it was conservative. Americans despised the CIA and also the Soviet Union. We cheered for Clint Eastwood as a rule-breaking cop who blasted lowlifes even when the lawyers told him to stop … and then we cheered for Burt Reynolds as a “bandit” in a black Trans Am, the roads behind him littered with the smoking remains of the Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia highway patrols.

  Responding to the new sensibility, our politicians tried to impress us with their humility. They courted us with soft southern accents, with tales of peanut farms and pork rinds. They posed as defenders of the people, the forgotten man, the silent majority, the great overtaxed middle, the “normal” Americans suffering the contempt of shadowy TV network elites. To list the leaders who were identified by the press in the 1970s as “populists” would be to include virtually the entire roster of prominent statesmen: both Richard Nixon and his opponent, George McGovern, were tagged with the p-word. So were Jimmy Carter, Ted Kennedy, and the hawkish Democratic senator Henry Jackson; so were big-city mayors Frank Rizzo and John Lindsay; so was West Virginia politician Jay Rockefeller, a great-grandson of the biggest Populist devil-figure of them all. 2

  Jim Hightower, the legendary Texas activist, relates the following tale from the seventies populism craze. One day a friend of his who worked for the Congressional Research Service received a request from the office of Senator Lloyd Bentsen, a man Hightower describes as an “aloof and patrician Texas Democrat who was known on Capitol Hill primarily as a faithful emissary for Wall Street interests.” Bentsen was thinking of a presidential run, Hightower continues, and evidently he wanted a big idea with which to distinguish himself. And so: “What is a populist? ” read the query. “The senator thinks he might be one .” 3

  And why not? Everyone else said they were one, and the pseudo-populist rebellions they led ultimately turned out to be great for Wall Street interests. What those years of revolt made possible was the opposite of populism: tax cuts,
deregulation, deindustrialization, and the disempowerment of working-class people through the destruction of their unions.

  By which I mean, the populist rhetoric invoked so abundantly in those years provided a perfect cover for the elitist politics we actually embraced. In the period I am describing, trade unions went from being a normal part of everyday life to a thing that had to be rooted out and crushed. America attacked inflation by embracing austerity. We gave up on the dream of economic equality—gave up on it so utterly that, in years to come, we would find it difficult even to recall what Reuther and Roosevelt meant when they used those words.

  * * *

  IT NEEDN’T HAVE happened that way. It was true that the old liberal order was having problems by the early 1970s, but the bonfire of public anger that consumed the country might have brought renewal to that system just as easily as right-wing backlash against it. Yes, Democratic leaders chose to turn away from the white working class and, yes, Republicans reached out successfully to that same group, but what that represented was not inevitability. It was liberal folly.

  Bayard Rustin wrote one of the most perceptive takes on this situation back in 1971—so perceptive that it might have been written in 1980, or 2000, or yesterday:

  The potential for a Republican majority depends upon Nixon’s success in attracting into the conservative fold lower-middle-class whites, the same group that the [liberal] New Politics has written off. The question is not whether this group is conservative or liberal; for it is both , and how it acts will depend upon the way the issues are defined. If they are defined as race and dissent, then Nixon will win. But if, on the other hand, they are defined so as to appeal to the progressive economic interests of the lower middle class, then it becomes possible to build an alliance on the basis of common interest between this group and the black community. 4