The Ghost of Populism Walks Again, by Geoffrey Nunberg
“Fresh Air” Commentary, 3/30/09

Rage is all the rage right now, particularly the populist sort. Over the last month, I counted almost 200 news stories that paired populist with items like rage, fury, and frenzy, four times as many as in the whole of 2008. And there were more than 100 that mentioned AIG along with pitchfork, the implement that Stephen Colbert brandished as he urged his listeners to join him in forming an angry mob. The cover of the most recent Newsweek announced a feature section called “The Thinking Man’s Guide to Populist Rage” over a still from the 1931 film version of Frankenstein that shows the villagers in pursuit of the monster, with torches, cudgels, and dogs.

Tongue-in-cheek or not, those images suggest the specters that populism triggers for a lot of people: demagoguery, social disorder, mob rule, and a new age of class warfare. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Suzanne Garment warned Obama that you couldn’t just stir up a little bit of populism and turn it off when it gets inconvenient. Populism is dangerous, she said, recalling the racism that tainted some adherents of the original capital-P Populists, the radical movement that flourished in the western states and the South during the depression of the 1890’s. They advocated curtailing corporate power, an eight-hour day, and a graduated income tax — proposals frightening enough to lead their critics to describe them as “wild-eyed, rattle-brained fanatics.”

But that’s playing a little fast and loose with the P-word.

Go here to read the rest of this really great essay!