POPULISM ISN'T POPULAR :

Why Democrats Must Be Populists : And what populist-phobes don't understand about America. (John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira, September 9, 2002, American Prospect)

[Al From and Mark Penn] believe that while populist appeals help with the Democratic base, they hurt Democratic chances among upscale voters -- whom From calls "new-economy swing voters" and whom Penn has labeled "wired workers." They blame Gore's loss in key border states such as Missouri on the defection of these voters, and warn that if Democrats persist in pressing populist themes in November 2002, they will lose those states again.

But this argument doesn't stand up. If you look at Gore's poll ratings before and after his speech at the Democratic convention, his support shoots up among the very voters whom the DLCers believed were cool to such populist appeals. According to the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, Gore's support increased 12 percent among voters who make between $50,000 and $75,000 per year (and by 19 percent among independents, according to the Gallup poll). If you look at the final results, Gore did relatively well among upscale voters, particularly those with high levels of education. Where he slipped precipitously from Clinton's margins in 1996 was among white working-class voters.

Take From and Penn's example of Missouri. In downscale north and southeast Missouri, where the term "wired workers" would provoke quizzical glances, Clinton had won white working-class voters by 50 percent to 38 percent in 1996, but Gore lost them by 60 percent to 38 percent, a huge 34-point swing. By contrast, Gore won upscale new-economy St. Louis County -- the high-tech suburban area to the west of St. Louis -- by 51 percent to 46 percent. Gore lost Missouri in the working class north and southeast, not in the affluent St. Louis or Kansas City suburbs.

Gore lost these working-class voters primarily because his populist appeal and his defense of Social Security could not overcome the Republican wedge issues of 2000: Democratic support for gun control and the shadow cast by the Clinton scandals over Gore's character. In an extensive post-election poll conducted by Gore's pollster Stanley Greenberg, white, non-college-educated male voters, who swung sharply from Clinton in 1996 to Bush in 2000, cited Gore's "exaggerations and untruthfulness," his "anti-gun positions" and his "being too close to Clinton" as the prime reasons for voting against him. College-educated white male voters who opposed Gore, meanwhile, overwhelmingly cited Gore's untruthfulness.

From's and Penn's fears that populism will drive away upscale voters stem in part from their misunderstanding of populism. They are fond of saying that other Democrats are living in the past, but this is a case where the DLCers are. Their model of populist advocacy is the 1930s, when populism did appeal primarily to a working-class electorate. They can't conceive of well-to-do, college-educated populists. But populism's leaders have historically been drawn from the well-to-do and the college-trained. During the early 20th century and again today, populist themes have resonated among upscale as well as downscale voters.

There's a strange disconnect in this essay as the authors argue in favor of economic populism but against social populism, without even seeming to recognize that they're doing the latter. This is an entirely predictable trap that Leftists continue to fall into, misapprehending Man as a primarily economic being. What they are asking for though is that Democrats try to cobble together an inherently unstable coalition that requires a socially liberal pitch to economic elites and an economically liberal pitch to the very poor. The problem is that both pitches tend to turn off the middle class, while the rich, though absorbed by guilt and self-loathing, are well aware that economic populism won't help the poor and the poor are generally hostile to the lax morality of the upper classes. (This last is something that Charles Murtaugh has been pondering.)
Posted by Orrin Judd at August 28, 2002 5:43 PM