Yesterday Max pointed back at populism of the late 19th century as a fertile ground for looking at the present. And who, having watched yet another bloodless performance by some FoxNews Democrat can deny that the moral clarity, fire in the belly and political grounding of populism is distinctly lacking in today's Democratic Party?

However, there is a larger picture - it is easy to pick apart the many failings of the populist movement, as a product of its time and place. It is even useful to do so, because in our own moment, some of the same mistakes are being made. "Energy Independence" is the "Free Coinage of Silver" of our era - a bad idea which is near and dear to the hearts of millions who don't have a clue about how to solve the real problems.

That larger picture is that, in the present, we must replace an old conversation - a conservative/reactionary/technocratic conversation with a new one - a progressive/populist/liberal conversation. The context of the populist movement is vital - because the natural rival of populism in the public mind is the reactionary movement. Racism and homophobia are the populism of fools.

While there are dominant ideologies to different eras, ideologies which govern without a conversation must use force to impose their will. When ideology becomes theology, then the state must have its own inquisition and inquisitors. The old conversation in America - which dominated from 1981 to 2006 - was a conservative/reactionary/technocratic conversation. Conservatism was the rubric of government, which was directed at furthering a reactionary vision of society, and which used technocratic means to accomplish a reactionary society by conservative means. And if the technocrats got too uppity, they were accused of having "liberal bias".

This conversation was not maintained without some effort, the media happily played along in demonizing liberal, progressive and populist elements, except in very narrow circumstances when these elements were temporarily useful in advancing some reactionary idea. Human rights suddenly became interesting to the media with respect to foreign policy, only when human rights were part of the causus belli against Saddam. Gas prices were a concern at $1.50/gallon under Clinton, but not at $3/gallon under Bush. And so on.

Many liberals could, and did, participate in this conversation as technocrats, essentially reduced to wining about some obvious problem, begging for a few pennies to plug the gap. Some embraced this converstation, arguing that they should be more interested in talking to their centre-right technocratic counterparts rather than to the populist or progressive impulses in society. I won't name any names here, you know who you are.

Populism is, indeed, all the rage in politics, and Max is more than right in pointing people back at the foundation of the word and the world view - simply because populism is usually found in rather debased forms. The crusade for a party unbeholden to entrenched interests is a topic of obsessive debate today. If Vermont is the epicenter of the exotic politics of viable third party candidates today Kansas played that role in the 19th century. Populism advocated, and as importantly, agitated for, many of the actions of government that were to follow - income tax, labor unions, limits on corporate size and power. The undebased populist coin is still good in the realm - the Populists of the late 19th century were against what we call "Corporate Welfare" today, and against an internal "Pinkerton System" of federal police.

However, the debased forms of the present often represent the lesser tendencies of populism itself. If a liberal devolves into a technocrat, a populist devolves into a reactionary. The political career of Thomas E. Watson provides a personal face to that arc. From Farmer's crusader who broke with the Democratic Party in Georgia over the Speakership, to Vice-Presidential Candidate on the Populist Party ticket - down to anti-catholic and negrophobe publisher and author, and finally short lived Senator of unreconstructed Jim Crowism by 1920 - Watson passed through almost all of the stages of populism, down to its tail end. He showed that one could be sympathetic to socialism and a pacificist, at the same time being a virulent anti-semite and racist.

Populism's problem is that it wants people to hold on to the world of the every day. That every day world, however, is filled with the ghosts of prejudices and long forgotten crimes, and it is easy to turn defense of the ordinary, into a hatred of that which disturbs the norm. If a liberal goes bad by accepting tenure and deciding that the boat doesn't need to be rocked, a populist goes bad by trying to throw people off the boat.

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Which returns me to the importance of the national political conversation. It is the tension between fundamentally unified goals expressed by fundamentally different means which keeps people honest. It is the cries of pain, hunger and frustration which, should they reach the ears of the technocat, should keep him awake at night and not allow him to accept the world as it is. Equally important, it is the policy imagination, and the vision of the wider world which keeps the populist from degenerating down into a localist and isolationist.

The present conversation is broken. It is unable, even derisively dismissive, of "the reality based community". Reality, however, may lose the debates, but it wins all the arguments. Reality is setting in Iraq, as it will set in on the subject of the budget soon enough. A reality based community, in order to be a reality based polity, needs a form of conversation which is adequeate to its goals, problems and means.

The pillars of that conversation must be populism, progressivism and liberalism.

Populism is the easiest to make the case for, we would all like to believe that what we do is for "the people". But as the history of progressive and populist causes in the late 19th century and early 20th century shows - it is far from easy to separate out what is good for "the people" from what is good for "my people", who are not "your people". In linguistics you learn that it is "the little words" that often control the meaning, the same is true in politics.

Populism's place is thus, a slippery slope. The reason for this is that populism desires, even demands, that actions taken be consonant with the emotional logic of the public at large. In one sense this is the most vital contribution of populism. People can't make an idea work, if they can't get it. However, within the public imagination there is a host of superstition and demonology. There are "obvious" truths which are, in fact, obviously false. Populism is more than a bull in a china shop, it is bullshit as people go shopping for goods from China.

Populism is the dynamite of politics - it has the explosive force to cut through mountains, and clear away obstructions. It also has the ability to blow your fool hand off if you aren't careful. Populism is also focus - without the focus on who the actual owners of government, and indeed the economy, are, it is easy for those in power to spend their time filing away their own burdens. Managers will pay more for an hour of their own time, than for a day of their customer's time - and the same is true in politics: people fight harder to get the corner office than to keep a roof over the head of a constituent.

Already key outrages against the public - such as the bankruptcy bill - are fading into the background. We have legislation that allows people to tithe rather than pay back creditors under the bankruptcy bill, but no move to actually roll back what is the worst legislation passed for the middle class in a generation bulging with competition for the title.

Populism's lacks - greater vision, the ability to determine the real causes of public misery, and an excessive focus on the Jeffersonian surreality of localism - are balanced by the other two points on the triangle. Where we must replace reactionary outrage with populist righteous anger - we must replace conservative piloting of the ship of state with progressivism, and mere technocratic manipulation with an authentic liberalism.

The replacement of conservatism by progressivism is most keenly felt among the young, in no small part because they have the least to conserve, and it is on the backs of the young that the mountain of debt - both explicit and implicit - rests. However, the urge to reach for the stars is not limited to the young, and indeed it is often the old who are most able to look longingly towards the promised land that they will not reach.

The raison d'etre of progressivism is a simple declarative truth: times will not be as they are. We cannot continue to slupr down an ocean of oil and belch an atmosphere of carbon dioxide. There is not enough tradition hydrocarbon fuel on the planet, and there is not enough air to sink the refuse into, to provide everyone with a decent living. The simple truth that the way of life of the present is rapidly hurtling towards oblivion, once grasped, creates an ethical imperative that is as powerful as populism's moral imperative. If we cannot leave people in the present in poverty, despair and frustration, we cannot condemn people in the future to the same fate.

Progressivism realizes that the ony way out is forward. That attempting to replace cheap petroleum with liquified coal is like replacing indentured servants with slaves, or breaking on the wheel with the rack. It is change with out advancement. Progressivism also realizes that human decency is a moving target. That which the past would accept as the basic human standard of living once, is not acceptable now, because we have more now than we did before. Where the populist wants a less molested version of his own century - late 19th, 20th or early 21st - the progressive realizes that the 22nd century is coming, at the rate of 60 seconds every minute, whatever we do.

Which brings us to the third, and most problematic, leg of the triangle. It is problematic because old liberalism is blamed, excessively, for the failures of the 1968-1980 period. In point of fact, failure is always a team effort, and the various contending strains of political effort - reactionary, populist, conservative alike - are as much to blame for the collapse of the post-war political an economic system. It is not that one can really defend the Cold War and its excesses on moral grounds, but one must admit that it was the spur to making the lives of more people better than any other time in history. Liberalism is also blamed for the failure of other ideologies of the left, particularly, and most egregiously, Stalinism.

The collapse of Stalinism, in fact, is and should be the great boon to both Socialism and Liberalism as ideologies - in that it was the presence of a supposedly leftist state which pursued supposedly humane ideals by the most inhumane reasons that was a constant drag on both the theoretical and practical existence of liberal government. The need to explain, or explain away, the Soviet Union, warped the direction of liberal and socialist thought, and the pragmatic need to fight the Cold War led an almost unimaginably long list of violations of the basic tennets of liberalism. We cannot discount the amount of human misery which was inflicted by nominally liberal and nominally socialist governments in order to hold back the Soviet Empire. We cannot discount the amount of human misery that various "People's Republics" inflicted in the name of expanding that empire.

Freed of the huge hole which was the Cold War, the intellectual ideologies of the left - with their intellectual imperative to recreate the landscape of human thought as the means to recreating the geography of human existence - should have been free to imagine what could be done with the human effort unbound by the end of the Cold War. For a brief moment the "peace dividend" was a topic of debate and threatened to unbalance the entire conservative conversation. If suddenly there was more than enough, America would soon turn away from an ideology that supposes that there is always too little.

One lack has been the lack of drive - without a populist movement to provide a stream of needs, the intellectual imperative often wanders into its own fetid swamps. Another lack has been the lack of hope - despair poisons minds. Both of these gaps in the imagination of the intellect of the left can be traced to the lack of a conversation to be an equal participant in, as opposed the the house slaves of a reactionary engine.

But if the need for populism is to remember its past, and thus face the failures of past waves of populism - the need for the intellectual wing of the left is to forget its past. The modern era produced a liberalism and a socialism which were products both of the opportunities and the challenges of that moment. At the same time that the populists were railing against the railroads - the real solution to the problem of transport - paved roads and internal combustion - were coming into being. It was Grover Cleveland, a hard money Democrat - who set the ball rolling towards an America knit together by public, paved, roads. It is a feature of life so omnipresent as to escape us. There was not even the frail outline of such a system in 1892.

The intellectual face of the left needs to face forward again. It also needs to end its subservience to the popular imagination's lesser aspects, as it so often has during the Clintonian years. Liberals need to stop playing the bottom to the reactionary top - because the reactionaries, while they represent impulses from the public, do not represent the public itself. Racism, homphobia, violence, envy, anti-intellectualism are outbreaks of the diseases of the public imagination, not the public imagination itself.

This conversation is newly foaled and on spindly, wobbly, legs. It has elected a Congress with a mandate to stop digging in the hole we are in, but without a clear means to make progress. There are a swirl of demands, ideas, hopes, fears, memes and goals - but as yet no means of knitting them together into a comprehensive vision. While leadership is one aspect of the creation of a consensus, the other side of leadership is a conversation. Leaders may create ideas, but far more often they draw from others, and give expression to the synthesis which others have come to, but not been able to ennunciate.

Populism? By all means. But those means are going to be liberal and progressive means.