>>> Wojtek Sokolowski <swsokolowski at yahoo.com> 09/18/2008 10:51 AM >>>
----- Original Message ----
From: Charles Brown <charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us>
CB:This position by Mencken is not to his political credit.
[WS:] I am not debating this. I think his animosity toward FDR was mainly a sign of his petulance rather than a bona fide political position. The same can be said about his anti-populism - it is rooted in his family experience with the Know Nothing movement (I think his old folk were attacked and injured by a Know Nothing mob, if I remember correctly) - and that seem to set his opinion about any mass movement. Certainly, nothing to be proud of. OTOH, this also shaped his views of KKK, and he was the only journalist in Baltimore who named (in print) the names of the perpetrators of the infamous Salisbury lynching of 1933. That is certainly to his credit.
However, the issue of populism in this country is rather complicated, as you are surely aware.
^^^^ CB: That's why I said "The populism of this period ( 1930's) is not misguided, and FDR-ism some of the best (populism) America has had. In terms of the complexities or variety of American populism - 1930's, New Deal , Wagner Act, Social Security, WPA, bank regulations, tax the rich, not racist - is the best variety in US history as far as populism. A main goal of the US left should be a revival of 1930's populism, neo-New Dealism.
^^^^^
On the one hand, no progressive victory is possible without a mass movement, no doubt about it. But on the other hand, any mast movement intghis country is far more likely to take a turn to th eright than to the left. ^^^^ CB: I don't think history sustains this proposition. We've had American mass movements go left and right. The US Civil war was a mass movement to the left in the North.
^^^
Examples abound, from the already quoted Know Nothing to KKK to militias, Reagan "revolutionaries," and the recent anti-immigrant movement. If wer were to rely on th elaw of probablity alone, the chances are that mass movement in America would be a gutter fascist backlash (dominated by pissed-off white males) against some minority than a progressive movement.
^^^ CB: I think the odds are a bit more even as to left or right, especially since we've just lived through about 30 years of white backlash against the Civil Rights Movement in the form of Reaganism, so any "backlash" now would be against that right backlash and that would be backlashing to the left. Has the backlashed based Southern Strategy of Nixon/Reagan/Gingrich/Bush exhausted itself or not ? That's what's on for this election.
^^^^6
Even if you take the Civil Rights Movement - undoubtedly one the brightest spots in this country history - it is diffciult to characterize it as a populist movement. In fact it was a reaction to the populist movement of white supremacists in the South who rebelled against the Fed forcing them to abandon segregation. The CRM had at two different and equally important component - the popular mobilization of Blacks and libearl segments of the white population, and and the instituional support "from above" mainly from the Federal government and mainline Black churches. It was intellectual - as evidenced inter alia by its links to Gandhism (as commemorated at the MLK memorial in Atlanta) - rather than populist.
^^^^ CB: Well, it was a _mass_ movement, a mass social movement, not a cult or sectarian political theater. As to whether a _majority_ , that's the contest. Civil Rights Movement became a majority movement in that the Democrat federal office holders, including President and Congress , and the Rep and Dem Supreme Court who represented majorities carried significant changes in federal law . All reform movements have as their goal law changes. Through the DP , the Civil Rights Movement succeeded fabulously in making changes in the law abolishing Jim Crow. There is new racism, but it is not Jim Crow. There is now Reaganite racism ,which is different than Jim Crow in that its signal characteristic is _denial_ of racism by whites, and thus the pernicious reverse discrimination/reverse racism doctrine and popular opinion, thus outlawing of affirmative action, thus, accusing Black protest against this denied racism as "playing the race card", etc., etc. the whole nine yards of Reaganite racist ideology and chains of lying thought.
^^^
I admit that my knowledge of the early 20th century populism is limited, but I also undestand that Hofstadter chastised it for its anti-intellectualism. When I called the 1930s populism "misguided" I meant to say that it was an expression of false hope of progressive intellectuals that they can turn populist mobs into a progressive force.
^^^^ CB: Au contraire. The 1930's were a time of roaring success and fulfilled, not false , hope of mobilizing masses of workers and farmers into a progressive force that made major legal reforms for the We, the People, including American intellectuals playing a role in the mobilization and struggle. Ashamed that Mencken was not part of that.
*******
Wojtek
--------------------------------------------------------------- "When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental — men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost. [...] All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men." - HL Mencken ----------------------------------------------------------------
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