Populism

I've written about populism before on this blog and I wasn't really planning on doing it again, but this paragraph from Joe Klein's latest article sort of got my goat:

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.

This is nothing but repitition of supremely hackneyed Conventional Wisdom that circulates around the elite opinion press like so much fun in a hot tub. Almost every respectable pundit considers populism an ineffective style of campaigning and lousy approach to politics, but this just isn't true. Yes, the Populists failed to achieve their objectives, but that does not mean that populism doesn't work. In fact, populism probably predates the actual populists (just look at Andrew Jackson) and has been successfully used in different varities by many candidates. Roosevelt's 1936 campaign for example had decidedly populist overtones (during that campaign, FDR declared that he welcomed the scorn of the propertied class) and conservatives have been able to use cultural populism fairly well. No one so glibly should dismiss populism the way Klein has.

The article had a number of other major flaws (flaws as in things that irritated me), such as when Klein compared Howard Dean to George Wallace, but I don't have the patience do detail them here. If you want to torture yourself and see what I mean, you can read the article here.