THE VICISSITUDES OF POPULISM

A LITTLE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

Hi! Remember me? The book is getting close. I’m hoping, a couple more months at the most. Meanwhile, don’t want you to forget me too much. I think most of everything in the excerpt below appears somewhere, on some post to this substack. But for purposes of the book it was deemed necessary to pull it together into a single overview. I thought some of you might find this of interest.

To many contemporary commentators, particularly those who would presume to have written the obituary for populism¹, it is taken to be a product of the much-maligned Trump Revolution of 2016. This perspective though reveals a remarkably myopic regard of the tradition’s rich theory and history. Here I’ll only quickly skim the history, with some of the more intriguing theoretical approaches considered thereafter.

Populism is the sole native protest and social change movement indigenous to the European experience in North America. Though many observers reasonably trace populism’s lineage back to the movement led by President Andrew Jackson, in fact Clyde Wilson argues² populism well-predates the U.S. founding:

Bacon’s rebellion in Virginia; the 1689 revolution in Maryland; the successful 1635-1638 resistance to the Massachusetts Bay colony against attempts to revoke its charter; Leisler’s 1688 rebellion in New York; Culpepper’s 1677-1680 rebellion in North Carolina; the ejection of proprietary government from South Carolina in 1721; the colonists reform of the proprietary regime in Georgia in the 1740’s; the revolt of the frontier Paxton boys in Pennsylvania in 1763, which led a reluctant government to adopt new Indian policies and expanded the franchise; the Regulator movements in the two Carolinas just before the Revolution. There were many more. Left historians have strained hard to find proletarian revolt, but without success. All these actions were populist: defensive uprisings of regional communities against sins of omission or commission on the part of officials. And all had a degree of success. [emphasis in original]

Notwithstanding this rich history, the term first became popular with the U.S. agrarian radical movement of the late 19th century.³ By the early 20th century this movement found its way into Canada, particularly in the prairie provinces. This was a multidimensional movement which too often gets overly identified with quixotic electoral efforts: the People’s Party in the U.S. and the United Farmers provincial parties of Canada. These turn of the century-ish agrarian populists contained conflicts over whether resources and energies were best directed into electoral politics or whether they should be directed to alternative institution building.⁴

In any event, notwithstanding the more famous forays into electoral politics, it probably was the alternative institution building that was most impressive. And while not always successful, it was out of these efforts that the agrarian populists’ most lasting legacies came. In the effort to remedy the structural conditions that left them impoverished – what they saw as an interlocking system of exploitation composing government, the banks, the railways, and the grain companies, among others – they built cooperative institutions to serve their collective purposes. These cooperative efforts were directed at financial, credit, marketing, and purchasing solutions. They included grain elevators, Charles Macune’s ambitious sub-treasury system, marketing boards, and health insurance plans.

Though, as Lawrence Goodwyn emphasized in his iconic work on the U.S. agrarian populists, such cooperative endeavors were never much separated from the educational ones that cultivated the membership lifeblood of such institutions.

The central educational tool of the Farmers Alliance was the cooperative experiment itself. The massive effort at agrarian self-help, and the opposition it stimulated from furnishing merchants, wholesale houses, cotton buyers, and bankers in the South and from grain elevator companies, railroads, land companies, livestock commission agencies, and bankers in the West, brought home to hundreds of thousands of American farmers new insights into their relationship with the commercial elements of American society.

Those educational efforts included a communication network composed of circulars; well-placed journalists, producing informative and advocative newspaper coverage; and many tens of thousands of trained, travelling lectures who addressed gatherings of farmers, large and small, across the land. Likewise, though, those educational efforts were also regarded as funneling into a renaissance of “democracy,” though this was not the standard brand of representative democracy over which so much electoral energies seemed to be squandered. They saw those institutions as needing reform, promoting such measures as initiative, referendum, and recall: enabling the public to have more direct control over the operation of their electoral, supposedly representative, institutions.

For many of the agrarian populists, though, the renaissance of democracy went way beyond this. They fashioned their institutions, right down to the locals of their National Farmers Alliance or Grain Growers Association, as what some of them explicitly called “schools of citizenship.” In these “schools,” often actually meeting in the local, rural schoolhouse, their membership learned the skills of oration, cooperation, and leadership, that would allow them to become effective citizens on behalf of their farmer communities. And throughout this agrarian populist movement, the emphasis was upon the value of the community. For many, while they relied upon an international commodities market (e.g., cotton or grain) for their livelihoods, in Polanyi-like fashion, they recognized the importance of conceiving of their economic life as rooted in what we’d call a gemeinschaft. They sought to insulate their families and communities from the corrosive effects of unfettered markets. Some spoke openly of their vision for a “moral community.”

In a perverse irony, though, as the moniker of “populist” grew in popularity, it began to increasingly lose this deep rootedness in temporalist institutions. As the Google Ngram graph below demonstrates, while the phrase “populist” first experienced a big bump in usage, as you’d expect from what I’ve described above, in the late 19^th century, it’s in the latter 1960s that it begins a dramatic escalation in popular usages, right through to the mid-90s. Then in 2012 it starts another dramatic escalation in popularity right through until the present.

The U.S. was the cutting edge of the post-WWII populist insurgency. While I won’t belabor a point here that I’ve made elsewhere, Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society may well be considered as the consolidation of managerial liberalism and the closing of the long durée of the French Revolution. Unsurprisingly then (or so I hope will become obvious briefly), in response to the consolidation of this managerial liberal regime in the 1960s (after decades of growing strength through the New Deal and the military-industrial complex that emerged from WWII), in the late 60s and 70s the new populist movement emerged in the form of what Richard Nixon called “the silent majority.”

Becoming somewhat less silent, most famously it manifested early in the hard hat brawls with hippies and anti-Vietnam war protestors, as well as the condemnation of affirmative action, and most dramatically fueled the anti-bussing protests of the 70s.⁵ However, in the 1980s, populism was coopted by the rhetoric of the Reagan Revolution. As Christopher Caldwell has observed, Reaganomics used massive deficit spending to buy off a decade of relative peace between the conflicting ambitions of the managerial class and the populist insurgents.⁶ Perhaps perceiving that the Reagan era truce was decaying under George H. W. Bush – as consumer confidence crashed and unemployment soared – that insurgency burst out again in the 1990s, fueling the presidential campaigns of Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot.

Again though, it was coopted, this time under the banner of patriotism, following the 9/11 attacks. However, as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq stretched on – and loved ones of the very people who filled the ranks of the populist movement kept returning home in body bags – skepticism grew over how the early patriotic outpouring had been manipulated. Following the financial crisis of 2008, with the massive transfer of wealth it incurred, and the absence of criminal accountability on the part of those responsible, that growing discontent about how the 9/11 attacks had been leveraged for the war machine, gave rise to a new eruption of this decades-long (now, also, widely anti-war) populist insurgency. Many middle Americans had believed that they’d found a champion in the hope and change rhetoric of Obama. When that turned out to be false, and then Bernie Sanders proved incapable of providing the champion they sought, the populists finally turned to the unlikely champion of Donald Trump.

But in all this, we’re getting well ahead of the story I want to tell. So, let’s take a step back and try to make sense of how this post-60s manifestation of populism came to be and what it really means. To unpack all that I want to turn to the political theorist who was most influential on my own thinking about modern populism and its significance: Paul Piccone.

Which takes the book into territory well-known to long time readers here. But, again, the value of the book is putting all this, and so much more discussed over the history of this blog, together into a coherent story. So, if you’d like to stay up to date on the book’s progress, and be the first to know about it when it’s ready, but haven’t yet, please…

And if you know of anyone else likely to find this sort of thing of interest, please…

1. For over half a century the iconic work in the denigration of populism was Richard Hofstadter’s The Age of Reform (New York: Random House, 1955). Among his criticisms was that the movement wasn’t sufficiently liberal. More recently, a cause célèbre among the dissident right has been Neema Parvini’s The Populist Delusion (Perth: Imperium Press, 2022). For him, the problem with populism was that it was too liberal. Both of these failed critiques are informed by a striking absence of any apparent sense of responsibility to actually read the primary sources or, in the latter case, even the relevant now voluminous secondary ones. For an incisive response to Hofstader, see Lawrence Goodwyn, “Rethinking Populism: Paradoxes of Historiography and Democracy,” Telos 88 (Summer 1991). For my response to Parvini’s rather squalid treatment of the topic see here.

2. Clyde Wilson, “Up at the Fork of the Creek: In Search of American Populism,” Telos 104 (Summer 1995).

3. The term did have an early history associated to land reform in Russia, though in a different context, with different implications. As Goodwyn demonstrates, a part of the problem with Hofstader’s misunderstanding of the history of populism arose from a failure to appreciate the distinction. See note 1.

4. Probably the best single volume on the U.S. experience is Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). For Canada, given the managerial class bias of the Central Canadian scholarship on the topic, I’d have to recommend my own, admittedly rather limited, doctoral thesis: Michael McConkey, “The Political Culture of the Agrarian Radicals: A Canadian Adventure in Democracy” (Ph.D. Diss, Montreal, McGill, 1990).

5. Christopher Lasch, True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics, 1 edition (New York, NY: W W Norton, 1991); Samuel T. Francis, “Message from MARs: The Social Politics of the New Right,” in Beautiful Losers: Essays on the Failure of American Conservatism (Columbia London: University of Missouri, 1994).

6. Christopher Caldwell, The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020).