Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 20, 1995 TAG: 9508180103
SECTION: BOOK PAGE: D4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: REVIEWED BY DAN FREI
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
\ Populism has long been a favorite political term in America. "The Populist Persuasion" by Michael Kazin, professor of history at American University, is a superb explanation of just what populism is, and what it is not. He defines the difference between populism as a social movement and as a political concept. What populist thinking represents has changed, and over time, populist language has been adjusted to suit the day's political predicaments.
In this serious overview, 10 years in the making and deserving of attention, the author searches for the reasons for the decline of the liberal component of the American left and the rising right-wing drift in the modern political culture. Kazin takes us on a colorful journey into American history by exploring the very forces that brought conflict between those who have realized and are realizing the American dream and those who have sought or are seeking it. The story is illuminating and compelling. The history of American populism is full of the politics of class.
Just what is populism?
Populism is the political promotion of the interests of the many over the privileges of a few. Kazin writes: "From the birth of the United States to the present day, images of conflict between the powerful and the powerless have run through our civic life, filling it with discord and meaning ... the most basic and telling definition of populism is a language whose speakers conceive of ordinary people as a noble assemblage not bounded narrowly by class, view their elite opponents as self-serving and undemocratic and seek to mobilize the former against the latter."
"The Populist Persuasion" takes us through the many shapes and forms that populism has taken in the 20th century and shows the shift from left to right that the language of populism has taken. Kazin considers as populist the small and short lived socialist/labor movement in the first several decades of this century which was representative of the populism of the American farm labor ethic of an earlier agrarian day, rather than strictly based in the Marxism of Europe.
In 1916, even Roanoke city had a Socialist candidate (Weldon Crawford) who ran against popular Mayor Charles Broun. Crawford received a whopping 13 percent of the vote. The socialism that was populist back then didn't last very long, but the language employed was populist indeed.
Kazin cites the perception in our political and civic culture of endless domestic enemies - "an elite," "the bureaucracy," or "them." He writes: "Continuity of populist language lay in the assumption that the elite was a morbid growth on an otherwise healthy body politic; the elite's attempt to centralize power in a few hands subverted the principles of self-rule and personal liberty."
Professor Kazin begins with Thomas Jefferson and ends with Bill Clinton in this sweeping account of the strange forms in which populism manifested itself over the years. George Wallace was a populist, and so was Sam Gompers and Father Coughlin. The strident anti-communism of post WWII was a kind of manufactured populism, but populist nonetheless. There was populist appeal in Nixon's visible campaign outreach to construction workers in 1968. There were elements of populist language in much of the anti-war and civil rights movements, but those elements alone did not comprise a true populist culture.
We can see elements of populism in today's conservative evangelical right-wing who seem, for the moment, to have captured the rhetorical flag. In the larger historical arc, not unlike the evangelically based "anti-saloon leagues" fighting for prohibition, this present version is sure to be eventually overtaken by more traditional applications of political action where class rather than theology is the significant attribute.
"The Populist Persuasion" is a human book, not overly analytical of demographic sub-groups, but it is comprehensive. As such, it's must reading for every serious student of American history.
Dan Frei is a political and public relations consultant in Roanoke.
by CNB