On the hundredth anniversary of William J. Bryan’s great silver crusade, it is fitting that pseudopopulism should become something like a permanent style of American politics. Virtually no one’s a Keynesian anymore, but everyone’s a populist. Everyone’s furious about the inside-the-beltway crowd; everyone’s a person of the people; everyone’s our ally in the perpetual war against the cultural, economic, and political elite. We all know that Washington stinks, that shadowy interests run everything, that boodle is king: this is the monotonous verdict of novel, film, and even corporate press release. So the symbols and images of populism were the lingua franca of this year’s political discourse. The common American’s struggle against the forces of tyranny was a story that every journalist wanted to tell and every politician wanted to star in.
A hundred years ago this combination of forces ignited an explosion of popular outrage against institutional power; today the captains of industry and the career politicians know the game better, steering and even leading us in expressions of outrage against themselves. In political year 1996, both sides were on your side in the struggle against privilege. Bill Clinton might as well be a direct descendant of Bryan, so natural is his Bubba act (which comes complete with enormous appetites, in true Bryan fashion). Meanwhile the plainspoken Bob Dole was a one-man populist crusade against labor unions, bureaucrats, foreign plutocrats, and eastern newspaper editors. Even Newt Gingrich–who has referred to himself as the historical heir of William McKinley and his industrialist fund-raiser/campaign manager Mark Hanna, the duo who neatly dispatched Bryan in 1896 by running the most expensive political campaign the nation had ever seen–even Newt adopted a form of pseudopopulism, albeit an exotic strain from the Limbaugh right, imagining vast plots against the faith and values of the common people orchestrated by “countercultural McGoverniks,” the NEA, and the Washington Post. “The People Outraged” was the only TV show on the only network (brought to you by Ameritech and Archer Daniels Midland, naturally); the election was just a casting call for the lead role. And four years later, once we have discovered that the heroes of ’96 were a gang of fakers, a new coterie of certified-authentic populist heroes will show up to help us reclaim democracy from the interests.
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Then came the cruelest blow. The program’s anchors, accompanied by a political analyst from the Chicago Tribune, congratulated Weller, whose candidacy the Trib had endorsed and whose victory it had predicted, for staving off the powerful forces that were threatening Republican congressmen elsewhere. Weller had won culturally as well as electorally: not only would he remain the congressman, but he got to be the underdog as well, the incumbent and the challenger at the same time. Even his red-baiting was passed over by the Tribune expert as “lighthearted.”
But in taking up his pen Tommy Thompson had more ethereal goals in mind than simply bringing more business to Wisconsin. Deep in his heart, for some reason, Tommy wants you to think of him as a “progressive,” and the purpose of Power to the People is to capture for him, and by extension for his party, the coveted symbols of the moribund populist left. The Progressives, successors of the Populists, are best remembered for their efforts to break up the trusts, ensure living wages for workers, and build a government that could regulate corporate power. Granted, the need for a progressive revival is fairly plain these days: wages and labor are on the retreat in nearly every industry, and the logic of monopoly now works its magic in no less important a field than information. But going to war with the Culture Trust is not what Tommy Thompson has in mind. He aims to do precisely the opposite. He boasts, in fact, that Wisconsin was “among the first states to deregulate telecommunications”–for which the ever-dwindling number of media conglomerates shall be eternally grateful–and in Power to the People he spares no effort to prove that the interests of “the people” and those of “the market” are identical right down the line. “To be the party of the working class,” Tommy even pronounces at one point, “you have to work with business to create jobs for working people.” While the bulk of his book may not be worthy of much attention, the contortions through which he puts the American past in his quest to capture the motorcycle-mounted romance of the populist left deserves some sort of prize.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): illustration by Peter Hannan.
