Populism is politics which opposes wealth and power
in the name of  the common folk. It takes both left
wing and right wing forms and sometimes degenerates
into bigotry and attacks on minorities. Populism can
be faked, and that is being done right now - e.g.,
Limbaugh and Beck. Populist appeals can be made by
spokesmen for special interests who have no
intention of fulfilling their democratic promises,
but who are just opportunistically faking populism
as part of an attack on some enemy. (As I never get
tired of saying: Republican populism is fake, but
Democratic elitism is real).

Since the Fifties the Democratic Party, whose
populist wing was critically important during the
New Deal, has avoided and repressed populism.
Individual populists such as Paul Wellstone have
occasionally been elected, often in defiance of the
party machine, but they have never had much
influence in the party. The Democratic strategy has
been cooperation with big business, and their slogan
has been "a rising tide lifts all boats" --
"win-win" solutions where everyone wins and nobody
loses. This worked pretty well until about 1970,
when business started to pull away from the deal,
and since that time it's been mostly downhill for
the Democrats, for labor, and for the average
American.

When they made their deal with big business, the
Democrats became a wonky party of technocrats and
expert administrators who balanced all the various
interests and came up with the answer which was best
for everyone, and they distanced themselves from
their earlier party-of-the-common-man pretensions.
Rather than to represent the majority of the
electorate, they increasingly defined their
constituency as a hodgepodge of special interest.
Political parties inevitably do represent plural
interests, as the Democrats certainly had done ever
since the Civil War, but the post-Fifties Democrats
made a fractionated constituency a deliberate goal
and did everything they could to avoid majoritarian
appeals and to marginalize majoritarianism within
the party.

In 1948 the Democrats purged its left, much of which
had populist roots, and the right populists mostly
ended in the Republican Party. Truman's purge wasn't
thorough enough for the right, and an anti-elitist
McCarthyism strain emerged which survives to this
day, (for example with the teabaggers). Meanwhile,
Democratic intellectuals, partly following the
leftist German refugee Adorno, developed a theory
holding that all populism is ultimately
totalitarian, either Fascist or Communist.

The liberals described McCarthy as a populist and
hinted that he was a Fascist. This was actually a
very peculiar move. First, while McCarthy was
anti-elitist and demagogic and appealed to the
common man, he also was a fairly standard
conservative Republican whose support did not come
mostly from populists or progressives. Second,
calling McCarthy a populist did not hurt him with
anyone who had not read Adorno and who still admired
the Populists. And finally, by the time these
criticisms of McCarthy came out, McCarthy had been
censured and had died in disgrace.

The target was not McCarthy at all. McCarthy had had
a lot of Democratic support, including the Kennedys,
but in any case he had been defeated. The
technocratic Cold War liberals had won - they
controlled the Democratic Party and expected to win
the Presidency in 1960. The real goal of these
attacks was to preclude the re-emergence of a
populist wing within the Democratic Party, so that
the Democrats could redefine themselves as a
neutral, non-majoritarian elite of experts. While in
office, Democrats conduct a realistic, militaristic
foreign policy while domestically dividing the
goodies between the nation's many and varied
interest groups without identifying with any one of
them -- and above all without responding to
majoritarian anti-business or anti-war popular
movements.

My main conclusion is that the Democrats have
crippled themselves by renouncing populist and
majoritarian appeals while presenting themselves as
expert administrators and effectively allowing the
Republican Party to cash in on fake populism. This
strategy hasn't worked since 1968, and it has
crippled the Democrats by making them incapable of
counterattacking against blatantly dishonest
fake-populist appeals by the Republicans. At the
level of the high-level party pros and a lot of
elected officials, this isn't a problem at all -
they are business Democrats on the take from the
plutocratic malefactors, and they do very well for
themselves even when the Democrats lose.

But the elitist strategy is disastrous in its
effects at the lower levels - the sincere, wonkish
party workers who have been indoctrinated with
anti-populism in Pol Sci 101, and even more so the
enormous contingent of Democratic voters who have
also taken Pol Sci 101 and think of themselves as
wonks. On the internet and elsewhere, far too often
rank and file Democratic discussions of politics,
rather than concentrating on the reasons why the
Democratic position is the right one (in the cases
when it really is), end up with wonky discussions
about process, and these discussions always seem to
end with a lesser-evil slide to the center. And
while this is exactly what the Democratic leadership
wants, this is usually not what rank and file
Democrats, Democratic volunteers, and idealistic
low-level workers want.