Note: This essay was written in 1999, as I looked back at a political trend prevailing in the United States at the end of the century, with some comparative glances at contemporary trends in western Europe.

 

The United States and the Western European countries share the same political regime, commercial republicanism, as well as the practice of more or less universal suffrage for adult citizens. But United States voter participation has declined from the high levels of one hundred years ago, whereas European voter participation is high. Further, U. S. voting rates have declined recently, both in the decade of the 1990s and in the previous three decades.

To take the recent numbers first: In the national midterm elections in the period 1962-1970, Americans voted at rates ranging from just under 47% to 48.6%. By contrast, in the period 1986-1998, percentages have ranged from a high of 38.8% in 1994—the year of the ‘Gingrich Revolution,’ in which annoyed voters overthrew a longstanding Democratic-Party majority in the House of Representatives—to a low of 36.1% in 1998.

In western Europe in the 1960s, some countries saw voter turnouts nearing 90% (Burnham 82-83). The European turnouts in the 1990s are also noticeably higher, for the most part, in the United States.

The numbers in presidential elections have been higher, but parallel. In 1996, 49% of voting-eligible citizens voted, down from 63% in 1960. Admittedly, the result of the 1996 election was a foregone conclusion, in sharp contrast to the heavily contested 1960 race. With the advent of fairly reliable scientific polling, many people may not bother to go to the polls when the decision seems already to have been made; if one prefers Bill Clinton to Bob Dole, and one expects Clinton to win easily, why not let my fellow citizens be the good soldiers and troop off to the polls? Nothing crazy is likely to happen, and one saves time and effort by staying home.

Except that the trend prevails across elections. Turnout has declined despite the effects of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, with provisions such as ‘motor voter,’ which make registration easier. Although Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward argued some years ago that voter registration in the U. S. is too difficult, that European governments are obligated to register voter, that two-thirds of unregistered citizens in American are below the median household income, leading to underrepresentation of those who depend upon government services most, the rather flaccid response to liberalized procedures can give little encouragement to such reformers. Although economist Stephen J. Knack and others have made brave efforts to put the best face on these results, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that deeper forces are at work than the effects of voter registration rules.

The highest turnout in the 1998 elections occurred in Minnesota, where the former professional wrestler Jesse Ventura captured the imaginations of his fellow citizens, as he had so often done in his previous career. Unless we are to empty the ranks of the World Wrestling Federation—that Jeffersonian breeding ground for the natural aristoi of virtue and talent—in the quest for revivified civic consciousness, it is difficult to see how to proceed.

Several dubious arguments have been advanced to explain the ‘secular’ or century-long trend as well as the shorter-term trend. Theodore J. Lowi blames not one aspect of the legal system, the registration rules, but the system itself. “Modern law has become a series of instructions to administrators rather than a series of commands to citizens…. The citizen has become an administre, and the question now is how to be certain he remains a citizen” (Lowi 144). Sentences worthy of a latter-day Tocqueville, perhaps, but are not the Europeans more ‘administered’ than we, their states more extensive, bureaucratic, and intrusive? Could it be that there is something to the fact that Americans were first democratized, then bureaucratized, whereas in much of Europe the reverse was the case” Lowi does not ask, and so does not say.

Thomas B. Edsall observes that top income earners are more likely to vote than those whose family incomes are low (Edsall 179-181). If so, why have voting rates declined in the last two decades, when more Americans have become wealthy than at any other time in our national life? There is, further, less really grinding poverty today than in the 1930s, and probably less than in the nineteenth century. Could there be, then, some correlation between widening income levels and non-participation? Could it be that the increasing numbers of affluent voters are more than counterbalanced by increasing numbers of nonvoters who are less well-off relative to the upper echelons? That might correlate better with existing economic conditions, but Edsall, writing in the early 1980s, does not ask, and so does not say.

Wolfinger and Steven J. Rosenstone cite “the transcendental importance of education” as a factor in voter turnout (102). The more highly educated one is, the greater one’s sense of civic duty, and the greater the social pressure to vote. That may very well be true, but that cannot explain the decline in voting, long-term or short. Americans in the twentieth century are markedly better-educated—or at least educated more extensively—than were their predecessors. And Americans in the past twenty years re no less educated than Americans of the 1960s. Could it be that the content of American education—especially the primary and early secondary education that is universal today—somehow discourages voting in adulthood? Could be: Some more civic-minded version of Allan Bloom might write a jeremiad on the subject. But Wolfinger and Rosenstone do not ask, and so cannot say.

Wolfinger and Rosenstone also notice that farmers, being more dependent upon government policies than most groups, tend to vote more. The decline of the farm population might then be a factor in the century-long trend. But poor, urban blacks and Latinos also feel the impact of government policies more than most groups, and their voting rates are low. Sheer dependency upon government services cannot be the main factor. After all, in this century nearly all Americans have become increasingly affected by, if not dependent upon, government regulations. surely we should all be voting early and often, but we are not.

No monocausal socioeconomic factor seems decisive. A social scientist might devise a complex formula that would measure the weights and interrelations of these trends. I am not that political scientist, and so must leave such projects to the adepts.

Retreating to that sanctuary of the mathematically impaired, political history, I shall explain the decline of voting in America and contrast the American circumstance with that of Europe, writing in terms merely plausible, rather than mathematical and demonstrative. The esprit de finesse may be less impressive than the esprit de géométrie, but perforce I must go with the former.

Historians mark the beginning of the decline of voting at 1896, when 80% of eligible voters (i.e., adult, mostly white, males) voted (Chambers 14). Voting correlates with strong party identification; post-1896, party identification weakened (Burnham 120, 133; Campbell et al., chapters 6 and 7). The year 1896 was one of America’s so-called critical elections, that is, an election in which a significant and long-term political alignment occurred. This particular realignment had effects that caused voter turnout decline. Why might one think so?

John Agnew’s concept of ‘core and periphery’ can be and has been usefully brought into play here. Agnew argues that the socioeconomic ‘core’ of the United States—the centers of commerce and manufacturing—has long been politically at odds with the ‘periphery’—the agrarian hinterlands. It must be admitted, of course, that the ‘core’ started out as a fairly puny area—a network of dots along the eastern seaboard. Nonetheless, by 1787 the ‘core’ was sufficiently influential to get the new, commercial-republican constitution ratified; a century later, the ‘core’ could be said to occupy most of a whole region, the northeast. In the 1896 election, the socioeconomic core and periphery were matched up, for the first time since the days before the Civil War, with the party political system. The Northeast became solidly Republican, the South solidly Democratic, with the West siding with the North. This had been true of antebellum America, but this time the impassionating issue of slavery was gone; division did not lead to disunion but to political stability, both within the key regions. Republicans were safe in the Northeast, Democrats safe in the Southeast) and nationally. Republican majorities rested largely undisturbed, except by the anomalous Wilson, beneficiary of a Republican split, until 1932.

An important dimension of this episode was described by Peter H. Argersinger in his 1980 article, “Fusion Politics and Antifusion Laws.” Fusion (the support of one set of candidates by more than one party) gave party competition added juice. In the West, Republicans had a plurality but not a majority of the votes in many states. Democrats could counter by pooling votes on a fusion ticket with, for example, the Greenback Party or some other populist organization. Obviously, in the West this gave Republicans a strong motive to get rid of fusion balloting and replace it with the blanket ballot or ‘Australian’ system. Republicans succeeded in this campaign by invoking an anti-corruption argument; that paved the way to 1896 (Argersinger 287-306).

The new settlement enabled Southern Democrats to put the finishing touches on their post-Reconstruction program of disenfranchising blacks and poor whites. These groups were electorally unnecessary and both politically useful to suppress, as Jack Bloom explains.

In the North, the new stability eventually made political bosses, always a bit unsavory to respectable, middle-class sorts, less salient, as well. Although initially more secure in the new alignment, bosses lost in the long term. Less competition yielded less urgent need for political mobilization. Reformers, including business interests, could not push confidently for professionalized government, the end of the patronage system, of ‘corruption.’ But the end of patronage meant that a major incentive to vote, namely, the desire for an indoor job with no heavy lifting, disappeared. If I can get a government job by passing a test instead of voting and getting others out to vote, I will sharpen my pencil and stay at home. Progressives supposed that a new system of primary elections, initiative and referendum, and similar devices would keep participation rates high. They were mistaken. Civil service reform meant that the basic infrastructure of government would remain, whatever party was in power. Absent some major crisis, why vote?

By 1912, less than 59% of eligible citizens voted. The crisis of the Depression brought turnouts into the low 60s for a time (still far less than the rate in the 1890s); in 1952 and 1960—both elections about the future of the New Deal-type government the Depression brought on—the numbers got into the low 60s again. But for the most part, numbers dwindled.

By the 1950s the “quasi-military drill” of nineteenth-century American politics was long gone (Chambers 15), replaced by media-centric advertising, which further diminished the strength of the parties (Sorauf, in Chambers, 54-55). Motivated by the invigorating thumotic passions attendant to peer pressure (no ‘Australian ballots’ in the nineteenth century until 1892—your neighbors knew how you voted) and by the less invigorating but no less compelling motive of job-seeking, political soldiers had been displaced by consumer-spectators, motivated by images and sounds—less compelling devices, as any experienced preacher, or salesman, will tell you.

The American circumstance can be contrasted with the European. In America, bureaucratization took a lot of the fun, and some of the point, out of democratic politics. In Europe, bureaucracy already existed. Democratic-republican politics, hard-won during violent revolutions in the nineteenth century and world wars in the twentieth, took on a much more earnest character than it did in twentieth-century America, where the fight for voting rights (except for the suffragist and the civil rights movements) was fought overseas, in trenches and not in ballot booths.

Angus Campbell and his colleagues remark that Americans are not so ‘ideological’ as Europeans, and not so strongly partisan. European political parties still recall regime politics—forgotten in the United States since the 1860s—and still galvanize political passions. Sharper class struggles are tied to regime politics; for decades in Europe (certainly up to the time of Mitterand’s France, which changed expectations by doing so little) a socialist party victory might be seen as the capture of the state apparatus by ‘the workers,’ a new politeuma or ruling body. Not so, the New Deal, or at least not so obviously. This is reinforced by the fact that in Europe the state itself is regarded as sovereign, not the people, as in America. By reason of history, by reason of the socioeconomic character of the parties, and by reason of the structure of sovereignty itself, Europeans are less likely to be altogether more earnest and conscientious about voting than their lackadaisical New-World allies (cf. Lowi in Chambers 240-241).

Unlike the president-oriented twentieth-century American republics, European republics tend to be parliament-centered (McCormick in Chambers 104). The function of parliamentarism is similar to that of local patronage networks in nineteenth-century America. Parliamentarism reinforces localism, and therefore peer pressure, even with ‘Australian’ ballots. Thus the European republics, which appear heavily nationalized, actually have rather strong local roots. Steady, day-to-day ruling goes on, with a strong connection between local communities and the large, patronage-dispensing bureaucratized state apparatuses.

What of the shorter-term, post-1970 decline? With the sociopolitical infrastructure of American politics replaced by media-driven entertainment packages, about which voters are increasingly sophisticated and therefore skeptical, it is no wonder that increased levels of education have coexisted with increased non-participation. Jesse Ventura is right: If it takes a high school education to make a fan see that pro wrestling is fake, then the way to the hearts of an educated electorate is to do what the World Wrestling Federation did, starting in the 1980s: Admit that the performers are faking it, let the public in on the act, wink at the camera in your campaign commercials. This, however, isn’t likely to be a very long-lasting ‘fix.’ Absent some way to tie national political campaigns and daily governance to local and family concerns—other in the abstract, emptily rhetorical way of proclaiming ‘The Year of the Child,’ ‘The Year of the Woman,’ the Year of the This or the Year of the That—there will be no cure for mediocre turnouts.

 

Works Cited

Agnew, John: The United States in the World Economy: A Regional Geography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Argersinger, Peter H.: “Fusion Politics and Antifusion Laws.” American Historical Review, LXXV (1980) 287-306.

Bloom, Jack: Class, Race and the Civil Rights Movement. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.

Burnham, Walter Dean: Critical Elections and the Mainsprings of American Politics. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1970.

Campbell, Angus, et al.: The American Voter. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1960.

Chambers, William Nisbet: “Party Development and the American Mainstream.” In Chambers and Burnham, 1960.

Chambers, William Nisbet, and Burnham, Walter Dean, eds.: The American Party Systems: Stages in Political Development. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967.

Edsall, Thomas B.: Power and Money: Writings on Politics, 1971-1987. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1988.

Knack, Steven J.: “Does Motor Voter Work? An Analysis of State-Level Data.” Journal of Politics 57 (3) (August 1993) 796-811.

Lowi, Theodore J.: “Party, Policy, and Constitution in America.” In Chambers and Burnham, 1970.

McCormick, Richard P.: “Political Development and the Second Party System.” In Chambers and Burnham, 1970.,

Piven, Frances Fox and Cloward, Richard A.: Why Americans Don’t Vote. New York: Pantheon Books, 1988.

Sorauf, Frank J.: “Political Parties and Political Analysis.” In Chambers and Burnham, 1970.

Wolfinger, Raymond E. and Rosenstone, Steven J.: Who Votes? New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980.

The term is much-debated. Daniel T. Rodgers includes ‘the people’ among his ‘contested truths.’ Political definitions center on the question, ‘Who rules?’ Persons calling themselves populists insist on popular sovereignty against (in the words of one Kansas populist, “the plutocrats, the aristocrats, and all the other rats”—presumably not including the democrats (Canovan 51). Socioeconomic definitions (as offered, for example, in Hofstadter’s Age of Reform) point to the agrarian origins of pre-twentieth-century populists, the industrial-working-class origins of many twentieth-century populists. Early populists were “entrepreneurial radicals” of the post-1815 farm (see also Canovan’s formulation, “rural radicalism”). Later populists were industrial workers displaced or threatened by large-scale, shadowy economic forces. Typically, the dichotomy turned up by these definitions pits paper-pushers of various descriptions (bankers, corporation men, bureaucrats, university professors) against the worker/producers, those who (to employ nineteenth-century vocabulary) were described as horny-handed sons of toil. Ideological definitions of populism (seen also in Hofstadter) point to certain key themes in populist discourse as the telltale markers: the imagery of a golden (though not a gold-standard) age; the apocalyptic conflict of good and evil; conspiracy theories; teachings on the primacy of money in the determination of social and political as well as economic power; jingoism or, to use a less Hofstadterian term, patriotism.

These definitions all run up against the very sort of contestation out of which populism itself is born. Is Mr. X or Movement Y ‘truly’ populist? the people are sovereign, but who are the people? Who are the producers? Does Mr. X or Movement Y believe his/its own discourse? The answer will very often depend upon how the writer offering the definition defines the key terms. Michael Kazin’s The Populist Persuasion attempts to short-circuit this dilemma by defining populism as a rhetoric, “a language”—and a “flexible” one, at that—”whose speakers conceive of ordinary people as a noble assemblage not bounded narrowly by class, view their elite opponents as self-serving and undemocratic, and seek to mobilize the former against the latter” (1). I shall use Kazin’s definition as my starting point, working back to the social, economic, political, and ideological markers. When, where, and why have politicized American citizens appropriated the language of populism, the appeal to and for ‘the people.’

Under this definition (although Kazin doesn’t notice it), the first American populists were of course the revolutionaries who deployed the themes expounded in the Declaration of Independence: A “people” is severing the political bands connecting it to another “people”; respectful of the opinions of mankind, they declare their reasons for so doing; these include the principle that just governments are based on the consent of the governed and that when a form of government becomes destructive of certain inherent human rights, the people may alter or abolish that government and frame new governing forms. In America, the Tories had the British and mercenary armies, but the Whig elites/gentry needed soldiers who could only be drawn from the commons. Local militias were also in place, as were the local governments; in both the use of guns and the use of words, American commoners were already empowered before the Revolution began. Economically, the Americans were commercial-agrarian for the most part, and not only did not need but were impeded by the British imperial trading system. socially, Americans were overwhelmingly Protestant, sharing suspicion of ecclesiastical hierarchies. Just as important, America had no titled nobility; this made an unmixed republic possible, obviating the Aristotelian-Polybian need to balance the ‘orders.’

These conditions enabled and encouraged political elites such as the ‘Virginia dynasty’ of Jefferson, Madison, et al. to appeal to ‘the people’ against the foreign and foreign-dominated incipient ‘tyrants.’ The American Whigs borrowed their conspiracy theory, elaborated at some length in the Declaration of Independence, but also in Jeffersonian fulminations against centralized banking, from English Whig sources—particularly Cato’s Letters. Theirs is a perfect example of Richard Bensel’s distinction between ‘core’ and ‘periphery’ in that sense, the question of populism in America is always not only a matter of ‘when’ and ‘why’ but of ‘where.’ Once the American ‘periphery’ cut itself loose from the British imperial ‘core,’ a new ‘periphery’/’core’ dichotomy arose, between the farmers in the interior of the new country and the merchants along the coast. The battle over the 1787 Constitution, won by the merchant-coastal interests who wanted those farmers to pay their debts, moderated without by any means eliminating the populist elements of the Revolution; the Jeffersonian “Revolution of 1800” saw a return of the appeal to the people, now framed within the new constitutional structure, a return powered by the claim that Hamlton and his allies were secret monarchists bent on establishing their class via a complex and unfamiliar financial system, including that old-Whig bète noire, a national bank.

Kazin excludes the revolutionary generation from populism because it was led by gentry. This is true, but if populism is a persuasion, then it doesn’t necessarily matter who is making the appeal. At any rate, Jefferson founded the Democratic Party, which produced in the next generation no less a common-touch figure than Andrew Jackson, rich but rough-hewn, who again appealed to ‘the people’ against the bankers and their supposed English puppet-masters. In this project, Jackson could appeal not only to farmers and rugged frontiersmen (quite literally dwellers on the periphery) but to small business people, equally at the mercy of “the money power.”

Although drafted into populism by later political orators, Lincoln—first a new Whig, then a Republican—was not a populist. For Lincoln, government of, by, and for the people was a problem, not a solution. Like Publius, Lincoln worried that popular sovereignty may attack unalienable, natural rights; he would, like Publius, guard the people from their own excesses. For the next populist movement we must turn to the decades after the Civil War.

The first self-described populists reacted to the economic hard times of the 1880s and 1890s, and against the corporations, which came to prominence in the years after the war. America went back on the gold standard in 1879; the demand for gold outstripped the supply for most of the next twenty years. Economic contractions occurred in 1882-85 and again in 1891-97 (for details see Friedman and Schwartz, 106 ff.). There was no relief for the consequent deflation, as silver had been demonetized in 1873, remonetized in 1876 in insufficient quantity to inflate the currency. The populists would scarcely recommend anything along the lines of a Federal Reserve Bank, such a thing being decidedly anti-populist. Under such conditions, wherein debtors were paying back creditors in dollars worth more than they were when the dollars were borrowed, the ‘periphery’ had serious, politically exploitable grievances against the ‘core. Third-party ferment—uncontrolled by the Australian ballot system, which wasn’t instituted until the 1890s—crystallized into the formation of the People’s Party, a coalition of Western small farmers burdened by exclusionary and confiscatory monopoly practices by the railroads and Southern small farmers burdened by usurious local storekeepers under the ‘crop lien’ system.

A co-op movement in 1880s Texas got the new populism started; the co-ops were an attempt by farmers to control both buying and selling, and so to cut out the middlemen, including creditors. This venture was undercapitalized and therefore unsuccessful. Farmers turned to politics, thinking that even if they had no credit they still had votes. Silver miners in the West and other political elites could then formulate a convincingly nasty story: Demonetization was “the Crime of ’73,” perpetrated by a cabal of Jewish, English, and Anglo-American financiers who wanted to establish the gold standard so American bankers could pay off loans to other gold standard nations, Britain first and foremost. In later words of Ignatius Donnelly of Minnesota, “a vast conspiracy against mankind has been organized on two continents and is rapidly taking possession of the world.” By 1889, the populists reached out to the Knights of Labor, proposing a coalition of ‘producers.’ In addition, the late 19th-century populists, like the American colonists and the Americans of the Second Great Awakening, were animated by Protestant religious fervor. “Christ himself was an evicted peasant,” one of them claimed. Such language contrasted sharply with the increasingly scientistic language of the elites, who excused hardship by claiming it ensured the survival of the fittest.

The People’s Party ran into several difficulties. North/South wounds hadn’t healed; enlisting freemen in the South would have been a useful counter to the Democratic Party, but, despite some efforts in that direction (most notably in Texas), race prejudice remained too strong. In the North, populism would tend only to take votes from the Republicans, giving power not to populists but Democrats. Also, a ‘people’s party’ still needs to be a party, with organization, funding, professional politicians. ‘The people’ can’t simply take over; even the American revolutionaries needed George Washington, John Adams, Robert Morris. Finally, labor didn’t feel comfortable with the farmers. To an industrial worker in New York City, what’s wrong with low farm prices?

As a result, the People’s Party as absorbed in the West by the Democrats when the latter nominated William Jennings Bryan, and was blocked in the South by Democratic politicians who bribed, intimidated, and played on racial prejudice. On their end, the Republicans were also busy and effective, ruining the populists’ electoral chances, which depended on fusion controlled by themselves rather than co-optation controlled by the Democrats, by instituting the Australian ballot system (Argersinger 287-306), designed to enable individuals to resist ‘popular’ pressures. In the end, as Margaret Canavan writes, “Whether they like it or not, Populists were a collection of minority groups, not ‘the people’ itself” (54). This raises an important point about populist appeals, a point made by almost everyone who writes about them. In the broad, extended, diverse Madisonian republic, designed to make popular sovereignty untyrannical by registering divisions among the people, appeals to ‘the people’ will always be self-limiting. Even in colonial, pre-Madisonian America, the revolutionaries hadn’t represented much more than one-third of the population. Appeals to ‘the people’ are seldom taken up by most, let alone all, of the population. Appeals to ‘the people’ serve rather as means by which one elite can knock a hitherto more powerful rival—to be sure, sometimes benefiting many others beyond themselves. In fact, the ‘new’ elite very often will include ‘new men,’ aristoi of virtue and talent (or at least oratorical ability) who rise from subordinated social classes. This is obviously one of the main appeals of populist movements to ambitious and capable persons.

Farm prosperity from 1900 to the First World War further blunted populist fervor; by the time farmers again had cause for complaint, in the 1920s, they were insufficiently numerous plausibly to claim title to ‘the people’ as a political slogan. In the twentieth century, ‘periphery’ and ‘core’ in the United States had much less geographic salience than at any time previously. Twentieth-century populist appeals shifted for the most part to interest groups—’peripheral’ in social and political ways but not so much territorial ones—starting with the labor movement under Gompers and, as Michael Kazin rightly sees, the prohibitionist movement. The civil rights movement of the 1945-65 period, the student movement of 1962-72, the ‘Moral Majority’ and other right-of-center populist appeals of the last quarter of the century, have all pretty obviously played to groups that cannot seriously be described as ‘the people’ as a whole. What populist rhetoric does do—and here again Kazin is astute—is to give such groups a vocabulary with which to address their fellow citizens in a broad-based republic where Marxist and other class-based appeals sound more strident than they might in a more rigidly stratified society in which old, settled social orders prevailed in recent memory.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt seems to have learned from the Democrats’ co-optation of Bryan. If ever there was a circumstance that might have yielded a renewed populist movement, it was the Great Depression. All the elements were there for an agro-labor coalition: economic disaster, incompetence and corruption on Wall Street, stumbling Washington pols—in Robert H. Wiebe’s phrase, “masterless men in a structureless society” (60). A new version of Coxey’s Army erected Hooverville across the street from the White House. Yet FDR and his professionalized elite—man of them coming out of the secular wing of the Progressive movement—adeptly incorporated these elements (especially the farmers) into a bureaucratic state-building project. And note well: This could be done on the basis of the old program of the People’s Party, insofar as that party advocated increased activity and regulation by the federal government. Hofstadter observes, “Populism [of the late 19th century] was the first modern political movement in the United States to insist that the federal government had some responsibility for the common weal,” by which he means responsibility for its management (61). Once again, organization triumphed over popular energy, but this time the organization wasn’t the old-fashioned party structure, reformed into subordination by the Progressives, but a centralized, state apparatus that regulated populist passions by rechanneling them into a governmental structure (some might say ‘maze’) of institutions and regulations.

Kazin discusses the ‘shift to the Right’ in twentieth-century populist politics; he doesn’t say much about why the Right could appropriate populist rhetoric. If populist appeals set the average, hard-working, productive American against the bloated, lazy, despotic few, then the government itself, particularly when allied to corporate and other organized, professionalized interest groups, could easily stand in for the nearest contemporary equivalent of George III or the Monster Bank. Institutionalized or statist liberalism—’statist liberalism’ being something of a contradiction in terms, as Locke reminded readers of Thomas Hobbes—makes an inviting target for conservatives who subscribe not to The New Republic but the old one. Add to that a foreign threat from the Left, Communism, which is genuinely statist, and to that dark suspicions—very much in the Whiggish tradition of conspiracy-mongering—of collaboration (or at least ‘softness’) by a no-enemies-on-the-Left neoliberal state toward that foreign threat, and you have an enduring political trope of the years 1945-1990. Notice that the solution to political problems advanced by 19th-century populists—a larger national state, intervening in behalf of ‘the people’—could itself become the target of populist ire, once that state was professionalized, co-opted by elites. Notice also that a populist-talking Right, once in power, soon divides into state-tolerating ‘neo-conservatives’ and state-hating ‘libertarians,” the latter sometimes in alliance with state-hating religionists and ‘paleo-conservatives.’

Another way of stating the matter is this: If the plausibility of populist appeals depends upon some real sense of a ‘periphery’ exploited by a ‘core,’ American populism in the twentieth century was fragmented. Except for the dichotomy of ‘the people’ versus ‘the government’—rather blunted because the people elect much of the government—or ‘the people’ versus ‘the corporations’—rather blunted because the people buy products made by the corporations and often buy stock in the corporations themselves—America became the core in the modern world. Real peripheries, and therefore plausible populism, have moved offshore, into Africa, parts of Latin America and Asia. Populism, defined as appeals to the people as a whole, depends upon believable claims that some organizable group can be said to be, or at least represent, the people. Populism thus needs a relatively simple society (an agrarian one will do, very nicely) with a majority class or group of classes that can style itself the producing and moral majority. Populism also needs both an immediate grievance and a structural target—respectively, for example, a depression and a politica/economic elite—to aim at. Populism in the United States has occurred when a material cause—economic hard times, typically—meets a formal cause—a stratified political and economic structure—in the name of a final cause—a threat to the natural rights of the sovereign people, or their ‘progress.’ Add one or more efficient causes—the long train of abuses and usurpations cited in the Declaration of Independence, the Crime of ’73, the Crash of ’29—for new political elites to brandish, and you have populism. The antidote to the excesses of populism is the artfully redesigned structure of political institutions—the Constitution of 1787, the New Deal state of the 1930s.

 

Works Cited

Argersinger, Peter: “Fushion Politics and Anti-Fusion Laws.” American Historical Review, Spring 1980, 287-306.

Canovan, Margaret: Populism. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981.

Friedman, Milton, and Schwartz, Anna Jacobsen: A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963.

Hofstadter, Richard: The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F. D. R. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1955.

Kazin, Michael: The Populist Persuasion: An American History. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995.

Rodgers, Daniel T.: Contested Truths: Keywords in American Politics Since Independence. New York: Basic Books, 1987.

Wiebe, Robert H.: Self-Rule: A Cultural History of American Democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

Blauner, Robert: Racial Oppression in America. New York: The Viking Press, 1972.

Browning, Rufus P., Marshall, Dale Rogers, and Tabb, David: Racial Politics in American Cities. New York: Longman, 1990.

Dahl, Robert A.: Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970 [1961].

Dubois, W. E. B.: Dusk at Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept. New York: Schocken Books, 1968 [1940].

_____. The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study. New York: The Free Press, 1992 [1935].

Greenberg, Cheryl: “Or Does It Explode? Black Harlem in the Great Depression. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Katznelson, Ira: City Trenches: Urban Politics and the Patterning of Class in the United States. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.

Mollenkopf, John H.: The Contested City. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983.

Moynihan, Daniel P.: The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. Washington: Office of Public Planning and Research, United States Department of Labor, 1965.

Pinderhughes, Dianna M.: Race and Ethnicity of Chicago Politics: A Reexamination of Pluralist Theory. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987.

Piven, Frances Fox and Cloward, Richard A.: Regulating the Poor: The Function of Public Welfare. New York: Vintage Books, 1993 [1971].

 

In 1961 Robert A. Dahl published his well-respected study, Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City. The city he studied was New Haven, Connecticut–a city which not only surrounds Yale University, Professor Dahl’s academic home, but could be described by him as “in many respects typical of other cities in the United States” (v). This typical city had a very small population of non-whites; only 6% of the residents were African-American, and there were few Latinos or Asians.

Dahl’s primary interest was in showing why economically advantaged people tended to participate less in city government and politics than economically disadvantaged people did (see pp. 293-295). That is, Dahl’s interest in blacks was instrumental to understanding the behavior of whites. As to the condition of black New Havenites itself, Dahl contented himself with saying that discrimination was declining and that they were rather well-integrated into the politics and government of the city.

Who Governs? is a very informative book, still useful to read. But it could not be written the same way now. A city with a nonwhite population of 6% could not be represented as “typical” in America today; even in cities with small minority populations, more care would have to be taken to treat whatever such populations existed as important ‘in themselves,’ not merely as illustrations of some putatively larger point. Inasmuch as Americans have made much of ‘race’ throughout their history, the new approach is truer, or at least potentially truer, to the way citizens in cities actually think and feel. The new approach is therefore likely to have more explanatory power regarding ‘on-the-street’ conditions in the city or cities studied. But as with all scholarly approaches, this one has its dangers, particularly those associated with the concept of ‘race’ itself. Precisely because ‘race’ is a notion deeply felt, but notoriously difficult to define precisely, it can involve scholars in a maze of traps.

Take, for example, the pioneering study by W. E. B. Dubois, The Philadelphia Negro. DuBois deplored the lack of “organization” in the life of urban blacks, a deficiency that put them at a competitive disadvantage in America. He accepted the view that democracy was “premature” for American blacks. Left to their own devices, they would be governed by oligarchs or even dictators. Hence the need for the “talented tenth” of urban blacks to guide a racially insulated (not integrated) population through the hazards and complexities of modern civilization. This is not so much Jeffersonianism as vanguardism; insofar as it is Marxist-Leninist it is a Marxism without much faith in the proletariat as the agency of change. DuBois perhaps thinks of urban blacks as lumpenproletarians, too far removed from modernity to organize themselves effectively. The argument is implausible because before and at the very time DuBois wrote, no less agrarian peoples, often under the tutelage (as it were) of political bosses who had no pretensions of vanguardism, were acculturating their ethnic groups to American city politics. DuBois operates under the spell of a commonplace ideological trope of the time, the claim that civilization in the modern world was a thing so complex that one needed an extraordinarily long apprenticeship to grasp it. DuBois was applying the underlying theory of European imperialism to American urban politics.

DuBois’s major contribution to the study of race isn’t so much in the specifics of his analysis, now understandably ‘dated,’ but in the challenge he issued to his fellow Americans in his later book, Dusk at Dawn. The race problem is “the central problem of the greatest of the world’s democracies and so the problem of the future world” (vii). The race problem may be seen in what DuBois takes to be the fact that “in America, not the philosophy of Jefferson nor the crusade of Garrison nor the reason of Sumner was able to counterbalance the race superiority doctrines of Calhoun, the imperialism of Jefferson David, nor the race hate of Ben Tillman” (139). Whether or not the indictment is too sweeping, it is an indictment and served as a call for future research, to say nothing of future reform.

For a long time this challenge was not answered by mainstream political scientists who looked at urban politics, as may be seen in Dahl’s study. But the urban unrest of the 1960s could scarcely be ignored, and it shattered any complacency with respect to race relations in American cities.

There has been considerable difficulty among urbanists not so much in trying to define ‘race’—those conundrums have been left in the (ham) hands of anthropologists—but in how exactly to assess its political importance. Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward begin their book, Regulating the Poor, by emphasizing not race and ethnicity but institutional/legal control of ‘the poor.’ They associate racial focus with Daniel Patrick Moynihan and his critique of ‘the black family,’ a critique to which they take strong exception (193). But then, two-thirds of the way through their book, they begin to consider African-American poor in the cities, bringing race and class together under their overall thesis, which is to describe how politicians—in this case, Democrats, who run the cities—have attempted to bypass their own local political machines and to offer a bureaucratic system of poor relief in order to dampen social unrest. This approach makes sense, but it comes rather too late in a book whose authors feel they must engage in elaborate rhetorical and methodological maneuvering just to get to their main point.

Cheryl Greenberg’s “Or Does It Explode?’ has no such inhibitions about addressing race, but commits the opposite error, using ‘race’ too unproblematically, almost as an independent variable in the urban equation. Greenberg tries to account for the fact that newly-arrived European immigrants in the period 1900-1930 rose faster in the economic order than newly-arrived blacks, despite “equally low levels of education in the two communities” (21). This is a continuation of one of DuBois’s questions. She observes further that even well-educated blacks found only menial jobs, and public jobs were in large measure off-limits to blacks during the 1920s. The Depression accordingly brought greater hardships to urban blacks than to urban whites, with blacks accounting for 15% of New York City’s unemployed, even as they were but 5% of the population at the time. Greenberg’s account is descriptively powerful but analytically weak. She explains these discrepancies by citing the racial prejudices of whites as the blockade faced by New York blacks. She does not show the whys and wherefores of such prejudice, which presumably did not just exist as a force of nature.

Robert Blauner interprets the crises of the late 1960 and early 1970s in American cities sociologically. Urban life reflected the American social structure; minority racial groups (Blauner does not overlook Latinos) and their oppression by whites are central features of a social dynamic not reducible to class or economics. Rather, race privilege is a matter of status. Racial groups are not classes but Weberian “status groups,” monopolies of honor, “packet[s] of privilege” (27, 31). This tends to falsify Dahlian optimism, and leads to a more realistic assessments of future prospects. Races will not be assimilated at any time in the near future, Blauner predicts. He was right.

Blauner observes that cities have been centers of industrialization. White immigrants competed successfully for industrial jobs against emancipated Southern blacks and poor Southern whites—a datum that complicates any easy assumptions about racism as an explanation of the condition of urban blacks (64). More ambitious, Blauner argues, racial minorities are colonized, Third-World peoples, “part of the world-historical drama” of Western conquest (74), peoples who may unify as a worldwide political movement (52). Such peoples do not fit “the collective self-image of democracy for all men” established by whites in Europe and North America (52). Third-World peoples did not immigrate to America; they were colonized. This overlooks the fact that Latinos do in fact immigrate to the United States, and many, especially those who arrived prior to the recent ‘waves’ of immigration from Mexico and Central America, seem to be tracking the progress of previous ethnic, notably Italians. If Blauner were to argue that Latinos were colonized by Spaniards and Portuguese adventurers before arriving here, the answer is obvious: Welcome to the club. What ethnic group wasn’t colonized by some more powerful group, before arriving here? Even the English were mastered by the Romans.

Further, Blauner doesn’t show exactly why industrialism would single out racial minorities for long-standing oppression, or why democracy would single them out for exclusion from its “self-image.” There is a somewhat Procrustean attempt by Blauner to fit urban racial politics into a global Leninist network (evidently in imitation of Fanon), an attempt that, though impressive, seems too polemical by half.

Similarly, Blauner’s critique of the McClone Commission report on the 1965 race riot—or, as he prefers to put it, the Watts rebellion—in the Watts section of Los Angeles combines insight with polemical distortion. The McCone Commission report, he charges, assumed that the disorder was simply a matter of law-breaking caused by unemployment and poor education, along with bad public relations by the Los Angeles Police Department. The report ignores the way police were used as controllers of a ‘ghetto.’ The report also ignores the issues of nationalism raised by the ‘rebellion.’ This has the unmistakable hint of special pleading: If the ‘rebellion’ were as politicized as Blauner wishes it were, it would have issued in more explicitly political organization by blacks, in the aftermath of the riot—and not only the blacks who showed up a few years later in Mayor Tom Bradley’s administration. Blauner starts out as a sociologist, but ends by looking at politics in the wrong place, namely, among those excluded from the political process who subsequently made no attempt to enter it.

The more successful efforts focus not on ‘race’ or ‘society’ or economics in isolation or in combination, but on those things as exploited by the political structure of the city. As John H. Mollenkopf notes, whether market-oriented or Marxist, earlier economics-oriented accounts of city life did not allow for political differences; two capitalist cities might differ more from each other than from a capitalist city and a socialist city (8). “[G]overnment intervention follows its own logic rather than that of private interests” (9). Mollenkopf emphasizes the interventions of federal government agencies and of the Democratic and Republican parties in urban politics, and is very informative about politics ‘from above.’ He has no feel for street-level politics. But this isn’t a problem specifically caused by his use of race as a key factor in urban politics.

Dianna M. Pinderhughes, like Blauner, questions pluralist accounts of racial and ethnic groups, observing that pluralism tends toward optimism, partly because it focuses on white ethnics, not racial minorities. Pluralism ignores such governmental practices as redlining and restrictive covenants to confine minorities to certain parts of the city; deliberate division of the labor force along racial lines in order to minimize bargaining power of labor groups; the use of violence and/or heavy police activity; and restriction of black leaders within Democratic political machines to their own neighborhoods, with none of the citywide influence enjoyed by white ethnic leaders. “Racial status so pervaded the Chicago environment that it affected every sector of the economy and the polity (234); Pinderhughes shows how this politics of exclusion backfired in the end, leading to the political cohesion among blacks which resulted in political victory in the 1980s, once blacks had sufficient numbers to form effective alliances with sectors of the white community.

For a survey of urban politics in a number of American cities, a survey that enables the reader to compare the circumstances in a variety of places, Racial Politics in American Cities provides the best-balanced view of any of these studies, deserving of the stature it has earned as a standard text in the field. The authors eschew polemics and repeatedly show exactly how and why blacks and Latinos succeeded (or, in the case of New York, usually failed) to acquire political power commensurate with their numbers. The authors identify two basic strategies that can be used: the “outside” strategy of interest-group pressure on government and the “inside” strategy of obtaining direct power via elections. They lay out the different phases of successful uses of each strategy, based on the specific case studies presented in the volume (12). They discuss various factors influencing outcome: size of minority populations; the extent of support from liberal whites; and what might be described as the political styles (often linked to the political purposes) of black leadership. (To understate the matter, the Black Panthers in Oakland generated a different sort of political atmosphere than moderate-liberal mayor Wilson Goode in Philadelphia.) The authors present information on the political success is assuredly ‘worth the effort’—as measured in the establishment of such long-held minority goals as civilian police review boards, government appointments, city contracts, and government jobs (24). Fully integrated governments are demonstratively more responsive governments. In short, the authors actually ‘do political science’ as it relates to racial politics in cities.

The results show the importance of not assuming that ‘objective conditions’ will flow into a more just urban political order. Political organization building is crucial, both within and among minority communities, and between minority and white communities, especially politicians. As in any democratic regime, the demographic transformation of racial minorities into racial majorities within a city is a necessary but not sufficient condition for success in the election of black, Latino, and Asian mayors and city council members, who can then strengthen coalitions with influential white minorities within the cities. And of course what is made can be unmade. As in Chicago in 1989, a biracial coalition can fall apart if political acumen is missing, or if co-optation occurs.

When done intelligently, the new focus on racial issues in urban politics politicizes urban studies, not in the sense of making them more partisan than they have been, but of getting urban studies away from the technocratic, sociological approach seen in a focus on housing problems, transportation, and finance considered as ‘things in themselves.’ Rather, the study of urban politics becomes ‘political’ in its focus on structures of political authority. Unjust disparities of political power yield unjust disparities in housing, transportation, and finance. In City Trenches, Ira Katznelson worries that race-oriented studies may neglect social class—which can and should be treated politically. Class is particularly salient in understanding the white ethnics, many of whom have thought of themselves as ‘labor’ while in the workplace or union hall, but as Poles, Italians, Irish, etc. as soon as they get back home. This bifurcation of urban life among white ethnics helps to explain the lack of socialist politics in American cities, Katznelson thinks; he might well go on to think that this indicates a deficiency in socialist politics and the ideologies which animate it.

Such cautionary points as Katznelson makes are well taken, but they really suggest only the commonsense observation that any well-delineated picture must include some things at the expense of excluding others. Any single approach to the study of politics, urban or otherwise, will see some things clearly, others obscurely or not at all. That is why one needs to read more than one kind of study of politics.