The People, No

by Frank, Thomas

  32.    On the UAW’s war on Wallace, see Nelson Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor (Basic Books, 1995), pp. 428–29.

  33.    Richard Hofstadter, “The Age of Rubbish,” Newsweek , July 4, 1970.

  7. THE MONEY CHANGERS BURN THE TEMPLE

    1.    Here is how the passage continues: “ ‘The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.’ ” So 62 percent of white America tell the Harris Poll. A quarter of the American people abandoned their trust in our government between 1964 and 1970; by the start of this decade, two-thirds of us believed we had lost our national sense of direction; half of us thought we were on the verge of a national breakdown.” Jack Newfield and Jeff Greenfield, A Populist Manifesto: The Making of a New Majority (Warner Paperback, 1972), p. 16.

    2.    Writing in 1972, C. Vann Woodward furnished a list of politicians identified in those days as “populists.” See “The Ghost of Populism Walks Again,” New York Times , June 4, 1972. The historian Eric Goldman did the same in “Just Plain Folks,” American Heritage 23, no. 4 (June 1972). An even more comprehensive list is given by George B. Tindall in the important essay “Populism: A Semantic Identity Crisis,” Virginia Quarterly Review 48, no. 4 (Autumn 1972): 501–18.

    3.    The Hightower Lowdown , May 2009, p. 1. Emphasis in original.

    4.    Bayard Rustin, “The Blacks and the Unions,” in Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin (Quadrangle, 1971), p. 349, my emphasis.

    5.    The 2.4 million strike participants as reported by Jefferson Cowie in Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New Press, 2010). Cowie provides a good description of the insurgencies in the various unions, but the classic account is Thomas Geoghegan, Which Side Are You On?: Trying to Be for Labor When It’s Flat on Its Back (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991). “Non-white and non-male”: See Lane Windham, Knocking on Labor’s Door: Union Organizing in the 1970s and the Roots of a New Economic Divide (University of North Carolina Press, 2017).

    6.    Newfield and Greenfield, A Populist Manifesto , pp. 20, 9.

    7.    Lawrence Goodwyn, Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America (Oxford University Press, 1976), p. xiii.

    8.    Fred Harris, The New Populism (Thorp Springs Press, 1973), p. 8.

    9.    Ibid., p. 13.

  10.    Charles Mohr, “Harris Regards Key Issue as Need to Fight Privilege,” New York Times , December 27, 1975; see also Tom Hayden, “Fred Harris: A Populist with a Prayer,” Rolling Stone , May 8, 1975.

  11.    See Christopher Lydon, “Fred Harris Seeks Presidency,” New York Times , January 12, 1975, and Richard Linnett, “What the ‘Godfather of Populism’ Thinks of Donald Trump,” Politico , December 31, 2016.

  12.    Newfield: See his memoir, Somebody’s Gotta Tell It: The Upbeat Memoir of a Working-Class Journalist (St. Martin’s Press, 2002). Goodwyn’s role in the Texas arm of the civil rights movement is described by Max Krochmal in Blue Texas: The Making of a Multiracial Democratic Coalition in the Civil Rights Era (University of North Carolina Press, 2016). Goodwyn himself wrote a considerable amount on the subject, mainly in the Texas Observer . See his articles “ ‘Hey-You’ in Huntsville,” Texas Observer , August 6, 1965; “The Caste System and the Righteousness Barrier,” Texas Observer , December 31, 1965; “Anarchy in St. Augustine,” Harper’s Magazine , January 1965.

  13.    Newfield and Greenfield, A Populist Manifesto , pp. 25, 26, 23. Goodwyn outlined his theories of democracy in issue number one of Democracy , January 1981, pp. 47, 51.

  14.    “People are smart enough”: The line appears in Lydon, “Fred Harris Seeks Presidency,” and also in Fred Harris, Does People Do It? (University of Oklahoma Press, 2008), p. 181; “Experts,” “open that thing up”: Hayden, “Fred Harris: A Populist with a Prayer.”

  15.    “Antipolitician” is a description applied to Carter by Rick Perlstein in The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Simon & Schuster, 2014), p. 581. I am indebted to Perlstein’s description of Carter in the passages that follow.

  16.    Robert S. Boyd, “Jimmy Carter Adopts a New Tag—Populist,” Philadelphia Inquirer , July 18, 1976.

  17.    Anthony Lewis, “In Search of Jimmy Carter,” New York Times , May 31, 1976.

  18.    See the UPI account as printed in the Salina Journal , January 20, 1977. For more on this theme, see the New York Times editorial from December 16, 1976, titled “Keeping in Touch,” in which we learn that, “having been elected as a populist, Jimmy Carter is naturally perplexed as to how he can restore easier access and a more informal atmosphere to help him keep in touch with ordinary people.”

  19.    On the employer counterattack and the Carter administration’s failure, see Lane Windham, Knocking on Labor’s Door , pp. 76–81. The full-employment scheme to which I refer was the Humphrey-Hawkins bill, a proposal that would have altered the basic nature of the American economy. The bill was a cause célèbre for the labor movement and also for the Congressional Black Caucus; it would have consummated the populist vision of so many of the figures I have described in these pages; and for a time it seemed to be the long-awaited answer to the discontent of the sixties and seventies. But the Democrats in the Carter administration pulled its teeth and turned it into an empty symbol that would bring no real effects. See Cowie, Stayin’ Alive , chapter 6.

  20.    Michael Novak, The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics: Politics and Culture in the Seventies (Macmillan, 1973), p. 20.

  21.    Kevin P. Phillips, The Emerging Republican Majority (Arlington House, 1969), p. 36.

  22.    Ibid., p. 464.

  23.    Ibid., p. 470.

  24.    Kemp, quoted in Albert R. Hunt, “Which Conservatism, Traditional or Populist, Will Reagan Stress?,” Wall Street Journal , May 27, 1980, p. 1.

  25.    I am summarizing here my own book One Market Under God . The quotes are from George Gilder, Wealth and Poverty (Basic Books, 1981), pp. 101, 98.

  26.    Jeffrey Bell, “The Elites and Reagan’s Populist Agenda,” Wall Street Journal , May 4, 1981, p. 24. Bell would later write a book-length contribution to the genre, Populism and Elitism: Politics in the Age of Equality (Regnery Gateway, 1992).

  27.    Ibid. Biographers of Reagan often depict the GE stage of the future president’s life as something resembling indoctrination, with GE management personnel instructing the callow actor in the teachings of the free-market philosophers.

  28.    Reagan quoted in Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (Norton, 2009), p. 247.

  29.    Richard A. Viguerie, The Establishment vs. The People: Is a New Populist Revolt on the Way? (Regnery Gateway, 1983), p. 23.

  30.    See Howard Fineman, “Poppy the Populist: A Onetime Preppy Talks to ‘the Folks,’ ” Newsweek , November 7, 1988. Interestingly enough, Fineman seemed to think that the original American populist—the man all would-be populists must try to emulate—was former Alabama governor George Wallace.

  31.    Patrick J. Buchanan, “How Middle America Is to Be Dispossessed,” his column for March 12, 2019, at Buchanan.org. See also “After the Revolution,” his column for March 11, 2011.

  32.    See James Bennet, “Buchanan Attacking All Fronts,” New York Times , February 29, 1996, and also Michael Lind, Up from Conservatism (Free Press, 1997), pp. 2–3.

  33.    David Nyhan, “Pitchfork Populist’s Blue-Collar Con,” Boston Globe , February 23, 1996.

  34.    Yes, Trump once wrote an op-ed for a major newspaper. See Trump, “Buchanan Is Too Wrong to Correct,” Los Angeles Times , October 31, 1999. On Hitler and the Nazis, see Steve Kornacki, “When Trump Ran Against Trump-ism: The 1990s and the Birth of Political Tribalism in America,” NBC News “Think,” October 2, 2018, https://www.nbcnews.co
m/think/opinion/when-trump-ran-against-trump-ism-story-2000-election-ncna915651 .

  35.    In a 1988 interview with Polly Toynbee of the Guardian , Trump denounces America’s openness to foreign investment and trade for reasons of national pride. The interview was reprinted in that paper on January 21, 2017.

  36.    Chris Cillizza, “Pat Buchanan Says Donald Trump Is the Future of the Republican Party,” Washington Post , January 12, 2016.

  37.    Michael Wolff, “Ringside with Steve Bannon at Trump Tower,” Hollywood Reporter , November 18, 2016. N.B.: “workingman” is Wolff’s coinage, not Bannon’s.

  38.    Michael C. Bender, “Bannon’s Journey to Economic Nationalism—Trump Adviser Cites Father’s 2008 Financial Trauma as a Turning Point,” Wall Street Journal , March 15, 2017.

  39.    These lines are from an interview Bannon did with Rudyard Griffiths in 2018 before a debate in Toronto with David Frum on “The Rise of Populism.” His remarks were published in The Rise of Populism (Anansi, 2019), p. 10, a transcript of the proceedings. See also the long critique of Wall Street and capitalism that Bannon unrolled in a 2014 talk to a group called the Human Dignity Institute. Read the transcript at https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/lesterfeder/this-is-how-steve-bannon-sees-the-entire-world .

  40.    Bannon said this in his 2018 Toronto debate with David Frum.

  41.    On Bannon’s (and hence Trump’s) deliberate effort to appeal to the Left, see the remarkable interview/essay by Robert Kuttner, “Steve Bannon, Unleashed,” in American Prospect , October 6, 2017.

  8. LET US NOW SCOLD UNCOUTH MEN

    1.    Mickey Kaus, The End of Equality (Basic Books/A New Republic Book, 1992), p. 173. Robert D. Atkinson, “Who Will Lead in the New Economy?,” Blueprint , June 2, 2000.

    2.    William A. Galston and Elaine C. Kamarck, “Five Realities That Will Shape 21st Century Politics,” Blueprint , Fall 1998.

  “In the Industrial Age, the working class dominated the electorate,” intoned Democratic grandee Al From in the course of one of his many denunciations of populism. “The new electorate of the Information Age is increasingly dominated by middle- and upper-middle-class voters who live in the suburbs, work in the New Economy, are culturally tolerant, and have moderate political views.” From “Building a New Progressive Majority,” Blueprint , January 24, 2001.

    3.    The “SXSL” festival took place on October 3, 2016. A description of its audience-selection process as well as the phrase “commander in cool” appear in Erin Coulehan, “Commander in Cool,” Salon, September 26, 2016.

    4.    On journalists opposing Trump, see Jim Rutenberg, “Trump Is Testing the Norms of Objectivity in Journalism,” New York Times , August 7, 2016; David Mindich, “For Journalists Covering Trump, a Murrow Moment,” Columbia Journalism Review , July 15, 2016. On journalists’ campaign donations, remember that journalists rarely give to political campaigns because it is thought to violate objectivity rules. See Dave Levinthal and Michael Beckel, “Journalists Shower Hillary Clinton with Campaign Cash,” Columbia Journalism Review , October 17, 2016. On Clinton campaigning in Republican states, see Matt Flegenheimer and Jonathan Martin, “Showing Confidence, Hillary Clinton Pushes into Republican Strongholds,” New York Times , October 17, 2016. Also, see Nate Silver, “There Really Was a Liberal Media Bubble,” fivethirtyeight.com, March 10, 2017.

    5.    See Lawrence Goodwyn, “Organizing Democracy: The Limits of Theory and Practice,” Democracy 1, no. 1 (1981): 51, 59. Emphasis in original. The idea was important to Goodwyn, and so he repeated it a few pages later: an essential requirement of a mass democratic movement, he wrote, is “an acceptance of human consciousness where it is.”

    6.    “Individual righteousness,” “celebrating the purity”: Goodwyn, The Populist Moment (Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 292. Goodwyn used these phrases to explain the failure of the Socialist Party, which took over many of Populism’s positions but got nowhere electorally. “Ideological patience”: Goodwyn, “Organizing Democracy.” In Many Minds, One Heart, the historian Wesley Hogan uses the phrase “democratic patience” to describe SNCC in the 1960s.

    7.    Joel Stein, In Defense of Elites: Why I’m Better Than You and You’re Better Than Someone Who Didn’t Buy This Book (Grand Central Publishing, 2019), pp. xvi, 161, 177.

    8.    Ibid., pp. 254, 239.

    9.    A study published in 2018 examined the demographics of seven different political categories defined by their attitude toward things like immigration, police brutality, and white privilege. It found that the most liberal category, the group it called “Progressive Activists,” was the wealthiest, the best-educated, and the second-whitest category. (“Devoted Conservatives” were the absolute whitest group.) The study, titled The Hidden Tribes of America , was done by an anti-polarization group called “More in Common” and was published in October 2018. Read it at https://hiddentribes.us .

  10.    See the graphic designer Bonnie Siegler’s Signs of Resistance: A Visual History of Protest in America (Artisan Books, 2018), a full-color book that shows us protest artifacts of the Revolutionary period, the women’s suffrage movement, the civil rights movement, the anti–Vietnam War movement, feminism, gay rights, opposition to the Gulf War, Black Lives Matter, and the opposition to Trump, but leaves labor out almost completely (participants in the 1968 Memphis sanitation strike are included under Civil Rights).

  11.    Blow did quote a famous 1946 poem by German cleric Martin Niemoller on July 27, 2017, which mentions Nazi persecution of “trade unionists.” Labor unions here in the United States, however, are something Blow seems to view differently. One of the very few times Blow mentioned them during this period was in his New York Times column for August 31, 2017, when he accused Donald Trump of “cozy[ing] up to police unions and encourag[ing] police brutality.”

  12.    Beginning in November of 2016, the American news media published dozens, probably hundreds, of articles blaming automation for the deindustrialization of America and specifically exonerating trade deals. It was one of the most remarkable displays of class-based herd thinking I have ever witnessed. Here is a sampling: “Don’t Blame China for Taking U.S. Jobs,” Fortune , November 8, 2016; “The real reason for disappearing jobs isn’t trade—it’s robots,” CNBC, November 21, 2016; “Most US Manufacturing Jobs Lost to Technology, Not Trade,” Financial Times, December 2, 2016; “The Long-Term Jobs Killer Is Not China. It’s Automation,” New York Times , December 21, 2016; Robert Samuelson’s column on the matter, “Trump is obsessed with trade—but it’s not a major cause of job loss,” Washington Pos t, January 29, 2017; “Rise of the machines: Fear robots, not China or Mexico,” CNN Business , January 30, 2017.

  There were second thoughts on this matter, but generally speaking they were not published till much later. See the 2018 summary of the ups and downs of the pundit consensus by Gwynne Guilford, “The Epic Mistake about Manufacturing That’s Cost Americans Millions of Jobs,” Quartz , May 3, 2018. See also the life work of the economist Dean Baker, who has written on trade and other class issues for years.

  13.    There is an enormous literature purporting to show the real reasons for Trump’s unlikely victory; much of it finds a root cause to be rising income inequality in addition to factors such as race hatred. For a good summary of the inequality argument, see Rosalind Dixon and Julie Suk, “Liberal Constitutionalism and Economic Inequality,” University of Chicago Law Review , March 2018.

  A few notable studies that diverge from the “deplorables” hypothesis:

  •  Harris Beider, Stacy Harwood, and Kusminder Chahal, “The Other America”: White Working-Class Views on Belonging, Change, Identity, and Immigration (Centre for Trust, Peace and Social Relations, 2017): A study of white working-class views that was conducted while the 2016 campaign was in progress; its finding was that white working-class Trump supporters “believed he could rest
ore their sense of economic stability that has been taken away.”

  •  Bob Davi and Jon Hilsenrath, “How the China Shock, Deep and Swift, Spurred the Rise of Trump,” Wall Street Journal , August 11, 2016: Evaluated support for Trump in Republican primaries and noted the geographic correlation of Trump support with the economic effects from Chinese competition.

  •  J. S. Goodwin, Y. Kuo, D. Brown, D. Juurlink, and M. Raji, “Association of Chronic Opioid Use with Presidential Voting Patterns in US Counties in 2016,” Journal of the American Medical Association Network Open 1, no. 2 (2018): e180450: Notes the remarkable correlation between support for Trump and “chronic opioid use” at the county level.

  •  Salena Zito and Brad Todd, The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics (Crown Forum, 2018): A study of swing counties in the upper Midwest that attributes Trump’s victory to, among other things, social media and the Democratic Party’s supposed cultural radicalism.