As the current financial meltdown deepens, predictions of a rising populist backlash against the nabobs of Wall Street are starting to echo across the land. Is the fire this time so hot that the Middle American Radicals will finally rise up and take back their country from the elites in Washington and Manhattan who have mismanaged the finances?
We have all heard this many times. In the early 1980s, the former Nixon adviser and political commentator Kevin Phillips predicted that the pro-business program of Reaganomics—deregulation of the stock market, large tax cuts for the wealthy, and high deficit spending—would provoke a backlash in the heartland. As Phillips argued in his Post-Conservative America (1982), the “Reagan coalition” of big business, evangelicals, and right-wing populists was doomed to extinction, since Reagan’s attempt to restore the tax cutting ideology of the Coolidge era without correlative cuts in spending was not bound to win the support of conservatives wedded to the populist ideals of Andrew Jackson or William Jennings Bryan. Phillips, a lifelong Republican (albeit in a “country & western Marxist” sense), gloomily predicted that favoritism to the corporate elite was no basis for building a successful political realignment on the Right. When Americans voted for Clinton in 1992, it seemed to Phillips, Sam Francis, and many others that the middle class had reached the boiling point over their failure to benefit from the policies of the Reagan era, which Bush the Elder had continued. Perhaps the MARS would finally have their chance, once they discovered that the Democrats were no more populist than the GOP.
As we know, no middle class rebellion materialized. Instead, Americans wracked up unsustainable private and corporate debt-loads well into the Clinton and 2nd Bush eras. The middle class continued to embrace the attitude of the Reagan era towards debt—it doesn’t matter. As Andrew Bacevich has recently argued in The American Conservative, middle-class Americans have been encouraged since the 1980s to expect endless and painless consumption, without sacrifice.
If all this is true, isn’t there something odd about expecting a populist rebellion? For if the middle class represents the “People,” then why would its members now rebel against policies which they have otherwise supported these past decades?
It is tempting to respond that the crisis is so serious this time that the likelihood of a populist rebellion is that much greater. After all, numerous analysts have declared the current meltdown to be the most serious crisis since the Great Depression. When the middle class is being squeezed in such an unprecedented fashion, surely the prospect of a prairie fire is good, yes?
Without middle class support (or at least complacency), however, this crisis could not have happened. Usually populist rebellions enjoy whatever little success they have only if the rebels have failed to benefit from the economic policies of elite groups. I am not holding my breath for a new version of Bryan’s famous “Cross of Gold” speech, in which he famously condemned the Republicans and big business, during the 1896 election, for selling out (“crucifying on a Cross of Gold”) the interests of the heartland for the sake of fidelity to the gold standard. As a fire-breathing evangelical with no ties whatsoever to the corporate elites of his day, Bryan could easily appeal to those Americans left out of the prosperity of the Gilded Age: farmers, workers, and the small towns. Bryan was himself a have-not, appealing to his fellow have-nots. And even with mass support from the heartland in a time of severe economic depression, he still lost to McKinley.
It is highly unlikely that a middle-class version of Bryan will emerge out of this crisis to rally the troops: the rousing “Cross of Gold” speech will not be replaced by a tepid “Cross of worthless paper securities” speech. Both parties have broad middle-class support and are wedded to the managerial elites in a manner inconceivable to the America of Bryan’s age. The evangelical base of voters, whose ancestors threw their support behind Bryan, has become far too prosperous to rebel against the lingering effects of Reaganomics. Disgruntled as the middle class is at present, it is probable that they will go along with the “solutions” to the crisis offered up by the Democrats or the Republicans. As for the true have-nots, who have never benefitted from this prosperity in the first place, it is unlikely that they will even bother to vote (if election history since the 1960s is any indication).
The revolution is on hold.
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A New Populism?
As the current financial meltdown deepens, predictions of a rising populist backlash against the nabobs of Wall Street are starting to echo across the land. Is the fire this time so … [Read More]
Posted by Grant Havers on October 01, 2008
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