Book Review/James McCarty Yeager

The One, Multifarious, True Populism

Thomas Frank, The People, No — A Brief History of Anti-Populism, (Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt & Co.: New York), 2020, $26.99.

How the Wall Street Journal ever let Thomas Frank be a columnist, as in a former life he was, leaves me gasted in the flabber regions. That paper’s editorial side notoriously, if not to say infamously, provides the most respectable home that crackpot right-wing libertarian anti-government fantasists have. The WSJ’s op-eds are the suppurating print adjunct of Fox News.

Frank, however, has a vastly more spacious viewpoint than WSJ readers were normally exposed to. His title, an inversion of a Carl Sandburg poem, Frank’s book portrays the actual, manifested ideals of the populist streak in American society. He covers the steady resistance to full democracy that genuine populism provoked in both parties from the 19th to the 21st centuries. Still, he concludes: “Understood the way I have defined it, populist protest against the economic elite is what made the Democrats the majority party for so many decades.”

His theme is the continuous struggle of the same old adversaries that dueled at our founding. Still, arrayed in combat are mass involvement in economic betterment via politics, as against the ever-steadfast repudiation of that energy by economic and, it pains me to say, intellectual elites.

Frank begins by establishing the good faith and better practices of the prairie populists of the 1890s. He shows through archival sources that the agrarian reformers justifiably opposed the New York banks, the Chicago wheat speculators, the Minneapolis grain elevator operators, and the railroads everywhere. And as the People’s Party did so, they sought, and found, allies among black sharecroppers and urban laborers. The populist movement was pluralist and bottom-up from the start; its opposition monolithic, hierarchical, and censorious still.

The “Pops” of the 1890s looked back to the Jeffersonian vision of small self-sufficient farmers, and enriched that goal with a demand for a living wage and autonomy to laborers. But having fused with the Democratic Party over the 1896 insurgent nominee, William Jennings Bryan, the first modern wave of populism was crushed when McKinley’s allies conducted what Frank points out as the most lavishly-funded campaign in American history.

Again in the 1920s and very early ‘30s, statewide victories of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party of Minnesota, the Non-Partisan League in North Dakota and the Progressives of Wisconsin prefigured Franklin D. Roosevelt’s rising tide that lifted all boats. Frank doesn’t mention these exemplars of his general thesis but he shows that the second great wave of American populism was admirably embodied in the surprisingly blunt attacks by FDR on “the malefactors of great wealth.”

Frank notes that Roosevelt’s genuine concern with “the people” was unusual, even for Democrats, at the time; and it was positively abhorred by the industrial-financial-academic complex. FDR enacted a great many of the old People’s Party’s goals (a currency base larger than the gold supply; social insurance programs; and regulation of business.) He was so successful that today’s GOP is still trying to kill off his legacy, pretending to populist rhetoric as they do so.

Beaten down in the 1950s by the confluence of Wall Street Ivy Leaguers, technocrats and corporate intellectuals, populism arose for the third time in the civil rights movement. Frank shows the clear importance of union support (through Walter Reuther, Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph) for Martin Luther King’s transformative calls for voting rights, desegregation and economic equality.

Community involvement in change from the bottom up again frightened the socio-economic elites into their standard anti-populist denigration, joined by a segment of otherwise liberal Democrats, who privileged expertise and education in preference to commonality with workers, minorities and the deprived.

Yet King articulated the populist creed in all its pluralist glory, and showed the opposition in all its mean repression. In 1965, he traced the course of Jim Crow’s invention as a means to prevent black and white farmers from organizing together in the south. “They segregated southern money from the poor whites; they segregated southern mores from the rich whites; they segregated southern churches from Christianity; and they segregated the Negro from everything. That’s what happened when the Negro and white masses of the south threatened to unite and build a great society: a society of justice where none would prey upon the weakness of others; a society of plenty where greed and poverty would be done away with; a society of brotherhood where every man would respect the dignity and worth of human personality.”

At the same time, the self-administered poison of Vietnam paralyzed the Democratic Party from head to heels. The energy of student protestors was diverted from solidarity with labor — each side gave way to indulgence in social and moral superiority. Afterwards, the ills of maldistribution slowly deflated prosperity until the present time.

The fourth wave of resistance to the evils of white supremacy, militarism, and naked, unfettered capitalism (in all its blind fury against the hands and hearts whose work makes it function) began again to ferment after the great national disgrace of 2016.

The path Frank demonstrates from 1890 to 2020 shows that trying to classify George Wallace (and his lineal descendants Ronald Reagan, Pat Buchanan and Donald Trump) as populist is merely a tactical facade. Of course it is intended to disguise the machinations of the usual economic suspects. The repressive plan is, always, to steal the rhetoric of, and to subvert, popular movements by means of astroturf fakes like the Tea Party.

Frank’s message for 2020 can be distilled as, “You can’t have the war on concentrated economic power without a broad-minded acceptance of average people.” The people are arising as they expose and oppose the festering brew of American racism, economic royalism, and intellectual snobbery. If the Democratic Party can act on its rooted populist principles, it can serve the needs of the current vast coalition.

That’s a big if, but it has happened before; and may be happening even now.

James McCarty Yeager was Sen. Eugene J. McCarthy’s press secretary during his independent campaign for the presidency in 1976; he later edited McCarthy’s 1989 book “Non-Financial Economics: The Case for Shorter Hours of Work.”

From The Progressive Populist, September 1, 2020

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