Time Essay: The New Populism: Radicalizing the Middle

The nicest thing anyone can say about a Democratic presidential candidate this year is to call him a populist. Not all the candidates like the appellation. George McGovern—as populist a candidate as there is, left of George Wallace—and Scoop Jackson shun the label. But the rest boast of their populist credentials whenever they can. Wallace plays up his poor-country-boy origins in the Deep South; Humphrey points to his populist record over the years. While he was still in the race, John Lindsay tried to project himself as an "urban populist." Ed Muskie held off for a while, but after doing badly in the Florida primary, he, too, converted to a populist position.

In the new perspective, Robert Kennedy is portrayed as a populist in company with the grand old daddy of conventional populism, Congressman Wright Patman. But then, quite different sorts of politicians have been labeled populists: Spiro Agnew, for example, and Lyndon Johnson.

Populism is a label that covers disparate policies and passions: among many others, New Deal reforms, consumer rage against business, ethnic belligerence. Often it is merely a catch phrase. Yet it describes something real: the politics of the little guy against the big guy—the classic struggle of the haves against the have-nots or the have-not-enoughs. The conflict was softened by the belief in permanent American prosperity and submerged by the global traumas of the past three decades. Now that the U.S. is looking inward once again, and learning that its wealth is not limitless, populism is undergoing a revival.

It is an ism whose time has come, or returned; and though no ism lasts too long in America, this one appears likely to have an extended run. At the heart of the movement is the man in the middle. He is squeezed by a system he wants to respect but feels he has no control over. He is the pursuer of the American dream, but stalled in midpassage. To oversimplify, he is self-reliant and reasonably industrious, he holds a steady if not too exciting job, owns and takes pride in a modest home, likes sports, wants his kids to go to college. Yet he can never quite make ends meet, especially in the last few years of runaway inflation.

When attention was focused on the outsider in the 1960s—the black, the Indian, the Mexican American—the somewhat better-off white American was simply ignored. Not especially articulate, he took a while to make his discontent known. When he first started to organize and complain, he was too glibly dismissed as a law-and-order bigot. Liberals decided his fears were sheer fantasy.