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I’ve heard and read Huey "Kingfish" Long, Rush Limbaugh, FDR, and many others described as populists. I recently described Ed Schultz as a ‘populist’ rather than a ‘liberal.’ I stand by the classification, but on reflection I realized that ‘populist’ is label that fits on both the left and right.
What people labeled populist have in common is a claim to favor (or defend) the common folk against some identified elite. So Rush can be a populist because he claims to protect the people from the liberal elite. The fact that his liberal elite is an imagined coalition of "Feminazis", "Communists", and fellow-traveler "Democrat" Party is neither here nor there.
William Jennings Bryan was a populist because he protected (or attempted to protect) the workers and farmers from the banking elite ("You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns; you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold." Huey Long began his political career protecting the citizens of Louisiana against Rockefeller’s Standard Oil.
Politicians on the right (Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, George Wallace, Strom Thurmond) presented themselves as populists, protecting the nation from threats posed by jews, communists, integrationists, Big Government, etc. Even Barack Obama has struck populist chords in his rhetoric.
I’ve come to the conclusion that if everyone can be a populist (and don’t doubt for a moment that it’s a useful cloak for any politician), then the term is useless. Henceforth I won’t be referring to anyone as a populist. I will use the useful term demagogue for asshats like Rush, but for me there aren’t any populists any more.
So, Ed Schultz is centrist who has serious concerns about globalization, the loss of manufacturing capacity in the United States, and related issues (e.g., banking and finance, immigration.) He’s not the Rush Limbaugh of the Left, if only because he isn’t on the Left. He’s also a reasonably thoughtful fellow who (so far) doesn’t demagogue people.
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this is where i disagree – i think populism, if it was an axis, would be orthogonal to the left/right axis. in this way it is like authoritarianism. yes, everyone on the left/right axis can be authoritarian, but it is still a useful term because not everyone is.
i think what has people confused is that we don’t have many (any?) genuine progressive populist voices in our political culture right now. sometimes politicians fake it – witness the week of faux outrage in congress about the aig bonuses. but that was really just a transparent, pathetic joke.
and this brings up the other point where i disagree – people like rush limbaugh or the politicians you mention can use populist rhetoric but they aren’t populists. insiders aren’t populists. although they may seek to take advantage of, or more likely deflect and contain, popular anti-elite sentiment.
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popular anger, rage really, is not going to go away if we stop naming it. give it another name if there something better (more accurate), and i’ll be happy to use it. but naming, for me, is the first step to understanding. and that is what i want to try to do.
Popular anger (or rage, for that matter) isn’t populism. As nearly as I can tell, giving voice to that anger is populism. You can give voice to that anger without intending to do anything about it. Perhaps this is another example of the effects of power corrupting people.
Huey Long really did do good early in his political career. He kept spouting the same verbiage, but stopped doing much about it later on.
Demagogues like Limpballs don’t deserve anything but our scorn.
For me, it’s much to easy to walk the walk for the label to be useful. If we determine populists by their actions (and combine that trait with other important, useful traits like not having authoritarian tendencies) then it might become a useful label.
By the way, I agree 111% that there aren’t many (if any) liberal/progressive populist voices out there. Thom Hartmann is the only one I can think of.
excellent point. i stand corrected. thank you.
haven’t given this much thought, but i think i’ve been mostly calling the “giving voice” part populist rhetoric, and reserving the term populism for something that includes trying to do something about it.
i don’t know enough about huey long to have anything to say. but i appreciate your distinction between his early and late periods. what i have read has been quite conflicting and your explanation gives me a possible way to understand that.
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it’s EDT here and i’m fast approaching the wall. will think about the rest tomorrow. just want to say thank you for the thread and discussion and i hope others will jump in with their 2 cents (or more).
The Kingfish was quite a figure. I got interested in him when I read All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren’s thinly veiled novelised biography of Huey.
Long’s biographers are pretty mixed about him. I haven’t read all the material written about him, but some see him as a silver-tongued devil and others as a tragic figure. I guess he’s more interesting as a tragic figure.
i agree limbaugh is a demagogue.
but back to populism. do you not think something is happening (or maybe threatening to happen) in american political conscious right now? that there is a growing anti-DC, anti-elite sentiment?
if not, what do you think is happening?
and if so, what do you think we should call it if not populist sentiment?
Garry Wills wrote a marvelous book a few years ago, A Necessary Good. In the book, Wills traces the history of antigovernment sentiment in this country. We’ve had Raygun-esque sentiments about our government since before it was formed. The only time the President has taken the field in the role of Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Armed forces was in suppressing the Whiskey Rebellion around 1790. (Yeah, it was George Washington, so he knew up from down.)
So Americans are historically suspicious and opposed to Washington, D.C. The really unusual thing I sense about this movement is that the press are ignoring it. Historically, the press led, or at least pumped the bellows in the forge. Maybe the intertubes that allow you and me to have this discussion is part of that.
But back to what to call it. If the word hadn’t already been appropriated, I think populism would be an apt description. But the word has been appropriated, and so people think they know what it means. Except when we’re shifting the meaning of the word. The beatback (to the extent that its happening is coming from the left with some help from the libertarians on the right.
I suppose populism is as good a word for it as any, but if we’re going to call it that we need to explain that we don’t mean populism in the strict conventional sense.
appropriated? by whom? other than anti-elite, i didn’t know there was “strict conventional sense” for the meaning of populism.