Class Warriors

The liberalism I grew up with was not the left of academia or sophisticated New York salons. It was the liberalism of small farmers and manufacturing workers who just wanted a fair shake, who believed that big corporations were trying to screw them. To put it in more sophisticated terms, they believed that the social elite must not monopolize the social surplus. Anyone who contributes deserves a share of the benefits. Today we call these people populists.

The ideology of populism is not to be confused with the Populist Party, and has little to do with the social democracy of western europe. Its nascent form is to be found in Jefferson's party, and reaches its mature nineteenth century form under Jackson. The populism of those times was directed at urban elites and rich planters who they saw as preventing regular Americans from making a good living. It viewed government as the enemy, because the federal government was viewed as the instrument of their enemies.

Populism underwent a revolution in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. There were two main elements to this change. First, they realized that government power could be used to regulate the corporations who were jeopardizing the economic independence of small farmers. So they became champions of strong government rather than its opponents. Second, the balance of power among populists shifted from the countryside to manufacturing workers. The latter played second fiddle to the former until the industrial revolution dramatically expanded the number of urban manufacturing workers. But this basic coalition of farmer and worker was the essential electoral base of every successful Democratic presidential candidate from Thomas Jefferson through Franklin Roosevelt.

Populism is against a lot of things. It is against Big Business, its historic foe. It is once again a critic of Big Government. And it has had an ambiguous relationship with Big Labor. Populism is intensely nationalistic and tends to be against the rest of the world. There has also been a regrettable tendency among some strains of populism to be against ethnic and religious minorities, as well as immigrants. It is this kind of populism which is partly responsible for its bad odor at the present.

The question is, what is populism for? Contrary to many of its critics, it is neither mindless envy nor American socialism. Populism is at its core essentially egalitarian. Populists believe that people's economic independence must not be threatened by powerful external forces. They want each person's ability to be the determiner of her fate. Basically they just want the rules to be fair, and are antagonistic to the idea that any person or group should be able to cash in on arbitrary advantages (like who they know or who their parents are). Populists are in many ways the quintessential Americans: they want everyone who works hard to have a house, a yard, and be able to take vacations. They want everyone who is willing to sweat have a chance to make it to the middle class. What a radical idea.

The problem for Democrats today, as so ably demonstrated by Thomas Frank in his What's the Matter with Kansas, is that populism has been captured by the right. The erosion of middle class living standards requires an explanation, and vague forces like “the global economy” are not going to cut it. There needs to be a concrete enemy, one you can grapple with. In the same way the earlier generations of populists viewed eastern elites and corporate executives as the source of their woes, contemporary populists have been given a new foe: liberals (who also happen to be, in stereotype at least, eastern urban rich pansy snobs). So they are voting for the party who is the one really responsible for their deteriorating situation.

This has happened before. In the post-bellum South, populists fought over who was to blame for their socioeconomic disaster. The northerners could not be gotten at. At hand were two candidates: the planter class that had led the country into the war, and the freed slaves who were the legal beneficiaries of it. While many southern leaders tried to do the right (and proper) thing and create a bi-racial coalition of poor sharecroppers and small farmers against the rich planters, this effort was undone by racial animosity. Instead, the planters managed the pit the poor whites and blacks against each other. The South has never really recovered.

Today's populists must not make that mistake. There is an enemy at hand, an enemy that just so happens to be their old, once-defeated foe: corporate america. What liberals need to do is figure out how to convince them.