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May 06, 2005
The Populist is Dead, Long Live the Populist!
Matt's post using the liberal establishment's widespread apathy, and indeed, antipathy towards Dick Gephardt's candidacy as evidence that the designation "left" now turns more on things like war, the environment, and gay rights than on economic populism may be true, but I'm having trouble with it. Gephardt was abandoned by all sort and manner of folk because, after his time in the House, no one liked him. He was dull, ineffective, opportunistic -- yawns directed at his candidacy were aimed at the man, not the policy platform. That said, Edwards got a fair run of great press for seriously taking on poverty and making class an issue. Indeed, of all the candidates (save maybe Dean), he's the only one I hear anyone talking about in a policy sense, an odd outcome considering his reputation as a lightweight but a wholly understandable one if you think, as I do, that many Democrats are thirsting for an authentic populist.
But when Edwards' populism-lite is sparking fires, you know you've a problem. And indeed, we don't know how the party feels about populism because we haven't run a populist for quite awhile. The problem, I think, stems from two places. First, any good populist has to come across as a man of the people. Southern Democrats are, for a variety of reasons, most able to pull that off. Unfortunately, Southern Democrats are generally centrist, pro-business kinda guys owing to electoral realities in the region. Think Carter, Clinton, Bredesen, Breaux, Gore etc. Northern Democrats, like Kerry, tend to be wealthy and aristocratic, not to mention a smidge unelectable. Western Democrats, until California's recent switch (remember, we produced Nixon and Reagan), didn't much exist. And which regular guys have we produced? Jerry Brown may think like a populist, but he acts like a particularly nuts Angeleno. As for the Midwesterners, the only two we've recently tried out were McGovern and Mondale, and, to put it nicely, they had their own problems.
The second issue is that we're a bit scared of being "class warriors", which means no national Democrats are really trying it. That's partially a reflection of our recent reliance on corporate money, which effectively eliminated serious populism from our toolbelt, and partially a reaction to the media consensus that populism is an old, loser-Dem kinda stance. In any case, that doesn't mean liberals and lefties don't remain enamored of balls-out populism, they've just had to accept that few candidates are willing to publicly display it and thus they've created a different set of liberal litmus tests. But it'd be interesting to see what happens if we did run a Bernie Sanders-style populist whose whole pitch was an attack on income inequality and corporate pay. I've a feeling that The Nation, The American Prospect, and MoveOn would react quite well. Guess we'll see if and when Edwards has the guts to turn his populism-lite into the real deal.
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Am I the only person who remembers that Dennis Kucinich and Carol Mosley Braun ran for president?
Maybe it's also worth laying out what you mean by "populism." Do you want someone who just happens to talk about class issues a lot without actually doing anything drastic? Or do you want someone who will actually propose and do drastic stuff? And if so, what? Or more to the point, what could they propose that wouldn't get them marginalized like Dennis Kucinich did? Surely the fact that Kucinich looked like Santa's Little Helper and didn't have a "down South" feel to him weren't his only problems, were they?
Posted by: Brad Plumer | May 6, 2005 5:28:52 PM
Oddly enough, I think they were the major portion of his problems. Frankly, I'm not exactly sure what populist policy proposals would be. I assume lots of urban investment, a focus on covering the uninsured, more progressivity in the tax code, some sort of a work program, a focus on labor, a willingness to go after corporations, etc.
Now, that's mostly because I'm not a populist in a serious way so I don't really know how a theoretical one would think. But insofar as it's a class warrior in the way we think of one -- which is in the way we think Democrats like Kucinich think -- it's my opinion that one of them would do just fine with the electorate, so long as they weren't Dennis "Dept. of Meditation for Peace" Kucinich or Dick "Sorry, Just Sold You Down the River' Gephardt. Edwards, with a bit more gravitas annd a stronger attack, would be a pretty powerful candidate among the lefty set, or at least I think so.
Posted by: Ezra | May 6, 2005 5:37:05 PM
Gephardt voted for Bush's first big tax cut.
Gephardt voted to authorize the Iraq war.
After that, all Gephardt deserved from me was a big STFU.
-T
Posted by: Toast | May 6, 2005 7:22:58 PM
Mario Cuomo!
Posted by: Karen | May 6, 2005 7:26:29 PM
Kucinich has a bizarre lifestyle, lousy speaking style, and is just plain silly looking. Besides he doesn't come across as being very practical. Anyway, I could never forgive the little turncoat jerk for his impeachment vote.
Posted by: J Bean | May 6, 2005 10:06:02 PM
Well, I think Clark has garnered a fair amount of attention for his work on foreign policy issues, both before the primaries, but continuing now (talks to Hill Dems, his piece in the new WaMo on Iraq). It could be argued those are more important developments in the realm of hashing out party policy and direction than any other because they take place in a realm Democrats have been weak in.
I also think a fair amount of the economic-cultural debate misses the fact that those two issues are simply not seperate in the minds of average voters. Not only do they bleed into each other, economic considerations are clearly subordinated by the electorate to cultural ones, no doubt because the image a candidate presents encompasses everything they may do. You can't carve out economic policy to free it from cultural considerations. Dick Gephardt and Bernie Sanders are products of specific political cultures, as are "The Nation" and "The American Prospect." Their respective economics are products (the tradition of urban industrial labor unions and Northeastern distrust of rampant capitalism, for example) of the traditional culture of American liberalism. Economics is policy; cultural signals preclude policy (and indeed politics all together) and are almost always more salient, especially among people who don't follow this stuff.
Bernie Sanders is not the best example to use here because he is such an outlier of American politics, but we have to consider the way in which liberal economic policy is approached. Clinton's salesmanship, life story, and cultural background made his economic policy different on a fundamental level than Kerry's, no matter how much time Kerry spent with Laura Tyson or Bob Rubin.
Economics are cultural products. Democrats have to get their cultural approach right before they can move American attitudes on economics.
Posted by: SamAm | May 6, 2005 10:33:58 PM
Not all social programs have to cost the earth to be effective. Simple ideas like needle exchange for addicts and converting unused buildings into refuges for the homeless can have an impact out of proportion to their cost. The Republicans blew the budget on war and tax breaks for the rich. How tough can it be to make those priorities look shabby ?
Posted by: opit | May 7, 2005 12:51:50 AM
Northern Democrats, like Kerry, tend to be wealthy and aristocratic, not to mention a smidge unelectable. Western Democrats, until California's recent switch (remember, we produced Nixon and Reagan), didn't much exist.
Umm, Ezra, you're a smart guy, but this is pretty stupid. In terms of northern Democrats, was Tip O'Neill "aristocratic"? Are the Daleys? (Yes, they're wealthy, but aristocratic?) Is Chuck Schumer aristocratic? For that matter, is Howard Dean? This is an absurd characterization.
As for western Democrats, well a) California is not the west; and b) California has had numerous Democrats. Jerry Brown, for instance. And his dad. As for the rest of the west, there were tons of western Democratic senators in the 60s and 70s - Frank Church, from Idaho; Mike Mansfield, the long time majority leader, from Montana; Scoop Jackson from Washington; Gale McGee, from Wyoming; Mo Udall was a congressman from Arizona...and this tradition has never fully gone away.
At any rate, at the very least, there's been a long-lived tradition of big city populism in the Democratic Party, and something of a tradition of western populism as well. The south has tended to be less populistic, at least on the liberal end of things, because populism and racism have often been associated in the south - think George Wallace and Orval Faubus.
Posted by: John | May 7, 2005 1:36:27 AM
brad totally scooped me on this one. you leave your computer for one evening, and this is what happens...
Posted by: almostinfamous | May 7, 2005 2:38:18 AM
Two things, from my sojourn in the capital of Radical Christian populism--
1. The crisis in rural America. Things have been bad there for a while and are starting to die. Wal-Mart is a good metonymy, but it goes well beyond that. The crystal meth problem is, to scale, as bad as the crack epidemic. Virtually all talented young people are fleeing rural communites. I'm guessing the primary income is farm subsidies, medicaid and VA benefits and Social Security. The only people moving in are immigrants, often illegal, who often take over what become defacto company towns. (I think Tom Frank discusses this--I haven't read the book.) If fuel prices rise, these people will be hammered; if the economy staggers, these people collapse.
The right democrat could really make a difference here. I don't know if it could win house seats due to gerrymandering, but combined with our urban advantage it could lead to big gains in the Electoral College and Senate if we do well in the suburbs. Zizka/John Emerson used to write about how depressed the Dakotas have become, but I don't know if he's active anymore.
2. Kevin Phillips, Kevin Phillips, Kevin Phillips. Most people our age know him (if at all) for his book "American Dynasty". More importantly, before defecting from the New GOP, he helped put together Nixon's 1968 coalition, the ur-campaign for modern populism. He's since written a half-dozen books about wealth, power and class. If we want working and middle class white people to vote Democrat again, he at least knew the reasons why they left us, and it wasn't racial demagouging (his office at least).
Phillips certainly isn't infallible, but he's the place to start. He called the realignment of the South in 1969 and noted that it wouldn't be a temporary swing to Nixon but a permanent move. See a good interview with Bill Moyers below.
http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript_phillips.html
Posted by: Exile in Colorado Springs | May 7, 2005 5:02:59 AM
I'm not sure how well it would work, but reform needs to be included with the populist approach. Sort of a K-street, Delay, Enron axis of evil. The assault on unions, overtime pay, working conditions, repeal of taxes on dividends and capital gains are all symptoms of the effectiveness of that "axis". People in the middle do feel squeezed by rising costs of living, and more demands from their employers. It's something to think about.
Posted by: marvyt | May 7, 2005 8:46:11 AM
One reason Edwards got attention was that he was able to talk about class issues while avoiding the class warfare tag. He could explain how a (dreaded) trial lawyer could actually serve the interest of the "common folk." His theme of the two Americas told people how they were getting shafted; he didn't say they were getting shafted by the rich, because in America everyone wants to be rich someday. His malpractice clients were getting shafted by the powerful, the corporate interests. People relate to that. They hate their HMO's.
A populist "framing" can answer the big GOP idea that less government is always better and we must all take "personal responsibility" for health insurance, retirement security, etc. People are seeing -maybe for the first time in a long time-that there are some things where we're better off if we stand together and share risks. Bush's push to destroy social security can be a godsend, if we are smart in how we play it.
There's a story that can be told: markets aren't the answer for everything; corporations can be out-of-control and not good for your health. We can attack the global-warming-is-a -myth spin spending by energy companies while gas prices are skyrocketing. Attack Walmart for passing its employee's healthcare costs onto all of us.
The element of reform that marvt sees as needed could be as simple as going back to talking about the corrosive effect of money on politics-attack the congress and the credit industry for the bankruptcy bill. Run against the bought-and-paid for congress. If some bought-and-paid-for democrats get hurt by that, it doesn't bother me one bit.
I think there can be a successful populist campaign, but where is the candidate who can run it?
Posted by: mmolleur | May 7, 2005 12:26:13 PM
John -- I almost used Brown as an example of why CA didn't work, but decided not to bash him. You see the problem, though, with trying to paint Gov. Moonbeam as a populist, right?
Posted by: Ezra | May 7, 2005 12:44:57 PM
