Populists against Liberals

“Can populism be liberal?” asks an article at the liberal online webhost, “Salon.” To ask the question answers it, and Michael Lind, himself a progressive, provides the reasons for “No.”

Here’s what Lind writes:

➢ the Obama Democrats. . . cannot take advantage of the popular backlash against Wall Street [because Obama’s] attempt . . . to win Wall Street campaign donations has been all too successful. As Clinton's Treasury secretary, Robert Rubin helped complete the conversion of the Democrats from a party of unions and populists into a party of financial elites and college-educated professionals. Subsequently Obama raised more money from Wall Street than his Democratic primary rivals and John McCain.

➢ Obama owed his meteoric rise [to] the big money that allowed him to abandon campaign finance limits. According to one Obama supporter I know, the Obama campaign pressured its Wall Street donors to [write] many small checks, [creating] the illusion that the campaign was . . . dependent on small contributors . . . Obama continues to raise money on Wall Street. . .

➢ the moral fervor of the . . . left [comes from] the environmental movement[, which] insist[s] global warming must be combated not only by low-CO2 energy technology but also by radical lifestyle changes like switching from industrial farming to small-scale organic agriculture and moving from car-based suburbs and exurbs to deliberately "densified" cities with mass transit. [This] campaign triggers the populist nightmare of arrogant social elites trying to dictate where and how ordinary people should live.

➢ New Deal liberalism was primarily about jobs and wages, with benefits as an afterthought. [Today’s liberalism is] about benefits, with jobs and wages as an afterthought. . . -- universal healthcare coverage first, jobs later.

➢ New Dealers [wanted] economic growth with full employment, on the theory that if the economy is growing and workers have . . . wages, you don't need a vastly bigger welfare state. . . today's progressives seem to [be] primarily about redistribution from the rich to the poor[, a shift] connected with the shift in the social base of the Democratic Party from the working class to an alliance of the wealthy, parts of the professional class and the poor[, reflecting] the plutocratic social structure of the big cities that are now the Democratic base.

➢ Unlike the egalitarian farmer-labor liberalism that drew on . . . the small town and the immigrant neighborhood, metropolitan liberalism [is] charity for the disadvantaged carried out by affluent altruists. Tonight the fundraiser for endangered species; tomorrow the gala charity auction for poor children.

➢ the Republican Party benefited from the last two populist upheavals. . . [first,] the anger of George Wallace voters, and, following the campaign of Ross Perot in 1992, Newt Gingrich captured anti-system reformism to build a Republican congressional majority for most of the period between 1994 and 2006. In each case, liberals and progressives indiscriminately rejected the populist voters [as racists or] crypto-fascists. Today ridicule of the bombastic Sarah Palin shades all too easily into loathing for the lower middle class.

Comment: Liberals have become the elite at whom the populist masses wave their pitchforks.