“The government lies to us, we all know it. The media lies to us.”
“My mission over the next 18 months of this campaign and throughout my presidency will be to end the corrupt merger of state and corporate power that is threatening now to impose a new kind of corporate feudalism in our country.”
~ Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Democratic son of assassinated Democratic Robert F. Kennedy, is out on the stump for his presidential campaign in challenging President Joe Biden. He is beating the populist drum, but he is no newcomer to this. What some might not be used to hearing is this kind of populism in the Democratic Party and coming from a member of a political dynasty, since so long ago the neoliberal DNC elites betrayed the working class and sold their souls to big biz interests. Yet populism, in its mercuriality, has a way of coming from all directions, constantly shifting forms, and soaking into everything.
It’s not quite guaranteed that Republicans will become the new populist party, in this new populist era. Along with RFK Jr., many Democrats are making a run for it: Bernie Sanders, Andrew Yang, Marianne Williamson, etc; with much earlier precedents such as George McGovern, Jesse Jackson, Ralph Nader, and many others. But the powers that be have, until recently, kept populists down (Matt Stoller, How Democrats Killed Their Populist Soul), as they’ve done with leftists. Also, though progressives have typically opposed populists (Bill Schneider, Class warfare fractures both parties), one can sense that the line between the two is presently blurred, maybe disappearing entirely; as leftward public opinion indicates. Populists have lit a fire under progressives’ asses.
Populism is often a strange mix of fears and hopes. RFK Jr. is an environmental lawyer with a platform of civil liberties, anti-corruption, transparency in government, opposition to military-industrial complex, anti-corporatism/fascism, and economic revitalization, but he is also an anti-vaxxer, the latter more often associated with the alt-right. It reminds one of how Donald Trump made progressive-like campaign promises about infrastructure rebuilding, healthcare reform, fighting corruption, etc, albeit all bull shit; and now is campaigning on protecting Social Security and Medicare, further bull shit. As with progressivism, populism is in the air, and has been for a while now. An old creed of populism has always been a distrust of elites, going back to ancient slave revolts and medieval peasants revolts, then reawakening in the modern era of revolutions and mass movements.
On that note, RFK Jr. has resurrected the conspiracy theories about the supposed CIA’s assassination of his father Robert F. Kennedy and his uncle John F. Kennedy. Even as the accumulated evidence does get one thinking, it’s not verified if CIA agents or other government officials assassinated or were involved in the assassinations; though the government apparently was involved in its coverup for some motive or another. For example, in response to questions and criticisms following the Warren Commission Report, a 1967 CIA memo directed agents to deceptively push ‘conspiracy theorist’ accusations through assets in the US mainstream media; and data analysis shows that the use of the label ‘conspiracy theorist’, that had been rare in the MSM up to that point, suddenly was widely used following. That illegally propagandistic attempt to hide and obscure the truth from the public provides supporting evidence for a potential link of the CIA to the assassination itself, but it doesn’t prove it and at this point, barring further leaks or a death bed confession, we’ll likely never know.
But what is proven beyond a doubt, according to released and leaked CIA documents and assorted other evidence, is that for generations the CIA has assassinated numerous democratic leaders around the world, along with having overthrown democratic governments and attacked democratic groups and movements; in concert with persecution and oppression of the left in general. This is similar to it being proven, according to released and leaked FBI groups, that the FBI used COINTELPRO tactics to attack, weaken, and destroy democratic groups in the US, including actions that involved a FBI asset and led to the assassination of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton by the police that the FBI was working with, but also including other devious ploys like the attempt to blackmail Martin Luther King Jr. into suicide. That is some fucked up shit that most Americans remain unaware or disinformed about, as they’re not going to learn about it by attending school, public or private, or by listening to corporate media, including so-called public media largely funded by corporations.
If our government has done all of this and worse in other countries and here at home, what would stop them from assassinating a standing U.S. president? Certainly, neither morality nor law has been a significant hindrance so far in their covert activities. So, it’s easy to be suspicious when the intelligence agencies of one’s own government have a known long history of political evil, violence, brutality, terrorism, and oppression; even when knowledge of this remains an open secret amidst mass ignorance and indoctrination, causing a sense of free floating anxiety and vague paranoia among the masses. Nonetheless, like Robert Kennedy Jr., many other Americans are becoming less ignorant about abusive corruption and less forgiving toward the purveyors of it (e.g., according to polls, most Americans acknowledge that racism is systemic among police departments and requires reform). That is part of why there has been decades of falling public trust in all major institutions (big government, big media, big biz, and big church; and now the military as well), a situation that is fomenting populist unrest and outrage. It obviously has nothing to do with partisan politics. Many of the same people who voted for Barack Obama stated they would’ve voted for Bernie Sanders, did vote for Donald Trump, and likely would vote for Robert Kennedy Jr.
The argument has been made that, given the admission in polls that many Trump voters said that they didn’t trust Trump to do what he promised, it seems that electing Trump was more of a ‘Fuck You’ to the entire political system; a desperate sense of frustration among a certain segment of the disempowered, disenfranchised, and dispossessed; the equivalent of throwing a grenade into a bunker (the Joker’s philosophy that, in chaos, there is equality). While distorted and misguided by dark fantasies of paranoia, hatred, and bigotry, there was a valid sense of protest, if only a kernel, even in the January 6 MAGA insurrection. With populism repeatedly sprouting up within the Democratic Party as well, this animosity can’t be blamed on just the far right and the politically disaffected. While most Americans have lost trust in major institutions, they also state in polls that they still support the ideal of good governance and want a strong and active government that supports democracy and the public good. For all the moral failure and political evil, the American public hasn’t merely fallen into cynicism, passivity, and indifference. Hence, the reason populism retains its ever stronger appeal, across party lines.
What this anti-elitism and anti-corruption ultimately comes down to is an opposition to high inequality. Such disparity is more of power, position, and privilege than only income and accumulated wealth. This is where it’s important to make a distinction between right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and social dominance orientation (SDO). RWAs aren’t inherently inegalitarian, per se; that is to say not necessarily pro-inequality, in some ways quite the opposite. But that is the case among SDOs, specifically SDO-Es on the SDO-7 subscale. RWAs just want everyone within a given population to conform to the same norms and so in a sense equalize everyone, if inconsistent and hypocritical in practice; whereas SDOs don’t want people to conform at all but, rather, to be kept in their place. In studies, it’s demonstrated that SDOs seek out inequality and, when it’s lacking, will strive to create it. SDOs love rigid hierarchy where power is elevated, concentrated, and centralized within an elite; and hence the subordination and subjugation, suppression and silencing of the masses, the denial of autonomy and agency (i.e., democratic self-governance).
The US has the highest inequality in the world, at a time of the highest inequality in world history. It’s an social dominance utopia, which means a dystopia for the rest of us. Most Americans don’t accept this, even as they are largely ignorant of how bad it is. In surveys, most Americans severely underestimate how vast is inequality. Yet actual inequality is so far above what most Americans, when asked, state is tolerable. Imagine the populist outrage once Americans realize the full extent of the propaganda, indoctrination, and disinfo used to keep them in the dark. And place that in context of the American majority’s ignorance about being a left-liberal majority that is manipulatively divided, another truth that is slowly trickling out into public knowledge, though not yet forming as a shared public identity. If not fully informed, most Americans do get the gist of it. They grok the basic problem and support the policies that would solve it, such as greater democracy, universal healthcare, higher taxes on the rich, stronger corporate regulations, etc. Americans have repeatedly demanded this, as seen with Bernie Sanders having been the most popular candidate in 2016, whereas both Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump were the least popular since data was kept, but the elite repeatedly won’t allow majority leftist opinion to be heard or genuine populism to take hold, much less to gain entry into power.
Here is an important point of confusion. The thing is SDO is divided into two facets, that measure distinct and so can be separate in any given individual. Besides SDO-E (inegalitarianism), there is also SDO-D (dominance proper). The latter is about old school bigotry and oppression, with caste systems, ghettos, sundown towns, redlining, apartheid, a permanent underclass, class war, and such; but old school social dominance is politically incorrect at this point and less of a direct threat, though far from gone. So, authoritarians may or may not have high levels of SDO-D dominance tendencies, whether or not they’re high in SDO-E inegalitarianism. For example, when researched, authoritarians overall don’t perceive immigrants and foreigners as a threat, as long as they are portrayed as assimilating. But to SDOs, assimilation of the foreign is to be feared because it undermines the established hierarchical boundaries of division. So, while conservative Republican partisans indeed have higher rates of authoritarianism, it is primarily SDOs, if with the help of authoritarians, that rule the two-party state, which of course includes the corruption of the transpartisan and cross-administration deep state (CIA, FBI, Homeland Security, etc). This is how occasional token minorities and poor individuals can become politicians, presidents, administration figures, Supreme Court judges, intelligence agents, etc; while oppression of the masses remains, actual meritocracy is neutralized, and the banana republic goes on.
Populism, at its heart, is the simple insistence that it doesn’t have to be this way, that something better is possible, must be possible. Now whether populism takes beneficial or harmful form is dependent on how much pushback the elite give it, and dependent on which counter-elites, reformers and revolutionaries or demagogues and reactionaries, will put their support behind it. It’s a powerful force, but disgruntled populists can get lost down dark paths, just as optimistic populists can lead us toward a brighter future. What determines the outcome is not only what the public demands but also what the elite allows, and as well what the rest of us choose, either for or against the public good. To attack populists as mere right-wing reactionaries and useful idiots would only be to harm ourselves, would be to deny that we too are of the people and that we too share the same fate. Never doubt populism is always a movement of hope. Let us maintain that. Populism is a movement of the populace, of the people. And we, all of us, are the people. It’s for us to decide what becomes of it, what becomes of the possibility for freedom and betterment.
Marmalade 
Well done. Thanks.
We added a paragraph as concluding thought. The former last paragraph was too much of a downer, which is what we were trying to avoid. Populism has, unfortunately, become conflated with Trump’s MAGA. But we wanted to remind people of the other side of populism, that seeks democratic and progressive reform.
Dear Benjamin and Ron,
Hello! This is my second attempt at submitting this long comment, as I am unsure whether my first attempt was successful or not.
Benjamin, I am grateful to you for composing such a thorough examination of some of the salient issues of populism, which can arise in both democracy and autocracy. There are many sobering implications of populism, which is a very topical area to explore the many outstanding tensions between (the sociopsychological states of) sanity/stability and insanity/instability, affecting even the very existence and survival of humanity. In my very extensive and analytical post entitled “💬 Misquotation Pandemic and Disinformation Polemic: 🧠 Mind Pollution by Viral Falsity 🦠“, my own multidisciplinary perspective proposes that four of the most insidious and corrosive conditions have exacerbated many socioeconomic, sociocultural and sociopolitical issues dramatically:
(1) The prevailing anti-intellectualism
(2) The cult of anti-expertise sentiment
(3) The politicization of science
(4) The prevalent manifestation of populism
Needless to say, condition (4) is the most relevant to this current post entitled “Populism Continues to Grow, Across Party Lines“. You are very welcome to find out much more about these four conditions at my extensive and analytical post entitled “Misquotation Pandemic and Disinformation Polemic: Mind Pollution by Viral Falsity“, and I welcome your input and feedback there, as I am certainly very keen and curious about what you will make of my corresponding contributions.
Thank you once again, Benjamin, for your pertinent and cogently written post. Wishing both of you a productive mid-May doing or enjoying whatever that satisfies you the most, both intellectually and educationally!
Yours sincerely,
SoundEagle
We know where you’re coming from and it’s a common view. Maybe back in the Aughts, we were first exposed to it through Richard Hofstadter’s work and we found it compelling at the time as it fits the narratives one hears in media, but we’ve come across a lot more scholarship since that time and so have reassessed our conclusions (Charles Postel, The Populist Vision; Tom Lutz, American Nervousness, 1903; Thomas Frank’s writings; etc). Hofstadter was the first major scholar who established this anti-populist critique. But a number of things could be noted. His critique was critiqued by other scholars, and even Hofstadter himself later admitted to having gotten it wrong. As Jacobin writer Anton Jäger concludes, “why has so little changed in populism studies? Why does a concept that was declared bankrupt by its very inventor still have such a stellar career? […] To some, it simply demonstrates the power of ideas in historical processes. To others, it should stand as a call for self-examination.”
Also, consider those who have been identified as populists by themselves, by their supporters, by their opponents, and/or by historians and political scientists. This is a diverse bunch that transcends and often disconfirms the definition you offer in your article, which problematizes it from the start. Yes, populists like Donald Trump and RFK Jr. more closely fall into a certain pattern, with typical reactionary elements such as conspiracy theorizing, albeit not all conspiracy theorists are reactionary. But others aren’t reactionary at all: Eugene V. Debs, George McGovern, Ralph Nader, Bernie Sanders, etc. Interestingly, MLK Jr., Jimmy Carter, and Barack Obama all openly agreed that the populist label applied to themselves, and indeed they used populist rhetoric. Not exactly a list of anti-intellectuals, fear-mongers, and regressives.
Part of the problem is people rarely self-identify as populists. So, from an elite perspective, often in defense of the status quo, it gets used as a way of maligning and dismissing one’s opponents without having to acknowledge their criticisms and challenges; not that we’d argue that is what you’re doing, but some have applied this to what they interpreted as Hofstadter’s Burkean-style conservatism that perceived the reactionary paranoid style among leftists as well, albeit this conclusion is complicated by his late life return to radical leftist sympathies. There is such a diversity of definitions and supposed examples of populism that often are diametrically opposed. We can’t even agree on what is populism and who is a populist. But we can look to the original Populist movement here in the U.S., the first time that label was ever used.
Consider the Scopes Monkey Trial. One one side, there was a fundamentalist attack on science education. And on the other side, was a defense of intellectual freedom, moral obligation, and civil rights of teachers as torchbearers of Enlightenment thought. Yet the lawyers on both sides were leading Populists. That alone rips apart the conventional narrative of ignorant and backwards Populists. The fact of the matter is that this divide between intellectualism and anti-intellectualism wasn’t limited to within the Populist movement but seen across the entire society. That is to say it really had nothing to do with Populism at all. Most Populists were thinking of Robber Barons and corrupt politicians, not public school teachers, when they thought of oppressive elites.
Let’s get at a specific point you make by way of data: “40% of populist leaders are indicted on corruption charges, and their countries register substantial declines in international corruption rankings); and that populists attack individual rights (freedom of the press shrinks by 7%, civil liberties by 8%, and political rights by 13%).” If populist leaders are defined as you define them, then by definition they’ll be prone to corruption and attacks on individual rights. But once again, what if the definition is wrong in the first place? If so, the data would be accordingly wrong. In either case, it’s unsurprising that in places where democracy has failed that leaders who rise up often also are compromised by the corrupt culture around them. Anyway, who is defining these leaders as populists and based on what standards or measures? Why not look back to how the original Populists defined themselves? Accordingly, Bernie Sanders fits the profile perfectly, whereas Donald Trump’s actual policies as president undermine any populist claims. Certainly, Trump was never popular, as the American majority is far to the left.
Remember that, like the populist Sanders and his supporters, many original Populists were in addition self-identified social democrats, democratic socialists, municipal socialists, etc; including in the South that once had a strong left-wing movement (Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe) with many minorities joining the Populists (Omar H. Ali, In the Lion’s Mouth: Black Populism in the New South, 1886-1900). Also, as the term populism was coined in the U.S. to define a specific American tradition of mass political movement, it’s not clear that outside of the U.S. (and the rest of the West, particularly the U.K.) the term can be applicable in straightforward fashion or applicable at all. Anglo-American populism has a specific lineage of Anti-Federalism, Radical Whiggism, and Court Party; specifically in the context of the Coal Wars, Fries’ Rebellion, Shays’ Rebellion, Whiskey Rebellion, American Revolution, North Carolina Regulators, English Civil War, and English Peasants Revolt. But calling every mass movement, revolt, uprising, and insurrection across the world as ‘populist’ is probably not helpful, much less historically meaningful.
The early Populist movement was diverse and that maybe adds to the confusion. For example, there were some racists and antisemites in the Populist movement, albeit far from the majority. But as far as that went, there was an even greater number of a wide variety of bigots in the two main parties and in the halls of power. Most of the influential reactionary leaders were found among the upper classes and ruling elites in urban areas, not the Populists of the working class and the rural poor. Plus, as the People’s Party of the 1890s was a radical leftist coalition, the Populist movement was multi-racial, multi-ethnic, and multi-religious and so specifically attracted many minorities (e.g., in 1894 Adolph Sutro, a German Jew, was elected mayor of San Francisco on the Populist ticket). As always, each group in the coalition had its own interests and biases, yet there was a shared ideology in opposition to elitism and corruption while advocating democratic and economic reforms, much of it embracing a progressive vision of social improvements, scientific knowledge, technological advancements, and national governance.
The confusion is predictable, though. The same pattern repeats across history. So many leftist, liberal, and progressive movements, identities, labels, and rhetoric get co-opted over time by the reactionary right. Like the Populists, the original libertarians were also on the Left. Having formed as part of the European workers’ movement, from the late 19th century to the early 20th century, libertarianism meant anti-authoritarian and anti-statist socialism and so it upheld a principled idea of anti-capitalist free markets (e.g., anarchosyndicalist employee-owned-and-operated businesses), in line with much Marxist ideology. It wasn’t until the 1950s that right-wing reactionaries co-opted, redefined, and repurposed libertarianism; a coup that they were quite proud of, in admitting what they had done. But all of that happened long after the Populist era. As such, there would’ve been plenty of civil libertarians, often openly identified as ‘libertarians’ but not always, within the Populist movement and as members of the People’s Party. We need to be careful about labels, which is all the more reason to be historically informed. We should put up a fight, rather than passively concede territory that the reactionary right seeks to steal.
As an example of this kind of ideological confusion, look at some of our older comments (here and here) over at your post, Misquotation Pandemic and Disinformation Polemic: Mind Pollution by Viral Falsity. In one of those comments, we linked to two of our posts where we noted that Trump’s main support came from middle class professionals, mostly urbanites and suburbanites, not the rural poor and the broad working class (Right-Wing Politics of the Middle Class; & Class Anxiety of Privilege Denied).
Like Republicans in general, these faux ‘populists’ are above average in education and wealth. The actual poor and working class mostly supported Bernie Sanders, the most popular presidential candidate and the only major one whose platform was in line with majority (i.e., popular) public opinion. The lower classes have long sided with Democrats and still largely do, in spite of the DNC elite betraying them long ago. Considering that both Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump were the two most unpopular presidential candidates since data was kept, and considering that both were well right of popular opinion, in what sense could a ruling elite like Trump, long tied into elite politics and wealth (not to mention family friends of the Clintons), be fairly and honestly called a populist? This is why Thomas Frank has argued that, “In my opinion, there is no such thing as right-wing populism, there are people who mimic it, and Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, would be people I would list. But populism is the Jeffersonian tradition in American life. It is a democratic, left-wing movement. It’s about building a mass movement, a transracial mass movement of working class people for economic democracy. That’s what it is, that’s what it’s always been.”
We edited and revised, expanded and elaborated upon our response to you. But it ended up being so long that the formatting went all wonky. So, we lopped off all the links and quoted material at the end. Hopefully, by posting them as a separate comment, the formatting won’t be an issue.
“I was thinking about the distorting lens of the corporate media. Even when alternative media responds to it, much of the false framing goes unchallenged and uncorrected. That is because the public intellectuals on alternative media are not necessarily all that different from their counterparts on corporate media, often the same people in fact.
“Consider Richard Hofstadter, an influential public intellectual during the mid-20th century. He wrote The Paranoid Style in American Politics, which was published in 1964. He portrayed the earlier Populist Era as right-wing and reactionary, presumably in response to the mainstream debate that was capturing the attention of the intelligentsia during the Civil Rights movement and Vietnam War protests.
“The basic problem is this portrayal was factually incorrect. The first populist movement, from the late 1800s to the early 1900s, was a broad mix of ideologies. Besides the expected groups on the political right, the populism back then was also found among social liberals, social democrats, progressive reformers, labor organizers, left-libertarians, anarchists, anarchosyndicalists, Marxists, socialists, communists, Fabians, feminists, etc.
“That false portrayal created a false understanding in the 1960s and ever since. Those proclaiming populist views weren’t only those who believed in white supremacy, folk religiosity, and volk nationalism. As I said, most Americans, including most whites, came around to opposing Jim Crow and the Vietnam War. If populism means what is popular, why was mass opinion so distorted in the accounts of intellectuals like Hofstadter and remains distorted to this day?
“Why do even liberal intellectuals and academics ignore minorities and most poor whites when focusing on a narrow segment of radicalized whites as representing all of populism? These intellectuals and academics have access to all kinds of info and so why do they repeatedly get it so wrong? Good info is not always hard to find. In a few minutes of a Google search, I could pull up polls showing how far left is the American public, including the poor of all races.
“Why does the myth continue? Why is it so important to be treated as true? What makes it so powerful as propaganda and mind virus, as ideological realism and reality tunnel? What would happen if there was mainstream acknowledgment of and public debate about the left-wing populism of the silenced majority? Is the supposedly ‘liberal’ and ‘centrist’ intelligentsia more right-wing and reactionary than they realize?”
Click to access w31148.pdf
“It may seem tempting to project our present-day circumstances back onto the past, seeking to identify a package of attributes which has been constant over time: anti-elitist and demagogic political discourse, appealing to lower educated and blue collar workers, promoting damaging economic policies, and opposed to globalization in all its forms. But history was more complicated than that. Not everyone called a Populist was a populist; protectionism was frequently opposed by working class voters and promoted by elites; populists were blue collar in some contexts, but better educated and enjoying higher occupational status in others; they were more likely to be Protestant in some contexts, and more likely to be Catholic in others; it was sometimes the elites whose policy prescriptions were both simplistic and destructive.
“We would prefer it if instead of “populism”, scholars used terms such as demagoguery (Bernhardt et al., 2022) and illiberal democracy. The linguistic association with the Populist movement of the late 19th century encourages not only historical confusion, but a tendency to ascribe to popular protest movements sinister and anti-democratic tendencies even when this is unwarranted. Historians tend to be suspicious of over-generalization and historians of Populism are, unsurprisingly, particularly unhappy with the way in which social scientists use the word: in the opinion of Lawrence Goodwyn, for example,‘”populism” is one of those terms that have been employed so indiscriminately that political science might be better served if it were quietly dropped’ (Goodwyn, 1991, p. 40).25 But if we are stuck with the label, then the least we can do is to stop conflating populism, hostility to globalization, advocacy of simplistic economic policies, and 19th century US Populism. These are separate categories that sometimes intersect, but sometimes do not.”
https://www.oah.org/tah/issues/2016/february/if-trump-and-sanders-are-both-populists-what-does-populist-mean/
“In the American context, Hofstadter’s thesis of an unstable Populism of the 1890s going “sour” continues to inform journalistic practice. In a 2015 issue of the New Yorker, George Packer writes that Sanders and Trump fit the pattern of “the volatile nature of populism” that “can ignite reform or reaction, idealism or scapegoating.” He cites as evidence that the Populist Tom Watson of Georgia ended his political career as a racial demagogue. But what if Watson was more of the exception than the rule? [6] What if—as more than half a century of historical scholarship has confirmed and reconfirmed—the great majority of former Populist leaders, activists, and supporters went to their graves committed to their ideals of social justice? Clarence Darrow, like many former Populists, found a political home in the farmer-labor wing of the Democratic party. Others, like Mary Elizabeth Lease, the “Queen of Kansas Populism,” did the same in the progressive wing of the Republican party. Still others took the path of Henry Demarest Lloyd and joined the Socialist movement led by the former labor Populist Eugene V. Debs, the same Debs whose picture hangs on the wall of Bernie Sanders’s Washington office.
“As the decades roll along, the journalistic claims about populist volatility and shape-shifting sound increasingly strange. The political thought that motivated the original Populists has proven to be at least as constant as any other school of political ideas. In its proposals for making a more just and equitable society and under a variety of names—antimonopolist, farmer-labor, populist, democratic socialist, nonpartisan, progressive— populism has remained a steady, deep, and broad stream in American political thought. As of this writing, this stream shows no sign of jumping its banks and turning to the far right, any more than Bernie Sanders is about to sport an orange comb-over and campaign for a new round of tax cuts for the “winners” and billionaires.”
Click to access coates.pdf
“Hofstadter criticised populism and progressivism, and adopted an ‘ideological ambivalence’ in questioning the merits of democratic reform. Schlesinger, one of the foremost exponents of the orthodox interpretation, conceded that this ideological ambiguity concerning democratic reform may have represented ‘the flowering of the natural conservatism which Alfred Kazin detected thirty years ago.’28 Likewise, Robert Collins
concluded that ‘it was this conservatism, rather than his earlier radicalism, that most directly contributed to his ambivalence in The Age of Reform.’29 Hofstadter provided further evidence of his conversion to conservatism with his appreciative acknowledgement that ‘what is of most value in conservatism is its feeling for the past and for nuances of thought, of administration, of method, of meaning.’30 As Howe and Finn observed, ‘In this sympathetic description of conservatism, Hofstadter could just as well have been describing some aspects of his own outlook.’31 Furthermore, academic criticism of the book hailed mostly from the left, to which Hofstadter responded that they correctly interpreted The Age of Reform as conservative in its outlook.32 Hofstadter had previously admitted that his disdain for populism ‘springs not from that element in me that is more ‘radical’ than they were but from the latent conservative in me.’33 The Hofstadter of 1955 had adopted a non-ideological perspective which reflected a growing discomfort with democratic reform and the surfacing of this latent conservatism.
“The writings most commonly utilised by orthodox interpretations of Hofstadter to emphasise an apparent hostility to conservatism are collected in The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays. Upon closer inspection, these works reveal that Hofstadter was writing from an antidogmatic, non-ideological conservative position. As demonstrated, Hofstadter had in ‘The PseudoConservative Revolt’ carefully distinguished pseudo-conservatism from practical conservatism. Similarly, in ‘The Paranoid Style’, perhaps Hofstadter’s most famous essay, he recognised that whilst the paranoid style was indeed a pejorative phrase, it was not to be exclusively applied to the right. Hofstadter explained that though ‘a common ingredient of fascism, and of frustrated nationalism’, the paranoid style equally ‘appeals to many who are hardly fascists and it can frequently be seen in the left-wing press.’34 Furthermore, Hofstadter criticised the ‘ex-Communists who have moved rapidly … from the paranoid left to the paranoid right, clinging all the while to the fundamentally Manichean psychology that underlies both.’35 Thus Hofstadter viewed the paranoid style as typical of ideological extremities on the right, but also the left. The more visible right subsequently provoked Hofstadter’s ire.”
https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/240125/pdf
“Historians mainly remember Richard Hofstadter’s depiction of Populism in The Age of Reform (1955) for its critique of what he called Populism’s “soft side,” an anxiety-ridden, conspiracy-minded movement of agrarian radicals who feared that the march of progress was leaving them behind. Less well remembered is Hofstadter’s depiction of Populism’s “hard side,” represented by the farmer as “a harassed little country businessman,” who understood himself to be part of a market economy and who focused his energies on “agricultural improvement, business methods, and pressure politics.”1 Drawing his examples of hard side Populism from the two decades after the demise of the People’s party, Hofstadter argued that after 1896 agrarianism as a “mass movement” (a primitive form of collective action in the social science terminology of the 1950s) yielded to modern methods through which farmers influenced federal legislation and the markets in which they competed.
“In an important new national study, Charles Postel locates the origins of this hard side of Populism squarely within the experience of the People’s party and, especially, of the Farmers’ Alliance. Unlike Hofstadter, Postel sees continuity between the Alliance-Populist agenda and early-twentieth-century agribusiness. Populists, Postel contends, were forward-looking men and women who embraced the Enlightenment idea of progress, not backward-looking yeoman trapped in the amber of agrarianism. They were comfortable with modern means of transportation, communications, and mass media, and they shaped “the weapons of protest out of the modern materials of technological, organizational, and ideological innovation” (p. viii). In other words, the Pops tried to beat the captains of industry at their own game.
“After reading The Populist Vision, it is tempting to cite Dorothy’s comment to her little dog after the cyclone had deposited them in Oz: “Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore.” These are not exactly the Populists of Hicks, Hofstadter, or Goodwyn. Kansas is not the normative Populist state here, nor are Texas or Georgia, but California. The central characters are not William Jennings Bryan, Tom Watson, or Mary Elizabeth Lease, but Charles Macune, father of [End Page 209] large-scale economic cooperation in the “Southern” Farmers’ Alliance, and Marion Cannon, Los Angeles booster, California cooperative and Alliance leader, and Populist Congressman.
“Many who have written about Populism will find their oxen being gored by Postel. This is a good thing, for his is a book well worth arguing with. Postel makes a compelling case for reconsidering parts of the major narratives of Populism and he offers fresh insights into the emergence of modern agribusiness as part of industrial America in parallel with the expansion of the national state. He joins a growing list of scholars who are connecting the study of historical social movements with a new generation of social science theory far different from the structural-functionalism which gave Hofstadter a scientific vocabulary in the 1950s.
“The Alliance-Populist agenda as outlined by Postel is familiar: “The power of the Populist movement lay in the efforts of common citizens to shape the national economy and governance” through large-scale cooperatives and a legislative program which, if enacted, would have expanded the role of the federal government in regulating transportation, communications, and finance, and strengthened existing agencies such as the Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Postal system (p. 4). Less familiar is Postel’s analysis of the mindset of Populist organizational leaders and intellectuals: “A firm belief in progress gave them confidence to act. Because they believed in the transforming power of science and technology, they sought to attain expertise and knowledge for their own improvement. Because they believed in economies of scale, they strove to adapt the model of large-scale enterprise to their own needs of association and marketing. Because they believed in the logic of modernity, the Populist ‘clodhoppers’ attempted to fashion an alternative modernity suitable to their own interests” (p. 4).”
“Think of the original states rights argument of Southern aristocrats which, in opposing federal treaties, sought to steal Native American land; and then justified it with populist appeals of opening the land for white settlers. That is kind of the right-wing populism that so worried the likes of Richard Hofstadter when he wrote The Paranoid Style in American Politics. But that unfairly dismisses millennia of genuine populism, built on an emerging class consciousness that made all of modern leftism possible, no matter how the reactionary right has co-opted it. The merchants and large landowners wouldn’t have taken up such rhetoric, if they hadn’t been preceded by a centuries-long grassroots movement of working class revolt; not merely limited to agrarianism, if sometimes taking that form; much less identical to the extremes of reactionary politics such as anti-Catholicism, antisemitism, and McCarthyism. Hofstadter too came around to admitting he was wrong, that genuine populism was much more diverse and very often radically left-wing in its egalitarianism (Anton Jäger, The Myth of “Populism”).”
https://jacobin.com/2018/01/populism-douglas-hofstadter-donald-trump-democracy
“Still, this negative consensus seems rather less absolute on the American side. American leftists seem to have few qualms about labeling Bernie Sanders “a progressive populist.” On the other hand, Jeet Heer, a writer for the New Republic, calls that ascription a “fundamental lapse of judgment.” In a 2016 election debate, Cornel West deemed it a fatal mistake to label someone like Trump a “populist.” Unlike their European counterparts, the American commentariat remains hesitant to attach an exclusively pejorative conception of the term. If Barack Obama — a stern opponent of Brexit and supporter of the stillborn transatlantic free-trade treaty — feels that Europeans have a misplaced definition of populism, something must be amiss.
“The fact is, historians and journalists have been quibbling over the exact meaning of the term populism — and who should and shouldn’t qualify as one — for at least sixty years. A lack of historical analysis has allowed the term populism to retain a plasticity rivaled by few other concepts. According to recent reports, the word was used no less than a million times in journalistic publications in the years 2014–16. Essayists declare that we’re living a “populist nightmare,” while academic journals compete in what can only be called a mini-industry. Meanwhile, what’s actually meant by the word populist remains anyone’s guess. […]
“Hofstadter’s thesis immediately faced objections. The debate, often referred to as “one of the bloodiest episodes in American historiography,” lasted over twenty years, eventually involving historians such as Walter Nugent, John Hicks, and Comer Vann Woodward, all of whom wrote passionate defenses of the Populist movement.
“This quickly led to some embarrassing conclusions. Many of Hofstadter’s claims — that the Populists were antisemitic; that they provided the social basis for McCarthyism — turned out to be empirically unjustifiable. Nor could Hofstadter explain the career of many later Populists, who joined European Jews in the American Socialist Party and became fierce critics of Henry Ford’s bigotry.
“The claim that most former Populist states had become seedbeds of McCarthyism — one of Hofstadter’s key arguments — also turned out to be false. Hofstadter and his colleagues saw that most ex-Populist states strongly supported the Wisconsin Senator. Yet, as political scientist Michael Paul Rogin pointed out in 1967, partisan Republicans were most likely to support McCarthy while working-class voters could be classed as lukewarm anti-communists at best.
“By the end of the 1960s, Hofstadter’s thesis was in tatters. Empirically dubious and politically elitist, few academics still believed in his argument. Even Eric Foner, one of his doctoral students, has declared that his supervisor was wrong from beginning to end.
“But academe is not the assembly. As Jeet Heer pointed out in a recent piece, Hofstadter has had a curious legacy. On the one hand, American historians attribute little importance to the actual content of his work on Populism. In academic circles, the idea that the Populists were the McCarthyites’ forebears “languishes in ruin,” as the historian of Populism Lawrence Goodwyn once put it.
“In public consciousness, however — and certainly in European debates — the Hofstadter thesis is alive and well. It’s hard to find a contemporary pundit who doesn’t see populism and proto-fascism as implicit synonyms and who doesn’t cast the late-nineteenth-century Populists as first-class bigots. […]
“Its heritage, however, remained problematic — as became even clearer in 1968. Around that time, two English historians decided to organize a conference at the London School of Economics. A variety of researchers attended: Isaiah Berlin, Ernest Gellner, Ghita Ionescu, and — most interestingly — Hofstadter himself.
“At the end of the conference, Hofstadter joined the conversation. He started his speech by admitting that he was slightly dazzled by the wide range of movements classified as “populism”; he had expected nothing but a discussion of Russian and American variants. He also conceded defeat in the revisionist controversy — the “genetic affiliation” between McCarthyism and “earlier agrarian movements” was “doubtless miscarried,” he said. Even if the John Birchers and other “paranoid-style” politicos did “twang some populist strings,” they no longer qualified as “substantial” populists.
“This confession, however, did not stem the concept’s rise in European academia. While Hofstadter admitted his mistakes, European political scientists became even more enthusiastic about his version of small-p populism. In the 1980s, Hofstadter’s thesis gained further traction in European political science departments, most interestingly in France. […]
“Accordingly, the original Populists were quickly buried under three decades of ideology. Americans now find it difficult to convince Europeans that it once signified something other than pure demagoguery and proto-fascism. […]
“Rather, we should ask a different question: why has so little changed in populism studies? Why does a concept that was declared bankrupt by its very inventor still have such a stellar career?
“When writers such as Cas Mudde, Jan-Werner Müller, and Pippa Norris continue to describe populism in ways eerily similar to Hofstadter’s definition, we should wonder why this particular vision of the movement has proven so successful. To some, it simply demonstrates the power of ideas in historical processes. To others, it should stand as a call for self-examination.”
https://glencoe.mheducation.com/sites/0076621367/student_view0/chapter19/where_historians_disagree.html
“This generally approving view of Populism prevailed among historians for more than two decades, amplified in particular by C. Vann Woodward, whose Origins of the New South (1951) and The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955) portrayed southern Populism as a challenge to the stifling power of old elites and even, at times, to at least some elements of white supremacy. But Woodward was not typical of most scholars viewing Populism in the early 1950s. For others, the memory of European fascism and uneasiness about contemporary communism combined to create a general hostility toward mass popular politics; and a harsh new view of the Populist movement appeared in a work by one of the nation’s leading historians. Richard Hofstadter, in The Age of Reform (1955), admitted that Populism embraced some progressive ideas and advocated some sensible reforms. But the bulk of his effort was devoted to exposing both the “soft” and the “dark” sides of the movement.
“Populism was “soft,” Hofstadter claimed, because it rested on a nostalgic and unrealistic myth, because it romanticized the nation’s agrarian past and refused to confront the realities of modern life. Farmers, he argued, were themselves fully committed to the values of the capitalist system they claimed to abhor. And Populism was “dark,” he argued, because it was permeated with bigotry and ignorance. Populists, he claimed, revealed anti- Semitic tendencies, and they displayed animosity toward intellectuals, easterners, and urbanites as well.
“Almost immediately, historians more favorably disposed toward mass politics in general, and Populism in particular, began to challenge what became known as the “Hofstadter thesis.” Norman Pollack argued in a 1962 study, The Populist Response to Industrial America, and in a number of articles that the agrarian revolt had rested not on nostalgic, romantic concepts but on a sophisticated, far- sighted, and even radical vision of reform—one that recognized, and even welcomed, the realities of an industrial economy, but that sought to make that economy more equitable and democratic by challenging many of the premises of capitalism. Walter T. K. Nugent, in Tolerant Populists (1963), argued that the Populists in Kansas were far from bigoted, that they not only tolerated but welcomed Jews and other minorities into their party, and that they offered a practical, sensible program.
“Lawrence Goodwyn, in Democratic Promise (1976), described the Populists as members of a “coop- erative crusade,” battling against the “coercive potential of the emerging corporate state.” Populists were more than the nostalgic bigots Hofstadter described, more even than the progressive reformers portrayed by Hicks. They offered a vision of truly radical change, widely disseminated through what Goodwyn called a “movement culture.” They advocated an intelligent, and above all a democratic, alternative to the inequities of modern capitalism.”
https://newrepublic.com/article/157190/richard-hofstadter-got-wrong-paranoid-style-reissue-review
“Amid the present academic boomlet in anti-populist jeremiads, Hofstadter’s reading of the American Populist movement as a bigoted, nativist, and anti-Semitic insurgency, steeped in “status anxiety,” is arguably more influential than ever, half a century after his death in 1970. But as is the case with many intellectual legacies, a great deal has been lost in translation: Hofstadter envisioned reform as a prolonged revolt against modernity—not a particularly useful framework for understanding today’s demagogues, who, instead of trafficking in grievances about the world they have lost, augur a bold new turn in plutocratic governance. Meanwhile, Hofstadter’s crudest simplifications have endured: His latter-day anti-populist apostles tend to fall back on his caricatured accounts of the backward masses and their motivations, pointedly ignoring the social-democratic cast of American Populism of the Gilded Age. […]
“The other essays collected in The Paranoid Style feature equally damning interpretive blind spots. An extended meditation on imperialism and the Spanish-American War manages to suggest that Populist reformers were ardent supporters of imperialism—a bald misreading of the historical record. A look back at the track record of antitrust enforcement suggests, in classic balancing-boy fashion, that the antitrust cause succeeded only once it ceased to be the intellectual plaything of the backward reformer class. “The problems of yesterday are not solved but outgrown,” Hofstadter coos in a transport of Whiggish hubris—one that, again, is uniquely ill suited to our own new millennial economic order of unregulated digital monopoly.
“In both books, Hofstadter’s dim view of populism and its legacy rests on a willful misreading of the Populist insurgency’s actual history. Far from advancing a toxic synthesis of nativist prejudice, fundamentalism, and retreatist cultural politics, many movement Populists in the nineteenth century were radical innovators, proposing measures such as public ownership of utilities, the popular ballot initiative, and the direct election of senators that would come to pass under the highbrow ministrations of the later Progressive movement. The Populist Party also proposed instituting the Subtreasury Plan—a new currency system predicated on the labor value of commodities, which got appropriated and pressed into the service of finance capital with the Progressive-era founding of the Federal Reserve in 1913.
“And very much contrary to Hofstadter’s portrait of Populists as xenophobes, bigots, and racists, the movement sought to forge cross-racial coalitions of farmers and workers in the former Confederacy; it was the creation of a Colored Farmers’ Alliance in the Southern and Western states that terrified the Southern plantocracy, which then proceeded to launch the vicious reign of modern white supremacy in the South, as C. Vann Woodward documented in his 1955 work The Strange Career of Jim Crow, and as Lawrence Goodwyn showed in his magisterial 1976 study Democratic Promise. Hofstadter only managed to rouse the image of an incorrigibly racist and bigoted Populist movement by selectively culling outbursts from movement leaders such as Thomas E. Watson, Ignatius Donnelly, and Mary Elizabeth Lease. Several of these figures—Watson chief among them—embraced such ugly sentiments in the wake of Populism’s abrupt collapse after the 1896 election, and in concert with the consolidation of the white supremacist regime in the modern South. To isolate Populists as the principal source of racist reaction in the region and the country at large, as Hofstadter and his many followers have done, is very much like blaming the medical profession for the rise of the coronavirus.”
https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2023/04/14/the-power-of-populism-is-populism-the-solu
Thomas Frank:
“[Populism strengthening democracy is] most definitely possible. And the reason I say that is because as a historical fact, the populist movement in America, which is where the word comes from, are the people who fought for the direct election of senators, the secret ballot, the initiative and referendum. And they were the first political party in this country to support votes for women. So, yeah, democracy. Absolutely. And they are also massively against corruption. This was one of their big issues.
“Well, look, the problem is one of definitions. The word’s meaning has changed so much and is used by so many different people to mean so many different things. For example, in your opening segment, you had a recording of George Wallace. His archrival, Martin Luther King, was in that sort of competition, was one who was much closer to the original populist position and in fact, identified himself with the populist position.
“Wallace hated that word, thought that the word populism didn’t like to apply it to himself, you know, resented it. And so it’s very confusing to call someone like that a populist. The word is, these days, the word is all over the map. And it has essentially, I mean, you can say whatever you want about it. You know, these academics who impute all these different meanings to it, I mean, they could use the word Whigs, you know, the Whig Party. They could use the word Fenian. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just made up. I want to talk about what populism actually was and where the word came from. In my research, I was actually able to find the exact origin of the word itself. It’s actually kind of an interesting story.
“So populism was for listeners who don’t know already, was the last great, successful third-party movement in American history. And it was the end of that road, but it was the beginning of the idea of politics based on social class. It was specifically a working-class labor movement. It was a left-wing labor reform movement, a lot like the Labor Party in England or in Australia or the Social Democrats in Germany. That’s what it was. Its main base was farmers. It was very strong on the Great Plains and in the South[, as was leftist ideologies such as communism and Marxism]. I’m from Kansas. It’s a sort of local legacy there. We all know about populism, and it frightened a lot of people. […]
“So that’s him talking about the new left. Not populism specifically, but Hofstadter is a really fascinating story. I want to say, though, first of all, the stuff about populism being racist. This is a misunderstanding that derives from Hofstadter. The populists were the anti-racist party of their day. There was a group that historians called the Black populists. The populists made this this famous stand against what used to be called white solidarity in the South.
“And in fact, they were beaten in 1898, in North Carolina, in this shocking sort of, well, bloodbath, let’s say, engineered by the racist forces of the state, who then, once they had beaten populists, the populists who were, like I say, they were trying to work with Black voters at the time. Once they had beaten them, they proceeded to strip the vote from Black people and from poor whites. This is where Jim Crow comes from. It was an effort to suppress populism. It wasn’t engineered by the populists themselves.
“And the reason the story of Tom Watson is so fascinating to historians is because he betrayed the principles that he had enunciated. So, you know, so inspiringly earlier in his life. And what happened is we were talking about 1896, William Jennings Bryan and the populist walked into the greatest beat down in all of American political history. The sort of American elite came together behind the Republican candidates that year. A guy called William McKinley and proceeded to unleash this stereotype of populism that they had invented, where populism was supposed to be willful ignorance, irrational, you know, a form of mental illness, basically this idea of working-class people trying to reach above their station.”
https://www.publicbooks.org/public-thinker-thomas-frank-on-how-populism-can-save-america/
Thomas Frank:
“Populism has long been targeted—from the 19th century to Trump—as a danger to the social order. This is what fascinates me now. Not so much the story of Populism, although that’s a great story, but the story of anti-populism, the people who hated and despised the movement, beginning with the big New York daily newspapers of the day.
“Then I branched out, got into the humor magazines of the period, which absolutely despised Populism, just hated it. And these were fun to research because I don’t think too many people have used these in their studies of Populism before. The Library of Congress had one of them on microfilm—it was called Judge—but the microfilm was in black and white and it was not easy to read. I wound up buying them, just buying the physical magazines from somebody on eBay, and that way the cartoons are in full color; they’re absolutely beautiful.
“Another thing these magazines were—these magazines that hated Populism and mocked it all the time—was extremely racist and anti-immigrant and antisemitic, viciously antisemitic. So, what does that tell you? There were occasional antisemites among the Populists, of course, but the broader culture was cruelly, viciously antisemitic. It’s just in your face with every page you turn. We’re talking about Republicans and Democrats here, the most refined and high-toned elements of society.
“Richard Hofstadter, the Columbia historian who wrote the most famous anti-populist work of them all, must have known that. He accused the Populists of being antisemitic and anti-immigrant. Why didn’t he report about the much more obvious antisemitism and xenophobia of the New York elite? Surely he knew about it. Why didn’t he include that in his work?
“All sorts of doors start opening once you figure this out and start digging in the anti-populist field. Hofstadter absolutely hated Populism and would return to attack the movement again and again in the course of his life. He most famously wrote a book that came out in ’55 called The Age of Reform, where he said the populists were anti-intellectual, that they were pathological, that they were paranoid, that they were in the grip of all these psychological maladies, and all because they were people on their way down, meaning because they were working class.
“As I was digging into this anti-populist literature from the 1890s, I found that they employed the exact same critique that Hofstadter made in the ’50s. It all seemed very familiar.
“Of course Hofstadter had much more subtle tools at his disposal. He had Adorno and The Authoritarian Personality; he had all the psychological jargon of the 1950s.
“But the original anti-populists were no slouches either. The greatest intellectual of the day, William Graham Sumner, of Yale University, came after the Populists. So did leading economists. Hofstadter wrote a book that was partly about Sumner (Social Darwinism in American Thought). He knew about this. And yes, the anti-populists of the 1890s may have used the blunt awful methodologies of the time, but the accusation was the same: calling them anti-intellectual and continually pointing out that they were from the lower orders of society. The 19th-century anti-populists accused them of not being able to think about economic issues.
“They called William Jennings Bryan a maniac. There was a psychologist who wrote about Bryan for the New York Times, declaring that he showed “evidence of a mind not entirely sound.” The reason the psychologist gave for this conclusion was that Bryan had theories about economics and yet he had not studied economics in college. Hofstadter simply updated this same critique, using language of the hyperrational 1950s.
“In the 1930s, the song remains the same. This time the anti-populists attacked Roosevelt, the Labor Movement, and the New Deal, using the exact same line of analysis: the lower orders are out of control, the riffraff are delusional, they are anti-intellectual, and so on. Only this time anti-populism was jazzed up with the highbrow theory of the 1930s, by which I mean eugenics. It comes very close to fascism. […]
“[T]his is where the word got redefined. This is why we use the word “populism” the way we do. The consensus intellectuals of the ’50s plucked the term from 19th-century obscurity and redefined it. It is their redefinition that is still with us today.
“Today you have this pedagogy called global populism studies. They have a group at Stanford. They’re all over Europe. And all of them use the definition of populism that Hofstadter and his colleagues came up with in the 1950s: that populism is a generic term for mass movements of working-class people that exhibit these certain pathologies. Populists are people who look to the past rather than to the future, so they don’t believe in progress. They’re paranoid. They believe in conspiracy theories. They are anti-intellectual; they don’t understand the modern economy; they don’t really understand any kind of complexity; they hate foreigners and people who are far away. They don’t understand the city.
“Unfortunately, Hofstadter was wrong about Populism. His theory about the Populist movement of the 1890s was crushingly refuted. Michael Paul Rogin, in his first book about McCarthy, wrote an absolutely devastating takedown of Hofstadter and those other intellectuals of the 1950s. Walter Nugent wrote another, going county by county across Kansas to prove that Populists weren’t anti-immigrant. Norman Pollack wrote another. There are probably hundreds more refuting Hofstadter’s take. But it doesn’t matter. His redefinition of Populism has kept on going.
“Hofstadter’s redefinition continues even though it’s empirically incorrect. It doesn’t matter. All sorts of bad ideas that are removed from reality continue on. Deregulating the banks in the 1990s, hip capitalism, the “new economy.” They continue because they are useful or flattering to a certain class of people.
“But what makes anti-populism, this particular bad idea, work? It persists because it’s not just an attack on populism but also a manifesto for a social cohort—let’s call them the professional-managerial class—that Richard Hofstadter was part of and that the comfortable political scientists of today are also part of.
“All of them share the idea of the intellectual in power. In Hofstadter’s day the university system was expanding by leaps and bounds. MBAs were running the corporation, not somebody who inherited it or somebody who had built it up himself. PhDs started running the departments in Washington. It was the 1950s, managerialism was dawning, and this class of people was coming into its own. And they needed a concept to describe what they were displacing. What was the opposite of them? Populists.
“In their view, mass movements of working-class people were dysfunctional, were pathological, were what we must avoid. In a famous essay, Lipset called it “working-class authoritarianism.” It was dangerous stuff. And it didn’t matter if you pointed out examples that didn’t fit: look at the leaders of the CIO, look at the leaders of the United Auto Workers. They’re not authoritarian; they’re not racist. Well, that doesn’t matter, because we’ve done these personality tests of the rank and file that prove they harbor secret bad thoughts or whatever.
“Fast-forward to today. The Democratic Party has now completed the circle. Just like Hofstadter and Lipset and all the rest, they have really turned their backs on working-class people and working-class movements and put their hopes in the meritocracy, in the professional-managerial elite. That is who will deliver progress and reform. Not the working class.
“Just look at Obama’s cabinet or at Obama himself. Look at the Clintons. In both cases, authority arises from their attainments in school, their brilliance. All the Rhodes Scholars, the Nobel Prizes, the genius grants. That’s where they start their understanding of who should govern and what government should do.
“Now we’re in this period where the wheels are coming off the idea of meritocratic reform.”
http://hnn.us/articles/30629.html
“McCarthyism loomed large in the background of Hofstadter’s next book, The Age of Reform, published in 1955. There, Hofstadter searched the past for the roots of the” conspiracy theory” and “paranoid tendencies” that he saw in popular anti-Communism. The book won Hofstadter his first Pulitzer and remains, in Alan Brinkley’s words, “the most influential book ever published on the history of twentieth-century America.” The book’s most enduring contribution, Sean Wilentz rightly argues, is its re-interpretation of the New Deal, not as part of the nineteenth-century reform tradition in America, as most historians saw it, but rather as an “outrageous departure” from it. The old reformers ended up with prohibition as their great achievement; the New Deal, by contrast, focused not on moral campaigns against evil but on pragmatic and practical aims. It eschewed ideology and focused on results–and the results included the welfare state, the Wagner Act for labor and Keynsian policy for the budget. It’s still a bracing interpretation.
“Hofstadter’s argument that the historical roots of McCarthyism lay in the Populist tradition, on the other hand, is simply wrong. He argued that the Populist movement of the 1890s was deeply irrational and essentially proto-fascist. The Populists saw the principal source of injustice and economic suffering in rural America in what they called “the money power.” In Hofstadter’s analysis, this was evidence of irrational paranoia, of “psychic disturbances.” Moreover, Hofstadter argued that these denunciations of “the money power” were deeply anti-Semitic. Alas, his evidence of Populist anti-Semitism was embarrassingly thin: a handful of lurid quotes from a few Populist leaders about the “House of Rothschild” and “Shylock,” and an argument that Henry Ford’s anti-Semitism came from his background as “a Michigan farm boy who had been liberally exposed to Populist notions.”
“The problem with this analysis, aside from the paucity of evidence, was that anti-Semitic rhetoric was hardly a monopoly of rural Midwestern Protestants in post-Civil War America. The Protestant elites in East Coast cities were probably more anti-Semitic, and Irish Catholic immigrants in Eastern cities had no love for Jews either. The larger problem stemmed from Hofstadter’s theoretical framework. Today Hofstadter is regarded primarily as a great writer with a powerful personal vision. But he was engaged with the most advanced social science theory of his day, and he pioneered the application of theory to history–the move that many of his fans today consider the downfall of the profession. The Age of Reform was framed around the theory of “status politics,” which came from an essay by German sociologist Max Weber, published in the United States by Hofstadter’s Columbia colleague and friend the radical sociologist C. Wright Mills. Hofstadter’s “status politics” thesis held that the Populists were driven to irrationality and paranoia by anxiety over their declining status in an America where rural life and its values were being supplanted by an urban industrial society. Populism, in this view, was a form of reactionary resistance to modernity. Here Hofstadter was the Jewish New York intellectual anxiously looking for traces of proto-fascism somewhere in middle America. He saw Joe McCarthy as a potential American Hitler and believed he had found the roots of American fascism among rural Protestants in the Midwest. It was history by analogy–but the analogy didn’t work.
“None of these problems escaped Hofstadter’s critics at the time. In The Nation, William Appleman Williams argued that Hofstadter’s conception of status politics defined opposition to the status quo as fundamentally irrational while the irrationalities of liberal capitalism went unexamined. In 1967 Michael Rogin published a powerful book, The Intellectuals and McCarthy: The Radical Specter, showing that the people who voted for McCarthy, by and large, were not former Populists but rather upper-middle-class suburban Republicans. And it was not just leftists like Williams and Rogin who questioned Hofstadter’s “status politics” thesis. One of C. Vann Woodward’s greatest essays, “The Populist Heritage and the Intellectual,” insisted that the Populist program of the 1890s was far from irrational, that the Populists were not proto-McCarthyites, that many McCarthy supporters came from” college-bred, established-wealth, old family” sources. But if Hofstadter’s argument was challenged effectively at the time, his anxiety about an American fascism stayed with him for the rest of his life.
“Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, the 1963 book that won Hofstadter his second Pulitzer Prize, was another attempt to identify the historical origins of what Hofstadter saw as the key threat to liberalism in his own time. The book enjoyed a revival in the Age of Reagan, and is cited today at a rate that seems to be increasing exponentially. But the book seems mistaken about the period in which it was published. Anti-intellectualism was hardly a major problem in the United States in 1964. American intellectuals in the early ’60s had never had it so good: Universities were growing as never before, Congress provided lavish funding for elite institutions and professors like Hofstadter were highly paid and won big book contracts. Popular magazines followed the hot debates among intellectuals–Daniel Bell on the “end of ideology,” David Riesman on “the lonely crowd,” C. Wright Mills on “the power elite,” Irving Howe on “the age of conformity,” C. Vann Woodward on “the strange career of Jim Crow,” Michael Harrington on “the other America.” As Russell Jacoby argued in The Last Intellectuals, the 1950s were the golden age for liberal thinkers like Hofstadter. Yet something about that era was clearly troubling him.
“In the book’s first chapter, “Anti-Intellectualism in Our Time,” Hofstadter explained what was on his mind: the defeat of Adlai Stevenson twelve years earlier, in 1952. Hofstadter had been a passionate supporter of Stevenson, whom he described in the book as “a politician of uncommon mind.” Eisenhower’s victory was an “apocalypse for intellectuals”–a typically striking phrase, but wildly off-base. Stevenson was intelligent and articulate, but he was no intellectual. He wasn’t even especially liberal: He backed away from Truman’s call for national healthcare; he supported the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act; and he was no friend of black people, choosing as his 1952 running mate Alabama Senator John Sparkman, a militant segregationist. (Hofstadter should have noticed, because he supported the civil rights movement and joined the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery march, as Sean Wilentz recently pointed out.) When it came to Stevenson, Hofstadter’s vaunted skepticism and irony evaporated.
“Anti-Intellectualism was another of Hofstadter’s anxious searches for the roots of American fascism, finding it this time in the evangelical Protestants of the nineteenth century and then in the fundamentalists of the 1920s. Rereading it today, that search seems misguided: McCarthyism was not essentially a movement against intellectuals. True, there were loyalty oaths for professors and purges of faculty leftists, but the anti-Communists devoted much more energy to purging Hollywood radicals and the leftist union activists–a crucial base for New Deal politics. Yes, McCarthy targeted Harvard, but he spent more time attacking the State Department and then, notoriously, the Army. And Hofstadter’s conclusion that the McCarthyite anti-intellectualism of the 1950s had its origins in the evangelical Protestantism of the nineteenth century was fundamentally mistaken. Hofstadter’s friend Woodward, after reading the book, wrote to him privately, “Dick, you just can’t do this.”
“Four years later, however, some readers of Anti-Intellectualism in American Life saw the book in a new light, against the backdrop of the 1968 student uprising at Hofstadter’s Columbia. There, antiwar radicals occupied university buildings and denounced “university complicity in the war.” Liberal intellectuals were horrified by the spectacle of students challenging the university, and they went so far as to liken the demonstrators to Brownshirts. They were decidedly less alarmed by Columbia’s repressive response. The administration brought 1,000 cops on campus to clear the buildings; 712 students were arrested, 148 injured and nearly 400 filed police brutality complaints. Nothing like that had ever happened on an American campus, although much worse was to come at Kent State and other schools. It’s not surprising that Hofstadter agreed to speak at the official Columbia commencement later that spring. Nevertheless, it’s sad to picture him rising to give his speech, while forty uniformed policemen stood guard and 300 students walked out in protest to join 2,000 other people at an antiwar counter-commencement nearby.
“In other ways, however, Hofstadter’s response to the student uprising at Columbia in 1968 set him apart from the liberal critics who regarded the student movement as dangerously anti-intellectual. While his friends in Morningside Heights carried on about the students and saw themselves manning the barricades against the new barbarians, Hofstadter opened the door and invited his students in to talk with him about their goals and strategies. Eric Foner, one of those students, recalled that “his graduate students, many of whom were actively involved in the civil rights and antiwar movements, were having as much influence on his evolving interests and outlook as he was on theirs.” Indeed, the year after Columbia ’68, Hofstadter was rethinking his earlier work. He privately conceded that his critics had been right about The Age of Reform; in a letter he declared that the book’s status thesis was (in Brown’s paraphrase)”flawed and unusable” and that “nativism and anti-Semitism permeated American society in the 1890s.” In another letter written the same year, he declared that his effort in Anti-Intellectualism in American Life to explain the present had (in Brown’s paraphrase)” clearly missed the mark.” Here was another surprising and unusual quality: a willingness to reassess his work and find its flaws.
“The most remarkable of his relationships with students after the ’68 events was with his research assistant, Michael Wallace (who went on to win the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Gotham, a history of New York City). In the spring of 1968, in the midst of the demonstrations, Wallace, a PhD candidate, had unlocked the door to Fayerweather Hall, the history building, so that his fellow student radicals could occupy it. A few months later, Hofstadter invited him to collaborate on a documentary history on American violence.
“Thus the intellectual fruit of the trauma of ’68 for Hofstadter was not a history of student radicals as Hitler Youth but rather a partnership with one of those radical students that produced a powerful exposé of American racial and class violence. In Foner’s words, Hofstadter and Wallace’s American Violence: A Documentary History “utterly contradicted the consensus vision of a nation placidly evolving without serious disagreements.” This intellectual turn is the most surprising of all in the Hofstadter story. American Violence was the last book Hofstadter published before he died in 1970. He was only 54. (An unfinished work, America at 1750, was published posthumously in 1971.)”
Since you were interested enough in the topic to have previously written a post about it and then mentioned it here, we’d be curious what you think about this counter-argument based on populist scholarship, historical analysis, social science insight, demographic data, and public polling. In seeing this further evidence, would you change your own position on populism or at least add more nuance to it? Would you consider revising your own post on populism or adding an addendum to it or else writing a new post to include this other info? We are all about engagement, conversation, and discussion, if we generally dislike debate. Like you, we are opposed to the reactionary right: anti-intellectualism, cult of anti-expertise sentiment, and politicization of science; but this applies to the entire reactionary right whether posing as ‘populists’ or not, while not applying to past and present leftist populists. The only real difference between us is that you’ve called certain reactionary right-wingers “populists” whereas we’ve called them “faux populists” or “pseudo-populists”.
So, maybe we shouldn’t over-emphasize the disagreement, if neither should we paper it over. In some ways, of course, substance is more important than labels. But we must never forget that those who control rhetoric can more easily control all else; as there is power in language for it can shape identity (e.g., Wirthlin effect, in manipulating symbolic ideology or identity-based ideology so as to obscure operational ideology; see Lilliana Mason, Ideologues without Issues: The Polarizing Consequences of Ideological Identities). It’s similar to how the American founders who advocated nationalism, imperialism, and corporatism claimed for themselves the name ‘Federalists’, while besmirching actual defenders of federalism as Anti-Federalists. Those Anti-Federalists as true federalists, by the way, were the earliest American ideological ancestor of the Populist movement, as the People’s Party was drawing upon some of that old Anti-Federalist ideology, rhetoric, and policies.
In this context, one’s opinion on populists is basically no different than one’s opinion of the Anti-Federalists. That is a good way to frame it, since many scholars have ended up projecting the ‘populist’ label and descriptor on even the politics prior to the Populist era proper. One example of this is that of the Jacksonian Democrats who inherited the ideological or at least rhetorical legacy of the Jeffersonian Democratic-Republicans, of which formed out of the Anti-Federalist movement. But Andrew Jackson was already demonstrating that kind of faux populism that Trump capitalized on. The true Anti-Federalists torchbearers, though, were Democratic factions like the Locofocos. Led by the ‘populist’ William Leggett, they were radical labor rights activists, social democrats, and left-libertarians; much like many Anti-Federalists before them (e.g., Thomas Paine). Because of this, they became critics and opponents of Jacksonian Democrats and Tammany Hall Democrats. But they are rarely remembered now, as they became subsumed within the overarching pseudo-populist rhetoric of President Jackson.
We’ve long professed our love of the Anti-Federalists. As we see it, the revolutionary or really pre-revolutionary debate never ended. That is why we point to the various rebellions (Whiskey, Shays’, Fries’, etc) that continued long after the formal American Revolution ended, or rather when the new ruling elite declared it over. Populism, in the sense of the later People’s Party, was already present in basic form with the working class radicals like Thomas Paine and Ethan Allen, and others like Thomas Jefferson who also saw it in terms of elite-controlled class war and corruption. It’s clear that the Anti-Federalists were prescient in predicting every major point of conflict and failure that has developed over American history. That original debate between Federalists (faux federalists) and Anti-Federalists (real federalists) continues to this day, and it unsurprisingly finds resonance between the ongoing fight between faux populists headed by Trump (who grew up rich) and real populists headed by Sanders (who grew up working class). The old revolutionary class war has never ended, and sadly the elite not only control the government, corporations, and media but also play the role of controlled opposition to cancel the actual populist majority.
More recently, we’ve followed this trail further back, in trying to suss out what connected the proto-populist, proto-liberal, and proto-leftist strains of the Axial Age to the emerging modern ideologies of the early modern revolutionary period. We were already somewhat familiar with what were the links in the Anglo-American tradition, but we hadn’t yet fully explored some key traditions. We’ve long discussed the English Civil War and increasingly we’ve emphasized the English Peasants’ Revolt. But what we became more aware of is the immediate precedents of the Anti-Federalists as found in the Radical or Real Whigs and the Country Party, the latter of which was an interesting egalitarian and populist mix of Enlightenment thought, religious dissent, class war, Renaissance humanism, and neo-classical republicanism; where, for example, ‘patriotism’ referred to loyalty to the people, one’s fellow citizens. This is why some of the Radical Whigs later could espouse patriotism while speaking positively of the king being beheaded during the English Civil War. Loyalty could only be given to a government that was loyal to the people.
Many American revolutionaries took up this patriotic rhetoric, to the point of calling themselves Patriots, as they saw themselves as being patriotic for the very reason they were fighting an anti-populist, anti-representative, and anti-democratic government. But some like Paine took it a step further, often with a twist of a global populism where they declared themselves citizens of the world. Their patriotism was not only to a particular people but all people. When Benjamin Franklin said that, “Where liberty is, there is my country,” Paine replied, “Where liberty is not, there is my country,.” Paine also wrote that, “The World is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion.” That is ‘patriotism’ as sourced in 17th and 18th century English and American ideology. Yet now the reactionary right has likewise taken over that rhetoric, as seen with the Tea Party and MAGA. Fox News is constantly throwing out ‘Patriot’ in relationship to everything right-wing reactionary. The thing is the original meaning of patriotism was closer to the left-wing principle and ideal of fraternity, solidarity, class consciousness, and group consciousness. In taking away the language of the left, the left is silenced.
Here is a main point about rhetoric. There is the old or even ancient populist rhetoric. One hears hints of populist sentiments, worldview, and ideology going back to the medieval peasants revolts and ancient slave revolts, along with numerous movements of religious dissent. But one also hears the same drum beat of class war committed by elites against the populist movements of the lower classes and castes. This pattern has been repeating for millennia since it began at least as early as the Axial Age. The same basic anti-populist accusations (ignorance, bigotry, anti-intellectualism, anti-expertise, rural, poor, uncouth, unworthy, envious of their betters, etc) has long been lobbed against the disenfranchized and subjugated masses in denying their demands of agency and attempts to gain it. During the Cold War, once radical leftists like Richard Hofstadter became fearful of both McCarthyism and working class revolt, causing him to temporarily retreat into the privileged position of the white liberal class. This is why leftists have long held a grudge against liberals who joined in punching left, but it puts people like us in a tough position as we’re left-liberals in seeing how anti-populism is dangerous in dividing the left and crippling the potential for a leftist movement.
Part of our response is that we’re all about historical context, in a society filled with historical ignorance, amnesia, disinfo, and revisionism. We speak from personal experience of slowly emerging awareness. For most of our life, we were influenced by the ‘mainstream’ (i.e., elite) critical dismissiveness toward populism that erases the memory and legacy of the Populist Era. There is a reason the actual Populist history is rarely taught in the education system or spoken about in corporate media and elite politics. Most populists today are working class leftist radicals like us. But as with most Americans in general, as part of a leftist supermajority, populists are silenced and suppressed by the elite-controlled platforms of media and speech.
This is where the centrality of history comes in. The original Populists and their leaders, according to their own self-definition and the platform of the People’s Party, were radical leftists of the working class (farmers, miners, factory workers, laborers, etc) who were seeking progressive and democratic reforms. But MAGAhead diehards, as made clear by the makeup of the January 6 insurrectionists (business owners, real estate agents, etc), are mostly reactionary right-wingers of the professional class (above average in wealth and education); with Trump having been born into plutocratic wealth that was accumulated through corruption: not paying workers and contractors, deals with organized crime, money laundering, political bribery, etc.
Trump and the MAGAheads have little in common with the original Populists who advocated positions along the lines of social democracy and democratic socialism, as does the populist Bernie Sanders who was born into the working class. The two groups could not be more opposite, one co-opted by corrupt elite and the other opposing corrupt elite, the defining distinction on what is and is not populism. But then again, to be fair, it is more complex than that, since politics and ideological identities tend to be messy, such as how most people are easily manipulated by identity politics (symbolic ideology) to betray even their own professed beliefs, values, principles, positions, and policies (operational ideology). We’ll get to that in a moment, but let’s make another point first.
Yet it’s true that, “most terrible and unscrupulous manifestations of populism,” according to this description, would undoubtedly, “tend to be highly insidious, wretchedly corrosive and flagrantly damaging in many respects, worse still when such manifestations are amplified by political, financial and media powers.” But then again, just change ‘populism’ with numerous different ideological labels (elitism, classism, capitalism, liberalism, progressivism, etc) and the same would apply. We must look to the larger context to understand what is going on, since it can’t be limited to any single group, identity, or expression.
My suspicion is that populism is rarely corrupted, except in societies that were already corrupt. That is an old problem, in how when reformers or revolutionaries gain power they can easily be drawn back into authoritarianism and social dominance that they struggled against or else their movement gets taken over by demagogues and other bad actors (e.g., the faux Federalists who gained power after the American Revolution, in weakening actual federalism). That is because these problematic social factors aren’t merely ideologies as politics but ideologies as worldviews and cultures that permeate the entire population (e.g., the insidious nature of systemic racism that is internalized, often unconsciously).
So, in the corrupt systems in the U.S., no matter the good intentions, it’s rare for anyone to gain power and position within national politics or corporate economics and not become corrupted over time (e.g., union leadership being defanged by the temptations of corruption, as happened with AFSCME leaders backing Clinton when most AFSCME members supported Sanders). That is true of all parties and persuasions. But the point is that the corruption preceded all else, as part of high inequality and low trust. And so it really has nothing to do with populism at all, or no more than it has to do with anything and everything else, which means it is arguably misleading, plus unhelpful and unfair, to specifically scapegoat populists as a special case. Corruption often leads to yet more corruption, a difficult cycle to escape, related to the victimization cycle where most victimizers once were victims themselves. Populism is a response to that, if unfortunately not always up to the task.
Now for a point of genuine complexity. Who is and is not a populist is not always straightforward. Most populists at one time were ordinary people of conventional views, until corruption and elitism finally hit some breaking point, often under severe social and economic duress, such as out of control inequality and inequity, poverty and plutocracy. And once populism is in the air, anyone can use populist rhetoric, even to anti-populist ends, as was the case with Trump. But we agree with Thomas Frank, that there is no ideologically and historically informed argument for Trump being a real populist leader, and hence no way to portray his base as populists — it just can’t be done. Populism is defined by both ends and means, but not necessarily by rhetoric.
Also, keep in mind that not all Trump voters were MAGAheads and insurrectionists. Likely, most of them were simply disenfranchised, alienated, and frustrated. It’s not that they believed and trusted Trump, as in polling they admitted they did not. And it’s not that they were merely being regressive and reactionary, as many of them stated they had voted for Barack Obama and would’ve preferred Bernie Sanders as president. But the corrupt elite of the DNC leadership, the same people who attacked Obama and his supporters (‘Obama Boys’, ‘Obama Bros’), undermined democratic process to ensure Sanders (the most popular candidate) didn’t get the nomination and so they smeared his supporters (‘Bernie Boys’, ‘Bernie Bros’) with anti-populist language.
If Sanders had been nominated and likely elected, as democracy demanded, then populists and the American supermajority would’ve gotten what they wanted, progressive and democratic reform. But the corrupt elite in both colluding right wings of a one-party state wouldn’t allow that. So, the left-wing populist mood became disgruntled and was shunted down the path of either lesser evil voting or not voting at all, that is to say a vote of no confidence. What is a damning judgment is that so many Americans perceived Trump as a lesser evil than Clinton, and it’s not clear they were entirely wrong when one looks at the history of the Clinton dynasty, racist tough-on-crime, and pay-to-play. Personally, we chose to vote for neither Trump nor Clinton, since evil is evil.
There are some conclusions we’ve come to, and so let’s put it simply and bluntly. As we’ve said, in agreeing with Thomas Frank, there is no possibility of right-wing populism. Populism is defined by the Populist movement of the Populist era, specifically that of the People’s Party. That is working class leftist radicalism (egalitarian solidarity of class or group consciousness, of anti-elitism and anti-authoritarianism, of justice and fairness, of liberty and freedom, and of democratic and progressive reform). If it’s not that, then it’s not populism. Period. It matters not what someone says, but what they do and how they do it. To put it another way, if it don’t walk and talk and quack like a duck, then it ain’t a duck. We should never cede territory to the reactionary right, no matter what language they co-opt, in their hoping to steal our thunder, to cause confusion and conflict, and to muddy the water by making words near meaningless. Here are some other related examples.
There is no such thing as right-wing anti-authoritarianism or left-wing authoritarianism. That is because a defining feature of leftism is egalitarianism, as that is what has always meant to be on the left of authoritarian power, by definition referring to opposition (e.g., French revolutionaries as anti-monarchists, anti-theocrats, and such). And to the degree something is egalitarian is to the degree it is non-authoritarian. What gets called left-wing authoritarianism, such as Stalinism, was actually neo-feudal and neo-imperial state capitalism with an overlay of strongman personality cult. What exactly is left-wing (i.e., egalitarian) about that? Nothing, if we are to be fair and honest. Social science research demonstrates this, in how the same bad conditions (parasite load, pathogen exposure, and other social stressors, or other conditions of cognitive overload) simultaneously increases population levels of both social conservatism and right-wing authoritarianism.
Similarly, there is no such thing as right-wing libertarianism. Libertarianism originally meant anti-authoritarian, anti-elitist, and anti-statist socialism, but of course it also meant anti-capitalism, anti-corporatism, and anti-inverted-totalitarianism. Libertarianism is liberty for all, not liberty for the few while none or little for everyone else (whereas liberty for an elite alone, that is the definition of something like Southern slaveholding aristocracy, not libertarianism). There is no way to have a libertarian society, where everyone is free, without people also having democratic self-control and self-governance in their communities, workplaces, and the larger society. Liberty is simply one half of freedom, that is negative freedom, which would include freedom from oppression, freedom from want, freedom from desperation (e.g., FDR’s Second Bill of Rights).
For the same kinds of reasons, there is no right-wing liberalism (i.e., right-wing ‘classical liberalism’). But this one gets a bit murky, because of the whole issue of symbolic and operational ideologies. It doesn’t matter if people call themselves liberals, conservatives, progressives, or whatever; or rather it only matters to the degree that it is used for immoral deception and manipulation, and when that happens we should vigilantly defend against it and publicly call it out. People are either liberal or not, albeit there are varying degrees and aspects of liberalism. The point is, to the degree they are a liberal, they are not on the Right. When conservatives falsely invoke ‘classical liberalism’, they are using historical revisionism. The earliest liberals were radically leftist for their time and often are still radically leftist to this day. All the Right is doing with this dishonest rhetoric is to distract and distance themselves from how horrific was classical conservatism.