HATE IS AN AWFULLY THIN POLITICAL GRUEL:

The Fire This Time: Why populism may be the last resort of desperate Democrats (JOE KLEIN, January 4, 2003, TIME)

Populism has a long, unsuccessful and fairly dreadful history in American politics. There was one brief, shining moment in the 1890s when rural populists organized themselves into a political party and produced a brilliant cache of reform initiatives. Their best ideas—antitrust laws, federal food-and-drug regulation, the income tax, the Federal Reserve System—were soon appropriated and enacted by mainstream political parties. More often, populism has been a demagogic and reactionary force, the province of left-wingers who hope to profit from public resentment of the rich, and of right-wingers eager to blame the vagaries of life on shadowy cabals—bankers and fat cats, immigrants and foreigners, blacks and Jews. Happily, this most optimistic of republics has never had much use for such tawdry darkness.

The Democrats' current populist flirtation is somewhat sunnier. It stems from the hope that the political pendulum has swung as far to the right as it possibly can—away from the responsible taxation and regulation of corporations, away from an essential small-d democratic sense of fairness—and is ready to swing back. Bill Clinton was that rarest of breeds—an optimistic populist, the first Democrat to argue that the current globalization of the economy is similar to the nationalization of the economy a century ago and that a new set of reforms is needed. John Edwards' candidacy has been a test-tube example of Clintonian populism. He has offered a moderate, positive and quite comprehensive set of proposals to democratize corporate governance and provide new incentives for the working poor and middle class. But Edwards' candidacy is missing an essential ingredient: he doesn't have anything nasty to say about anyone. Populism just ain't populism without spit in the air.

Watching Dean on the stump these past few weeks, I tried to remember the last Democratic politician who was so joyously vituperative. (Pat Buchanan was the last Republican.) Suddenly, as Dean ranted one evening about "Washington bureaucrats like George W. Bush and Tom DeLay who want to dictate to your local school boards," I realized that he reminded me of George Wallace—a liberal version, to be sure, and without the theatrical racism. But Wallace was about a lot more than racism. He was about the inanities of Washington, the "pointy-headed intellectuals who can't park their bicycles straight." He was a little guy too, with the same chestiness, the same rolled-up sleeves as Dean. He was congenitally pugnacious, a former boxer (Dean was a wrestler). He claimed to provide a voice for the voiceless—albeit a set of alienated Americans very different from Dean's affluent Net surfers. Wallace voters were, well, white guys with Confederate flags on their pickup trucks. And he was a formidable national candidate. In 1972, he won Democratic primaries in Michigan and Maryland. His slogan—"Send them a message"—could easily be Dean's. In fact, Kerry has taken to saying "We need to send them more than a message, we need to send them a President."

Given that Wallace is probably the most successful hate candidate in American history, or at least recent history, the Democrats would appear to have put a pretty low ceiling on their potential support; even more so because the swing to the Right is still in its very earliest stages--still to come are such immensely popular measures as privatization of Social Security, limits on abortion, an end to affirmative action, immigration reform, etc..

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 5, 2004 09:39 AM