Populism and Paranoia, by George Packer

[jefferson_dem]

Populism and Paranoia

Step out of the A.I.G. bonus frenzy, the bailout conundrum, and other matters of the moment to think a bit about American history. It’s all related.

Last year, Vintage reissued Richard Hofstadter’s classic 1965 essay collection “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” The title essay has joined the American political lexicon, partly because (as Sean Wilentz points out in his introduction) Americans keep living up to it. Among Hofstadter’s examples of paranoid rhetoric from the early sixties, here’s an Arizona gun owner testifying against federal control over mail-order firearms: “a further attempt by a subversive power to make us part of one world socialistic government.” These days, the apocalyptic rhetoric of the lone gun nut has become the staple political analysis on Fox News (for example, try to watch this recent performance by Glenn Beck, which displays every pathology from Hofstadter’s essay).

The modern American right, which is congenitally vulnerable to paranoia, gives into its own tendencies most readily when Democrats are in power and its own sense of dispossession is greatest. The John Birch Society thrived under Kennedy; talk-radio demagogues and the militia movement came into their own during the Clinton years; the prospect of a big Democratic win last year had a lot of conservative pundits and some Republican candidates describing Obama as a radical, a socialist, or worse. In some quarters the language has gotten more intemperate since he took office and started governing like the center-left politician that he’s always been. It isn’t just language that’s symptomatic of the paranoid style. It’s the certainty of a conspiratorial hand behind every decision; the evangelical fervor that sees every political dispute as an ultimate contest of good against evil.

Lately, the media has seized upon the word “populist” with all the mindless fury of a mob of…populists. To restore some meaning to the word besides popular outrage, turn to Hofstadter again. He wrote about populism as well, in “The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R.,” where he emphasized—and maybe overstated—the irrational resentments of the political movement that started in the late nineteenth century as the anti-Wall Street People’s Party and, by the postwar period, had produced among its offspring the anti-communist reaction of McCarthyism. Populism could spring up on the right and the left, and at times—as in the case of Father Coughlin and his Depression-era Social Justice Movement—it was hard to tell them apart. “The phenomenon I am concerned with,” Hofstadter wrote, “involves not so much the progression from one political position to another as the continued coexistence of reformism and reaction; and when it takes the form of a progression in time, it is a progression very often unattended by any real change in personal temper.”

<SNIP>

Obama is a liberal, and liberalism can’t afford to be deaf to populism, or it ends up in the graveyard where the campaigns of McGovern and Dukakis are buried. Nor can liberalism, which seeks to strengthen institutions of governance, afford to be driven by populism’s destructive side. Thus, Obama’s recent comment that he wants not to clamp down the public’s anger, but to “channel” it (he didn’t add: “so it doesn’t destroy my presidency”). It takes the political skill of a Roosevelt to uphold the liberal value of rational governance in the midst of a populist storm. Roosevelt felt that his biggest political challenge lay not with the Republicans, who were moribund between 1932 and 1937, but to the left, where the populist demagogue Huey Long kept threatening to take on the Democratic President. Today’s Republicans are at least comatose, but there’s no obvious political equivalent to Long. The popular passions that nearly made Long a dictator, though, are still with us, and they could whip left, right, or both simultaneously.

In short, a lot is riding on the bailout.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/georgepacker/2009/03/populism-and-pa.html?printable=true