The following are extracts (for review purposes) from The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism, Thomas Frank, 2020:
Chapter 1: What Was Populism?
"Liberalism as we know it now is a movement led by prosperous, highly-educated professionals who see government by prosperous, highly-educated professionals as the highest goal of protest and political action. Where once it was democratic, liberalism is today a politics of an elite.
"What makes this particularly poignant is that we are living through a period of elite failure every bit as spectacular as that of the 1890s. I refer not merely to the opioid crisis, the bank bailouts, and the failure to prosecute any bankers after their last fraud-frenzy, but also to disastrous trade agreements, stupid wars, and deindustrialization...basically, to the whole grand policy vision of the last few decades, as it has been imagined by a tiny clique of norm-worshipping D.C. professionals and think-tankers.
"In this moment of maximum populist possibility, our commentariat proceeds as though the true populist alternative is simply invisible or impossible." – p. 52
Chapter 2: Because Right Is Right and God Is God
"'A Most Lamentable Comedy' was the title that small-town newspaperman William Allen White gave to the anti-Populist novella he published in 1901[, a] thinly disguised account of insurgent politics in Kansas. (note 2-30)...
"In White's telling, Populism was a form of mass hysteria[.] His novella incorporates virtually the entire list of frightful characteristics that pundits of the day attributed to Populism[.]
"[White] shows the...influence of the French social theorist Gustave Le Bon, whose book The Crowd...first appeared in English in 1896. Le Bon's most famous assertion...was that ordinary people, when gathered in crowds, became psychologically subhuman[.] Le Bon...also charged that crowds were irrational, impulsive, suspicious of progress, and fond of authoritarian leaders—precisely the bill of accusations that later generations of American social theorists would use to blast what they called 'populism.' (note 2-31)
"Give the plain people a say, this kind of thinking holds, and by some deep, irrational instinct they will try to smash the social order and to topple the highly educated people who administer it[.] Now, as then, populism is the word we apply to this imagined war of madness against reason, of entropy against order, of the poor against the rich, of the unthinking rabble against society's brains." – pp. 74–7
Chapter 3: Peak Populism in the Proletarian Decade
"The literary critic Kenneth Burke...in...1935 [gave a] speech to a left-wing writers group[.]
"Here is Burke's key insight: 'We convince a man by reason of the values which we and he hold in common.' The alternative, Burke pointed out, is to scold your audience, to assume 'antagonistic modes of thought and expression' and to 'condemn' the unenlightened. What we ought to be doing is not scolding but persuading[.] (note 3-21)" – pp. 97–8
Chapter 5: Consensus Redensus
"[T]he mid-1950s [was] a time of confidence and unprecedented middle-class prosperity....Huge public fights over ideology need never happen again, American intellectuals agreed; thankfully, the era of mass mobilization had given way to a political system of interest groups and experts, of plenty and of contentment....
"The 'liberal consensus' is the name that is sometimes applied to this smug worldview,...the orthodoxy of the age....Civility was the rule in political speech; pragmatic dealmaking was the political method; and pluralism was the unalterable political fact of the day. 'The problems of modern America were no longer ideological but technical and administrative,'...and the way to address these was 'by knowledgeable experts rather than by mass movements.' (note 5-1)
"'Knowledgeable experts' enjoyed something of a boom in the 1950s. Universities expanded dramatically. All the smart young men had good paying jobs at some center for advanced something, or were introducing modern management techniques to a federal department, or were working as 'systems analysts' in some giant corporate bureaucracy.
"Consensus thinkers were obsessed with the social position of the expert. After all, you couldn't have stability and prosperity without them....In a once-famous 1962 essay, sociologist Daniel Bell...hailed the 'technical and professional intelligentsia' who had ascended to the top echelons and the 'new system of recruitment for power' that had wisely plucked them out of the mass. Even the military, Bell marveled, was now in the hands of this deserving cohort. As he put it, 'the problems of national security...can no longer be settled...by common sense or past experience [but currently require] technicians and political theorists'...under the visionary leadership of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. (note 5-2)...
"[From note 5-2:] Bell continues[:] '[T]he "military intellectual" has emerged, and men like...Kissinger..."move freely through the corridors of the Pentagon and the State Department...rather as the Jesuits through the courts of Madrid and Vienna three centuries ago." ' (The quote is from an anonymous article in the Times Literary Supplement from 1961.) [Note 5-2 end]
"There was a wonderful coincidence behind the intellectuals' newfound faith in consensus: those who now organized and administered the great administrative organization were people exactly like them—highly educated professionals. The consensus thinkers saw American society as stable and harmonious because they were now part of its elite, members of the insiders' club just as surely as the press lords and steel magnates of the past." – pp. 148–50
"The early 1950s saw the rise of Wisconsin senator Joe McCarthy[;] he was cheered on by millions of average Americans as he accused innocent people...of being Communists. Under the influence of this bullying Republican demagogue, America became hysterical with fear. It indulged in a carnival of persecution that was largely aimed at intellectuals[.] In response, intellectuals began to believe that paranoid hatred of the educated elite was a permanent threat lurking always just beneath democracy's surface. Open societies like ours, they concluded, were in constant danger of convulsions of intolerance brought on by the uneducated rank and file....
"The effect of McCarthyism was to turn the country's intellectuals against ideology even more forcefully. [T]hey pushed toward a theory of democracy in which the passions of the millions were muted in favor of stability or 'equilibrium'—a form of democracy in which everyone accepted that the real power lay with professionals like themselves.
"'Pluralism' was the name the intellectuals gave this model, but the name was misleading. The key to the pluralist system, as the consensus thinkers imagined it, was not people from different walks of life having their say; it was the leaders of different groups coming to agreement quietly around a big mahogany table somewhere. Forget angry crowds marching in the streets by the millions: what you needed to make democracy work was a bunch of professional interest-group leaders, representatives who were highly civilized and who got along well with one another. These leaders and representatives were the key. They would reach across the aisle. They would compromise and make deals. They would find and inhabit the warm and 'vital' center. (note 5-3)
"'Representative government,' wrote Daniel Bell in 1956, was the only way to put 'a check on the tyrannical "popular" majority.' It was the only way to 'achieve consensus—and conciliation.' (note 5-4)
"You could trust representatives. They were professionals. What you could not trust were ordinary citizens coming together in mass movements. The men of the fifties knew that nothing good could ever result from such a thing. Mass movements were unstable and given to extremism. Mass movements did not listen to intellectuals. Their grievances were irrational—expressions of declining status or psychological maladjustment or bigotry or something even worse. Mass movements were swept along by moral passion to do terrible things. Herd average people into mass political groups, expose them to demagogues, and they become...a mob. Awful developments followed inevitably: McCarthyism today, perhaps fascism tomorrow." – pp. 150–2
"'Populism' was thought to incorporate many sins in the eyes of the liberal consensus, but most of them were attributed to the same perceived error that conservatives had identified in decades before: a refusal of deference. Populism was egalitarianism taken to such an extreme that it rejected legitimate hierarchies along with wrongful ones—legitimate hierarchies being, of course, the ones that the intellectuals themselves had climbed, the hierarchies of scholarly achievement. Populism represented the denial of their expertise. As Daniel Bell put it in The End of Ideology, 'populism goes further' than merely rejecting economic status: 'that some are more qualified than others to assert opinions is vehemently denied.' (note 5-6)
"We have heard several versions of this view already. That democracy means the overthrow of all standards of excellence is the baseline fear of the anti-populist tradition going back at least to the 1890s if not to the French Revolution. But Bell didn't acknowledge that he was part of any such tradition. Nor did he name any actual Populists when he made the above statement; he just asserted it and moved on. As we shall see again and again with the consensus intellectuals, they seemed to believe they could say whatever they wanted about populism without any obligation to prove it[.]" – pp. 153–4
"Richard Hofstadter, the most famous American historian of his day, retold the story of the 1890s People's Party in his enormously influential 1955 book, The Age of Reform.
"[Hofstadter] accused the Populists of losing faith in progress,...argued that the Populists despised immigrants[,] that they were 'profoundly nationalistic'[, that they] understood history by referring to crackpot conspiracy theories having to do with bankers and gold,...and [that] they were 'chiefly' responsible for anti-Semitism in America, blaming Jewish bankers for the farmer's problems. (note 5-7)
"The Populists,...Hofstadter explained,...were not people of the city, 'the home of intellectual complexity.' What's more, farmers of the 1890s were a group that was on the way down, 'losing in status and respect' in comparison to successful, upwardly mobile city folk. Losing status made them anxious, and anxiety, in turn, made them reach for irrational explanations and embrace the politics of resentment. (note 5-8)
"In [Hofstadter's] famous 1964 essay, 'The Paranoid Style in American Politics,' he again highlighted the Pops' [supposed] fondness for the language of conspiracy....
"Hofstadter's psychoanalysis of the People's Party was hugely influential in its day, powerfully reinforcing elite fears of grass-roots movements and relaunching 'populism' as the generic name for the familiar political specter that always haunts the respectable. Few of the details in the historian's dark portrait stood the test of academic scrutiny, however. Many of the items I mentioned above turned out, upon investigation, to have been based on either a tendentious reading, or a whopping exaggeration, or else an outright error.
"Looking back from sixty years on, the motives behind Hofstadter's war on the reformers of the 1890s appear to have been both petty and distinctly of-their-time. What I mean by this is that Hofstadter seems to have chosen Populism as a proxy in his lifelong personal war against a previous generation of scholars, the so-called progressive historians, who cherished memories of Populism but whose symbols and theories had degenerated into patriotic clichés by the 1950s. (note 5-10) What better way to spite them than to revive the old anti-populist stereotypes of the 1890s?
"The central idea of the progressive historians' vision of the past had been social conflict, Hofstadter later wrote, meaning a struggle that always featured the same two sides, changing form but recurring throughout our history: radical versus conservative, farmer versus capitalist, the heirs of Jefferson versus the heirs of Hamilton. Thus when we find Hofstadter accusing the Populists of oversimplifying the political struggle in which they were engaged, imagining it as a war between 'the people' and the 'money power,' we understand that he is also criticizing his scholarly predecessors, who said similar things all the time. (note 5-11)
"But by 1955 that older generation of historians was gone. In putting Populism behind us, The Age of Reform was meant as a sort of manifesto for the new breed, with their faith in pluralism, professionalism, and benevolent, administrative capitalism. Hofstadter sifted through the nation's reform tradition, dismissing things that were no longer useful—mass movements, for example—and celebrating what he felt had paved the way for the post-ideological present. (note 5-12)
"Reviving the 1890s depiction of social protest as a species of resentment and unreason turned out to be exactly the thing to do in 1955. The Age of Reform perfectly captured the rationality-worshipping tenor of its times. It won the Pulitzer Prize. It has been described as 'the most influential book ever published on the history of twentieth-century America.' (note 5-14) And it transformed 'populism' back into a term of top-down abuse[.]" – pp. 154–8
"Using the tools Hofstadter provided them, American intellectuals quickly built anti-populism into a towering structure of liberal social theory....
"The most memorable effort along these lines was The Torment of Secrecy, a 1956 study of McCarthyism by the sociologist Edward Shils....Shils...pile[d] up...prizes and professorships and prestigious appointments[,] but when he turned to populism, the sociologist did not proceed empirically as Richard Hofstadter had done, combing through Populist books and manifestos. Instead, he advanced on his target by means of assertion and stereotype[.]
"Shils proceeded to establish that populists held [certain] views[,] in the same way that his predecessors...in 1896 and 1936...had: simply by saying so. When Shils asserted it, however, it was not the same as when a conservative Republican asserted it[,] in a pamphlet with a hysterical title like The Platform of Anarchy. What Edward Shils wrote was social science. It was scholarship. (note 5-15)...
"Before long we come to Shils' real concern: the threat populism posed to intellectuals like him and his colleagues. Obviously the danger was substantial: 'When populism goes on the warpath, among those they wish to strike are the "overeducated," those who are "too clever," "the highbrows," the "longhairs," the "eggheads," whose education has led them away from the simple wisdom and virtue of the people.' Shils knew that populists did things like this because those are things that Joe McCarthy did[.] (note 5-17)...
"As a description of the actual Populist tradition this was nonsense, but Shils sailed right on, enlarging the populists' supposed hatred of learning into a hatred of quality and refinement in general. 'Populists, whether they are radical reformers or congressional investigators,' he wrote, 'are all extremely suspicious and hostile towards the more sophisticated person.' In Shils's system, populism is the name one gives to any situation in which 'there is an ideology of popular resentment against the order imposed on society by a long-established, differentiated ruling class.' (note 5-18) In other words, any objection that ordinary people might have to any system of domination is in fact little more than nihilistic demagoguery and the rejection of all standards.
"The populist, Shils went on in his bombastic way, 'denies autonomy' to any institution of government. Populists hate bureaucracy. They despise the justice system and politicians in general. They hate learning. They deny the right of privacy. But oh, they love bullshit: this is the definition of the species. 'Populism acclaims the demagogue who...break[s] through the formalistic barriers erected by lawyers, pedants and bureaucrats[.]' (note 5-19)
"It's kind of a peculiar experience to see someone defending intellectualism so ferociously while engaging in intellectual practice of the kind that would score him a flat 'F' were The Torment of Secrecy turned in as a sociology term paper. Virtually nothing in Shils's denunciation of populism is tied to supporting evidence....
"Still, The Torment of Secrecy was another influential work. This was where the word 'populist' left the historical rails and began its long career wandering hither and yon, haunting the scholarly mind. This was the missing link where the anti-populist stereotype built up for six decades by American conservatives was adopted by the theorists of liberalism and then spread into every corner of the international world of scholarship.
"The reason for the book's influence is clear enough: it flattered the powerful. What Shils meant to do with his attack on populism was build support for a liberal democratic system where political actors wisely limit their ambitions to what he calls 'gradual increments of change.' To achieve such a system, what was required from working-class people was acceptance of hierarchy, meaning 'deference' toward 'those who govern,' like in Britain. (note 5-20)
"What was required from those who ruled, meanwhile, was a certain chumminess toward one another—'a sense of affinity among the elites,' as Shils put it. People on top, he pleaded, must respect others on top. (note 5-21)
"From this nifty hierarchy 'only extremism is excluded.' Only populists are to be ostracized.
"Perhaps you recognize what Shils is describing: It is the current liberal ideal of Washington, D.C. It is the philosophy of mainstream American journalism. It is the strategic model for the cautious, scholarly, consensus-minded Clinton and Obama administrations, extending their hands in friendship to fellow elites in Wall Street and Silicon Valley. This is where it all begins." – pp. 158–62
"To declare that the people were the problem with democracy was to make a spectacular break with the Jeffersonian tradition, but the strictures of social science required more. One had to be precise. Which group of people, specifically, was the problem?
"The answer was provided by the sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset. In 1959 he discovered that the great danger to self-government was what he called 'working-class authoritarianism.'
"Lipset was perfectly candid about this. What he called the 'lower-class individual' was not really suited to democratic self-government. The 'norms of democracy,' he wrote, could only be appreciated by someone with 'a high level of sophistication and ego security.' Working-class people weren't 'sophisticated' by definition, and this led to all sorts of problems: they fell for demagogues, they hated minorities, they were suspicious of intellectuals, and so on. (note 5-22)...
"Tellingly, Lipset introduced his findings about 'working-class authoritarianism' not as useful information in its own right but as 'a tragic dilemma for those intellectuals' who had once believed in ordinary people. In the world of the consensus it was intellectuals who mattered, and Lipset merely wanted to draw their attention, in a collegial and scholarly way, to the fact that when they said noble things about 'the proletariat,' they were making an unfortunate mistake. (note 5-25)...
"'Authoritarianism,' scholars would come to agree, was a property associated with working-class voters, with populism, and the answer to it was rule by elites. White-collar authorities had to be strengthened in order to fend off working-class authoritarianism.
"Now, we have seen lots of authoritarian deeds in this book—strike-breaking private armies and so on—but precious few of them can be laid at the feet of the working class. On the contrary: it has consistently been elite fears of working-class votes that give...rise to Democracy Scares. This historical contradiction of the 'working-class authoritarian' thesis seems to have been obvious to no one, however. Elites must have greater authority, the argument went, or else authoritarianism will win out. This can only mean that some group's authority is nonauthoritarian by definition—and it is of course the enlightened authority of the highly educated who are always the heroes of consensus literature.
"They are the ones who know how to meet the grievances of the working class with stone-faced discipline. The populists may crave authority, but we the authorities will break them of that." – pp. 163–5
"Thanks to the work of Hofstadter, Bell, Shils, and Lipset, anti-populism became one of the great themes of the consensus years. Everyone wanted it to be true. Everyone agreed on it. Mass movements of working people were dangerous.
"And then: the whole scholarly edifice came crashing down....Soon it became clear that Hofstadter had done little archival research on Populism....
"Historians who did do research in Populist archives...proved that Populism wasn't any more backward-looking than any other movement that protested capitalism. That the Pops weren't against industrialization[.] That they weren't hostile to education. That they weren't nativists[.] (note 5-26)
"[T]he historian Norman Pollack...showed that...'the incidence of Populist anti-Semitism was infinitesimal.' (note 5-27)
"To identify 'status anxiety' as the source of mass protest movements—and also as the reason to dismiss them as irrational—sounded ever so scientific, but it turned out to be completely arbitrary, a label the critic (or historian) could affix to almost any group he chose in order to disparage it. To apply the term to the Populists, Hofstadter basically had to ignore the movement's voluminous and extremely rational concern with practical economic matters. Remember, the Pops came up during a time of terrible farm prices and a severe business depression. They faced these developments squarely and with comparatively little scapegoating, kind of an impressive achievement for the nineteenth century when you think about it. Dismissing their discontent as 'status anxiety' comes close to denying the reality of economic hardship altogether. (note 5-28)
"[From note 5-28:] Here is [historian] Michael Rogin's take: 'Populism was hardly a moralistic flight from an environment in which everyone else was concerned with facts. The movement made an effort to come to grips with the transformation of American society [in the second Industrial Revolution – MB]. Simply because Populism faced the changes America was undergoing while other groups in part denied or repressed them, it is not to blame for the more desperate political responses like McCarthyism.' [Note 5-28 end]
"Under this hailstorm of rebuke, Richard Hofstadter eventually gave up trying to defend the Populism chapters of The Age of Reform. (note 5-29) His status-anxiety theory was tossed into the dumpster of discredited hypotheses[.] Christopher Lasch, who was Hofstadter's protégé at Columbia, believed Hofstadter's contempt for Populism in fact betrayed his cohort's 'cultural prejudices' against the lower middle class. (note 5-30)" – pp. 165–6
"Here's the crazy thing, though. Academic anti-populism lives on. Indeed, it thrives. The almost complete discrediting of its founding text seems to count for nothing. Today, seemingly every well-educated person in America and Europe knows that populism is the name we give to mass movements that are bigoted and irrational; that threaten democracy's norms with their anti-intellectual demagoguery. Upon Hofstadter's famous mistake the burgeoning pedagogy of 'populism studies' builds its theories and convenes its panels. Out of this scholarly blunder of the 1950s has grown the common sense of ruling elites everywhere.
"But of course it's not just Hofstadter's mistake. Consensus-era anti-populism built upon prejudices that were inherited from conservatives in the 1930s, which they had inherited from conservatives in the 1890s....[T]he elements of the anti-populist stereotype remained stubbornly the same, and so did the social position of those who embraced it. Indeed, it seems that whenever we find someone attacking populism, their underlying purpose is to shore up the legitimacy of whatever system it is that has made them an elite.
"What motivated adherents of this anti-populist creed, in each historical iteration, was raw self-interest. The core of the consensus school's viewpoint, as Michael Rogin described it, was 'the hope that if only responsible elites could be left alone, if only political issues could be kept from the people, the elites would make wise decisions.' (note 5-31) This is the essence of anti-populism always.
"Today the 'hope' for wise decisions by elites rolls irresistibly on, while the war on populism continues in almost exactly the same terms used by Hofstadter and Shils in the consensus days of 1955, the same terms used by America's eminent lawyers in 1936 and by America's leading economists and aristocrats in 1896. It doesn't seem to matter that the theory is based on a debunked historical hypothesis. On it goes, repeating the same eternal archetype: the bigotry of ordinary people, the folly of protest movements, and the wisdom of elites....
"When someone moans about populism, we know instantly that they are summoning up a vision of a society directed by responsible professionals, always including themselves, always concurring prudently with one another, always doing their best to steer the world through complex problems. These professionals are all highly educated; in fact, they probably all went to a tiny handful of schools. If it's pundits we're talking about, they work for one of a tiny handful of media outlets; if it's policy advisers, they work for one of a tiny handful of think tanks. They might not all agree with one another down to the letter, but agreement itself—consensus—remains for them the noblest of goals." – pp. 167–8
Chapter 6: Lift Every Voice
"After 1965, as the Vietnam War became issue number one, the New Left exploded in size. At its zenith, SDS [(Students for a Democratic Society)] had around one hundred thousand members—small by historical standards, but with a cultural reach that far exceeded those numbers. Its ideas spread from the elite campuses to the vast world of college students, giving us 'the Sixties' as everyone remembers it: constant protests, [etc.]" – p. 184
"The Democratic Party itself did the opposite of what [Martin Luther King's] reformers hoped. Instead of embracing a bold agenda of redistribution, the party descended into a civil war in the wake of the Vietnam debacle. The winners of that tussle were ultimately the party's anti-populists—technocrats who believed that reforms, if any were warranted, had to come from the highly educated leadership class.
"As for the New Left, it failed to become the next step in the grand march of progress, always remaining a movement of college students, not 'the people.' Its members never transcended their essential identity: these were proto-professionals, young people in training for positions in the upper reaches of America's middle-class society. They were a charming elite and even an alienated elite, but an elite nevertheless. (note 6-20)
"And they acted like one. In the early days of SDS, the group's understanding of capitalism didn't have a whole lot to do with traditional working-class concerns—with hard work for lousy pay, for example, or with monopoly, or with the power of banks. (note 6-21) Indeed, what made them a 'new' Left was the singular belief that educated people like them, rather than the working class, were now the agents of political progress. In this they bore a strong resemblance to the consensus intellectuals who taught them, scholars who believed progress would come from the enlightened people in society's higher-educated ranks, not from mass movements or blue-collar workers....As Tom Hayden, the principal author of The Port Huron Statement, recalled years later, he had believed that humanity had entered 'a whole new period of history in which the Left had to go from a belief in labor as the agency of change to students as an agency of change.' (note 6-22)
"Social class was a persistent stumbling block for the New Left. One anecdote [historian James] Miller relates in his history of SDS is how the group's organizers, trying to bring together the unemployed in several northern cities, eventually lost interest in the poor folks they were trying to help—because those poor folks often turned out to think America needed to fight communism in Vietnam. (note 6-23)...
"[From note 6-21:] When the early SDS howled calamity, it often meant a calamity of the middle-class soul: of the individual all stifled and isolated and alienated because of the conformist demands of mass society. 'Loneliness, estrangement, isolation describe the vast distance between man and man today,' declared the Port Huron Statement. 'These dominant tendencies cannot be overcome by better personnel management, nor by improved gadgets, but only when a love of man overcomes the idolatrous worship of things by man.' And so on. [Note 6-21 end]
"Eventually the romantic populism of the early 1960s drained away completely. It happened in movement politics and it happened in the larger culture....
"By the time the clock ran out on the New Left, its activists had come to believe that the American people...were not the would-be beneficiaries of progressive reform; they were the enemy, facilitators of the evil Amerikan empire.
"'Working people' here in the USA were not anything special, a 1969 SDS manifesto declared; just another 'particular privileged interest' bought off with imperialist plunder. The only 'people' who mattered by then were the 'oppressed peoples of the world,' the peasants of Vietnam and the Third World, and with them the white New Left boldly declared its solidarity. SDS was a 'Revolutionary Youth Movement' now, an armed ally of the global people's uprising in whose eyes all Americans (with the exception of African Americans) were suspect. (note 6-24)...
"The New Left succeeded in stripping the aura of nobility away from what the Pops called the 'producing classes,' and [succeeded] in inventing an understanding of radicalism in which politics was no longer really about accomplishing public things for the common good. Instead, politics was becoming, at least in part, a path to personal fulfillment or healing. Protest degenerated into 'street theater'; 'radical style' came to trump 'radical substance,' as the historian Christopher Lasch put it; a satisfying sense of personal righteousness became the ultimate end of political action. (note 6-25)
"It was the opposite of what King and [close associate and political strategist Bayard] Rustin were after, what populism is always after: a grand coalition of social forces that would reform capitalism in the interests of the great majority. That was lost in the late sixties[.]" – pp. 185–8
"[A]n insight the protesters of that era missed [was]: organizations of ordinary working people are often a force for democratic progress by their very nature, regardless of the ignorance or bigotry of [some] individual members of those organizations.
"The radicals missed the point then, and everyone misses the point today. The social stereotypes established in those last awful years of the sixties have stuck with us. Like the geriatric Rolling Stones, they chug along imperturbably though they are now decades past their rightful retirement. We cannot shake them. When we recall that King and Rustin and...president of the powerful United Auto Workers [union] Walter Reuther hoped for a grand alliance of ordinary people, we have trouble imagining what they might have had in mind. But white working-class people as enemies of progress—oh, that we understand.
"The big counterculture think-book of 1970, The Greening of America, described 'blue-collar workers' as 'those arch-opponents of the new consciousness.' [I]t exhorted us to have pity on th[o]se monstrous proles[, stereotyping them as] '"fascist"[ic;] tight-lipped[;] tense[;] crew cut[;] correctly dressed[;] church-going[; showing the] American flag[;] hostile [to] communists, youth, and blacks[; with] little...love[,] poetry[,] music[,] nature, or joy[;] dominated by fear[;] narrow-minded[ly] prejudice[d;] self-defeating[ly] materialis[tic;] lonely[;] suspicio[us;] angry[;] envious[;] bitter[;] self-hating[;] ravag[ing their] environment[;] fle[eing] from consciousness and responsibility[;] turned against [their] own nature.' And so on. (note 6-27)...
The Greening of America is dedicated to 'the students at Yale,' where its author taught in the Law School. That the stereotype [which] the book did so much to bolster might have been a straightforward expression of his cohort's structural antagonism to working-class people appears not to have occurred to its author. In hindsight, however, it is obvious: in 1896 the young gentlemen of Yale heckled working-class champion William Jennings Bryan; in 1970 their votary trolled the white working class generally for its lousy consciousness. And somewhere in between this myth was blithely cemented: The Ivy League elite were not only society's rulers, but also society's rebels and revolutionaries, its designated conscience. The successful were not only more capable than those who toil; they were morally superior as well. [T]he ruling class ruled because it deserved to rule.
"[I]n [the] final scene [of the movie] Easy Rider, the glamorous young bikers with the awesome rock 'n' roll soundtrack are brutally and pointlessly shot to death by a pair of heavily accented, obviously impoverished rednecks riding in the cab of an old pickup truck. Who are these villians? As the sharp-eyed historian Jefferson Cowie points out, 'It is almost impossible to not see these characters as a quote from The Grapes of Wrath.' (note 6-29)
"In other words, they were the Joads, the very symbols of resilient thirties populism, reimagined for the sixties and for the decades to come as murderers...as pigheaded killers of everything that is fun and joyful and enlightened and tolerant and cool in American life. As fascists." – pp. 189–91
"In this way the consensus school's anti-populism was elevated by its enemy the counterculture into wisdom for the ages[;] this essential bit of class profiling was set in stone. Working-class whites were reactionary and authoritarian." – pp. 191–2
"In an interview in 1970,...Richard Hofstadter...referred to the sixties as 'the Age of Rubbish' and criticized left-wing college students for an 'elitism' that was 'based on moral indignation against most of the rest of us.' [H]e referred to the vast numbers of Americans who 'intensely dislike young people—college students mainly[.]' He resented students for their precious radicalism...and he cast this resentment in stark, class-based terms. 'The activist young operate from elitist premises which they themselves aren't aware of, but which working people are acutely aware of. The kids ask for two weeks off for conducting political activities[.] People who work in offices and on assembly lines can't negotiate such arrangements[.] The kids implicitly assume a certain kind of indulgence that other types of people in this society don't get. This is intensely resented. The kids dislike the idea that they're thinking and acting as an elite, but they are.' (note 6-33)...
"[So] Hofstadter himself became a populist, of exactly the embittered kind he had spent his career analyzing." – pp. 194–5
Chapter 8: Let Us Now Scold Uncouth Men
"Lawrence Goodwyn, the great historian of mass democratic uprisings, once wrote that to build a movement like the People's Party of the 1890s or the labor movement of the 1930s, one must 'connect with people as they are in society, that is to say, in a state that sophisticated modern observers are inclined to regard as one of 'inadequate consciousness.' (note 8-5)
"Goodwyn also warned against a politics of 'individual righteousness,' a tendency toward 'celebrating the purity' of one's so-called radicalism. If you wish to democratize the country's economic structure, he argued, you must practice 'ideological patience,' a suspension of moral judgment of ordinary Americans. (note 8-6) Only then can you start to build a movement that is hopeful and powerful and that changes society forever.
"If you're not interested in democratizing the country's economic structure, however, individual righteousness might be just the thing for you. This model deals with ordinary citizens by judging and purging; by canceling and scolding. It's not about building; it's about purity, about stainless moral virtue. Its favorite math is subtraction; its most cherished rhetorical form is denunciation; its goal is to bring the corps of the righteous into a tight orbit around the most righteous one of all.
"What swept over huge parts of American liberalism after the disaster of November 8, 2016, was the opposite of Goodwyn's 'ideological patience.' It was a paroxysm of scolding, a furor for informing Trump voters what inadequate and indeed rotten people they were. The elitist trend that had been building among liberals for decades hurried to its loud, carping consummation.
"Where populism is optimistic about rank-and-file voters, the variety of liberalism I have in mind regards them with a combination of suspicion and disgust. It dreams not of organizing humanity but of policing it. It is a geyser of moral rebuke, erupting against teenagers who have committed some act of cultural appropriation, against the hiring of an actor for an inappropriate role, against a public speech by someone with unpopular views, against the wrongful dumping of household trash, against inappropriate tree-pruning techniques spotted in a nearby suburb. Its characteristic goal is not to get banks and monopolies under control, as populism typically does, but to set up a nonprofit, attract funding from banks and monopolies, and then...to scold the world for its sins." – pp. 228–9
"Why the ruling class must continue to rule is always the great theme of Democracy Scares, voiced by eminent economist and newspaper editor alike. In our own time, even comedians have a role to play in the operation. In Defense of Elitism, a 2019 account of the Trump era by Time magazine humorist Joel Stein, describes the essential divide between liberals and Trump supporters like this: 'Elites are people who think; populists are people who believe.' Populists are creatures of intuition and childlike impulse, people who think that facts 'are indistinguishable from lies.' Elites accept the expertise of experts; populism, however, is little more than 'a primal scream for primordial masculinity.' Just as in 1896, populism is supposed to represent the appetites and vulgar urges of the body, in revolt against the higher faculties of thought and reason. (note 8-7)
"The idea of ordinary people having a say in matters of state is strictly a joke. In a precise replay of conservative humorists of 1896, the liberal humorist of 2019 laughs off the suggestion that farmers be represented on the sophisticated body that decides U.S. monetary policy: 'Imagine if farmers' were involved in such decisions, Joel Stein guffaws, 'trying to figure out how to establish central bank liquidity swap lines during a financial crisis.' What our age urgently requires, he announces, is the opposite of that: a wide-ranging acknowledgement that elites are legitimate; that meritocracy is fair; that domination is rightful when the dominant group is made up of people who, like Stein and his friends, went to name-brand colleges. If ordinary people want things to change, I suppose, they must implore the brainy to change them. After all, democracy is, as he puts it, 'a government of the nerds, by the nerds, and for the nerds.' (note 8-8)
"What is especially disheartening about this 'defense of elitism' is the author's apparent unfamiliarity with liberalism's non-elitist past, of a time when liberalism was an expression of the democratic hopes of ordinary people[—]yet [it's] utterly typical of the resistance culture of our time, where more and more one notices a frank acknowledgment of liberalism [being] the politics of a highly educated upper class. (note 8-9)...
"What is missing from this vision of exuberant, future-minded liberalism is labor, the driving force of so many reform movements since the 1890s." – pp. 229–31
"[If you t]alk about the deindustrialization of vast parts of the country, the decimation of unions, the destruction of small towns by monopoly forces, [then] a certain kind of Democratic partisan...hears 'Trump voter.' The enlightened liberal shuns such people. They are to be scolded, not championed....
"On the campaign trail in 2016, Donald Trump made a point of...criticizing the nation's trade agreements[.] At the time[,] liberal pundits pretty much ignored the matter.
"Once Trump had won, a panicked punditburo swung into action, insisting in a crescendo of consensus that trade had little to do with the country's deindustrialization[. T]he initial reaction...was virtually unanimous and unfolded along the same lines as in 1896: the rationality of working-class grievances had to be denied. (note 8-12)
"The outcome of the 2016 election, the same punditburo insisted, could not and must not be explained by reference to economic factors or to long-term, class-related trends.
"[T]o acknowledge those plain facts was to come dangerously close to voicing the intolerable heresy that the D.C. opinion cartel dubbed the 'economic anxiety' thesis—the idea that people voted for Trump out of understandable worries about wages or opioids or unemployment or deindustrialization. The reason this was intolerable, one suspects, is because it suggested that there was a rational element to certain groups' support for Trump and also that there was something less than A+ about the professional-class Camelot over which the Democrats presided for eight years. Just as in 1896, the rationality of certain low-class voters was ruled out from the start.
"[T]he message of anti-populism is the same as ever: the lower orders, it insists, are driven by irrationality, bigotry, authoritarianism, and hate; democracy is a problem because it gives such people a voice. The difference today is that enlightened liberals are the ones mouthing this age-old anti-populist catechism." – pp. 233–5
"[Soon after the 2016 election,] our country's best-informed opinionators...were...determined to believe in the essential monstrousness of tens of millions of their fellow citizens.
"Why did these liberals adopt this ferociously anti-populist line so quickly? There were many conventional explanations for Trump's...win other than the general wickedness of the American people....
"But acknowledging that some Trump voters might be desperate and otherwise decent people became a thing unsayable in the small world of America's opinion class. [Instead, t]he total depravity of those people was the only acceptable explanation....Trump's rise was not about politics, it was about sin, and it was the task of progressives to scold the unrighteous for their iniquity. [As an] exception[, i]n early 2017, the liberal New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof...reminded his audience [that] 'Tolerance is a liberal value'[. Then, a] few weeks later, [he] recounted the outpouring of rage he had received since making this suggestion, writing that 'Nothing I've written since the election has engendered more anger...than my periodic assertions that Trump voters are human, too.'
"To scold...and conspicuously withhold forgiveness. [V]arious high-minded progressive commentators announced that they so hated the world that they were never, ever going to absolve those who had trespassed politically against them. Reasoning in 2019 that 'conservatives spat in our face and elected an abusive, racist, misogynist criminal,' the author and blogger Amanda Marcotte advised against forgiving rank-and-file Republican voters. '[S]hould progressives impose social consequences, declining friendships and putting a chill on family relationships, in order to send the message that supporting Trump was not OK and will not be shrugged off as a harmless lark?'
"Blacklisting was one of the weapons to which this ferocious moral crusade inevitably turned....What I find shocking is how comfortable liberals have become with the weapons of the boss....
"What is certain is that the liberalism of scolding will never give rise to the kind of mass movement that this country needs. It is almost entirely a politics of individual righteousness, an angry refusal of Goodwyn's 'ideological patience.' Its appeal comes not from the prospect of democratizing the economy but from the psychic satisfaction of wagging a finger in some stupid proletarian's face, forever." – pp. 237–41
"What these examples show us is a generation of centrist liberals collectively despairing over democracy itself. After turning their backs on working-class issues, traditionally one of the core concerns of left parties, Democrats stood by while right-wing demagoguery took root and thrived. Then, after the people absorbed a fifty-year blizzard of fake populist propaganda [from Republicans], Democrats turned against the idea of 'the people' altogether. (note 8-17)
"America was founded with the phrase 'We the People,' but William Galston, co-inventor of the concept of the Learning Class, urges us to get over our obsession with popular sovereignty. As he writes in Anti-Pluralism, his 2018 attack on populism, 'We should set aside this narrow and complacent conviction; there are viable alternatives to the people as sources of legitimacy.' (note 8-18)
"There certainly are. In the pages of this book, we have seen anti-populists explain that they deserve to rule because they are better educated, or wealthier, or more rational, or harder working. The contemporary culture of constant moral scolding is in perfect accordance with this way of thinking[.]
"The [current] liberal establishment I am describing in this chapter...is populism's opposite in nearly every particular. Its political ambition for the people is not to bring them together in a reform movement but to scold them, to shame them, and to teach them to defer to their superiors. It doesn't seek to punish Wall Street or Silicon Valley; indeed, the same bunch that now rebukes and cancels and blacklists could not find a way to punish elite bankers after the global financial crisis back in 2009. This liberalism desires to merge with these institutions of private privilege, to enlist their power for what it imagines to be 'good.' The wealthy liberal neighborhoods of America have become utopias of scolding because scolding is how this kind of concentrated power relates to ordinary citizens. This isn't 'working-class authoritarianism'; it's the opposite. [Of t]hose people on top, this kind of liberalism says: They have more than you because they deserve to have more than you. Those fine people dominate you because they are better than you." – pp. 241–2
"Populism was and is relentlessly optimistic—about people, about political possibilities, about life, and about America in general.
"Anti-populism is all about despair. Its attitude toward ordinary humans is bitter. Its hope for human redemption is nil. Its vision of the common good is bleak....
"Its darkest moments of all come when it contemplates climate change. I have in mind a much-discussed op-ed the New York Times ran in December 2018[. T]he philosophy professor who wrote it, Todd May, is a well-known anti-Trump activist[.] To me, his essay's appearance...felt like a political act, like the final verdict of a dejected elite on a stubborn population that refuses to heed its admonitions...that revels in falsehoods and that persistently chooses ridiculous demagogues over responsible experts.
"May's subject is human extinction—whether it should happen or whether it shouldn't. The professor phrases his indictment of mankind with a certain delicacy, but it's impossible to miss his point. We are a harmful species, he charges, 'causing unimaginable suffering to many of the animals that inhabit' the earth. He names climate change and factory farming as the worst of our trespasses, and declares that 'if this were all to the story there would be no tragedy. The elimination of the human species would be a good thing, full stop.'
"But there are other considerations, the professor admits. People do some worthwhile things. Also, it would be cruel 'to demand of currently existing humans that they should end their lives.' May's answer, ultimately, is to have it both ways: 'It may well be, then, that the extinction of humanity would make the world better off and yet would be a tragedy.'
"This kind of highbrow pessimism, this barely concealed longing for the death of the species, is an attitude you come across all the time these days in enlightened liberal circles. (note 8-19) It is the inevitable flip side of the moralistic politics I have described in this chapter: the wages for our sins; the recompense for our irredeemable stupidity....
"I think of Carl Sandburg, the twentieth century's 'Poet of the People[.]' And I think of Sandburg's 'Chicago,' the greatest populist poem of them all[.] It's a song about loving life despite it all, loving the life of the people[:] 'Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and under his ribs the heart of the people,/ Laughing!'" – pp. 242–4
Conclusion: The Question
"We have seen how a party of democratic inclusion chose to remodel itself as the expression of an elite consensus, and how a party of concentrated private power started passing itself off as a down-home friend of ordinary Americans[,] and between these two parties the greatest democracy in the world has become a paradise for the privileged....
"A joyless politics of reprimand is all that centrism has left: a politics of individual righteousness that regards the public not as a force to be organized but as a threat to be scolded and disciplined. Unfortunately, it is an ineffective politics in addition to an unhappy one....
"There is another way, reader. [T]here is a tradition that trusts in the people, that responds to their needs, that turns resentment into progress. That same populist tradition is and has always been at war with monopoly, with corporate authority, with billionaire privilege, with inequality....
"Indeed, you can't really have...the war on concentrated economic power...without...a broad-minded acceptance of average people. That is because the only real answer to plutocracy is a mass movement of ordinary working people, hailing from all different backgrounds, brought together by a common desire to dismantle the forces that make their toil so profitless and to figure out how they might gain control over their lives.
"The demand for economic democracy is how you build a mass movement of ordinary people. And a mass movement of ordinary people, in turn, is how you achieve economic democracy. Which is to say that the answer both to Trumpist fraud and to liberal elitism must come from us—from the democratic public itself." – pp. 245–7
"This is not an idle dream. We know what genuine populism looks like; we have seen it crop up in the agrarian 1890s, in the New Deal 1930s, in the civil rights days of the 1960s." – p. 248
"[P]opulism...is...the classic, all-American response to...plutocracy[. I]t is also the naturally dominant rhetorical element in our political tradition.
"[P]opulism is deep in the grain of the democratic personality. Americans do not defer to their social superiors: we are natural-born egalitarians. Populism...deflate[s] pretentiousness of every description.
"In political contests in most parts of America, the candidate who captures this refusal of deference...more often than not...wins. [P]opulist protest against the economic elite is what made the Democrats the majority party for so many decades.
"[W]e know that anti-elitism works...because we have seen it working against us for fifty years. The Republican Party owes its successful hold on power to adopting...anti-elitist themes[.]
"Populism is the supreme rhetorical weapon in the arsenal of American politics. On the other hand, the impulse to identify your goals with the elite—with any elite, even a moral one—is a kind of political death wish. In a democracy, a faction that chooses to go about its business by admiring its own moral goodness and scolding average voters as insensitive clods is a faction that is not interested in winning." – pp. 252–4
"Thanks to insurgent campaigns like the one mounted by Bernie Sanders for the presidency in 2016, we know fairly precisely what a modern-day populism looks like.
"[T]he key to making it work is movement-building on a massive scale[:] enlisting millions of ordinary people who have lost their faith in democracy.
"[T]he place it must come first is the Democratic Party. The party of technocrats and consultants...must eventually give way to the populism that we must have. Thus will the Democratic Party learn once again to breathe hope into those who despair.
"The populism I am describing is not formless anger that might lash out in any direction. It is not racism. It is not resentment. It is not demagoguery. It is, instead, to ask the most profound question of them all: 'For whom does America exist?'...
"For whom[—i]ts billionaires? Its celebrities? Its tech companies? Are we the people...just glorified security guards, obeying orders to protect their holdings?...
"Or is it the other way around—are they supposed to serve us?
"Let us resolve to ask that far-reaching question again[.] This time around, there can be only one possible answer." – pp. 254–6
2-30 – William Allen White, "A Most Lamentable Comedy," Stratagems and Spoils: Stories of Love and Politics (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1901).
2-31 – Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (Ernest Benn Limited, 1952 [1896]).
3-21 – Kenneth Burke, "Revolutionary Symbolism in America," American Writers' Congress, ed. Henry Hart (International Publishers, 1935), pp 87–94.
5-1 – Richard H. Pells, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s (Harper & Row, 1985), p. 130.
5-2 – Daniel Bell, "The Dispossessed" [1962], The Radical Right: The New American Right Expanded and Updated (Doubleday, 1963), pp. 22, 32.
5-3 – Michael Paul Rogin, The Intellectuals and McCarthy (MIT Press, 1967), pp. 274–75.
5-4 – Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (Free Press, 1962), pp. 122, 123.
5-6 – Ibid., p. 114.
5-7 – Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (Alfred A. Knopf, 1955), pp. 62, 82, 85, 78.
5-8 – Ibid., pp. 73, 78, 34.
5-10 – Christopher Lasch, "On Richard Hofstadter," New York Review of Books, March 8, 1973.
5-11 – Richard Hofstadter, The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington (Vintage, 1970), chap. 12. Hofstadter, The Age of Reform, p. 65.
5-12 – Hofstadter, The Age of Reform, pp. 126–27.
5-14 – Historian Alan Brinkley (in 1985), as quoted in David S. Brown, Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography (University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 99.
5-15 – Edward Shils, The Torment of Secrecy: The Background and Consequences of American Security Policies (Ivan R. Dee, 1996 [1956]), p. 98.
5-17 – Ibid., p. 100.
5-18 – Ibid., p. 101.
5-19 – Ibid., p. 104.
5-20 – Ibid., p. 49.
5-21 – Ibid., p. 227.
5-22 – Seymour Lipset, Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics (Anchor, 1963 [1959]), p. 108.
5-25 – Ibid., p. 87.
5-26 – Walter Nugent, The Tolerant Populists (University of Chicago Press, 1963), [etc.] There are probably a hundred more.
5-27 – Norman Pollack, "The Myth of Populist Anti-Semitism," American Historical Review 68, no. 1 (October 1962).
5-28 – Argument of historian David Potter, summarized in David S. Brown, Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography (University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 117. Rogin, The Intellectuals and McCarthy, pp. 32–33.
5-29 – Brown, Richard Hofstadter, pp. 118–19.
5-30 – Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (Norton, 1991), p. 457.
5-31 – Rogin, The Intellectuals and McCarthy, p. 275.
6-20 – Barbara and John Ehrenreich, "The New Left: A Case Study in Professional-Managerial Class Radicalism," Radical America 11, no. 3 (May/June 1977): 7–22.
6-21 – See main text.
6-22 – James Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (Touchstone, 1987), pp. 23, 87.
6-23 – Ibid., p. 214.
6-24 – Harold Jacobs, ed., Weatherman (Ramparts Books, 1970), p. 52.
6-25 – Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets, pp. 59, 60. Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (Norton, 1978), p. 83.
6-27 – Charles A. Reich, The Greening of America (Bantam, 1971), pp. 305–6, 320.
6-29 – Jefferson Cowie, Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New Press, 2010), p. 190.
6-33 – Richard Hofstadter, "The Age of Rubbish," Newsweek, July 4, 1970.
8-5 – Lawrence Goodwyn, "Organizing Democracy: The Limits of Theory and Practice," Democracy 1, no. 1 (1981): 51, 59.
8-6 – "Individual righteousness," "Celebrating the purity": Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment (Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 292. "Ideological patience": Goodwyn, "Organizing Democracy."
8-7 – 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.
8-8 – Ibid., pp. 254, 239.
8-9 – An anti-polarization group called "More in Common," The Hidden Tribes of America (October 2018: https://hiddentribes.us).
8-12 – "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, etc. See [a] 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.
8-17 – David Adler, "Centrists Are the Most Hostile to Democracy, Not Extremists," New York Times, May 23, 2018.
8-18 – William Galston, Anti-Pluralism: The Populist Threat to Liberal Democracy (Yale University Press, 2018), p. 22.
8-19 – See the literature on the "Anthropocene."
Copyright (c) 2021 Mark D. Blackwell.