Populism: Myth, Reality, Current Danger

Abstract

ALTHOUGH THE TREATMENT of populism at the textbook level is still Salmost exclusively favorable, it may be, as Professor Holbo declares, Sthat in intellectual circles the pendulum has already swung too far from adulation to disparagement. The question is certainly worth raising since it is of more than academic significance and has important implications for contemporary discussion of political values. While he does not say so in as many words, Professor Holbo in his attempt to revise the revisionists apparently recognizes that our estimate of the meaning of the Populist tradition is related to a general tendency among American intellectuals including many who regard themselves as liberals to be increasingly skeptical about the merits of direct democracy and the values and goodwill of the man in the street, rural or urban. In the course of his article Professor Holbo makes a number of implicit criticisms of various writers who share my general views on populism. I cannot answer for these other so-called new liberals, but I should like to make my own position clear. My original article was not an attempt to demonstrate that the doctrines of American populism in its heyday were fascist, nor that Populist ideas were the sole ingredients in what is commonly called American fascism. What I did try to do was indicate the extent to which American fascism was an indigenous growth -to point out that it owed much of its doctrine to the populist tradition and that a substantial number of its leaders and adherents were drawn from regions and social groups at one time sympathetic to populism. At the time the paper was written it would have been difficult, if not impossible, to conduct mass interviews of American fascists, much less Populists. I therefore chose to rely on written historical sources and in particular on the writings of the political and intellectual leaders in question. On the basis of the available evidence, I attempted to demonstrate both congruence of ideas and the way in which these ideas were transmuted and passed on from populism to fascism.