On Sat Feb 10 2001, Shane T Taylor wrote:
> Certainly, but he also said he's against capital punishment, which the
> polls show have majority support
That's a good point. Jesse not only combines single issues identified with both parties, he also embraces several positions that are outside the bipartisan consensus, and even outside majority opinions, like his opposition to capital punishment and his opposition to the drug war. It is issues like that that earn him most of his reputation for boldness. Interestingly, to the extent that those issues have found champions, they are just as likely to be people aligned with the Democrats as people aligned with the Republicans (as Dennis Perrin has pointed out several times in the case of drug legalization).
There are several problems with assimilating people like Jesse, and Arianna, and Perot and Jerry Brown to the long line of populist movements extending back to the Reformation. The first is, that so far as I can see, none of these guys are anti-elitist. They are anti-Washington, but that's been the rhetoric of most of our candidates at least since Watergate. I don't remember Jesse or Perot saying anything bad about rich people, or even eggheads. Jesse is if anything more prone to take Menckenesque swipes at the Booboisie. And Arianna is as elite and foreign as you can get. (Soirees, indeed.) So if they are not anti-elite, they are not conspiratorial, and they are not ethnic scape-goating, the comparison with historical populist movements seems to me to obscure more than it enlightens.
And that's leaving out the biggest problem: that historically, populist movements, right and left, have been social movements. They established institutions that went way beyond mere political parties. It was also of their essence that they intended a transformation of the country, a moral regeneration. Centrist populists generate no such movements. They have no organization beyond party organization (if they even have that) and no intentions beyond winning elections and installing new policies. Unlike the historical populisms of right and left, which saw their countries in the grip of some great evil, centrist populism is marked by its self-satisfaction. They think the American people are just peachy, just the way they are. The only problem, as far as these voters is concerned, is that the political class needs renewal. Fresh clear, bold ideas, shaking things up. That's all these people want. They think to accomplish that, all you have to do is get elected.
In the end, what it means to call these politicians populist is that they tend to emphasize rather than play down single issues that stir up emotions. What makes them centrist is that they choose issues that straddle the right left divide. It's almost as if they've decided to balance out the emotional claims by having some from each side, rather than playing towards the center like a Demopug by using code. And reinforcing both their populism and their centrism in the senses given above is their attack on party duopoly -- through attacking the party elites, through setting up third parties, and through championing issues outside the bipartisan consensus.
Hopefully that's the answer to Kelley's question "What's the point?" For better or worse, it seems to me that these people have enough points in common with each other, and enough points of of difference from right and left-wing populism (in any of the many senses of those terms), to constitute a distinguishable phenomenon. And as a related point, their lack of connection to any kind of transformative movement, and the lack of any sign that they ever will generate such a movement, makes it exceedingly unlikely that we should worry about them turning into the Strassner brothers. Their main problem seems to me to be their lack of seriousness, not their deadly seriouness.
As for Kelley's (and others') visceral aversion to the word "centrist" I'm certainly open to any other suggestions. But what some people call the emptiness of the word might be its main virtue. Perhaps as with the prefix "post," it primarily signifies what it is not, and that the difference is important. And that our understanding is provisional.
Michael
__________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com