Views > November 28, 2006

Embracing Populism

The Democratic victories on Nov. 7 were thanks to the populist agenda of challenging corporate economic power.

By David Sirota

It is a blissful yet bewildering feeling. You fight so long, endure so much establishment belittlement, and suddenly you win. That’s what happened on Nov. 7: We the populists won.

After our fully warranted victory laps and back patting, we must review Nov. 7’s lessons. If Democrats want to hold a governing majority, they must see the election for what it was: a mandate for economic populism and a battle cry against Big Money’s war on middle-class Americans.

Candidates all over the country talked about how corporate lobbyists have manipulated our trade policy to crush workers, our energy policy to harm consumers and our health care policy to hurt families. Polls show populism (a.k.a., challenging corporate economic power) is the “center” position for the voting public, even though it may not be the “center” position in a K-Street-owned Washington, D.C.

Since the election, Washington’s elite have tried to deny progressives credit and to downplay a mandate that threatens their agenda. These revisionists say the election was about Democrats pretending to be Republicans, billing people like Virginia Senator-elect Jim Webb as a “conservative.” Yet here is what this “conservative” wrote in a Nov. 15 Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “Class Struggle”:

The most important—and unfortunately the least debated—issue in politics today is our society’s steady drift toward a class-based system, the likes of which we have not seen since the 19th century. America’s top tier has grown infinitely richer and more removed over the past 25 years. … The top 1 percent now takes in an astounding 16 percent of national income, up from 8 percent in 1980. The tax codes protect them, just as they protect corporate America, through a vast system of loopholes.

If that is the new “conservative,” progressives won an even bigger victory than we thought.

This is a difficult time for Beltway lobbyists and corporate front-groups like the Democratic Leadership Council. It hurts them to see how populism was the Democrats’ ticket. But the elite are not contrite, rather they babble—”Vital dynamic center! Vital dynamic center!” We can understand their outbursts—it hurts to be rejected—but they are just going to have to deal. As winning candidates from Virginia to Kansas to Montana proved, the strategy of repeating lobbyist-written talking points to win red states belongs in the historical scrap heap. It’s the Era of Populism now.

This election, we also saw the potency of the Internet as a weapon. There is the myth circulating that Ned Lamont’s loss to Joe Lieberman in Connecticut was a loss for Internet organizing. This is utterly silly. The Lamont campaign, on which I worked as a political strategist, raised millions of dollars online and brought in thousands of volunteers through the Internet. Without the netroots, the Lamont candidacy never would have gotten off the ground in the first place.

Finally, movement progressives need to continue to see the Democratic Party as a means to an end—not an end unto itself. We need more candidates like Lamont—leaders who challenge lobbyists-in-Senator’s-clothing like Lieberman and consequently change the national debate on major issues like Iraq.

We must also understand that in fighting these fights, we are going to lose more than we win. That is what happens when you challenge incumbents. But both the wins and the losses are important, because they all help build a movement that transcends any one election cycle.

The major fight in American politics did not end on Nov. 7. All that ended was the beginning of our struggle. Now, the hard work starts—the work that must conclude with more than just a different set of politicians having plum offices in the U.S. Capitol. We must achieve results that affect ordinary Americans’ lives and change the course of this country for the long haul.

That is what America voted for—and that is what our country deserves.

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• Reader Comments

  I am a little less optimistic. I think the DLC still has a lot of power within the DNC on South Capitol Street.

  It is astounding to watch these re-elected Dems in interviews state the Democratic talking points where they list their top three agenda items: Minimum Wage increase, affordable prescription drugs (not overall healthcare) and improving security. They fail to mention the number one issue in almost all exit polls—Iraq.

  We the progressives need to pressure the Dems to use the power of the purse and cut off continued funding. I have written about these topics on my blog: www.beltwaybeast.blogspot.com

  Posted by peteindc on Nov 28, 2006 at 5:21 AM

  David is right. We need to be forceful and fight to win. The one down mentality among the left has to go. We can always be sure there will
  be a Marc Cooper or Larry Bensky or John Judis or Paul Berman to
  tell us how badly we are going to lose. Ignore them. They are never
  going to change. Under Clinton he never got pressure from the left.
  Thus he only responded to the Right. We know the Washington Post-
  Cokie Roberts-Jim Lehrer line. It’s a waste of time to spend much time
  on those folks.  Just starting to read Hostile Takeover.
  Pelosi is going to need a lot of pressure on her, she is atrocious on
  Israel/Palestine which is not helpful in getting us out of Iraq.

  Posted by blondemike on Nov 28, 2006 at 11:08 AM

  Populism, no matter if you are left or right, is pure poison to a democracy.  It is the Achilles heel of a system that otherwise works remarkably well and provides the most for the many.  It is nothing more than a political tool that ambitious and dishonest people of all stripes use to gain temporary power.  There is no truth, justice, or beauty in it at all.  It plays on the worst instincts of the mob.  It is the enemy of all liberalism, and liberal forms of government.  It is the disease that rotted the roots of all great Western civilizations that went before us.

  I find your embrace of it for some temporary victories very sad, totally illiberal and regressive, and evidence that we are at a very late stage in our democracy.  Disregard for the long term health of the republic for a few victories will only please the party cheerleaders who believe in little more than slogans and have no ideas.  It will leave the rest of us to clean up a huge mess. 

  You can embrace populism all you want, you just can’t square it with being a liberal, or that self government means anything more to you than manipulating a mob that must be considered ignorant and cynical at once in order for it to work (which it often does throughout history). 

  Populism is the reason that dictatorships and authoritarian governments can endure for centuries, but the average life of a democracy is about 200 years.  No defense has been found to inoculate free people against its deprivations except the same virtues that exist in the founding documents of this nation.  Never have those virtues succeeded in arresting populism once it firmly takes hold of a people. It is nothing more than bribing people with their own money, and attempting to instill the most baser forms of jealousy within a people for the political power of the very few. 

  It has always been that they promise all things to all people, and only end up delivering all things to themselves, and their tiny elite who manipulate the people. 

  That you could see populism as being a positive development is totally beyond me.  Sorry to rain on your parade, but if you think that America’s future lies in the embrace of populism by the Democratic Party, you can count this liberal out, because I would rather still believe in freedom, our country, and our system of government than any political party that maintains power by manipulating us and catering to the worst impulses of our people.

  Posted by ERWC on Nov 28, 2006 at 12:16 PM

  EWRC,

  I understand your Hobbesian fear of the mob.  All the dangers of popular movement politics that you mention have obviously in many historical times and places been led to cruel destructiveness and empirical negation of their intrinsic idealism by being co-opted either by those with megalomanic ambition or by cynical forces within the status quo.  But I think you are being rather one-sidedly negative in your assessment.  Popular movements have also been instrumental in bringing about lasting progressive change in societies where the ‘Movement’ has long since withered away. 

  Things like the establishment of representative democratic government in the first place.  There was a populist revolution in this country at the beginning of our history, doncha know.  The Federalists, when they got together, in secret, to write the Constitution didn’t really want to put anything like democratic elections in there, (many were intent on creating a new aristocracy with themselves as titled nobility.  Yes, it is historical fact.) but were only obliged to create the House of Representative by knowing that if they didn’t, it would set off widespread rebellion among the people, particularily the rank and file veterans of the Revolutionary Army who were camped right outside Independence Hall in Philly where they met (that damn Leveler Mob, the ingrates). 

  Things like the end of slavery, the regulation of child labor, the eight hour day and the forty hour week, paid vacation, unemployment insurance, workplace health insurance, worker safety, the minimum wage, worker pensions, social security Indeed, without such pressure from the masses there would be no reason for the elites of any society, much less ours, to embrace the kind of ‘noblesse oblige’ liberalism it would appear that you are espousing, and we would still be mired in the depths of feudalism.

  To follow your thinking one should never strive for one’s social and political ideals, just because they might not be perfectly realized. 

  I am fairly optimistic, that as long as the wealthy and powerful are willing and able to use their influence to ensure their self-interests (I might infer that is what you seem to be implying with the term ‘freedom’), then no populist movement will ever over-whelm that rough and never still equilibrium between the needs of the less well compensated wage-earners and the priviledge and power of the salaried and profit-earning elites, as long as there are some few voices of reason and compromise. (Which I have always considered the strengths of liberal philosophy.  Do you not?)

  Posted by luminous beauty on Nov 28, 2006 at 2:28 PM

  ERWC, you are rehashing some old myths about populism that have been handed down like family heirlooms by the corporate media for
  over a century starting with their smear campaign against Bryan when
  he ran against McKinley in 1896. The Populist Party wasthe first to call
  for nationalization of utilities, which are government awarded franchise
  monopolies, regulation of the railroads, free silver instead of the brutal
  gold standard, factory inspection, child labor laws, regulation of food &
  drugs, womens suffrage, universal free education, public libraries,
  limits on the working day and week, labor’s right to organize and more.
  They first called for direct election of US Senators, a progressive income
  tax and all the reforms of both the Progressive Era & the New Deal.
  I’m just now looking at LB’s rebuttal and see that she covers many of these points. Your comments that the system works remarkably well
  is utter horse manuer ! Where have you been the past 50 years or longer ? Our offices go to the highest bidder. Your comments sound
  like the John Birch Society “This is a Republic:Not a Democracy.”
  Your kind of liberal elitism is what has killed the left for 40 years.
  Too many people would like unelected Judges to make the legislative
  decisions. Well, if there’s not a societal consensus, that doesn’t work
  as Roe v. Wade shows. Before then there was a growing grassroots movement to legalize abortion, since then the Right’s been on the offensive.
  I know liberals like you for generations “I’m a liberal but I support Bork”
  “I’m a liberal but we’ve got to back Nixon in Vietnam” “I’m a liberal but I
  admire Goldwater’s honesty” “I’m a liberal but McCarthy has some good points” “I’m a liberal but Hitler is solving social problems” ad nauseum.
  You never mention the dozens of rightwing dictatorships that the US back that are not populist and the good things that populists like Chavez
  do in Venezuela. The Founding Fathers were a very mixed bag, neither them nor their documents can endorsed as a whole, it takes critical
  thinking, not the mindless parroting of rightist propaganda.
  It’s interesting that a class perspective is totally absent from your
  comments. Are you one of those Flat Tax liberals too ?
  Shame on you.

  Posted by blondemike on Nov 28, 2006 at 6:20 PM

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