There are three essential traits I look for in a political book: the author must choose interesting subject matter; they must present a coherent theory of events; and they must write clearly and succinctly in support of their narrative. Thomas Frank’s new book, “People Without Power: The War on Populism and the Fight for Democracy” - or as it is known in the US market, “The People, No” - is a hit on all three fronts. Rarely do I encounter progressive tracts that I enjoy reading as much as I enjoyed this book.
I have a semi-regular series on my blog I call “Myths of the Old Order”, where I take aim at one of the cherished myths of liberal ideology and examine how liberalism’s failures have exposed the tenuous underpinnings of the old order. Frank - previously famous for his cutting and insightful work in “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” and “Listen, Liberal!” - performs a similar task in taking aim at the myth of “populism”: “Populism is the word that comes to the lips of the respected and the highly educated when they see the global order going haywire . . .the political face-off of today . . .pits the center against the periphery, the competent insider against the disgruntled”. We might also call this out as radical centrism, or horseshoe theory-as-praxis. Frank calls it the ‘Democracy Scare’. In the writings of think tanks and government agencies, in the books of centre-rightists like William Galston or centre-leftists like Yasha Mounk, democracy is supposedly under threat from authoritarians and extremists on both the left and right that share more in common with one another than either does with the sensible centre.
In response, Frank has written a history of ‘actual existing populism’ to show that left-wing populism is nothing like the centrist caricature. But he has also written a matching history of ‘anti-populism’ - how the rhetoric and tropes of the ‘Democracy Scare’ have evolved, and remained the same, throughout recent history and how the liberal sneering of today against the likes of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn is in truth little removed from the reactionary ravings against FDR’s New Deal. Frank is able to tackle this daunting task because he has the most sophisticated analysis of what elites mean when they say ‘democracy’ that I’ve encountered outside a graduate-level classroom. Elites don’t really believe in democracy as it is popularly or even philosophically understood: the notion that individuals should have a say in decisions that might affect their rights and legitimate interests. Instead, elites operate under a consensus model of governance or what Galston (and Frank) call ‘pluralistic democracy’ - in which elites representing diverse constituencies meet in closed rooms to hash out solutions that serve the interests of the communities those elites supposedly represent. Barack Obama, famously, holds to this vision of liberal undemocracy, as does the NGO industrial complex. But what it amounts to, whether in the 19th century or the 21st, is a vision of society in which the majority of the population is deemed unfit to govern themselves.
Agrarian Populism
The core of Frank’s thesis is an in-depth account of the US People’s Party of the late 19th-century - the movement that was the first to explicitly call itself populist and the only indigenous American political movement to be praised by the first general of European communists. Frank demonstrates how - contrary to the assessment of later historiography - the first populists represented a multi-racial, working-class movement overwhelmingly focused on collective solutions to questions of economic justice. The People’s Party prospered when it teamed up with local political institutions (Democrats in most states, Republicans in others) to overthrow the status quo, but failed when it threw its weight behind the national Democratic Party (in the personage if Williams Jenning Bryant) and when it was culturally wedged on the grounds of race and culture. Frank notes that most of the macroeconomic principles the centre now takes for granted - the welfare state, fiat currency and free trade - were originally the ‘fringe’ ideas of radicals, and that there was nothing reactionary or anti-scientific about the first Populists - quite the contrary. Populists believed then and believe now - contrary to the self-congratulatory smugness of elites - that ordinary men and women are more than capable of governing themselves.
Frank matches his history of the People’s Party with an equally incisive account of the first wave of anti-populism, told largely through the story of the US presidential election of 1892 and the machinations of one Mark Hanna, campaign manager of the genteel Gilded Age president William McKinley. Hanna, the political hero of modern day conservative propagandists such as Karl Rove, invented the myth of populism out of almost whole cloth: that populists were ‘lunatics in rag’, that they posed a threat to democracy and rule of law, motivated by demogoguery and jealousy of the wealthy rather than a sober assessment of their real material conditions and those responsible for it. Frank points out that almost all of the tropes of modern anti-populism can be traced back in their genealogy to the mad hysteria of Gilded Age elites - with one notable exception. And that is that early anti-populisms did not accuse their opponents of racism (and anti-semitism), misogyny and xenophobia (if only because the establishment of the time was thoroughly soaking in such beliefs itself). That element, so common in anti-populist rhetoric now, came much later.
Rise of the PMC
The remainder of Frank’s history examines the recurrence of these patterns from the 1890s in three subsequent historical eras: the triumph of social-democratic populism in FDR’s New Deal, largely told through the story of FDR’s triumph in the presidential election of 1936; the ‘New Left’ era of the 1960s and the catastrophic failure of George McGovern, and finally the conservative counter-revolution represented by Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump. The key question Frank asks us to consider is how the populist triumphs of the New Deal gave way to an era in which anti-populism came to be seen as a not a fringe reactionary opinion, but a mainstream centre-left belief, and how latter-day conservatives came to portray themselves as populist insurgents against a corrupt liberal establishment.
This, sadly, is well-trodden ground for the contemporary left. The New Deal era was so successful that it produced a generation of administrators who believed that political problems were essentially technical in nature; a protest culture among students which came to see academic credentials and schooling (something inaccessible to their own parents) as granting moral virtue; and a union movement that was focused above all on defending the gains of the 1930s, even if it meant selling out their radical comrades at every opportunity. The self-satisfied Keynesian consensus of the 1950s and 60s was the first time that elites could claim to have ended history - and the first time that their abject failure to deal with overlapping economic and social crisis led to their ideology being completely discredited. The 2010s are in some respect, merely a neoliberal echo of this earlier failure; Trumpism a farcical repetition of the Reagan Revolution.
As early as the 1950s, the imagined opponent of this liberal consensus was the conservative firebrands exemplified by McCarthy and Goldwater. Their crusades against the liberal establishment failed, only to be picked up in later generations. But how the centre-left translated anti-populism into opposition to their own left flank [which had defended them again McCarthy and Goldwater] is the central mystery of the twentieth century: how did well-meaning technocrats “retrieve pieces of long-forgotten conservative stereotype, fit them out with fashionable academic jargon of their era, and launch the result as a shiny new diagnosis handed down by the well-adjusted administrative mind”? Franks blames particular academics and writers - Daniel Bell, Richard Hofstader, Michael Rogin, Edward Shils and Seymour Lipset - but these men were representative of a particular materialist transformation: the rising influence of the professional-managerial class. These elitist academics from Ivy League institutions only had influence because a generation of social movement and union leaders had come to believe in the moral value of their credentials - the same credentials that gave them, as children of the working class, access to the halls of economic and political power.
The Disciplining of the Working Class
Thomas Frank has once again written an important book, that leftists everywhere should read in order or understand the moment in which they live. The increasing movement towards managerial liberalism on the liberal lift - the idea that the working class (who are inherently racist, misogynist and xenophobia) need to be educated and disciplined by their social betters - is a political disaster in waiting. Social democratic parties that have embraced the sensibility of liberal undemocracy have seen their vote whither and their popular support die. On the contrary, right-wing populists have once again discovered that elites will tolerate proletarian manners so long as the give capital complete freedom of action. This is a uniquely dangerous moment for liberalism - it has rarely been as a weak as it is right now. Socialists are once again called upon to defend the liberal order against itself. Because liberals no longer have the good sense to recognise that popular democracy provides the legitimacy that keeps their social order running.