The People, No

by Frank, Thomas

  Might the white working class have joined a transracial movement taking America in a progressive direction rather than on into the decades of Reagan, Bush, and Trump? Unlikely though it sounds today, it was definitely possible.

  After all, while some were angry with the liberal establishment because it was supposedly soft on crime and committed to racial integration, others were angry because it wasn’t really liberal at all—because it had dumped the entire burden of the Vietnam War on their children; because it seemed only to care about the well-educated; because it was happily handing out subsidies to favorite corporate behemoths while their blue-collar lives still sucked.

  Between these two alternative viewpoints lay the political choices of the decades to come. Would Americans choose some grand appeal to social solidarity, as they had in the past? Would we try tepid, managerial centrism? Or would we plunge headlong into the glamorous, self-pitying resentment of the culture wars?

  The irony is that all three of these alternatives would be described with the same word: “populism.”

  * * *

  LET ME REPEAT that a renewed populism of the Left was possible. Although almost nobody remembers it anymore, the early 1970s saw the biggest strike wave since World War II, with some 2.4 million workers walking out. Most of these were by-the-book work stoppages called by the leadership of still- mighty national unions, but a surprising number of them were wildcat actions that were authorized by nobody except ordinary workers themselves. On top of this came a series of grassroots efforts to replace the labor movement’s aging and conservative and sometimes corrupt leadership—rank-and-file insurgencies in the Steelworkers, the Mineworkers, and the Teamsters, which were joined by a group of black union leaders drawn from across the movement. This new breed was nothing like Archie Bunker or the “hardhat” stereotype of those days: they were strong believers in workplace democracy; they were overwhelmingly anti-racist and anti-war; they were often non-white and non-male. 5

  Among the artifacts of this brief period of blue-collar possibility is a forgotten little book from 1972 called A Populist Manifesto , which proposed a grand plan for the seventies generation: a “pact between the have-nots.” The manifesto’s authors zeroed right in on the essential populist idea: “The key to building any new majority in American politics is a coalition of self-interest between blacks and low- and moderate-income whites,” they declared. That was because “the real division in this country is not between generations or between races, but between the rich who have power and those blacks and whites who have neither power nor property.” This was not a description of an existing movement, however; it was a blueprint for a new populism that might be called into being—“a platform for a movement that does not yet exist.” 6

  There was a populist revival in academia to go along with this renewed spirit of working-class revolt. It focused, appropriately enough, on the People’s Party of the 1890s. Instead of a cautionary tale about the paranoia and bigotry of working-class movements, the story of Populism was now remembered as a kind of golden moment for freedom itself. This was the teaching of Democratic Promise , Lawrence Goodwyn’s landmark 1976 history. The book aimed to do nothing less than turn history’s conventional understanding of progress upside down. The Pops, Goodwyn insisted, had a sense of democratic engagement that was better developed than our own; their movement, he wrote, made “the fragile hopes of participants in our own twentieth-century American society seem cramped by comparison.” 7

  One working politician who tried to build the populist ideas of the era into something larger was the Oklahoma senator Fred Harris, who ran for president as a Democrat in 1976. Harris spent the sixties as a reliable supporter of Great Society programs, but in the seventies he looked out over a country where the traditional alliances of liberalism were crumbling—where the “Okies” he grew up among were voting for George Wallace and where the Right was on the ascendant. Liberal appeals were no longer convincing to anyone, and Harris went looking for the reason why. The answer was that liberalism had developed a massive contradiction. As Harris wrote in 1973, “You can’t appeal to black people and poor people … on the basis of their own self-interest, and to everybody else”—meaning the vast, undifferentiated middle class—“on the basis of morality. That kind of an appeal is the luxury of the intellectual elite—for people who are, themselves, socially and economically secure.” 8

  How to resolve this? The answer, Harris wrote, was to appeal to just about everyone except the wealthy on the basis of self-interest, by taking on “concentrated wealth and corporate power.” By declaring war against oil companies, big banks, agribusiness, and so on, Harris proposed to build a transracial alliance of all non-rich people, white as well as black. His “New Populism,” he wrote, “seeks to put America back together again—across the lines of race, age, sex, and region. Those in the coalition don’t have to love each other. I wish they would. But all they have to do is recognize their common interests.” 9

  “The issue is privilege” was the remarkable slogan under which Harris ran for the presidency in 1976. He promised to break up General Motors, big oil, and other gigantic agglomerations of economic power. He routinely quoted Jesse Jackson, which was then regarded as a daring move for an ambitious politician. 10

  The innovation for which Harris will always be remembered, however, was his spectacular low-budget campaign—driving around the country in a camper, using his house as his headquarters, staying in the homes of supporters, carrying his own bags, making his calls on a pay phone at the local gas station. “This campaign will be a people’s campaign, both in strategy and belief,” Harris said on launching the effort. These populist strategies were meant to illustrate the populist beliefs, of course, but Harris also thought of his regular-guy run for the White House as a necessity: the only way someone with his views could possibly stand for high office was by doing it on a shoestring. 11

  * * *

  THE C OMMON THREAD among these populist revivalists was that all of them had some experience with civil rights and had thus learned the power of mass movements. Jack Newfield, a journalist who co-authored A Populist Manifesto , had been in the audience for Martin Luther King’s Montgomery speech in 1965, while Lawrence Goodwyn had spent much of the sixties organizing working-class black and brown voters in Texas. 12 Fred Harris, for his part, called for and then served on the Kerner Commission, which investigated the causes of the urban riots of 1967. *

  Another thing all of them did was reject the technocratic, elitist liberalism that was then emerging. The Democratic Party was making its fateful turn away from organized labor in those days; they were becoming a party of experts and technocrats, of white-collar professionals who admired fancy college degrees but had little interest in working-class solidarity.

  “Elitist” was the word A Populist Manifesto used to describe emerging centrist liberalism; a stylish politics for people bedazzled by experts but contemptuous toward their blue-collar countrymen. Populism, as the authors imagined it, “mistrusts the technocrats from the RAND Corporation and the Harvard Business School.” Lawrence Goodwyn, for his part, called “rule by experts” a “Leninist paradigm” that justifies itself by expressing its “impatience with mass human performance.” 13

  “People are smart enough to govern themselves” is how Fred Harris put this fundamental article of faith. Also: “Experts are always wrong.” Where they were most wrong, he continued, was on foreign policy questions, which had for decades been directed by elites from business and academia, and which Harris proposed to democratize: “you have to open that thing up, level with people, let them in on things.” Harris said these words in 1975, by which time the disasters of Vietnam were familiar to all. He added: “when you do, you can no longer justify most of what’s going on.” 14

  * * *

  IN THE LARGE field of Democrats running for the presidency in 1976, several other candidates imitated Harris’s trademark humility while divorcing it completely from his call for
a war on privilege. Populism as style became a runaway #1 smash hit; populism as multiracial economic democracy faded slowly into the sunset.

  Here was the catchphrase that eventually captured the nation’s heart that year: “My name is Jimmy Carter, and I’m running for president.” With such humble and direct words did the jeans-wearing “antipolitician” from Georgia make himself the screen upon which Democrats projected their populist dreams—“populism” now meaning a sunny, upbeat people-ism. 15

  Hailing from far outside Washington power circles and taking on a platoon of more famous Democrats, Jimmy Carter proceeded to win the party’s presidential nomination in a blurry but noble-sounding quest to restore people’s faith in a political system that looked rotten and corrupted after Watergate and Vietnam.

  Carter was certainly capable of speaking the old populist language. In his acceptance speech at the Democratic convention that summer, he denounced (in his soft-spoken way) the “political economic elite” who “never had to account for mistakes” regardless of how they screwed up. Lobbyists, the CIA, the income-tax system—all of them were offensive to the democratic spirit as Carter understood it. “It is time for the people to run the government,” he announced, “and not the other way around.”

  When Carter used the word “populist,” however, he meant to invoke comforting myths of the general will, not working-class solidarity. On the campaign trail, Carter encouraged journalists to use the term to describe him as a way of avoiding the conventional tags “liberal” and “conservative.” What populism was all about, he said, was expressing the will of the people, embracing a politics that arose “directly from the concerns and the yearnings of the people themselves, which is my own definition of populism.” 16

  There were other definitions floating around out there, but somehow Carter always managed to fit. In 1976, the liberal New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis watched Carter give an idealistic speech about how fine the American people were and decided right then and there that the man was a democratic hero:

  I thought: Jimmy Carter really does see himself fighting entrenched power, the status quo. He resents privilege, official arrogance, unfairness. He thinks of himself as one of the outsiders, those without power in society. In short, he is an authentic modern voice of that old American strain, Populism. 17

  Journalistic admiration of Carter’s ordinariness hit a sort of crescendo with his inauguration in January 1977, when the new president showed his distaste for the trappings of power by walking the length of Pennsylvania Avenue instead of riding in his limousine. Carter’s speech, according to one wire service account, struck a “populist tone” by calling for “humility, mercy, and justice.” This is a definition worth remembering in a time when our public thinkers routinely describe “populism” as a philosophy of vanity, cruelty, and intolerance, plus a snickering disregard for the rights of others. 18

  Put Carter’s humility aside and examine his actual deeds in the White House, however, and it becomes clear that his was the least populist administration since Herbert Hoover’s.

  The historian Jefferson Cowie calls the Carter years “The New Deal That Never Happened,” and the phrase is apt: After years of working-class discontent and African American uprisings, Carter’s victory was the great opportunity for Democrats to show what they could do for the vast majority of the population. Instead they did next to nothing.

  Oh, they were able to get a big capital-gains tax cut passed, all right—and if you’re looking for the roots of today’s extreme inequality, it’s a good place to start. Carter’s Democrats deregulated airlines and trucking. They embraced austerity as inflation mounted higher and higher. They stood by indifferently as an employer counterattack squashed the decade’s militant unionism. When it came to New Deal programs like a proposed full-employment scheme, they proved to be worse than useless. 19

  What the Carter team really cared about was fighting inflation and balancing the budget, anti-populist causes for which they were willing to accept spiraling unemployment. When his handpicked Fed chairman, Paul Volcker, chose to tackle inflation by jacking interest rates up to a now unthinkable 20 percent, he sent the economy into a sharp recession that, in turn, scorched Carter’s hopes for a second term. As for the ordinary Americans who were hard hit by the shutting down of prosperity, Volcker had this winning admonition: “The standard of living of the average American has to decline.”

  A bland technocrat straight out of the consensus playbook, Jimmy Carter represented a new kind of Democrat—a post–New Deal centrist who campaigned with vague populist niceness but whose true affection was reserved for ultra-competent policy experts. This understanding of liberal leadership would far outlast Carter’s political career: we would see it again in the presidencies of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, two more true believers in meritocracy who also thought to present themselves as kindly reformers on the side of ordinary people.

  In 1980 Carter led his Democrats into a sickening disaster. In a landslide, the country chose a new kind of Republican—Ronald Reagan, a man of ideology and moralistic rhetoric who also campaigned as a populist but who offered a far more forceful solution to the cynicism of the age.

  * * *

  ALL THROUGH THE 1970s, the Right had been sharpening its own populist appeal, coming up with all sorts of ways to express its outraged hostility to affectation and privilege—none of which, mirabile dictu, ever got in the way of their equally unrelenting efforts to roll back liberal economic achievements.

  You know what I’m talking about, reader. The Right’s war on the establishment has been the inescapable political soundtrack of the last forty years, playing at high volume from loudspeakers all around you. It has powered countless political careers. Thousands of fire-breathing right-wing best sellers have been printed so that they might clutter the attics of middle America. Conservative warriors too numerous to list have risen to celebrity status—radio, TV, journalism—burned briefly with rage against the establishment, and then settled back into obscurity.

  What establishment, precisely, did this populist uprising aim to confront? Well, there was the media, who supposedly poison our news and distort the truth. The intellectuals who hate our country; who instruct our kids in hating our country; who capitulate immediately to any kind of radical who hates our country. The pampered college kids who insult our soldiers and our cops. The activist judges who make the law rather than interpret it. In other words, the elite: the disdainful, contemptuous, East Coast, liberated, raised-consciousness elite.

  Elites who longed to give away the Panama Canal. Elites who were soft on welfare, soft on crime, soft on school discipline, soft on communism—but who still wanted to make Americans wear seat belts and drive cars with airbags. Elites who failed to live up to basic moral standards of behavior when in the Oval Office. Elites who make endless excuses for Muslim terrorism.

  What I am trying to describe with this hyperbole is a kind of inverted class war; a conflict that, as an early backlasher put it, “finds the upper classes rhetorically on the side of revolution in values and structure, and the lower classes rhetorically on the side of stability, slower evolution, and loyalty.” 20

  But the war was also about race. Almost wherever you looked, the young Republican strategist Kevin Phillips wrote in a once-famous book, white voters were moving away from the Democratic Party because it had come to be identified with African American protest and achievement. “The principal force which broke up the Democratic (New Deal) coalition,” Phillips wrote, “is the Negro socioeconomic revolution and liberal Democratic ideological inability to cope with it.” 21 (Whatever that meant.)

  In Phillips’s understanding of the age, ideas counted for little. Demographics was all, and tribalism was the essential political impulse. In one supremely cynical passage, Phillips even seemed to encourage the Republicans to continue vigorous “civil rights enforcement” despite the preferences of the party’s new, racist voters because securing African American voting righ
ts would accelerate the ugly phenomenon of racial sorting. The more blacks entered the political process, Phillips predicted, the more they would “seize control” of the Southern Democratic Party, and the more the region’s whites would come running to the GOP. 22

  The word that Phillips chose to describe what was going on with this new, majoritarian Republican Party was “populism.” Those who hated or opposed the country’s “establishment” or “privileged elite” were “populists,” and the great shift under way was the transition of the Republican Party from one of these poles to the other—“from establishmentarianism to populism.” As we know, biracial coordination was one of the things that defined 1890s Populism, * but for Phillips, “the new populist coalition includes very few Negroes.” This form of populism encouraged one group of working people to despise another. 23

  * * *

  THE GREAT OPPORT UNITY for this phony populism of the Right, in both its cultural and its racist flavors, arrived in the late seventies. Its embodiment was an actor, of course: sunny Ronald Reagan, who played the heroic Rooseveltian role, the man who would dispel the air of defeat and decline that hovered over the United States. Reagan would save us from the great malaise of the Carter presidency; he would inspire us with talk about our “rendezvous with destiny”; he would lead us on “a great national crusade to make America great again.”