There are two populisms. It’s hard to believe in our present moment because the right-wing variant has gained such prominence since the 1980s. The left-wing version does exist despite all the attempts to extinguish it. And it’s time for it to be resuscitated, recovered, and corrected.
The left variant of populism is mainly absent in our political discussions and is usually just trying to get noticed. The right, relishing its successes since 2016, is planning for the future and imagining a new world. Two fairly recent books encapsulate both of these realities. The two books can help us to understand the current political situation. Together they provide insights into the ascendance of right-wing populists like President Trump and the enduring weakness of left-liberals’ attempts to forget or suppress the left-wing version of populism.
Thomas Franks’ The People, No. was published in 2018 and is a book about how left populism has been marginalized both in practice and in historical memory. Franks, unquestionably, is arguing that this is a mistake. Patrick Deneen, a professor of political philosophy at Notre Dame’s book Regime Change is an interesting juxtaposition to Franks’ lamentation. Deneen’s book imagines the far-right’s capture of the state and its remaking it in its own image.
Franks’s argument centers on an organized elite working to prevent the exercise of leftish majoritarian policy (aka populism). He writes, “This imagined struggle of expert versus populist has a fundamental, almost biblical flavor to it. It is a battle of order against chaos, education against ignorance, mind against appetite, enlightenment against bigotry, health against disease. From TED talk and red carpet, the call rings forth: democracy must be controlled … before it ruins our democratic way of life.” For Franks, the supposedly progressive experts in America, from Bill Clinton to academics in elite universities, are unified in their battle to prevent any political success or even consideration of left populism.
Elites are the antagonists to populism in both authors’ formulations: “Our thought leaders relate to populism not so much as scholars but as a privileged class putting down a challenge to itself,” Franks writes. For Deneen, elites have stolen their positions from a previously authentic and popular one based on traditional religious cultural values. Deneen’s argues that “long-standing cultural institutions and practices should be given the benefit of the doubt… because they develop from the bottom up.” The “elites” work to divert politics away from either a majority grounded in a desire for fairness and justice, in Franks’ argument, or a traditionalist anti-liberal one in Deneen’s.
Patrick Deneen’s fundamental claim is that liberalism is the issue. Concepts of pluralism and belief in progress which undergird the last two centuries of liberalism are the problem. Indeed, liberalism is equivalent to Marxism for Deneen: “Classical liberalism, progressive liberalism, and Marxism, all of which have been in various ways locked in contention with each other in the modern age, nevertheless all share the basic feature of advancing forms of transformative progress. They divide not over the goal of politics, but over the means, which has inescapably involved taking sides between ‘the many’ or ‘the few.’”
For Deneen and his fellow right-wing populists, liberalism and the very idea that the people and the government can shift society in a more pluralistic and fair direction is folly. It distracts from what the majority really want: a traditionally-driven, more religious society. Deneen’s lack of evidence for his contention that this traditional illiberal society is a popular ideal is never really addressed. His argument — made clear by his book’s title — is really that the right should just to ignore what the vast majority of people want and replace elites with a new group that will force the majority into compliance with this renewed version of the old, apparently pre-enlightenment, Christian-centered state.
Frank also argues that there is a pre-existing order that is being hidden. For him though, it is a left populist tradition that is being hidden. For him, populisms are an inherent feature to American life. “The populist impulse has in fact been a presence in American life since the country’s beginning. Populism triumphed in the 1930s and 1940s, when the people overwhelmingly endorsed a regulatory welfare state. Populist uprisings occur all the time in American life, always with the same enemies—monopolies, banks, and corruption—and always with the same salt-of-the-earth heroes.”
Here, Frank touches on the historical legacy of populist class politics that I think is a good and important argument. Throughout its history, the United States has had continuous populist inflammations that — while also often also cohabiting with horrible racism or nativism — are consistently about ameliorating income and wealth inequality. Frank somewhat underplays this ugly paradox in the history of left populism that is somehow about fairness but had also erected walls to exclude initially Indigenous peoples under Jackson, then Black Americans under Roosevelt, and then immigrants.
Both authors operate in a kind of blindness of his own populists issues. Deneen’s belief is that some mythical majority exists for his “non-Marxist assertion of the political power of ‘the many’ in defense of the conservative aims of stability, communal norms, and solidarity afforded by and protected within nations.” Frank is a little too willing to ignore the fact that the left populism he most venerates in the book, that of FDR, was at least somewhat about equality for white workers rather than all workers.
Ultimately, Frank’s best argument is a secondary one that he doesn’t develop as much as he should. He points out that America’s history is a history of left populism and that it is actually “a homegrown Left that spoke our American vernacular and worshipped at the shrines of Jefferson and Paine rather than Marx.” In my view, this is what American politicians of the left need to take away in their battle against Deneen’s theocratic vision.
Left populism is an American legacy. Populism is not always a bad thing. Democrats and leftists in the U.S. need to re-discover that fact. Democrats and anti-rightwing elites (particularly those in universities) need to abandon their blanket anti-populism if they want to defeat Trumpian illiberalism. They need to admit that, historically, left populism has been the engine of American progressivism, whether under Andrew Jackson (I know!) or Franklin Roosevelt. Most challengingly, though, they have to re-discover that legacy while honestly grappling with the fact that that history has often come with horrible racism and, under Jackson, even genocide. They need to recover the old left populism Thomas Frank highlights while retaining the modern liberal values that Patrick Deneen is so against.
Leave a Reply