Time Essay: The New Populism: Radicalizing the Middle

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Elsewhere, the populists venture onto more treacherous terrain. As part of their program to redistribute the nation's wealth and power, Newfield and Greenfield propose breaking up the biggest corporations and banning mergers and takeovers by the 200 largest corporations. This gut rejection of bigness simply ignores the realities of the modern economy, in which not everything that is big is bad. Equally blithely, the authors would have the Government take over the telephone companies and the utilities, but the woes of public ownership at home and abroad show that it is no panacea. The danger of populism, old and new, is that it ruthlessly oversimplifies.

More important than a program, perhaps, is the new emotional boost the movement has given to the submerged middle. Populism has produced an unlikely hero. He is not the dirt farmer or wage slave of the past, but the civil servant. Never a figure of glamour, to say the least, he has finally come into his own. The new culture celebrities are teachers, cops, firemen and—it won't be long now—sanitation men. Two popular books, praised in liberal journals, were written by front-line civil servants. A hair-raising account of fire fighting in New York City, Report from Engine Co. 82, was authored by one of the men on the job, Dennis Smith. Joseph Wambaugh, a Los Angeles cop, has turned out a pair of novels about his experiences with the underside of society called The New Centurions and The Blue Knight. A nobly beating heart has been uncovered beneath the once despised uniform. The pig is acquiring a pedigree. To be anti-cop is no longer quite as fashionable as it was; it is anti-populist.

Moreover, the new populism finds romance in the "ethnics"—Poles, Czechs, Hungarians, Italians and even Irishmen. A few years ago, the ethnic citizen was denounced as a lower-middle-class (and -brow) boor, an impediment to progress. Now he gets a much kinder press. In a new book, The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics, Michael Novak, who is a Slovak American, makes the prediction that the ethnic Americans will be the "new political force of the 1970s." It is no accident that the stubbly heroes of recent films like The French Connection and Dirty Harry are ethnic cops, diamonds-in-the-rough who stalk their man without paying too much attention to libertarian niceties.

The new populism bears only an oblique relationship to the earlier movement of the same name. The populism that developed in the late 19th century was basically agrarian. It was a revolt of poor farmers, both black and white, in the South and in the Midwest against concentrated business strength in the Northeast. They were outraged over steadily declining farm prices that resulted from a worldwide expansion of production; they chafed at high interest rates and monopolistic railway rates. As their movement gathered strength, they formed a third party and began to build political power. In 1896 the Democratic presidential candidate, silver-tongued William Jennings Bryan, espoused much of their program. Populists who joined the Democrats were known as "popocrats."