Labor unions hoped to turn the Wisconsin recall election into a rallying cause for their ailing movement. But a Democratic president couldn’t be dragged off the sidelines for the fight.
Anti-Wall Street activists were itching to see JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon bashed like a pinata at a congressional hearing just two weeks after his firm blew $2 billion in risky speculation. But Democratic senators greeted him with flowers, not fury.
And, as President Barack Obama attempts to make Mitt Romney’s history as a wealthy buy-out artist a centerpiece of his 2012 message, he is second-guessed and hushed by some of the leading voices in his own party.
What the hell ever happened to populism in the Democratic Party?
The recent converge of setbacks on the left has activists and historians alike pondering anew how the modern Democratic Party has severed its connection to its own history—a tradition that many liberals wrongly imagined was about to spring back to life in the Obama years.
Populism—with its rowdy zeal to brawl against economic elites on behalf of the working classes—was for decades the party’s defining cause.
In language that highlights the tameness of contemporary class warfare, FDR railed against “economic royalists” and the “forces of organized greed,” and, of his business opponents, he gloated, “I welcome their hatred.”
These days, it’s possible to count on one hand the number of unapologetic populists in the U.S. Senate and, besides Elizabeth Warren, there are few more on the horizon.
For the fighting left, it is a frustrating puzzle. If ever there was a moment for a good, old-fashioned class war, at first blush it seems now should be the time. Yet even after the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression, there are few politicians preaching, or practicing, the old-time religion. The Occupy Wall Street movement, leaderless and without clear aims, is petering out as quickly as it sprang up.
Politicians, union leaders, and scholars cite four broad reasons why populism is not making much of a revival in the age of Obama:
• The political infrastructure doesn’t exist. Class-based partisan appeals by Democrats in the early and mid-twentieth century were typically supported by a robust and well-organized labor movement. That doesn’t exist in any similar form these days.
• Even populist politicians need money. Conspiracy theorists who believe campaign contributions drive the agenda aren’t altogether wrong. It is virtually impossible to be a successful national Democrat without relying heavily on business interests, including the financial industry, for campaign funds.
• The president, a man comfortable in elite circles, is not temperamentally inclined for the kind of sustained, rough-edged partisan combat that true populist politics requires. So while he is tempted by populist appeals on some days, he often turns ambivalent and changes his message the next.
• Most important of all, lots of Democrats simply do not support populism, on either ideological or stylistic grounds. Many upscale Democrats believe that Washington needs less combat, not more, and populist messages strike them as irrelevant at best, demagogic at worst. Even some working class voters have their assets in the stock market, due to 401Ks and IRAs, making even the most traditional of Democrats believe their interests are more in line with Wall Street than opposed.
This has left business as politically influential as at any time in recent history. And, with the 2010 Citizens United decision, in which the Supreme Court struck down key limits on contributions, the capacity of corporate interests to directly control campaigns may be as significant as at any time since the Gilded Age.
“They own the Republican Party and they have too much influence in my party, I mean there’s no question about that,” said Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio). “That’s why wealth is so concentrated at the top. And that’s all enforced now by this outside spending. Every member around here has had to have thought at times that, ‘If I vote this way the wrath of God is coming down on me.'”
Damon Silvers, policy chief at the AFL-CIO, portrayed the economic crash of 2008 and the Citizens United case as a cruel convergence for the cause of populism. “Citizens United has opened the tap on an ocean of money,” Silvers said. “The fear of that money is a trap. It stops politicians from talking about the issues voters are talking about: jobs, outsourcing, inequality, an unfair tax system. The only way to engage in the conversation the public cares about in this time of economic crisis and popular anger is to stand up to the power of money in politics.”
The crash of 2008 and backlash to the bailout left many liberals hopeful that there would be an opening for, if not a 21st Century New Deal, at least a sustained period of populist legislation. But for many progressives, the signature laws passed in Obama’s first term fell short of what they envisioned. The stimulus wasn’t big enough, healthcare reform didn’t include a public option and the crackdown on Wall Street didn’t go far enough. Then came 2010, when the right tapped into an Obama backlash and recaptured the U.S. House.
But populism’s decline is rooted in more long-term factors. Chief among these is the collapse of organized labor.
Just under 12 percent of the American workforce belonged to a union in 2011 — down from a 50s-era high of about 35 percent.
“The labor union movement is the movement that carries [populism] into the Democratic Party and as it gets weaker populism has gotten weaker,” lamented Robert Borosage, a longtime liberal activist who heads the Campaign for America’s Future.
And of the workers who are unionized now, more are in public-sector jobs – making them easier political prey for the right.
“It’s not the grange, it’s not the factory floor, it’s the bureaucrat,” said liberal author Rick Perlstein, explaining why today’s union movement is seen with less sympathy.
And without a strong labor movement, there is less institutional power nudging the political conversation toward matters of economic justice and reminding Democrats from whence their electoral strength springs.
“In order for populism to be powerful, populist institutions have to be powerful,” is how Georgetown University professor Michael Kazin put it.
But the energy in the progressive movement over recent decades has been more on cultural issues such as gender equality and gay rights than on bread-and-butter issues like wages and hours.
“The old liberal emphasis on the haves and the have nots hasn’t been there,” said Kazin, author of books on the history of the left and William Jennings Bryan. “They’ve been focused on issues perceived as upper middle class issues.”
The last Democrat to truly tap into mass anger, though about war not economics said the campaign finance system desperately needed fixing to rein in the power of business, but fretted that only a crisis may prompt reform.
“It may even take another banking collapse before that gets fixed,” said Howard Dean, the 2004 presidential candidate and former DNC chairman.