Why the Left's Populism Never Caught On

Since the 1960s, the American left has looked for a liberal who could light a fire against big business and the Pentagon while staying connected to the folks back home.

Click here for part 1 of this series.

"Progressive populism" has been a dream of the American liberal-left since the 1960s. The excitement of the big antiwar demonstrations and civil rights rallies lingered in the liberal memory: a whole lot more fun than 1950s liberal technocracy!

Following C Vann Woodward's cautionary biography of the Populist-turned-racist Tom Watson, first published in 1963, more left-wing historians set about redeeming and rehabilitating the record of the Populists of the 1890s.

Meanwhile, political activists kept looking and hoping for a leftist with a twang, somebody who could ignite an angry fire against big business and the Pentagon while staying connected to the folks back home on the range. The names of those in whom these hopes were placed would fill an index page in a history of the 1970s and 1980s. Where are you now, Jim Hightower? Ann Richards? Tom Harkin? George McGovern? Incredible as it may now sound, there were 2 weeks in the fall of 1988 when it was seriously reported that Michael Dukakis had reinvented himself as a populist ....

It never worked of course, because populism is not at all the same thing as left-wing mistrust of profit-making. There are overlaps, but the differences are more important.

Populism does not divide the "haves" from the "have-nots" on a dollar basis. It divides the economic "them" from the "economic" us on a tribal and moral basis. In the 1890s, quite a rich man could be accepted as a Populist, even a Populist leader. (Here's an image of the home of James B. Weaver, the Populist candidate for president in 1892.)

Populism did not condemn wealth. It condemned wealth that was earned and spent in ways that violated the moral sense of a particular community: whether railroading in the 1890s or international trade in the 1980s or global finance today. Populism's wrath was directed not against economic superiors, but against economic aliens.

Which is why populism - both the capital "P" Populism of the 1890s and the lower case "p" populism that has flared at intervals ever since - was and remains compatible with racism and anti-semitism. To the extent that "the left" is defined by its hostility to tribal, ethnic and national distinctions, "populism" can never be a movement of "the left." Xenophobia is as essential to populism as resentment is to socialism.

More to come…