Populism and government LUKE BRETHERTON


Politics of people power


The Tea Party has emerged as one of the most potent forces in America in recent times, and with a presidential election looming, the movement looks set to flex its political muscle further. Yet far from being something new, its roots are deep in the American psyche and history


the Tea Party as something new. Yet the Tea Party is a form of Populism – a perennial fea- ture of American politics and perhaps one of its defining characteristics. Since it emerged as a political movement in 2009, it has stood for reduced government spending and lower taxes, and is both conservative and libertarian. Without the structure of a political party and without its own Congressional candidates, it has nevertheless become a force to be reckoned with in American – especially Republican – circles. And with the next US presidential election looming in a year’s time (in 2012), the populist Tea Party could well play a high- profile role in nomination of runners. American Populism has its origins in the broad-based and fissiparous movement that emerged from the 1850s onwards. It reached its high point in the 1890s and the formation of the People’s Party, which challenged the duopoly of the Republicans and Democrats but declined rapidly as a formal movement thereafter. Yet like an event of nuclear fission, its half-life continues to be felt long after its moment of greatest energy. The vital centre of the Populist movement was the Midwest, with particular concentrations of activity in Texas, Kansas and Oklahoma. While primarily an agrarian phenomenon, its political impact came through forging a farmer-labour alliance. Michael Kazin, in his book The Populist


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Persuasion, identifies four themes that shaped the original Populist movement and all ongoing forms of Populism, of which the Tea Party is the latest expression. The first was Americanism (identified as an emphasis on understanding and obeying the will of the people); the second, producerism (the con- viction that in contrast to classical and aristocratic conceptions, those who toiled were morally superior to those who lived off the toil of others and that only those who cre- ated wealth in tangible material ways could be trusted to guard the nation’s piety and lib- erties); the third, the need to oppose the dominance of privileged elites who are seen to subvert the principles of self-rule and per- sonal liberty through centralising power and imposing abstract plans on the ways people lived (elites were variously identified as government bureaucrats, intellectuals, high


6 | THE TABLET | 1 January 2011


ith a few notable exceptions, most analysis of the Tea Party movement in the United States has ignored history and sees


the Methodist camp meetings and Baptist revivals in order to generate a powerful rhet- oric with which to challenge the status quo. This synthesis of economic critique and Christian theology came to be exemplified in the thrice-Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan’s 1896 “Cross of Gold” speech with its eponymous crescendo: “Having behind us the producing masses of this nation and the world, supported by the commercial interests, the laboring interests and the toilers everywhere, we will answer their demand for a gold standard by saying to them: You shall not press down upon the brow of labour this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” At the same time, consistent with their


financiers, industrialists or a combination of all four); and the fourth, the notion of a move- ment or crusade that engaged in a battle to save the nation and protect the welfare of the common people. Like many social movements, treatments


of Populism tend to be refracted through the concerns and sympathies of the historian’s own time. For example, Anna Rochester, writ- ing during the Second World War and herself a Marxist, envisaged the Populists as proto- Communists opposing monopoly capitalism but as insufficiently radical. This was a view shared, incidentally, by Engels in his Letters to Americans. This contrasts with Richard Hofstadter’s The Age of Reform. Writing in the 1950s in reaction against McCarthyism, Hofstadter argued that the Populists were nostalgic, backward-looking petit bourgeois businessmen who were insecure about their declining status in an industrialising America. He claimed that they were provincial, conspiracy-minded, and tended to scapegoat others, a tendency that manifested itself in nativism and anti-Semitism. His analysis is directly echoed in most treatments of the con- temporary Tea Party which is often viewed as made up of anxious middle-class activists worried about their status in a changing world order and given to nativism and racism. While some historians have followed Hofstadter’s lead, the consensus seems to be that Populism was neither predominantly socialist nor cap- italist, but generated a broadly Republican critique of the over-concentration of “money power”. The critique of monopolistic forms of power was combined with the language of


Jeffersonian vision, the nineteenth-century Populists developed the rudiments of a “cooperative commonwealth” consisting of a huge range of autonomous institutions, edu- cational initiatives and mutual associations such as cooperatives, in order to address their needs without being dependent on the banks or the state. Part of what makes the Tea Party so con- fusing to elite commentators is that Populism can be democratic or authoritarian and often combines elements of both: Huey Long, the Populist Governor of Louisiana from 1928 to 1932, is an example of the integration of democratic and authoritarian elements. However, a better way to frame the different currents found in Populist movements is as “political” and “anti-political”. “Political Populism” embodies a conception of politics that works to reinstate plurality and inhibit totalising monopolies (whether of the state or market) through common action and delib- eration premised on personal participation in and responsibility for tending public life. Saul Alinsky and broad-based community organising as exemplified in the work of the Industrial Areas Foundation and Citizens UK is an example of this kind of Populism. Within American history, Alinsky framed his approach to politics as being both Revolutionary and Tory. He was very critical of both concentrations of economic power and what he called “welfare colonialism” that kept the poor impoverished. At the same time, he emphasised the importance of working with existing traditions and institutions. Such an approach can be distinguished from lib- eralism, socialism, Communism and the


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