The Moment of the Right Wing Populist
Biden lays out a carpet of jet-setting elitist goons on which the far right will trample its way back into power
Biden’s recent choice of Neera Tanden as Director of the Office of Management and Budget set off a firestorm recently on the left, though it was in fact just a particularly poignant example of the sort of person who Biden has chosen to run the country for the next four years: wealthy, well-educated, drowned in Wall Street and foreign money, and fanatically loyal to the neoliberal wing of the Democratic party, taking particular exception to progressives. It’s difficult to imagine a more accurate image of the swamp Trump sailed into the white house in 2016 denouncing than people who use their government experience to secure Google contracts with the Pentagon for drone tech or take money from Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo while denouncing a $15 minimum wage, or share surnames with a pharma lobbyist who has recently started work for several major drug companies.
The move to dive headfirst into the corporate and think tank world to fill cabinet positions seems fairly predictable, and it’s hardly as if the right has any ground to stand on here (unless we’re to believe people like Jared Kushner, Scott Pruitt, Betsy DeVos and Sonny Perdue represent “real America”).
The truth, of course, is that the upper echelons of both parties have for decades demonstrated unrestrained contempt for poor and working class people and have far more in common with each other than with any of the rest of us. Race and gender are simply tools which they have used to play to their respective bases, with their messages changing drastically with the times. Republicans have leaned into the racism of their base, a strategy that began with Nixon, found its feet under Reagan and somewhat abated during the Bush years only to be redoubled under Trump. For their part, Democrats were happy to lean into racist caricatures of the inherent violence of black people during the ‘90s when there was wide public desire for tough-on-crime policy, a tendency you could find vestiges of even in 2008, when Joe Biden bragged to an audience about his support for a border fence and the need to impose stricter punishments on those who hired “illegals”. But of course the result of that election proved that the Democratic base had moved significantly to the left on racial issues and the rhetoric followed suit.
Now we are faced with a Democratic party that understands and responds to a certain idea of inclusiveness and diversity, one in which the language of class is simply brushed aside in favor of a preference for an elite which is no less elitist, but far less predominately white and male. This pretension towards progressive ideals plays well enough with middle class liberals without offending the conservatives Democrats hope to pull into the fold with constant appeals to centrism, but it doesn’t seem as if most people really buy it- it’s certainly notable that black men and women both split significantly more towards Trump than in 2016, even with the first black female vice president on the ticket. I must say I don’t recall anyone I encountered after the election who considered the moment particularly historic. One can’t help but think that after the disappointment of Obama, this faux-populism of bourgeois diversity just doesn’t go very far with people.
Indeed, it’s almost shocking how little the Democratic party seems to have learned from the electoral disasters of 2014 and 2016, nor seemingly from the near miss of 2020. Dibs over populism, which the academic left had already happily ceded to conservatives long before Trump came along, seems now to belong to people like Josh Hawley, Matt Gaetz and Tucker Carlson, and at this point it’s clear that they know it. I was struck particularly by this clip from today’s episode of Tucker Carlson Tonight:
I mean, what the hell? Parts of this video sound like something between Karl Marx, A. Philip Randolph and Bob Dylan. Yet they’re not coming from a German philosopher, a hard-headed black labor organizer-turned-civil-rights-activist or a floppy haired avante-garde folk singer- they’re coming from a millionaire conservative demagogue with an audience of 4 million people on an off night
They want everybody to think in false economic terms in order to keep everybody down, divide everybody by race, so you don’t even ask a question about class.
So where is this coming from? This message of economic populism hardly started with Saager Enjeti, co-host of The Hill’s Rising who’s cultural role seems to be to play Renfield to Tucker’s Dracula, or for that matter with Carlson himself. It has a long and strangely bipartisan history, which in its earliest form seems best represented by the Democratic House Representative Tom Watson, a firebrand of the progressive Populist Party of the 1890s.
To unpack the complicated nature of American Populist rhetoric, there is some need to dig into a fascinating part of American political history. The Populist Party, which advocated free silver and ending the gold standard, which was bankrupting the poor southern farmers it represented, as well as nationalizing railroads, progressive taxation and the direct election of senators (who until the early 20th century were appointed by state legislatures), was known for its desire to bring white and black farmers together to work towards their common interests. Typical of Watson’s rhetoric was this passage written for The Arena in 1892:
There never was a day during the last twenty years when the South could not have flung the money power into the dust by patiently teaching the Negro that we could not be wretched under any system which would not afflict him likewise; that we could not prosper under any law which would not also bring its blessings to him.
On this basis, Watson argued
The conclusion, then, seems to me to be this: the crushing burdens which now oppress both races in the South will cause each to make an effort to cast them off. They will see a similarity of cause and a similarity of remedy. They will recognize that each should help the other in the work of repealing bad laws and enacting good ones. They will become political allies, and neither can injure the other without weakening both. It will be to the interest of both that each should have justice. And on these broad lines of mutual interest, mutual forbearance, and mutual support the present will be made the stepping-stone to future peace and prosperity.
This seems like a shockingly modern proposition for 1892, and it was. The Populists were perhaps the first viable political movement in American history that viewed the cooperation of white and black working class people as crucial for the liberation of both from their true enemy, the wealthy capitalist who controlled the banks and railroads, enslaved the congress, and enriched themselves off the labor of others at every possible opportunity. The narrative they developed has the strong ring of many later left wing appeals to white racists to recognize their common struggle shared with people of color, perhaps best explained by Bob Dylan in the classic 1963 song Only a Pawn in Their Game:
A South politician preaches to the poor white man
“You got more than the blacks, don’t complain
You’re better than them, you been born with white skin,” they explain.
And the Negro’s name
Is used it is plain
For the politician’s gain
As he rises to fame
And the poor white remains
On the caboose of the train
But it ain’t him to blame
He’s only a pawn in their game
It’s superficially the same message: set aside your race hatred at least long enough to put your class interests first. But there is a nagging, irrevocable difference: Watson’s message was never that racism was wrong, simply that it was inappropriate to the context. Once the Populist Party was destroyed by the spectacular failure of the presidential race of William Jennings Bryan against William McKinley in 1896, Watson himself gradually abandoned the narrative of racial cooperation and embraced his own viciously racist instincts in one of the most staggering about faces in the history of American politics. Perhaps bitter over the failure of the Populist Party, he viewed black people as untrustworthy fools who could be led astray by anyone who would meet their immediate demands. The politician who in 1892 had performed well with rural black voters for his denouncement of lynching had by 1908 become an avowed white supremacist who wrote vicious diatribes against blacks, Jews and Catholics.
There recently has been an argument in libertarian leftist circles that right wing populism is a contradiction in terms; that the original Populists were decidedly left and racially progressive. This case was quite thoughtfully made by Thomas Frank in his recent book, The People, No, which explained the history of the Populist movement and moreso the anti-Populist response which, whether right-wing or center-left, has always been quintessentially elite. But the true origin of the Populist ethos is more complicated- the original Populists were not racially progressive. Far from it, in fact, as was lamented by the Colored Farmers’ Alliance, the black farmers union of the time (and in my mind a far more courageous working class movement than its white counterpart). Certainly in the case of Tom Watson, their support for racial solidarity was a matter of political expediency, arguing that black and white farmers had common cause against the oligarchs, but falling short of actually arguing that the racist attitudes they were trying to curtail in white farmers were baseless. And black farmers were well aware of this; the Populist Party arose from the Farmers’ Alliance, an all-white farmers’ union largely composed of white landowners who employed black sharecroppers- and were happy to represent the interests of the former when they came into conflict with those of the latter.
A brutal example was the cotton strike of 1891, when the intersecting interests of black and white farmers came to a bitter head. The Colored Farmers’ Alliance initiated a general strike of black sharecroppers in Lee County, Arkansas, fighting for a doubling of their cotton piece rate of 50 cents per 100 pounds to $1. The strike resulted in brutal violence, with strikers killing one plantation owner and a white posse killing 12 sharecroppers. Leonidas Polk, in his arterial Populist rag The Progressive Farmer, urged
our farmers to leave their cotton in the field rather than pay more than 50 cents per hundred to have it picked.
Polk, for his part, was an advocate of black emigration from the United States. Here we see the truth; there was Populism, a movement of “working people”, and there was Black Populism, a movement of working people the other working people could do without. Despite the fleeting appeals to transracial solidarity from the likes of Tom Watson, the two were not compatible. One can imagine the annoyance with which black farmers at Populist meetings endured these self-serving appeals to transracial class solidarity while sitting at segregated tables.
Sadly, what we see in the Populist Party of the 1890s (with its admittedly genuine left wing economic policy), the bourgeois nonsense of modern right-wing Populism, and certainly the incoming Biden-era of Neoliberalism is all the same: false appeals to racial solidarity, all of which leave whites and blacks alienated from one another and economically disadvantaged, in the grips of elites they seem to have no meaningful tools to fight against. As the Democrats gleefully abandon their progressive wing for the same elitist garbage that sank them in 2016, they leave the path wide open for the far more politically savvy right to carry the Populist torch with a rhetoric that dishonestly invokes racial unity in a way that should be the meat and potatoes of the left.
But as the mainstream left in America is in fact center right and inextricably bound up with the interests of Wall Street, the only consistent message of racial unity it can develop is one of a diverse oligarchy, hardly appealing to poor whites next to the working class spit and fire of someone like Tucker Carlson, who may not share the interests of the working class but has at least bothered to listen to them long enough to figure out how to manipulate them and convince them that the ruling class of today is decidedly liberal and that somehow Trump’s tax cuts on the rich are only something they ought to support.
The gooey center of American politics is the ability to capture the heart and soul of the swing-prone white working class. The way it looks presently, all you have to be is rhetorically Populist and slightly less visibly psychotic than Donald Trump to successfully do this, and the right has clearly recognized and begun to capitalize on that while the Democrats flounder in an Ivy League soup (some might even say swamp), making constant pretenses towards economic conservatism which can never overwhelm their open contempt for the poor rural voters they condescend towards come election season.
This is the catastrophic choice we’re left with when we’re forced to listen to either brand of elites, who in their varying ways try to claim their ownership of working class representation. One wonders what could be created if we were to try instead to listen to each other, and the sort of people who were willing to form an organization like the Colored Farmers’ Alliance in 1886- the regular people history forgets, who are usually crushed for their bravery, but who have always been on the frontier of moving society in a more civilized, humane and egalitarian direction.