The Alternative To The GOP’s Know-Nothing Populism

The game plan of the Republican election campaign was laid out last night at their Minneapolis-St. Paul convention. It relies almost totally on what is now an old and tested Karl Rove/George W. Bush theme — a faux populism, directed against “cultural elites,” that ignores the economically powerful and the great concentrations of corporate wealth. At times, the result verges on self-parody: a parade of East Coast millionaire and billionaire speakers, from Giuliani of New York to Romney of Massachusetts,  railing against East Coast elites.

It would be a mistake, however, to underestimate the potential political appeal of this faux populism. It has real roots in American history and society, going back to mid-eighteenth century ‘Know Nothing’ populism which targeted immigrants and to the demagoguery of post-Civil War Southern white populism so strikingly captured in C. Vann Woodward’s study of the tragic trajectory of Tom Watson. When Giuliani sneered at “cosmopolitanism,” he placed himself squarely in that tradition, speaking coded ‘culture war’ language for the denigration of diverse, pluralist urban centers where people of different national origins, different races and ethnicities, different faith communities and different sexual orientations live and work together. The irony is that it is his own ancestors who were among the targets of the ‘Know Nothing’ populism he now espouses with such enthusiasm.

In the Rovian iteration, this ‘Know Nothing’ populism draws upon another reactionary moment of American history, anti-intellectualism. In American presidential politics, political leaders who are also intellectuals, from Adlai Stevenson to Eugene McCarthy to Bill Bradley, have consistently fared poorly — and in significant measure because they were intellectuals. In this regard, American political history is distinct from most other democratic nations, including even our closest neighbor Canada, where intellectuals often play a preeminent role in politics. Drawing upon this theme, the Rovian Republicans intend to use one of Obama’s strengths — a powerful intellect and command of ideas — against him. Yet the American electorate has changed significantly in the half century since the campaign of the last intellectual Democratic Party Presidential candidate, with a dramatic increase in the numbers of college educated voters. On this count, the Republican political strategy — and not just its policy agenda — may be living in the past.

But the Obama campaign and Democrats will not win without a positive alternative to the faux ‘Know Nothing’ populism of Bush-McCain Republicanism. There is a real danger here — and not just in the field of education, although it clearly exists here — in adopting a mealy-mouthed version of Republican economic and social policy, advocating greater reliance on markets and more privatization and calling for further diminishment of our public square and of the role of government in the economy. It is not as a  mindless echo of Romney’s attacks on teacher unions, in the vein of Fenty, Booker and the Wall Street hedge fund operators of DFER, that Democrats will claim victory. Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and other key battleground states will not be won by temporizing on NAFTA, or by soft-pedaling the  need for a system of universal health care. Rather, in an era of economic hardship, Democrats must offer a genuine economic populism, one which takes on the cause of American working people against economic elites. We must take on directly a Republican Presidential candidate who believes that the economic stewardship of George Bush has been on target, and whose main economic advisor calls working people hurt by the dramatic economic decline of the Bush administration “whiners.” We must not be afraid to say that the real “special interests” are not embattled unions fighting for working people, but the rapacious economic and corporate elites who have dramatically expanded their power and their share of American wealth at the expense of working people over the last eight years. Democrats must take up the cause of economic justice.

As much as the faux ‘Know Nothing’ populism of the Republicans has roots in the darker moments of American history and society, the genuine economic populism of Democrats like William Jennings Bryan, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Hubert Humphrey and Robert Wagner Sr.  has deeper, more powerful roots in  American history and in what makes American great. It provide our alternative, and we must embrace it. In taking on the real elites, it provides the path to victory.

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