Populism Is Democracy at Work

Populism Is Democracy at Work
The president is merely speaking for the people.

By THOMAS FRANK

Late last month, the success of an idea made newspaper headlines. "Populism" was on the march. After the surprise victory of a Republican in the Massachusetts Senate race, a number of Democrats in the U.S. Senate swerved abruptly to the left, momentarily casting into doubt Ben Bernanke's second term as Federal Reserve chairman.

"Populist Backlash Puts Bernanke Under Siege," screamed a page-one headline in the Washington Post; those who read further would also have discovered that the "populist brushfire" was also responsible for the declining value of stocks. In a New York Times column published a few days later, David Brooks deplored "The Populist Addiction." The possibility that President Barack Obama would also fall to this advancing idea struck Washington Post columnist George Will as so cosmically wrong that he likened it to "Fred Astaire donning coveralls and clodhoppers."

What is populism? To judge by this coverage, populism is a trick that politicians perform—a clumsy disguise they adopt or a fake-folksy rhetorical line they try to put over. Populism is a species of demagogy, a backwoods form of class war, a sinister cross of Lenin with Li'l Abner.

Populism also seems to mean liberalism, only expressed in more fiery language than the pallid, technocratic drone that makes Washington happy. But whatever they mean by it, journalists and opinionators seem to agree that populism is dangerous. It scares the markets. And it is the duty of every right-thinking citizen to resist it.

This narrative of populism's scariness is a survival from the 19th century when, for a brief period, there was an actual movement that called itself "Populism." Those long-ago Populists inveighed against the power of monopolies and high finance and were denounced by the era's guardians of market orthodoxy in largely the same way as today: coveralls and clodhoppers, anarchy and communism, a harbinger of the end of civilization.

Generations of historians have demolished that antique stereotype of the original Populist movement. They have refuted it and re-refuted it; debunked it and re-debunked it. We now know, for example, that the Populists' political program was not the apocalypse but actually a quite sensible set of proposals, many of them—such as the income tax and the direct election of senators—were later adopted in different form. What's more, the Populist movement had a touching faith in modernity, in rural co-ops and scientific agriculture.

But journalistic stereotype is apparently invulnerable to such scholarly correction.

As are many other aspects of our story. The political impotence of populism, for example, is a favorite Washington theory expounded most recently by Mr. Brooks. Populism "nearly always fails," he writes, citing the defeat of three-time Democratic presidential candidate William J. Bryan. What's more, populism is fundamentally alien, since "this country was built by anti-populists." But if politicians who choose to talk about class are thereby dooming themselves not only to failure but to exclusion from the American tradition, one wonders, why do they do it? Why do the markets fear them so? And what are we to make of the careers of Andrew Jackson and Thomas Jefferson, of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman?

Another thing we might learn from the scholarly types is that for more than 40 years the language and rhetoric of the populist sensibility have been the property of the political right. Indeed, this "populism" is commonplace today, mobilizing the righteousness of the common people to push the policies that have made Wall Street immensely rich. It makes a hero of star proletarian Joe the Plumber for opposing higher taxes for the wealthy. It uses people-versus-the-powerful language in tax revolts and busing riots, in prolife demonstrations and fights over evolution, and in campaign after campaign against the big-government despots of Washington, D.C.

And today we have the tea partiers, rallying against deficit spending and weeping hot tears for the disregarded wisdom of Ayn Rand. Their beef is not with traditional economic dogma, but with those impudent figures who have dared to stray in the slightest from traditional rules. This kind of populism doesn't frighten markets; it enforces them. It is orthodoxy with a twang.

Commentators tremble to think that Democrats might be driven by the current economic situation into the arms of populism, but they might do better to examine the kind of populism that got us into this situation in the first place. This perverse movement powered the deregulation of the banks, the effort to starve the federal beast, and the grand campaign to herd the public into mutual funds on the grounds that markets are the true vox populi, expressing the infallible wisdom of the average citizen.

They might also begin searching for a different term to describe the situation when elected representatives start doing what their constituents want them to do. My suggestion: Call it "democracy."