The Question at the Heart of the Democratic Schism
Throughout the summer and fall, a group of writers (including me) began documenting the growing appeal of economic populism and the rising influence of its practitioners. We populist-boosters mostly had the field to ourselves for several months. But in the last few weeks, the skeptics have gotten vocal, culminating with a Wall Street Journal op-ed two weeks ago by the centrist group Third Way. The Third Way piece decried “the economic populism of New York Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren,” which it labeled a “dead end for Democrats.”
Lost in the back and forth has been a precise definition of what populism actually is. In some tellings it’s a rhetorical posture—say, denouncing inequality or Wall Street banks. In others, it refers to specific policy ideas, like raising the minimum wage or boosting Social Security benefits. Sometimes it’s been nothing more than a thinly-veiled cultural attack—a contempt for people who live on the Upper East Side and rent summer houses in Long Island.
Whatever the case, this vagueness does no favors for anyone trying to advance genuinely populist ideas. The lack of precision lets critics define populism in ways that are most convenient—coopting certain elements and distorting or trivializing others until the term gets drained of meaning. At that point, you no longer have a clash of worldviews, just what Slate’s Dave Weigel recently called a “game” between rival political mau-mau-ers.
Weigel’s piece on the flare-up between Third Way and the party’s populist wing was a useful case study in the dangers of defining our terms too loosely. Several times in the piece Weigel quotes Third Way’s co-founder and communications chief, Matt Bennett, who suggests everyone has gotten hung up over a mangy little label (never mind that his group wielded it like an epithet). If you set aide the loaded lingo, Bennett insists, we Democrats are mostly on the same side, with the exception of a few policy quibbles. “The idea of the op-ed was … [d]o we grapple with the entitlement crisis or not?” Bennett said. “[W]e’ve taken very progressive views on financial reform. We’ve featured lectures by people like Paul Volcker and Sheila Bair who are not, shall we say, running dogs for the banks.” Hey, some of my best friends are populists!
These characterizations are highly misleading. Populism can’t be ghettoized in a single issue like entitlements or financial reform. It touches pretty much every economic issue that divides Democrats.
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http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115942/democratic-schism-over-bankers-vs-reformers-real
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