The Threat on the Left

The Red Scare of the 1940s and 1950s, pushed by corporate America and the right, abruptly blocked further New Deal-style reforms for nearly two decades by using a crusade against Communism to smear and de-legitimate left and liberal causes. 

Today, as author Thomas Frank argues in his provocative new book, The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism, it is not just Corporate America, Donald Trump, and their minions who erect barricades against establishing economic rights for ordinary citizens. 

“The resistance culture of our time, where more and more one notices a frank acknowledgment of liberalism as the politics of a highly educated upper class.” 

Rather, he says, America is experiencing a “Democracy Scare” where elitists, often at the top of the Democratic Party, paint social movements as a form of “mob rule” and authoritarianism. This has led to a resurgence of  “anti-populism,” this time flowing from the center left. Frank has delivered a defiant challenge to the antipopulist  liberals more infatuated with the advice of experts and their own moral virtues than mobilizing ordinary Americans on the basis of progressive values. The history of these average folks—fighting against economic and racial inequality—remains a main tributary feeding progressive politics. Frank’s powerful history of populist movements and reflections on the present will challenge much of liberals’ often-condescending conventional wisdom.  

“The message of anti-populism is the same as ever,” writes Frank, a historian whose previous books include the best-selling What’s the Matter with Kansas? “The lower orders, it insists, are driven by irrationality, bigotry, authoritarianism, and hate; democracy is a problem because it gives such people a voice.” 

But, in contrast to past opposition to progressive social movements, Frank says that, in 2020, it’s “enlightened liberals are the ones mouthing this age-old anti-populist catechism.” 

America’s anti-populists, especially after Trump’s election, find it easy to blame voters—and the large number of nonvoters—rather than confront their own thread-bare programs, strategic blunders, and lack of genuine engagement with the concerns of ordinary people. 

One glaring example noted by Frank: Hillary Clinton’s decision, while campaigning in September 2016, to describe certain Trump supporters as “deplorables” and “irredeemables.” She topped this off later by boasting after the election, “I won the places that represent two-thirds of America’s gross domestic product . . . the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward.” 

Clinton, Frank contends, remained seemingly blind to the economic and social distress that occurred in “left-behind” America as “nearly half of America’s employment growth between 2010 and 2017 centered in just twenty large metro areas that are now home to about a third of the U.S. population, according to a 2018 report from The Brookings Institution. 

Meanwhile, Trump managed to connect with people in communities and regions overlooked during eight years of Democratic rule, while highly educated Democratic anti-populist leaders airily dismissed deindustrialization and discounted its victims as the unavoidable cost of (much-exaggerated) technological innovation. 

It is painful now to recall the famous forecast by Senator Charles Schumer, Democrat of New York, in 2016: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois, and Wisconsin.” 

Writing off the blue collar vote, it turns out, was not counterbalanced by fresh support for Democrats among moderate Republicans. Instead, it led to a crushing electoral defeat.

Neglecting obvious lessons from the 2016 disaster, anti-populist thinking still flourishes, typifying, Frank writes, “the resistance culture of our time, where more and more one notices a frank acknowledgment of liberalism as the politics of a highly educated upper class.” 

Rather than build mass movements to promote a fairer distribution of economic and political power, Frank says the “characteristic goal” of anti-populism is “to set up a nonprofit, attract funding from banks and monopolies, and then . . . to scold the world for its sins.”

The current generation of anti-populists essentially envision a “consensus of elites” to govern American society, with the unenlightened masses left on the decision-making sidelines lest their crude, troublesome demands upset the delicate balance among well-educated managers and experts. 

This worldview has been a consistent theme in U.S. history, especially since the Gilded Age of the 1890s. But the nation’s stark inequalities—mirrored 130 years later in 2020—spawned the growth of movements like the People’s Party, founded in 1891 to fight for fair farm prices, oppose the gouging of railroads, challenge monopolies, and fight for basic economic protections for farmers and workers.  

“The Populists wanted the government to own and operate the nation’s railroads, to manage the currency, to take possession of land owned by speculators, to set up postal savings banks, and a dizzying list of other interventions,” Frank explains. 

In 1896, the Populist insurgency uneasily joined with the more conservative Democrats to promote the spellbinding progressive William Jennings Bryan for President in the midst of an economic crisis. “We have petitioned, and our petitions have been scorned; we have entreated, and our entreaties have been disregarded; we have begged, and they have mocked when our calamity came,” Bryan thundered.   

To defeat Bryan and elect the business-friendly William McKinley, the avalanche of money from bankers and other corporate interests was predictably massive (more than twenty times what Bryan gathered). 

But Bryan’s candidacy also triggered a major “democracy scare” and unleashed an unprecedented and unending cascade of attacks on the specter of rule by the unwashed, the uneducated, and the envious. The effort was expensive, comprehensive, and surprisingly imaginative in conjuring up the threat of democracy run amok, as Frank colorfully demonstrates.

The anti-Bryan propaganda campaign was a forerunner of a more sophisticated barrage against Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1930s during another democracy scare. FDR’s response to the anti-New Deal campaign of business leaders was a classic of anti-elite populist rhetoric: “Organized money hates me—and I welcome their hatred.”

The labor movement, sheltered by New Deal legislation, exploded as a force in American workplaces—particularly through illegal sit-down strikes—and in the political arena, providing a voice to working people who had been shut out and shut up by the political system. Labor grew through the skillful application of anti-elitist populist appeals. 

Adding to the momentum of labor and other social movements of the 1930s was a host of groups on the left, including the Socialist, Communist, and Progressive parties, all employing variations of populist rhetoric, denouncing the power of elites, and hailing the indispensable contributions of ordinary working Americans. 

The civil rights movement was similarly born in a populist cradle, carried forward through strategies and tactics learned from the labor movement, and propelled by powerful anti-elite rhetoric, commonly drawing on Biblical stories of oppression by all-powerful pharaohs. As the movement expanded and matured, so did its goals. 

Moving beyond securing voting rights and an end to formal segregation, leaders like Martin Luther King Jr.—a self-described democratic socialist—increasingly focused on poverty, labor rights, and a guaranteed income for all. King even revived FDR’s concept of an economic Bill of Rights. He was assassinated in Memphis in 1968, while taking an active role in supporting a strike by sanitation workers.

King and fellow civil rights leader Bayard Rustin envisioned building a new movement with a fiery populist economic appeal that would bring Blacks and whites together behind a powerful economic program for all working people. Frank himself seems inclined in this direction as well.

It’s a shame that Frank’s book was completed before the recent explosion of the Black Lives Matter movement, touched off by the merciless killing of George Floyd and flaring up in more than 2,000 U.S. cities and towns in all fifty states, with fifteen million or more people filling the streets. 

The eruption has displayed the depth of pent-up rage felt by Black people and other people of color in asserting their humanity in American society. The movement challenges the fundamental inequities in income, wealth, health care, and a host of other issues. It has also revealed a stunning new level of support for racial justice among white people, with at least 57 percent or more of whites supporting the protests. 

At long last, the dream of multiracial unity in challenging established power centers, cultivated by the original populists of the People’s Party back in the 1890s, may be coming closer to realization. The anti-populists depicted by Frank are now on the defensive.

A forceful anti-elitist message will be imperative to further coalesce a broad, vital movement toward racial and economic justice, Frank insists. “The demand for economic democracy is how you build a mass movement of ordinary people. And a mass movement of ordinary people, in turn, is how you achieve economic democracy. 

“Which is to say that the answer both to Trumpist fraud and to liberal elitism must come from us—from the democratic public itself.”