First off, Kazin spends four pages criticizing the classical school theories of populism -- pp. 190-193. But he has plenty of criticism of a variety of forms of populism, including the early strains.
One of the staples of repressive and right-wing populist ideology has been producerism, a doctrine that champions the so-called producers in society against both "unproductive" elites and subordinate groups defined as lazy or immoral.
According to Kazin:
"...the romance of producerism had a cultural blind spot; it left unchallenged strong prejudices toward not just African-Americans but also toward recent immigrants who had not learned or would not employ the language and rituals of this variant of the civil religion....Even those native-born activists who reached out to immigrant laborers assumed that men of Anglo-Saxon origins had invented political democracy, prideful work habits, and well-governed communities of the middling classes." p. 35.
In the 1920s industrial philosophy of Henry Ford, and Father Coughlin’s fascist doctrine in the 1930s, producerism fused with antisemitic attacks against “parasitic” Jews. Producerism, with its baggage of prejudice, remains today the most common populist narrative on the right, and it facilitates the use of demonization and scapegoating as political tools.
Kazin: “Coughlin and his followers viewed finance capital and Marxist socialism as twin faces of a secular Satan. They defended a ‘people’ who cohered more through piety, economic frustration, and a common dread of powerful, modernizing enemies than through any class identity.” p. 112.
Kazin: "The rhetoric of white civic groups was full of accusations that ‘government bureaucrats, many influenced by Communism or socialism…misused tax dollars to fund experiments in social engineering for the benefit of pressure groups."
"[Politicians like Louise Day Hicks] in Boston and Mario Procaccino in New York echoed this sentiment when they taunted ‘limousine liberals’ for busing children to integrated schools while doing nothing to curb urban crime."
"Such talk represented one of the more persistent strains in the populist tradition. The attack on domestic subversion in city hall was new, but the charge that a haughty elite and a rabble of black or yellow hue were ganging up on the industrious Caucasian middle was nearly as old as the republic." p. 227.
Kazin suggests that “when a new breed of inclusive grassroots movements does arise, intellectuals should contribute their time, their money, and their passion for justice. They should work to stress the harmonious, hopeful, and pragmatic aspects of populist language and to disparage the meaner ones.” p. 284.
-Chip (obsessively types up notes from books when researching) Berlet
----- Original Message ----- From: "Max Sawicky" <sawicky at bellatlantic.net> To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Sent: Tuesday, October 02, 2001 9:18 PM Subject: RE: Organizations In Defense of Freedom
> I don't read Kazin as particularly critical of
> the original pop's. He describes it all as a
> rhetorical style, which does neglect (without
> explicitly condemning) the internal theory,
> but he sees such a style as a practical
> political necessity. At least, that's
> what I thought he said to me.
>
> mbs
>
>
>
> Hi,
>
> Canovan and Kazin are writing in opposition to both the apologists such as
> Goodwyn, and those of the classical school such as Hofstatdter. You simply
> have
> the dates of various interpretations out of order.
>
> The most recent scholarship on populism argues that Goodwyn etc. were too
> soft
> on populism, while Hofstadter etc. were too hard on populism.
>
> We can disagree about the more recent scholarship, but Canovan and Kazin are
> hardly fans of Hofstadter and the classical school. Neither Canovan nor
> Kazin
> consider the US 1890s Populists to be "provincial rubes."
>
> Kovel argues the lack of a populist structural critique point better than I.
>
> "Now there are plenty of good populists, as I have said. However, so long as
> they remain populist, they cannot rise above the implications of its basic
> method, which is to personalize politics. The racism and scapegoating can be
> restrained, but the need to focus upon some personnification of evil
> remains."
>
> http://www.publiceye.org/Sucker_Punch/Kovel.htm
>
> -Chip
>
>