Every time I encounter sentiments like these in this abattoir of idealism known as Washington, my mind goes back to my old city of Chicago, to a noisy and rusty and callous place that no one is ever sentimental about but where I like to remember how ordinary Americans used to live their lives, concerned with work and play and maybe getting ahead someday.
I think of Carl Sandburg, the twentieth century’s “Poet of the People,” a man who saw no contradiction between human sin and human life. And I think of Sandburg’s “Chicago,” the greatest populist poem of them all, which acknowledges the town’s vulgarity, all its tawdry sins—“They tell me you are wicked”; “they tell me you are crooked”; “they tell me you are brutal”—all charges that are as true today as they were in 1914.
But “Chicago” is not an anthem of scolding. It is a rejection of scolding. It’s a song about loving life despite it all, loving the life of the people, even in the midst of all the grinding industrialized awfulness:
Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth,
Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs,
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle,
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and under his ribs the heart of the people,
Laughing!
CONCLUSION
The Question
The story of populism and anti-populism is a dialectic of hope and cynicism. We have seen how a party of democratic inclusion chose to remodel itself as the expression of an elite consensus, and how a party of concentrated private power started passing itself off as a down-home friend of ordinary Americans. This historic inversion—so bizarre when you step back and think about it—has had precisely the effects that you would expect it to have. The legatees of Thomas Jefferson, lukewarm in all things, no longer really believe their own founding philosophy; the hard-eyed heirs of the robber barons, meanwhile, have swiped the democratic vocabulary of their enemies; and between these two parties the greatest democracy in the world has become a paradise for the privileged.
But there is light at the bottom of this vortex. Today, both elite liberalism and right-wing demagoguery stand before us utterly discredited. The fraudulence of the Right’s bait and switch is so plain it feels like a waste of space even to describe it. Instead of redeeming our communities and taking down the elites, as the Republicans promised, they found yet more ways to make the rich richer. Instead of draining the swamp, they have given us government-by-lobbyist; government-by-polluter; government-by-general. Under the stupid, swaggering leadership of our current commander in chief, it is not just the executive branch in Washington that has been corrupted; it is all of us. Lying is normal, Trump has taught us; it is natural for officeholders to line their pockets; incompetence at the top is the American way; justice is for the wealthy; bigotry is no big deal; money and power are the only things that matter.
The exhaustion of centrist, post-partisan liberalism is just as obvious. The disappointing experience of the Obama years made it clear that the ruling clique of the Democratic Party lacks the fortitude to confront the plutocratic onslaught of the last few decades. Even the most high-scoring meritocrats, we learned, will not take on the hierarchy to which they owe their exalted status.
The technocratic faction’s other selling point—that they alone can check the rightward-charging Republicans—lies in a million pieces on the floor after 2016. Not even when the GOP backed the least competent and most unpopular presidential candidate of all time could the Democrats’ consensus-minded leaders defeat him.
A joyless politics of reprimand is all that centrism has left: a politics of individual righteousness that regards the public not as a force to be organized but as a threat to be scolded and disciplined. Unfortunately, it is an ineffective politics in addition to an unhappy one. Plutocracy will go on even if we were to cleanse Twitter of every last problematic participant; health care will still be unaffordable even after the pundits manage to shame every last resentful Trump voter into silence. As a vehicle of reform this species of liberalism is useless.
There is another way, reader. As we have learned in these pages, there is a tradition that trusts in the people, that responds to their needs, that turns resentment into progress. That same populist tradition is and has always been at war with monopoly, with corporate authority, with billionaire privilege, with inequality. It insists and has always insisted that “too few people control too much of the money and power,” as the modern-day Texas populist Jim Hightower described it to me.
Indeed, you can’t really have the second part of the formula—the war on concentrated economic power—without the first part, a broad-minded acceptance of average people. That is because the only real answer to plutocracy is a mass movement of ordinary working people, hailing from all different backgrounds, brought together by a common desire to dismantle the forces that make their toil so profitless and to figure out how they might gain control over their lives.
The demand for economic democracy is how you build a mass movement of ordinary people. And a mass movement of ordinary people, in turn, is how you achieve economic democracy. Which is to say that the answer both to Trumpist fraud and to liberal elitism must come from us—from the democratic public itself.
As I write these words, under semi-quarantine due to the coronavirus pandemic, I can’t help but think of the lives and livelihoods that a people-oriented healthcare system might have saved. As our endless wars drag on, I think of the road not taken—of what Bayard Rustin and his colleagues called the Freedom Budget, their proposal for a massive enlargement of the New Deal and the Great Society that would have ended unemployment while securing proper housing and health care for everyone. It was, in a sense, what all of the movements I have described here were ultimately after—the great unachieved goal of American populism. In his foreword to the 1967 booklet introducing the Freedom Budget, Martin Luther King wrote that “we shall eliminate slums for Negroes when we destroy ghettos and build new cities for all . We shall eliminate unemployment for Negroes when we demand full and fair employment for all . We shall produce an educated and skilled Negro mass when we achieve a twentieth century educational system for all .” 1
* * *
THIS IS NOT an idle dream. We know what genuine populism looks like; we have seen it crop up in the agrarian 1890s, in the New Deal 1930s, in the civil rights days of the 1960s.
Let me relate one final tale of democracy’s promise. It’s a story that starts with the Appeal to Reason , the legendary Kansas newspaper that began life as a supporter of the People’s Party before transferring its allegiance to the Socialists. Years later, as Socialism followed Populism into oblivion, the remaining editor of the Appeal to Reason , a child of Jewish immigrants named Emanuel Haldeman-Julius, * cast about looking for ways to rescue the sinking publishing operation. The idea he eventually hit upon in 1919 owed much to the old Populist traditions of pamphleteering and mass popular education: left-wing essays, famous works of literature, and self-education tracts printed up in pocket-sized form and priced so low—five cents—that virtually anyone could afford them.
The People’s Pocket Series, he called them, before eventually changing the name to the Little Blue Books. You could buy them from vending machines in railroad stations. You could get twenty titles for a dollar, postpaid from Girard, Kansas. They were great books for the common man, a bridge between the agrarian radicalism of the 1890s and the labor radicalism of the 1930s.
The Little Blue Books, Haldeman-Julius once wrote, represented “a democracy of literature” in which the highest of highbrow culture was made available to anyone who wanted it. They were not meant to be showy: their covers were unpretentious; their paper was coarse and uneven. Yet this flatly proletarian business model was an overwhelming success. Ten years after launching his cheapskate publishing empire, Haldeman-Julius had sold a hundred million of the little books. By 1951
, the year he died, there were some twenty-five hundred different titles in his warehouse in Kansas; the grand total of Little Blue Books sold came to five hundred million. 2
The books themselves are relics of an age when tramps read Zola and dirt farmers wanted to know about Goethe and every village had an atheist who could quote Tom Paine or Robert Ingersoll. Scan the biographical literature on Haldeman-Julius and you will find testimonials from people who read Little Blue Books while on strike or while in prison, people who read them on the subway train, people who passed them around in hospitals and at boardinghouses.
Haldeman-Julius’s idea was not to reinforce hierarchies of taste but to demolish them—to “put all books on the same level,” as he once wrote. “The door to learning and culture has been forced open,” proclaimed one of his ads from the 1920s. The plain blue booklets were “not intended to decorate shelves but to enrich minds,” announced another. 3
The historian Christopher Lasch once famously declared that the professions “came into being by reducing the layman to incompetence.” Haldeman-Julius’s idea was to do the opposite—to undermine elites by making ordinary people capable. The Little Blue Books were emphatically about the intelligence of the “self-taught” American, about their ability to read Ibsen and Balzac on their own, about their power to undertake complicated projects by themselves: How to Psycho-Analyze Your Neighbors; How to Be a Gate Crasher; Airplanes and How to Fly Them; How to Make Your Own Cosmetics; How to Acquire Good Taste; How to Be a Modern Mother; How to Become a Writer of Little Blue Books; How to Build Your Own Greenhouse , and here, have a shot of Schopenhauer while you’re building it.
The big idea behind the enterprise, Haldeman-Julius wrote, was to put an end to “cultural, intellectual, economic and political subservience and inferiority.”
There are men (rich and powerful) who shudder at the thought of a free world—free thinking, free living, sane behavior, mass health and happiness, individual freedom and social responsibility, the right to candid speech on any possible subject. They live on lies. I don’t merely disapprove of them. I more than dislike them. I hate them with an implacable hatred. 4
This form of populism was no “celebration of ignorance.” It was a one-man campaign against the falsehoods of the mighty, against racism and intolerance, against organized religion, against superstition, against conventional interpretations of history, against orthodoxy of every kind.
For our purposes, though, it is Haldeman-Julius’s campaign against racism that means the most. Several Little Blue Books dealt with the Klan, which was generating great clouds of toxic nonsense in the twenties. In one of these, Haldeman-Julius described the Klan as a “viper,” a “beast,” a spreader of “poison,” “bigotry,” and “reaction.” * In 1927 his wife, Marcet Haldeman-Julius, authored one of the most striking Little Blue Books of them all: an original account of a lynching in Little Rock, Arkansas, written so soon after the event that it reads like firsthand reportage. As the awful story unfolds, she interviews the people involved and describes the scenes in brutal detail: the cowardice of the city officials; the insane vindictiveness of the white population; the members of the mob who aren’t ashamed of what they’ve done. 5
The publisher was optimistic about the prospects for his campaign of enlightenment. Science, he believed, was slowly pushing back the “tyranny of bunk,” loosening the grip of aristocracy and superstition. But there was an important caveat: for all his admiration of learning and science, Haldeman-Julius did not celebrate intellectual elites. One of Haldeman-Julius’s titles might have been the motto for his entire operation: The Dumbness of the Great. What made our age of enlightenment so wonderful, he argued, was that it promised to “disseminate greatness among all the people.” Experts may insist on the incompetence of the layman, but this Kansan aimed for something more democratic. Freedom and inquiry and brilliance could not be the property of some tiny clique: “It is the common man who has, by revolution and by the broader evolution of a new kind of civilization, been endowed with the rights of personality.” 6
What Haldeman-Julius was fighting was a war that was simultaneously against elitism and in favor of science and culture. This is contrary to everything we have been told populism stands for; it’s contrary to the way we believe civilization works. Science and culture are supposed to be about rank and prestige—they are the property of the “Learning Class.” And here are these coarse-grain booklets from Girard, Kansas, telling us exactly the opposite: that everyone has the spark of the divine.
This is populism in its best form. I mean this not just politically, and not just in terms of Haldeman-Julius’s forthright contempt for elites and racism and mob rule, but also in his simultaneous faith in the “common man,” his love for learning, and his guileless praise for Voltaire and Paine and Debs and Darrow. 7
* * *
THE LAST POINT I want to make is this: populism wins. Not only is populism the classic, all-American response to hierarchy and plutocracy, but it is also the naturally dominant rhetorical element in our political tradition.
I make this claim even though the Populists themselves didn’t get what they were after for many decades, even though the labor movement in the thirties never organized the South, even though Martin Luther King never saw the Freedom Budget enacted into law.
Still, populism has a power that technocracy and liberal scolding and Trumpist bullshit do not because populism is deep in the grain of the democratic personality. Americans do not defer to their social superiors: we are natural-born egalitarians. Populism is the word that gets at our incurable itch to deflate pretentiousness of every description.
In political contests in most parts of America, the candidate who captures this refusal of deference is, more often than not, the candidate who wins. This is a crude and sweeping simplification, but nevertheless it is usually true. 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.
Another reason we know that anti-elitism works is because we have seen it working against us for fifty years. The Republican Party owes its successful hold on power to adopting—you might say “stealing”—the anti-elitist themes I have described. From the days of Nixon to those of Trump, the conservative revolution happened not because Americans love polluters and disease but because Republicans sold themselves as a party of protest against the elite. Most of the time it was the cultural elite that was the target: the prideful people who make movies and write newspapers; who love blasphemy but hate the flag.
The point is so easy and so obvious that it’s hard to understand why it’s been so difficult for Democratic politicians to get it: Populism is the supreme rhetorical weapon in the arsenal of American politics. On the other hand, the impulse to identify your goals with the elite—with any elite, even a moral one—is a kind of political death wish. In a democracy, a faction that chooses to go about its business by admiring its own moral goodness and scolding average voters as insensitive clods is a faction that is not interested in winning.
* * *
BUT WE ARE learning. Thanks to insurgent campaigns like the one mounted by Bernie Sanders for the presidency in 2016, we know fairly precisely what a modern-day populism looks like. It would focus, of course, on economic reforms—ambitious ones, not technocratic fine-tuning. It would aim to put those reforms on the national agenda not by the strength of one candidate’s popularity but by bringing together a movement of working people, by mobilizing millions of people who don’t vote and don’t participate and don’t ordinarily have a say. It would be financed almost entirely by small individual contributions, in the classic Fred Harris manner. And it would aim to enlist millions of embittered voters—Republican voters, even—with far-reaching proposals of the kind we haven’t heard for many years: universal health care, no more grotesque student debt, banking reform, a war on monopolies, a reimagining of our trade policy.
This is not just a plan to win the pr
esidency. As Sanders himself used to say, it is a blueprint for a “political revolution,” a complete reversal of the direction in which the country has been traveling for decades. And the key to making it work is movement-building on a massive scale; enlisting millions of ordinary people who have lost their faith in democracy.
Another man who understands this is the Reverend William Barber II, the North Carolina pastor who is building a modern-day Poor People’s Campaign designed to pick up where Martin Luther King’s effort left off back in 1968. Barber’s plan is to organize poor people from every imaginable background with an eye to pulling together another unstoppable mass movement. As with other populist efforts I have described, it is the people themselves who provide the leadership. As Barber himself puts it, “the impacted people, poor people, are at the center of the leadership. We’re not doing some kind of social service for them.… They have to be a part of setting the policies. They have to be part of the critique. Therefore we build a stage for their voice, not for ours alone.”
It is an idea whose time has obviously come, and the place it must come first is the Democratic Party. The party of technocrats and consultants—of calculating triangulators and fans of the smoke-filled rooms—must eventually give way to the populism that we must have. Thus will the Democratic Party learn once again to breathe hope into those who despair.
The populism I am describing is not formless anger that might lash out in any direction. It is not racism. It is not resentment. It is not demagoguery. It is, instead, to ask the most profound question of them all: “For whom does America exist?”
I take that question from the culture critic Gilbert Seldes, who saw it as the great unanswered demand of the 1890s Populist revolt. The question was raised again in 1936, the year when Seldes wrote those words. It came up again in the 1960s. And here we are, asking it again today. 8
The People, No Page 22
