Time Essay: The New Populism: Radicalizing the Middle

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But their conservative foes were too much for them. Bryan lost to the candidate of big business, William McKinley, and populism began to disintegrate. But it left a legacy of reform. Many of the programs it had so ardently championed were eventually adopted: federal aid to farmers, the graduated income tax, the direct election of U.S. Senators. In many states, the initiative and referendum were written into law.

Populism also left another, less praiseworthy legacy. Addicted to conspiracy theories, it reduced its problems to a single hatable enemy: the Wall Street banker, who shaded all too easily into the unscrupulous Jewish moneylender. Anti-Semitism was a poisonous ingredient of populism. A passion for progress that had united the populists in the beginning turned into an equally passionate hatred when the movement foundered.

Courageous Southern integrationists like Tom Watson turned into rabid racists, fixing a segregationist course for the South for years to come. Later in Louisiana, Huey Long took certain populist tendencies to a tyrannical extreme, threatening to build a national movement based on class hatred. Coming out of one of the populist states, Wisconsin, Senator Joe McCarthy rose to national fame in part by arousing his constituents' lingering resentment of Eastern, upper-crust America.

Today's populism is different because it is no longer rural. Populists are as likely to live in big cities as in small towns or on farms. A populist program embracing tax reform, housing, health and a federal jobs program would have national, not simply regional appeal. Still, populism remains an ambivalent term. It contains two distinct strains: economic reform and social reaction. The two strains overlap, sometimes attract and sometimes repel each other. Populism implies, on the one hand, power to the people; on the other, it suggests an abuse of power by the people, a kind of folk malevolence. In its coarser, illiberal forms, populism could turn out to be the old backlash in disguise.

While celebrating the will of the people, many populists had to examine what this will consist of. They pride themselves on being humble, earthy, sweaty even in the service of the common man—but which common man? Much of the progress of recent years (racial integration, for instance) has not happened on direct order from the mass of the people but through national leadership. As local populists demand more power, there is a possibility that some of the liberal gains of recent decades will be reversed. The reaction to busing, the outcry in Forest Hills and elsewhere against scatter-site housing, serve as warning scrawls on the wall. Undiluted populism might turn out to be as bad as arrogant elitism. As Julian Bond puts it, "A lot of liberals are tired of black people. We're not as hip as we used to be."