The New Populism: Radicalizing the Middle

By Edwin Warner

The nicest thing anyone can say about a Democratic presidential candidate this year is to call him a populist. Not all the candidates like the appellation. George McGovern--as populist a candidate as there is, left of George Wallace--and Scoop Jackson shun the label. But the rest boast of their populist credentials whenever they can. Wallace plays up his poor-country-boy origins in the Deep South; Humphrey points to his populist record over the years. While he was still in the race, John Lindsay tried to project himself as an "urban populist." Ed Muskie held off for a while, but after doing badly in the Florida primary, he, too, converted to a populist position.

In the new perspective, Robert Kennedy is portrayed as a populist in company with the grand old daddy of conventional populism, Congressman Wright Patman. But then, quite different sorts of politicians have been labeled populists: Spiro Agnew, for example, and Lyndon Johnson.

Populism is a label that covers disparate policies and passions: among many others, New Deal reforms, consumer rage against business, ethnic belligerence. Often it is merely a catch phrase. Yet it describes something real: the politics of the little guy against the big guy--the classic struggle of the haves against the have-nots or the have-not-enoughs. The conflict was softened by the belief in permanent American prosperity and submerged by the global traumas of the past three decades. Now that the U.S. is looking inward once again, and learning that its wealth is not limitless, populism is undergoing a revival.

It is an ism whose time has come, or returned; and though no ism lasts too long in America, this one appears likely to have an extended run. At the heart of the movement is the man in the middle. He is squeezed by a system he wants to respect but feels he has no control over. He is the pursuer of the American dream, but stalled in midpassage. To oversimplify, he is self-reliant and reasonably industrious, he holds a steady if not too exciting job, owns and takes pride in a modest home, likes sports, wants his kids to go to college. Yet he can never quite make ends meet, especially in the last few years of runaway inflation.

When attention was focused on the outsider in the 1960s--the black, the Indian, the Mexican American--the somewhat better-off white American was simply ignored. Not especially articulate, he took a while to make his discontent known. When he first started to organize and complain, he was too glibly dismissed as a law-and-order bigot. Liberals decided his fears were sheer fantasy.

More perceptive observers--among them Organizer Saul Alinsky and Columnist Joseph Kraft--understood him better. They realized that his fears for his safety were justified and, more significant, that he had genuine economic grievances. With that, the Forgotten American had arrived, and the Republicans were the first to seize him. In 1968 he was metamorphosed into the Silent Majority and took a suitable place in a sort of faded Norman Rockwell portrait lit by a harsh new light. Even while denouncing and fearing the left-wing radicals, he himself grew impatient with politics as usual, and seemed ready to resort to more desperate measures. Middle American discontent as such is not populism. That requires an acceptance of relatively radical solutions; hence the odd convergence of left and right on certain issues. Both, for instance, denounce big bureaucracy in business, labor and government and demand more local control.

As discontent became more visible, liberals hastily reversed themselves. They came to realize that no substantial reform can be accomplished without the foot soldiers: the working-class whites. As they look back on it now, the radical student crusade of the 1960s, though it raised many valid issues, seems to have been something of an indulgence. It was too remote from the ordinary citizen; it had too high a moral opinion of itself and too low a regard for the morals of others. Writer-Activist Jack Newfield, who wrote approvingly of the exclusive radicals of the '60s in his book A Prophetic Minority, takes an altered view in a recently published sequel, A Populist Manifesto, co-authored by Jeff Greenfield, a former Robert Kennedy aide. The Manifesto argues that reform is possible only if poor or near-poor blacks and whites are brought together on economic issues that affect both: tax reform, consumer protection, free medical care for everybody. Earlier, Senator Fred Harris had written a book. Now Is the Time, in which he, too, proposed a far-ranging populist program that would unite groups of people who had only recently been at each other's throats.

As stitched together by its various theorists, populism calls for a drastic overhaul of the nation's economy--a kind of bargain-basement socialism. Its chief demand is one that has struck so responsive a chord in America that even President Nixon has started formulating a program of tax reform. Nothing has more outraged Middle-Forgotten-Populist Man as much as the fact that the wealthy often escape taxes while he is forced to cough up more and more. In calling for a fairer system and a closing of loopholes, the populists are being no more than eminently sensible. They are also on target when they insist that giving underaffluent people easier access to mortgages would appeal to both blacks and whites who are struggling, often against insuperable financial odds, to find decent homes in the cities and suburbs. But the developing scandals in the FHA are a caution against expecting miracles from federal intervention.

Elsewhere, the populists venture onto more treacherous terrain. As part of their program to redistribute the nation's wealth and power, Newfield and Greenfield propose breaking up the biggest corporations and banning mergers and takeovers by the 200 largest corporations. This gut rejection of bigness simply ignores the realities of the modern economy, in which not everything that is big is bad. Equally blithely, the authors would have the Government take over the telephone companies and the utilities, but the woes of public ownership at home and abroad show that it is no panacea. The danger of populism, old and new, is that it ruthlessly oversimplifies.

More important than a program, perhaps, is the new emotional boost the movement has given to the submerged middle. Populism has produced an unlikely hero. He is not the dirt farmer or wage slave of the past, but the civil servant. Never a figure of glamour, to say the least, he has finally come into his own. The new culture celebrities are teachers, cops, firemen and--it won't be long now--sanitation men. Two popular books, praised in liberal journals, were written by front-line civil servants. A hair-raising account of fire fighting in New York City, Report from Engine Co. 82, was authored by one of the men on the job, Dennis Smith. Joseph Wambaugh, a Los Angeles cop, has turned out a pair of novels about his experiences with the underside of society called The New Centurions and The Blue Knight. A nobly beating heart has been uncovered beneath the once despised uniform. The pig is acquiring a pedigree. To be anti-cop is no longer quite as fashionable as it was; it is anti-populist.

Moreover, the new populism finds romance in the "ethnics"--Poles, Czechs, Hungarians, Italians and even Irishmen. A few years ago, the ethnic citizen was denounced as a lower-middle-class (and -brow) boor, an impediment to progress. Now he gets a much kinder press. In a new book, The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics, Michael Novak, who is a Slovak American, makes the prediction that the ethnic Americans will be the "new political force of the 1970s." It is no accident that the stubbly heroes of recent films like The French Connection and Dirty Harry are ethnic cops, diamonds-in-the-rough who stalk their man without paying too much attention to libertarian niceties.

The new populism bears only an oblique relationship to the earlier movement of the same name. The populism that developed in the late 19th century was basically agrarian. It was a revolt of poor farmers, both black and white, in the South and in the Midwest against concentrated business strength in the Northeast. They were outraged over steadily declining farm prices that resulted from a worldwide expansion of production; they chafed at high interest rates and monopolistic railway rates. As their movement gathered strength, they formed a third party and began to build political power. In 1896 the Democratic presidential candidate, silver-tongued William Jennings Bryan, espoused much of their program. Populists who joined the Democrats were known as "popocrats."

But their conservative foes were too much for them. Bryan lost to the candidate of big business, William McKinley, and populism began to disintegrate. But it left a legacy of reform. Many of the programs it had so ardently championed were eventually adopted: federal aid to farmers, the graduated income tax, the direct election of U.S. Senators. In many states, the initiative and referendum were written into law.

Populism also left another, less praiseworthy legacy. Addicted to conspiracy theories, it reduced its problems to a single hatable enemy: the Wall Street banker, who shaded all too easily into the unscrupulous Jewish moneylender. Anti-Semitism was a poisonous ingredient of populism. A passion for progress that had united the populists in the beginning turned into an equally passionate hatred when the movement foundered.

Courageous Southern integrationists like Tom Watson turned into rabid racists, fixing a segregationist course for the South for years to come. Later in Louisiana, Huey Long took certain populist tendencies to a tyrannical extreme, threatening to build a national movement based on class hatred. Coming out of one of the populist states, Wisconsin, Senator Joe McCarthy rose to national fame in part by arousing his constituents' lingering resentment of Eastern, upper-crust America.

Today's populism is different because it is no longer rural. Populists are as likely to live in big cities as in small towns or on farms. A populist program embracing tax reform, housing, health and a federal jobs program would have national, not simply regional appeal. Still, populism remains an ambivalent term. It contains two distinct strains: economic reform and social reaction. The two strains overlap, sometimes attract and sometimes repel each other. Populism implies, on the one hand, power to the people; on the other, it suggests an abuse of power by the people, a kind of folk malevolence. In its coarser, illiberal forms, populism could turn out to be the old backlash in disguise.

While celebrating the will of the people, many populists had to examine what this will consist of. They pride themselves on being humble, earthy, sweaty even in the service of the common man--but which common man? Much of the progress of recent years (racial integration, for instance) has not happened on direct order from the mass of the people but through national leadership. As local populists demand more power, there is a possibility that some of the liberal gains of recent decades will be reversed. The reaction to busing, the outcry in Forest Hills and elsewhere against scatter-site housing, serve as warning scrawls on the wall. Undiluted populism might turn out to be as bad as arrogant elitism. As Julian Bond puts it, "A lot of liberals are tired of black people. We're not as hip as we used to be."

The crucial question is whether in the long run populism can reconcile blacks and whites; the evidence so far is mixed. In parts of the South, many poor whites, who were once called rednecks, have started to work with blacks in politics. Says Atlanta's vice mayor, Maynard Jackson, a black: "The poor white is beginning to tell himself that it is not enough just to be white. He sees, through television and other media, an America more affluent than ever before. And between that affluence and his own miserable life lies a chasm of despair." At the same time, many unions remain unyielding in opening their ranks to blacks, while white-black clashes in mixed schools and neighborhoods appear to be on the increase throughout the country. Especially in times of recession, fear for one's job outweighs possible common economic interests with the other fellow, and visceral prejudice all too often overpowers economic rationality.

But in its very ambivalence--in its confusion of labels and its crossing of ideological lines--populism, or what now passes for it, offers some hope of fresh starts in the U.S. In its appeal to both left and right, it can provide a common denominator for those who feel ignored and bypassed, and voice their imperative demand for new solutions, bolder ideas--and bolder men. Besides, it was not spun out of some overratiocinative brain; it has roots. James Clotfelter, professor of political science at Emory University and a close student of populism, says that it "has the potential of moving people into the future in the name of ideals of the past." It is a future, in other words, that might possibly work.

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