A More Inclusive Whole

Michael Kazin includes a quote from Jurgen Habermas in the introduction to his book The Populist Persuasion: "We must realize that all traditions are ambivalent and that it is therefore necessary to be critical about all of them."

All traditions are ambivalent -- that could be a fitting title for just about any book on American politics, but it's especially fitting for one about the American populist tradition -- a tradition that is both profoundly strong, as Kazin demonstrates, and profoundly ambivalent; the populists in his book are always lurching, at every stage and every incantation, between leftist sympathy for the marginalized, and an embittered and defensive rightism, full of fear and bigotry. William Jennings Bryan and John L. Lewis commingle with Andrew Jackson and Senator McCarthy. Father Charles Coughlin begins his career as a radio priest broadcasting Catholic social gospel and fighting for the poor against the moneyed class; he ends it lambasting FDR as a communist, fervidly defending Hitler, and serializing the "Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion." The prohibitionist progressives of the 1910s set the stage for the KKK revival of the 1920s. That beautiful, American idea -- the "common man" -- becomes, in time, the idyl of white-hooded bigots.

So it goes. And so it is today, I think. Here's a paragraph from a New Yorker profile of the Tea Party movement:

If there was a central theme to the proceedings, it was probably best expressed in the refrain “Can you hear us now?,” conveying a long-standing grievance that the political class in Washington is unresponsive to the needs and worries of ordinary Americans. Republicans and Democrats alike were targets of derision. “Their constituency is George Soros,” one man grumbled, and I was reminded of the dangerous terrain where populism slides into a kind of nativist paranoia—the subject of Richard Hofstadter’s famous essay linking anti-Masonic sentiment in the eighteen-twenties with McCarthyism and with the John Birch Society founder Robert Welch’s contention that Dwight Eisenhower was “a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy.” The name Soros, understood in the context of this recurring strain—the “paranoid style in American politics,” Hofstadter called it—is synonymous, like Rockefeller or Rothschild, with a New World Order.

What to make of populism, then? To me, it comes down to a distinction between the "populist persuasion" (Kazin's phrase) and the "populist principle" (my own): as a "persuasion," populism is nothing more than a mode of feeling and talking; it's a stock set of discursive images and expressions that tap into our collective hopes. This persuasion can be used by anyone, for good or evil (or both, time and again).  

As a principle, however, populism is something rather more specific.The surest expression of the populist principle I know is voiced in the essay "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life" by William James. James writes:

For every real dilemma is in literal strictness a unique situation; and the exact combination of ideals realized and ideals disappointed which each decision creates is always a universe without a precedent, and for which no adequate previous rule exists. The philosopher, then, qua philosopher, is no better able to determine the best universe in the concrete emergency than other men. He sees, indeed, somewhat better than most men what the question always is-‑not a question of this good or that good simply taken, but of the two total universes with which these goods respectively belong. He knows that he must vote always for the richer universe, for the good which seems most organizable, most fit to enter to complex combinations, most apt to be a member of a more inclusive whole.

So we have a test: "the more inclusive whole." Lincoln, John L. Lewis and Martin Luther King, Jr. would pass this test, and so would Eleanor Roosevelt, Maya Angelou and Barack Obama. These are the populists in James' sense. It is not hard to figure out who doesn't pass this test -- to figure out for whom populism is a persuasion not a principle.