How Populism Turned To The Right

Posted on September 24, 2008
Filed Under Political |

The Lexington column in The Economist is always worth reading for its wry insight into close-up American politics, but I am especially grateful for the recent explanation of how and when the long-enduring strain of political opinion called Populism switched from being a device employed by both left and right sides of the spectrum, and became an exclusive tool of the Republican party.

If you like clues, and wonder whose presidency this occurred under, you’ll love the title of September 18th’s column, Richard Milhous McCain. And the subtitle reads, “Americans cannot escape from the shadow of Tricky Dick.”

Nixon’s great contribution to Republican politics was to master the politics of cultural resentment. Before him, populism belonged as much to the left as the right. William Jennings Bryan railed against the eastern elites who wanted to crucify common folk on a “cross of gold”. Franklin Roosevelt dismissed Republicans as “economic royalists”. Nixon’s genius was to discover that the politics of culture could trump the politics of economics—and that populism could become a tool of the right.

Lexington goes on to discuss how these “politics of resentment” are now reappearing in the election contest, against all original hopes that reason and issues might prevail.

I was born into the latter half of the twentieth century, and took an interest in all the history of this land that had gone before: the Depression, Prohibition, the Panics, the Civil War, the landmark decisions of the Supreme Court in the early days of nation, and of course, the Revolution itself, and the great founding of the Union in the Constitution, worth in itself a lifetime of study.

Through all this I became aware of the streams of populist thinking, but I only connected with it personally in the 1980s, in the great tax protest movements that sprang up, and the gold and silver barter-exchange houses that ran interference with the IRS in a game of great daring. I was a legal researcher, and an editor and essayist of some local note.

In those days we the folk were oppressed by the elite establishment along the Eastern Seaboard, and populist thinking lent its support more to Libertarian than Republican, perhaps, and certainly not to Democrat.

A curious shift happened in the last thirty years, whereby the old enemy lost its power somehow, and the new power of the West came to overshadow it. I never thought I’d miss those yankees, but as the Republicans continued their downward spiral of stagnation, at the same time a peculiar power vacuum left Texas - and simultaneously Oil - in the driver’s seat.

This was the hopeless situation that brought such a mediocrity as W. Bush to the White House. Oil and good ol’ Texas politics, as corrupt a union as any could wish for. I wondered at the time how such a large and colorful nation as ours could find such lackluster rascals to run for President, and I think now I’m answered by today’s price of oil, which shows that money doesn’t give a damn about quality, so long as things go its way.

Comments

Leave a Reply