Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter insists the concept of populism is getting ruined by Fox News. In a piece titled "Enter the Foxulists: The faux populism of Palin, Dobbs, and Beck," Alter cringes at the thought of these people running for president:
Lou Dobbs, the modern incarnation of the Know-Nothing Party of the 1850s, is dropping hints about running for the White House in 2012, presumably without the benefit of the Hispanic vote. And Glenn Beck is planning a huge rally next summer in Washington dedicated to "Re-founding America." If Beck pulls a big crowd and wins some credit for decimating Democrats in the midterms, it's not hard to guess what he might try next.
One might almost laugh at the admission of guilt when Alter insists "We haven’t elected a populist president since Andrew Jackson 180 years ago. But we haven’t had a black guy with no experience and a Muslim name as president either."
He says our "science-fiction society" with its instant communication has created a "Tower of Babel" that encourages would-be populists:
The good news for them is that the dissemination of outlandish ideas is easier than ever. Where cranks were once limited to red-ribbon typewriter rants or maybe a radio show, they now have unlimited potential to get their message out. The bad news for them is that they have nothing to say. They say nothing loudly, colorfully, and sometimes even charmingly, but it still doesn't amount to a new vision for the country. If their means of communicating are dramatically enhanced, their ends are hopelessly conventional.
Alter’s candidate ran on empty concepts like Hope and Change, but his opponents "say nothing," have no vision. But he’s nastier than that. He insists Palin, Beck, and Dobbs remind conservatives of the good old days when liberal blacks wouldn’t aspire to the White House:
Populists of the past like Bryan in the 1890s, Huey Long and Father Coughlin in the 1930s, and even Pat Buchanan in the 1990s were angry about East Coast capitalists who were hurting the little guy in the heartland. They were anti-Wall Street, strongly protectionist, and committed to economic justice, even when some of them descended into racism and anti-Semitism.
Today's faux populists also feast on emotions-anxiety, anger, resentment-that intensify in hard times. But they are more accurately described as plain old reactionaries, a wonderfully precise word that has gone out of common usage. They're reacting against the pace of change and feeding right-wing nostalgia for a bygone era when a liberal black man wouldn't dare run for president.
Palin might try to echo Bryan, but she would consider Bryan's Populist Party platform of 1896 communistic were she to add it to her famous reading list. Dobbs, once corporate America's biggest apologist, still has no use for labor unions, which might make it tough to forge a connection with working people. Beck said recently that his reading of history suggested it was in the progressive era that the United States first started going to hell. He wants to make the country safe for the 1880s.
