Transformations of Populism in Europe and the Americas: History and Recent Tendencies 9781474225212, 9781474225243, 9781474225229

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Transformations of Populism in Europe and the Americas

Transformations of Populism in Europe and the Americas History and Recent Tendencies Lead Editor John Abromeit Co-editors Bridget María Chesterton, Gary Marotta, and York Norman

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2016 Paperback edition first published 2017 © John Abromeit, Bridget María Chesterton, Gary Marotta, York Norman and Contributors, 2016 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the authors. British Library Cataloguing-­in-Publication Data Names: Abromeit, John, 1970- | Chesterton, Bridget Marâia, 1973- | Marotta, Gary (Gary Michael) | Norman, York. Title: Transformations of populism in Europe and the Americas : history and recent tendencies / [edited by] John Abromeit, Bridget Marâia Chesterton, Gary Marotta and York Norman. Description: London : Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2015. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015018696| ISBN 9781474225212 (hardback) | ISBN 9781474225229 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781474225236 (ePub) Subjects: LCSH: Populism–Europe–History. | Populism--America–History. | Political participation--Europe–History. | Political participation–America–History. | Political culture–Europe–History. | Political culture--America–History. | Social change–Europe--History. | Social change–America--History. | Europe–Politics and government. | America–Politics and government. Classification: LCC JN8 .T73 2015 | DDC 320.56/62094--dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015018696 ISBN:

HB: PB: ePDF: ePub:

978-1-4742-2521-2 978-1-3500-3696-3 978-1-4742-2522-9 978-1-4742-2523-6

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk

Contents List of Contributors Introduction

vii xi

Part One  New Historical Perspectives on Populism Section I  Right-Wing Populism and the Rise of National Socialism in Germany 1

The Role of “the People” and the Rise of the Nazis  Peter Fritzsche

2

Conservatives—Radical Nationalists—Fascists: Calling the People into Politics, 1890–1930  Geoff Eley

15

Germany’s Conservative Elites and the Problem of Political Mobilization in the Weimar Republic  Larry Eugene Jones

32

3

5

Section II  Populism in the Balkans from the Late Nineteenth Century to the Present 4 5 6

Nationalism and Populism in the Balkans: The Case of Croatia  Mark Biondich

51

The People as a “Happening”: Constellations of Populism in Serbia in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries  Nenad Stefanov

68

Alija Izetbegović’s Islamic Declaration and Populism in Bosnia  York Norman

90

Section III  Transformations of Populism in the United States in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries 7

Richard Hofstadter’s Populist Problem and his Identity as a Jewish Intellectual  Gary Marotta

105

8

The American Populist and Anti-Populist Legacy  Charles Postel

116

9

Populist Movements in US History: Progressive and Reactionary  Ronald Formisano

136

vi

Contents

Section IV  Populism in Latin America and the Caribbean, 1920–60 10 Populism in the Circum-Caribbean, 1920s–50s  Gillian McGillivray and Thomas D. Rogers

153

11 Populist Discourses, Developmentalist Policies: Rethinking Mid-Twentieth-Century Brazilian Politics  Joel Wolfe

178

12 Populism as an Identity: Four Propositions on Peronism  Matthew B. Karush

197

13 Performing Populism in Paraguay: Febrerismo on Stage in the Works of Correa and Ruffinelli, 1933–43  Bridget María Chesterton

212

Part Two  Historical Theories of Populism 14 Transformations of Producerist Populism in Western Europe  John Abromeit

231

15 Populists and Parasites: On Producerist Reason  Mark Loeffler

265

Part Three  Recent Tendencies in Populist Movements in Latin America, Europe, and the United States 16 Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe Today  Cas Mudde

295

17 Ideologies of Economic Populism in America and their Subversion by the Right  Peter Breiner

308

18 The Contested Meanings of Populist Revolutions in Latin America  Carlos de la Torre

330

Index

345

List of Contributors John Abromeit is an Associate Professor of History at the State University of New York, Buffalo State, where he teaches courses on modern German and French history, modern European intellectual history and historiography. He is the co-­editor of Herbert Marcuse: A Critical Reader (with W. Mark Cobb, 2004) and Herbert Marcuse: Heideggerian Marxism (with Richard Wolin, 2005). He is the author of Max Horkheimer and the Foundations of Frankfurt School (2011). His articles and reviews have appeared in Constellations; Theory and Society; Theory, Culture and Society; Radical Philosophy; The Journal of Modern History; and The American Historical Review. Mark Biondich is an Adjunct Research Professor at the Institute of European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. He teaches courses on the history of the modern Balkans and the post-­communist transition in the region. He has authored two books, the most recent of which is The Balkans: Revolution, War, and Political Violence since 1878 (2011). Peter Breiner is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University at Albany, State University of New York. He is the author of Max Weber and Democratic Politics (1996) and numerous articles on Weber, Karl Mannheim, and other political theorists who continued the project of connecting political theory to political sociology. He is presently at work on a book that seeks to demonstrate that modern democratic politics is defined not by settled institutions but by an ongoing and dynamic struggle over the meaning of political equality and citizenship. Bridget María Chesterton is an Associate Professor of History at the State University of New York, Buffalo State. She earned her Ph.D. at SUNY Stony Brook in 2007. Her publications include The Grandchildren of López: Frontier and Nation in Paraguay, 1904– 1936 (2013) and articles in the Journal of Women’s History and the Hispanic American Historical Review. She is the editor of a forthcoming text, also with Bloomsbury Academic, entitled The Chaco War: Environment, Ethnicity, and Nationalism. Her future work is a monograph-­length text on the Stroessner years and consumption in Paraguay. Carlos de la Torre is Professor of Sociology at the University of Kentucky. His most recent books on populism are The Promises and Perils of Populism (2014); Latin American Populism of the Twenty-First Century, co-­edited with Cynthia J. Arnson (2013); and Populist Seduction in Latin America (2010). Geoff Eley is the Karl Pohrt Distinguished University Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His books include Reshaping the

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German Right: Radical Nationalism and Political Change after Bismarck (1980); The Peculiarities of German History (co-­authored with David Blackbourn, 1984); Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850–2000 (2002); A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (2005); Nazism as Fascism: Violence, Ideology, and the Ground of Consent in Germany (2013); and German Colonialism in a Global Age (co-­edited with Bradley Narach, 2014). He is currently writing a general history of Europe in the twentieth century. Ronald Formisano is the William T. Bryan Chair of American History and Professor of History (emeritus) at the University of Kentucky. He has written about populist movements and parties throughout his career. His seven books include The Transformation of Political Culture: Massachusetts Politics and Parties, 1780s–1840s (1983); Boston Against Busing (1991, 2004, a study of reactionary populism); The Great Lobster War (1997); For the People: American Populist Movements from the Revolution to the 1850s (2008); and The Tea Party: A Brief History (2012). His study of inequality in the United States will appear in 2015. Peter Fritzsche is Professor of History at the University of Illinois where he has taught since 1987. He is the author of several books including Rehearsals for Fascism: Populism and Political Mobilization in Weimar Germany (1990); Germans into Nazis (1998); Life and Death in the Third Reich (2008); and The Turbulent World of Franz Göll: An Ordinary Berliner Writes the Twentieth Century (2011). Larry Eugene Jones is Professor of Modern European History at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York, and has published extensively on the political history of the Weimar Republic, including German Liberalism and the Dissolution of the Weimar Party System, 1918–1933 (1988). He is also author of Hitler versus Hindenburg: The 1932 Presidential Elections and the End of the Weimar Republic (2015) and editor of The German Right in the Weimar Republic: Studies in the History of German Conservatism, Nationalism, and Antisemitism (2014). He is currently working on a history of the German Right from 1918 to 1934. Matthew B. Karush is Professor of History at George Mason University and Editor of the Journal of Social History. He is the author of Culture of Class: Radio and Cinema in the Making of a Divided Argentina, 1920–1946 (2012) and Workers or Citizens: Democracy and Identity in Rosario, Argentina, 1912–1930 (2002) as well as the co-­ editor of The New Cultural History of Peronism: Power and Identity in Mid-Twentieth Century Argentina (2010). He is currently completing a book on the transnational history of Argentine popular music. Mark Loeffler is a Collegiate Assistant Professor and Harper-Schmidt Fellow in the Society of Fellows at the University of Chicago, where he also received his Ph.D. in History. He is currently revising his first book manuscript, “Producers and Parasites: The Critique of Finance in Germany and Britain,” which examines contestations of finance capital from the Great Depression of 1873–1896 through the aftermath of the

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ix

interwar Depression. His second book project examines twentieth-­century discourses on the technological displacement of labor. Gillian McGillivray is an Associate Professor at York University’s Glendon College History Department in Toronto, Canada. Her book, Blazing Cane: Sugar Communities, Class, and State Formation in Cuba, 1868–1958 (2009) was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title. She recently published “Cuba: Depression, Imperialism, and Revolution, 1920–1940,” in The Great Depression in Latin America, ed. Paulo Drinot and Alan Knight (2014), and is working on a new research project on “Sugar and Power in the Brazilian Countryside, 1928–1964.” Gary Marotta is Professor of History (Emeritus) at the State University of New York, Buffalo State. He received his MA from Columbia University, his Ph.D. from New York University, and has published in the fields of US intellectual and diplomatic history, as well as art history, including the exhibition catalogue for the Rodin retrospective at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. He served as editor of the Journal of Long Island History, and his senior administrative posts include University Dean at Long Island University, Vice President for Academic Affairs at the University of LouisianaLafayette, and Provost at Buffalo State College. Cas Mudde is an Associate Professor in the School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Georgia. His most recent book publications include Political Extremism (2014), Youth and the Extreme Right (2014), and Populism in Europe and the Americas: Threat or Corrective for Democracy (2012). He is currently working on two books: (with Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser) Populism: A Very Short Introduction for Oxford University Press and (with Sivan Hirsch-Hoefler) The Israeli Settler Movement: Assessing and Explaining Social Movement Success for Cambridge University Press. He is co-­editor of the European Journal of Political Research. York Norman is Associate Professor of Eastern European and Middle Eastern History at the State University of New York, Buffalo State. He has focused on Balkan history, successfully completing a Ph.D. thesis on Ottoman Sarajevo during the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as well as on aspects of Bosnian history from 1878 to 1991. He is currently working on a book project on Celal Nuri [İleri], an Ottoman intellectual during the Young Turk and the early years of the Republic of Turkey. He has published a number of articles in recent years on this author and other late Ottoman intellectuals. Charles Postel, Associate Professor of History at San Francisco State University, has also taught at Sacramento State University, UC Berkeley, and the University of Heidelberg. His book on the Populist movement of the 1890s, The Populist Vision (2007), received the Bancroft Prize and the Frederick Jackson Turner Award. Recently he wrote “The Tea Party in Historical Perspective: A Conservative Response to a Crisis of Political Economy,” in Steep: The Precipitous Rise of the Tea Party Movement (2012), and “If They Repeal the Progressive Era Should We Care?”, Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (July 2014).

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Thomas D. Rogers is Associate Professor of History at Emory University. He specializes in modern Latin American history, with focuses on Brazil, labor and environmental history, and Afro-Latin American history. His book The Deepest Wounds: A Labor and Environmental History of Sugar in Northeast Brazil won the 2010 Warren Dean Memorial Prize from the Conference on Latin American History. Rogers has taught as a Fulbright Foreign Scholar at the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco. He has recent articles in International Labor and Working-Class History and Latin American Research Review. Nenad Stefanov is a researcher and lecturer in the History of Southeastern Europe at the Humboldt University in Berlin. His main areas of research are transnational history, border studies, and intellectual history. He is the editor of Bosnien und Europa: die Ethnisierung der Gesellschaft (with Michael Werz, 1994) and the author of Wissenschaft als nationaler Beruf. Die Serbische Akademie der Wissenschaften und Künste 1944–1989. Tradierung und Modifizierung nationaler Ideologie (2011). He is currently participating in the research project on “Phantom Borders in Eastern Central Europe,” which examines the establishment of borders in the post-Ottoman society in the Central Balkans. Joel Wolfe is Professor of Latin American History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is the author of Autos and Progress: The Brazilian Search for Modernity (2010) and Working Women, Working Men: São Paulo and the Rise of Brazil’s Industrial Working Class, 1900–1955 (1993). He is at present writing The Global Twenties: Trade, Work, and Society in the Western Hemisphere during the 1920s.

Introduction John Abromeit, Bridget María Chesterton, Gary Marotta, and York Norman

Origins and development of the project The inspiration for this volume came from the conference, “Transformations of Populism in Europe and the U.S.: History, Theories and Recent Tendencies,” which took place in April 2011 at Buffalo State College. The conference was motivated in part by the emergence of the Tea Party movement in the 2010 midterm elections as a major force in American politics, but also by the continued prominence of right-­wing populist parties in Europe. We wanted to pose the question of how and why populist ideas and practices—which emerged historically as part of a struggle for progressive ideals such as popular sovereignty, political inclusivity, and egalitarian anti-­elitism—had been so effectively appropriated by parties that embraced conservative and even reactionary political, economic, and cultural positions. Seeking to understand what—if any— connections existed between earlier progressive and more recent right-­wing populist movements and ideas was clearly a task for historians and historically minded sociologists and political scientists. Our examination would provide more satisfying answers if based on a comparative historical study of different regions, in which the development of populist movements and ideas could be observed over time. Toward this end, we invited a number of scholars with expertise on the history of populist movements and ideas in the United States, Germany, and the Balkans. One important point of reference in discussions of the history of populism in the United States has been the writings of the former Columbia University historian, Richard Hofstadter. In his 1955 Age of Reform he posited a complex link between some of the more questionable aspects of the political ideology of the progressive populist movement of the late nineteenth century and the emergence of a new populist radical right in the United States in the postwar period. With the revival of social history in the 1960s and 1970s, several historians revisited the history of progressive populism and went to great lengths to refute Hofstadter’s thesis.1 Although most historians of the progressive populist movement remain skeptical of Hofstadter’s arguments,2 other historians, sociologists, and historically minded social-­psychologists continue to find important insights in Hofstadter’s claims.3 Regardless of where one stands on Hofstadter’s controversial thesis, revisiting it and the heated debates it has provoked

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raises important questions about the differences between progressive and reactionary forms of populism and provides a good vantage point from which to observe the history and transformations of populism in the United States. In the German context, several prominent scholars have recently argued that the National Socialists’ rise to power depended largely on their ability to harness a widespread populist movement in Germany in the 1920s. How and why were the Nazis so successful in incorporating progressive populist ideas (such as popular sovereignty, or hostility to traditional conservative elites and parliamentary corruption) and practices (mass mobilization) in order to establish their hegemonic position as the embodiment of the general will of the German “Volk”? Justifications for the tragic war in the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s often were framed in terms of ethno-­nationalist ideology, which relied heavily on populist appeals to “the people,” whose will was supposedly embodied in the figure of charismatic leaders, such as Slobodan Milosevič and Franjo Tudjman. To what extent was the success of aggressive ethno-­nationalist movements in Serbia, Croatia, and other parts of the Balkans dependent upon their appropriation or activation of earlier populist traditions in the region? In addition to these three historical panels, there was a panel on theories of populism and another on recent tendencies in populist movements in Europe and the United States. The former addressed some of the central points of contention in the literature on populism, such as whether there is a “populist minimum”; in other words, what characteristics (if any) do populist movements and/or ideologies in different historical and geographical contexts have in common? How does one distinguish between progressive and reactionary forms of populism? The invited speakers on the recent tendencies panel sought to place the recent success of right-­wing populist parties in the United States and Europe within the broader historical contexts of the emergence of a new family of right-­wing populist parties in Europe since the 1980s and the shift in populist rhetoric in the United States from the left to the right in the 1970s and 1980s. What are the defining characteristics of the new family of “populist radical right parties”4 in Europe, and do they pose a threat to liberal democratic institutions? How does the Tea Party stand in relation to other recent populist movements, such as those that rallied behind George Wallace in the late 1960s and early 1970s or Ross Perot in the 1980s? To what extent can the success of recent right-­wing populist movements in the United States be explained as a displacement of populism from the economic to the cultural sphere, as Thomas Frank argued in his widely discussed What’s the Matter with Kansas? These same questions remained central to our concerns as we began to develop a book project based on the conference. We quickly realized that any serious comparative historical study of populism would need to include Latin America, where populism has played and continues to play a decisive political role. The rule of Juan and Evita Perón in mid-­twentieth-­century Argentina is often considered the paradigmatic case of populism and scholarly assessments of Peron display all the passionate disagreements one finds in the literature on populism more generally. How did Peronism function as a movement and an ideology, and how did it compare to other populist regimes in the mid-­twentieth century, such as those of Getulio Vargas in Brazil, Lázaro Cárdenas in Mexico, or Fulgencio Batista in Cuba? In contrast to Europe and the United States, more recent populist movements in Latin America have remained firmly within a

Introduction

xiii

leftist tradition, although their critics have often accused them of authoritarian tendencies. What do the successful populist movements and parties of the late Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, Evo Morales in Bolivia, and Rafael Correa in Ecuador tell us about the transformation of populist traditions in Latin America and in the world more generally? What do they have in common and how do they differ from contemporary right-­wing populist parties in Europe and the United States? The scope of our volume is intentionally broad and, as such, is meant primarily to serve the needs of laymen or scholars seeking an introduction to the history, theories, and recent tendencies of populism in the regions it addresses. Our decision to focus on Europe, the United States, and Latin America was determined by time and space limitations, and by the editors’ areas of scholarly expertise.5 There have been recent comparative historical studies of Latin American populism,6 or even comparative studies of contemporary populist movements in Europe and the Americas.7 But ours is the first trans-­continental comparative historical study of populism since Populism: Its Meaning and National Characteristics, which was edited by Ernst Gellner and Ghita Ionescu in 1969. Since then, Gellner and Ionescu’s study has been an important point of reference for scholars of populism, as it has for us as well. We have followed them in adopting an approach that is based primarily on comparative history, but also includes essays on theory and contemporary populist movements.8

Reassessing populism In what follows we draw upon the essays in this volume to suggest some tentative answers to the questions mentioned above. The essays can be placed in any number of different constellations, which will illuminate populism in different ways; each reader should draw his or her own conclusions. At the same time, we would like to put forth some general hypotheses in regard to three major areas of debate in the literature on populism. Is there a “populist minimum”? What distinguishes progressive from reactionary forms of populism? What explains the frequently observed phenomenon of the transformation of populism in the dual sense of, first, the tendency among populist movements to shift from democracy to authoritarianism and, second, the successful appropriation by right-­wing populist groups of progressive populist ideals?

A “populist minimum”? Table 1 below represents an ideal type of a “populist minimum,” which is based on the essays in this volume. For each of the characteristics mentioned, we have cited those essays in the volume which emphasize or illustrate it with particular clarity.9 The table also draws upon some other notable scholars’ efforts to construct a theory of populism.10 Table 1 expresses our conviction that it is useful analytically to construct a “populist minimum,” because there are a number of characteristics that nearly all populist movements share in common. In addition, there are a number of secondary characteristics which are common to most, if not all populist movements. As Max Weber pointed out long ago, when he introduced the concept of an ideal type, the

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match between the abstract model and the various empirical cases it is intended to illuminate is never perfect. Nonetheless, the model possesses explanatory power insofar as it grasps something essential and thus is not a “mere” abstraction. Our ideal types of a “populist minimum” and “progressive” and “reactionary” forms of populism, are not merely descriptive; they should help us explain the development of populist movements past, present, and future. Such a “populist minimum” should also help to distinguish populist from non-­populist movements and ideologies.

Characteristics shared by almost all populist movements (in no particular order) 1. Belief in popular sovereignty and its full political realization. “The People” are the sole source of legitimacy, and politics should express the “will of the people.”11 2. Virtue resides in the “simple people” from the “heartland” who compose the majority of the population.12 The will of this majority must be reasserted against a foreign and/or immoral minority, which has allegedly acquired too much power. Since the minority is portrayed as taking advantage of the majority, populist rhetoric is anti-­elitist.13 3. Politics is not based on compromise through negotiation between a plurality of distinct groups or interests, but instead on a stark friend–­enemy distinction, in which the stigmatized minority or alien oppressor must be completely assimilated, suppressed, or eliminated. Traditional affiliations such as class, profession, or party are abandoned or subordinated to one’s identification with “the people,” which is posited as identical with the political community as a whole. New forms of popular identity are created in opposition to the “enemies of the people.”14 4. Populism is a response to a real or perceived crisis in which politics and/or society have gotten out of control and ruling elites have been delegitimized. Populism promises to restore a “natural” or just order by returning power to “the people.”15 5. Although the above characteristics seem common to almost all populist movements, they must be combined with an appeal to local traditions in order to be successful. “The People” must be defined in terms of local traditions in a way that resonates emotionally with broad groups.16

Characteristics shared by most populist movements (in no particular order) 1a. Hostility to traditional conservative elites, who are seen as, at best, out of touch with the current needs of the people or, at worst, actively oppressing them.17 1b. Hostility as well to liberal representative politics, as inherently corrupt or inefficient. Populists aim to replace representative politics with direct democracy, or authoritarian and/or technocratic rule.18 In short, populism is usually hostile to both political liberalism and traditional conservativism.19 2. Suspicion of cosmopolitanism and internationalism.20 3a. Populists are reformist, not revolutionary. They desire change in order to restore or maintain traditional or existing social order that is perceived as being threatened by exploitative or corrupt elites or foreigners. If revolutionary rhetoric is used, then it is usually in the name of a “moral” or “spiritual,”

Introduction

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“revolution” that will reestablish the primacy of the virtuous political community over the selfish particularism of individuals or “special interest” groups.21 3b. The reformism and emphasis on “spiritual” or “moral” transformation also largely explains populists’ hostility to Marxian socialism, which is seen as both excessively and insufficiently particularistic, with its alleged overemphasis on the interests of workers and its internationalist betrayal of the national community.22 Marx’s call for a transformation of the social relations of production is deemed dangerous and unnecessary, because populists believe that economic antagonisms can be overcome through state regulation and/or corporatist co­operation between labor, capital, and other “productive” social groups.23 4. Populism is more common and more successful when democratic political institutions and modern means of communication exist. Despite its frequently nostalgic character, its presuppositions are thoroughly modern. Its appeals to tradition are often yoked to modern aims. The strong presence and persistence of populist movements and parties in the most modern societies has definitely laid to rest the once common belief that populism was a phenomenon unique to rural or “developing” societies.24 5. Economically, populists favor corporatism and/or cooperation among all productive elements in society. Populists do not object to private ownership of the means of production as long as these privately owned enterprises are productive. They identify the “parasitism” of foreign or minority groups who garner profits without working as the principal threat to the economy.25 6. Populist movements are composed of individuals and groups from a variety of social and occupational backgrounds. The ideological appeal of populism transcends particular demands and interest groups insofar as it demands that such particular identities are subordinated to one’s commitment to “the people” as a whole.26 Alternatively, the interests of the majority social group are equated with the interests of society as a whole.27 7. In the realm of art, and especially popular culture, populism is characterized by idealized or sentimental portrayals of the struggle of virtuous representatives of the common people against domination or exploitation by nefarious elites.28

Notable characteristics that are not decisive in determining whether a movement is populist or not Populism can be both: 1. Pro- or anti-­state.29 2. Urban or rural.30 3. Keynesian or (neo)liberal.31

Progressive vs. reactionary populism The characterization of “progressive” and “reactionary” populism shown in Table  1 is intended to establish ideal types. We fully realize that no actual historical or

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Table 1  Comparison of progressive and reactionary populism Progressive populism:

Reactionary populism:

1. Focuses on the particular, rational interests of particular groups. Aims to increase the political influence of its followers or to benefit them materially.32

1. Focuses on emotional issues, such as dignity or resentment. Symbolic or emotional compensation is most important.33

2. Does not require a strong leader. The role of the leader is to articulate the interests of “the people.” Leaders are replaceable because the movement coheres around specific demands.34

2. Depends upon a charismatic (and usually authoritarian) leader, who is seen as the personal embodiment of the “general will.” Supporters have a strong emotional identification with the leader.35 The leader is not easily replaceable, because the movement coheres primarily around his or her person. Political demands remain vague and subject to change.36

3. Involves a spontaneous mobilization of vast numbers of people who desire more influence in politics and/or redress of material grievances.37

3. Involves mobilizing from above the reluctantly political, who are normally suspicious of politics as such. The main role of the mobilized people is to legitimate the power of the leader’s party or organization. Once the real or imagined threat to “the people” has been neutralized, supporters are demobilized and political conflict is suppressed by authoritarian rule.38

4. Accepts intellectuals who are allies and who place themselves in the service of the larger cause. Supporters are encouraged to educate themselves.39

4. Harbors strong anti-­intellectual tendencies. Even reactionary populist intellectuals present themselves as anti-­intellectual. Supporters are encouraged to trust the leader(s) for guidance.40

5. Informed by analysis and critique rather than simply vilification of a personalized “enemy.”41

5. Personalizes politics and blames problems on concrete individuals and/or groups, who must be neutralized or eliminated.42

6. “The people” are seen primarily as a group of living individuals.43

6. “The people” are seen as a collective, transcendent, transgenerational entity.44

7. “The people” are seen as a deliberate historical achievement and ongoing project, subject to redefinition in the future.45

7. “The people” are seen as an organic growth, historically, culturally or even biologically limited and not subject to redefinition.46

8. The aims of the movement and the rules that should guide politics (especially the relationship between rulers and ruled) are clearly articulated.47

8. The aims of the movement (beyond eliminating the threat of “the enemy”) and the rules that should guide politics remain vague.48

9. Emphasizes fairness, justice, equality and redistribution of power and/or wealth. Favors equality for women.49

9. Emphasizes the maintenance of “natural” hierarchies and the acceptance of inequalities of wealth and power. Opposes equality for women. Pronounced xenophobia and a tendency toward paranoia are present.50

10. Demands the replacement of representative politics with direct democracy in order to eliminate corruption and promote equality.51

10. Demands the replacement of representative politics with authoritarian and/or technocratic rule in order to eliminate corruption and increase efficiency.52

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contemporary populist movement will conform exactly to either type. The point of such an exercise is rather to make clear that populist movements always share characteristics of both. But such ideal types and enumeration of common characteristics can be helpful in grasping the political tendencies of historical or contemporary populist movements.

Transformations of populism from progressive to reactionary Finally, we would like to offer some more tentative reflections on a theme central to many of the essays in the volume, namely the transformation of populism from progressive, in a reactionary or repressive direction. We would not like to argue that such transformations are necessary, or the only possible trajectory that populist movements and ideas can follow. Charles Postel provides an alternative to the interpretation of American populism, popularized by Richard Hofstadter and others, which sees its ideas moving in a left-­to-right trajectory from the 1890s through the 1960s. Matthew Karush demonstrates how the Peronist movement in Argentina split into progressive and reactionary wings. Nonetheless, many of the essays in the volume have described the development of populist movements and ideas as moving in a trajectory from progressive to reactionary, in at least three distinct ways: the shift of particular populist movements in a more repressive direction within the course of their own development;53 the appropriation by reactionary populist movements of ideas and traditions from earlier progressive movements;54 and the increase—very broadly speaking—of reactionary populist movements in the twentieth century, compared to the predominance of progressive populist movements in the nineteenth century, which were inspired directly or indirectly by the French and/or American Revolutions. We believe that each of these three phenomena warrant closer examination, but in the limited space we have here, we can only tentatively offer a few possible hypotheses, based on the essays in the volume, which would need to be tested and refined by further research. Regarding the frequently observed development of particular populist movements in a repressive direction, the hostility of populism to representative politics seems to play a key role, because if a populist movement succeeds in gaining power, it tends toward the suppression of politics—what several authors in this volume describe as a tendency toward “demobilization.”55 This tendency is clear in cases such as National Socialism or authoritarian populism in Serbia, Croatia, Cuba, Nicaragua, Jamaica, and the Dominican Republic. In other cases where the populist movement is more difficult to categorize politically—such as Argentina or contemporary Venezuela—authoritarian leadership and egalitarian grass-roots political institutions may develop simultaneously. These institutions or organizations can serve to check the authoritarian tendencies of the populist leader, or can outlive him or her. The ideal of a progressive populist movement would be a successfully functioning radical democracy, with a maximum decentralization of power.56 In addition to populism’s hostility to representative politics, its essentially reformist and idealistic-­moralistic character57 also seems to favor the maintenance of core institutions and values of the dominant society, even after a successful populist movement.

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When trying to explain the ease and effectiveness with which reactionary populist movements have appropriated progressive populist ideas and traditions, recent theorists of populism and the essays in the current volume provide several clues. First, one needs to point to the realization—made first perhaps in the US, but followed not much later in Europe and then elsewhere—that core political principle of populism, popular sovereignty, is fully compatible with authoritarian rule. One could argue that Hobbes had already pointed the way, with his theory of sovereignty, which mixed authoritarianism and popular legitimation. In any case, later theorists of reactionary populism, such as Giovanni Gentile and Carl Schmitt, were happy to portray their arguments as being in the tradition of theorists, such as Rousseau and Mazzini, who had linked popular sovereignty to progressive political projects.58 Furthermore, the transformation of nationalism in Europe over the course of the nineteenth century, from a predominantly liberal-­democratic to a chauvinistic conservative ideology, also established the conditions for the emergence of new forms of right-­wing populist nationalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.59 Such forms were then often imitated outside of Europe.60 Other factors to consider in the reactionary appropriation of populist ideas is their tendency to reduce politics to a Manichean conflict between friends and enemies and to blame social problems on one or more concrete groups and to call for their neutralization or elimination as the solution. Such an approach fails to grasp the causes and mechanisms of social domination and thus lends itself well to ideological appropriation by those who have no interest in fundamental social change or in providing genuine explanations of domination.61 On a related note, populists’ demands that everyone be willing to make sacrifices for “the good of the people as a whole” makes it easy to conceal an unfair distribution of such sacrifices. Such injustices are difficult to address within a political framework that discourages the articulation of particular interests and insists that individuals’ primary identity and loyalties remain with the political community as a whole. Finally, and most tentatively, we offer a few hypotheses regarding the question of why there has seemingly been an increase in the number of reactionary populist movements in the twentieth and twenty-­first century, when the nineteenth century— especially the first half—witnessed the rise of progressive liberal, nationalist, democratic, and socialist movements in Europe and around the globe. At the risk of returning to a mechanical sociological explanation of populism, it is hard to overlook the fact that in modern capitalist societies, populism has often involved lower-class mobilization (peasants, artisans, workers) by or along with an ascendant middle class, which has a common interest in overthrowing an entrenched traditional and/or foreign elite. Once this middle class attains power, new conflicts emerge between it and its erstwhile lower-class allies. Reactionary populist movements in the twentieth century have often been prompted by a mobilization of the middle class (spontaneously or initiated by conservative elites) against political challenges from the lower classes or left-­wing workers’ movements.62 Furthermore, it is worth considering the ways in which modern means of communication—especially one-­way forms of communication, such as radio and television, that can be easily dominated by small, powerful groups— lend themselves naturally to authoritarian populist forms of politics, which rely upon

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identification with a leader and the dominance of images and emotional rhetoric over rational debate.63 The essays in this volume were completed before the remarkable victory of Syriza in the Greek elections in January of 2015. Many commentators have applied the populist label to Syriza and have seen Syriza’s victory as a sign of the possible resurgence of left-­ wing populism in Europe. Syriza’s open support of Podemos, the new self-­proclaimed left-­populist party in Spain, as well as its formation of a governing coalition with the right-­wing populist Independent Greeks party (ANEL), seemed to confirm this interpretation of Syriza.64 Yet, Syriza’s own ideological roots lie with the rich and diverse traditions of Greek Marxism,65 and some of Syriza’s leading intellectuals have stressed the differences between Syriza and Podemos in relation to populist political strategies.66 Despite its coalition with ANEL,67 Syriza has rejected the xenophobic ideology that is so central to right-­wing populist parties in Greece and elsewhere in Europe.68 As noted in the typology of left- and right-­wing populism above, the essays in this volume emphasize, for the most part, the ultimate incompatibility of Marxian socialism and populism. Still we hope that the ideal types presented here can help answer the question of whether Syriza, Podemos and other political movements and parties can justifiably be labeled “populist.” At the time of this writing (April 2015), it is unclear how the crisis in Greece will be resolved or how much support Syriza and Podemos will retain in the coming years.

Summary of the essays Germany Peter Fritzsche has done more than anyone to introduce the concept of populism into recent scholarly discussions of the rise of National Socialism in Germany. In his essay he briefly presents some of his main arguments why “populism is a useful category of analysis with which to regard National Socialism.” After a theoretical overview of the general characteristics of populism, Fritzsche goes on to demonstrate how almost all of the preconditions for its success existed in Germany during the interwar period. The November Revolution of 1918 undermined the authority of socially dominant groups and traditional ruling elites, while at the same time creating new forms of democratic politics, of which not only the Social Democratic and Communist left, but also the nationalist right took full advantage. Although these new forms of political participation at first led to the emergence of a number of small occupational and interest-­group parties—especially among the middle and lower-­ middle class—by the beginning of the 1930s, these parties disappeared entirely and many of their members became Nazi supporters. Fritzsche describes this process as populist, insofar as it involved the “de-­identification” of individuals with their occupational or social groups and a “re-­identification” with the rhetorical claims of the Nazis to represent the German people as a whole against its internal and external enemies. Fritzsche argues that the Nazis built upon a powerful populist movement among patriotic veterans and civic groups that was set in motion in 1918 and picked up momentum in the mid-1920s, especially during Paul von Hindenburg’s successful

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presidential campaign in 1925. Although the Great Crash of 1929 may have been the direct precursor of the Nazis’ rise to power, they could not have succeeded, according to Fritzsche, without the prior existence of this movement and its successful mobilization of a widespread populist attitude. Geoff Eley begins his essay with a review of some of the main tendencies since the 1960s in the scholarly literature on fascism, in general, and the rise of National Socialism, in particular. Eley observes in this literature a gradual move away—common among the discipline of history as a whole in the 1970s and 1980s—from social to cultural methodologies and modes of explanation.69 Eley characterizes Peter Fritzsche’s Rehearsals for Fascism: Populism and Political Mobilization in Weimar Germany as the “culmination” and “apex” of the social historical research conducted on the “movement” phase of National Socialism. After describing Fritzsche’s relationship to this research and sympathetically summarizing some of his main arguments, Eley points to four different ways in which Fritzsche’s reinterpretation could possibly be improved or expanded. Eley is concerned that Fritzsche has not drawn out the singularities of Nazi ideology clearly enough; has underestimated the violent impact of the First World War on political culture; and has not adequately addressed the crucial role played by counter-­revolutionary violence from 1918 to 1923 in setting the stage for the Nazis’ eventual success. Even more important for Eley, however, is Fritzsche’s relative neglect of the formation of a radical, right-­wing populist nationalism in Germany—and elsewhere—already before 1914. He argues that we must pay attention to the European-­ wide crises of constitutionalism and capitalism in order to understand this new nationalism, which was rabidly anti-­socialist, but which also successfully appropriated the language and political style of progressive populist movements from the French Revolution onwards. Eley and Fritzsche both characterize the Nazi movement as a form of “right-­wing Jacobinism,” but Eley argues that more extensive genealogies are necessary to determine how such transformations of populism from the left to the right occurred around the turn of the twentieth century. In his essay Larry Eugene Jones raises some questions about the applicability of the concept of populism to conservative and conservative revolutionary politics in the Weimar Republic. Jones does not deny that strong populist impulses existed in Germany between the wars. In fact, he examines four historical episodes in which such impulses set the tone of political debate: the November Revolution of 1918; the wave of nationalist protests following the announcement of the Treaty of Versailles in May 1921; the reevaluation of crisis of the mid-1920s; and the rural movement of impoverished peasants and agricultural workers in the late 1920s. In each case Jones argues that the attempts by conservative political elites to harness such populist anger failed. Not only was conservative populism in Weimar a failure, it does not make much sense to describe the National Socialist movement as “populist” either, according to him, because it possessed a highly centralized and disciplined structure that was inimical to political spontaneity and that aimed to demobilize, rather than mobilize the German population politically. Defending a purely contextualist approach to the concept of populism, Jones argues that the concept loses its explanatory power when separated from the emancipatory meaning it possessed in nineteenth-­century Europe and the United States.

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The Balkans Mark Biondich’s essay examines the history of populist movements in Croatia from the late Austro-Hungarian period until the death of Franjo Tudjman in 1999. He defines populism as movements that protested “established political regimes, social orders, and ruling ideologies.” Founded in 1904, the Croatian Peasant Party (HSS) garnered strength from the resentments of peasants and other socially disaffected elements in Croatia toward the existing political elites. The HSS really flourished during the interwar period under Stepan Radić, the unabashed opponent of Croatia’s incorporation into the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. His assassination by Serbian nationalists in Parliament in 1928 led to the radicalization of Croatian nationalists, and growing support for Ante Pavelić’s Croatian fascist movement, the Ustashas. The Nazi invasion of Yugoslavia gave the Ustashas a brief mandate to establish a greater Croatian state and attempt genocidal policies toward its Serbian and Jewish minorities. Josip Broz Tito’s Partisan movement stopped the slaughter and reestablished ethnic tolerance, although it came at the cost of tolerating popular nationalist dissent. Franjo Tudjman, a onetime member of the Yugoslav Communists, reinvigorated Croatian nationalist popular resentments with the onset of the “Croatian Spring,” in 1970. This presaged Tudjman’s Croatian Democratic Union, which successfully took power in Croatia in 1990. Tudjman, like Radić, was able to establish himself as an authoritarian figure, although it was he, and not Radić or Pavelić, who ultimately succeeded in transforming his movement into a state. In his essay Nenad Stefanov argues that there is no unbroken line of continuity between Svetozar Marković’s Russian-­inspired narodniki movement in the 1870s and later anti-­liberal movements, such as the push for a people’s state in the 1930s, or the “anti-­bureaucratic revolution” carried out by Slobodan Milosevič in 1987–9. Rather, he posits that the latter two cases were in fact totalitarian movements based on the strategy of “demobilization,” a paradigm for explaining the breakup of former Yugoslavia introduced by V. A. Gagnon.70 Stefanov also builds on the findings of Nebojša Popov, a sociologist who tied Milosevič to the right-­wing radicalism of the 1930s, and the cultural anthropologist Ivan Čolović, who saw radical nationalists of Milosevič’s ilk using politics of symbols to consolidate their rule. He offers an alternative to the interpretation to some recent commentators who have seen Milosevič as gaining strength from the long-­term authoritarian traditions of the Serbian Radical Party, which allegedly betrayed Marković’s vision as early as the 1880s. Stefanov finds that populism in general used mass protests, or “happenings,” to legitimize a new Serbia that would use the fear of nonconformity to suppress alternative voices. Such a movement was not inevitable in Serbia, however, as there were emerging critical intellectuals from the 1970s onwards, such as those of the Praxis Circle, which raised legitimate social concerns that were echoed as late as October 1988. Demobilization unfortunately ended these hopes. York Norman’s essay deals with the Bosnian Muslims, whose history of mass political participation differed considerably from their Serbian or Croatian counterparts in terms of its religiosity and diverse socio-­economic origins. As Norman points out, Bosnian populism, which began in the wake of the Austrian occupation of 1878, never

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was strictly a peasant-­based movement. Instead, supporters of the protests, townsmen and landowners as well as agrarian laborers, emphasized their unity as Muslims. Such movements could be seen in Ali Fehmi Džabić’s struggle for cultural and educational autonomy at the turn of the twentieth century, the succeeding Yugoslav Muslim Organization of the interwar years, and various Bosnian Muslim activists during the Second World War. Alija Izetbegović, the founder of the Party for Democratic Action, was the first Bosnian Muslim populist to openly espouse independence, and not autonomy, as a solution to his community’s precarious place within Yugoslavia. Izetbegović first expressed this point of view in 1970 in his work, the Islamic Declaration, a controversial book that landed him in jail and promoted his position among conservatives as the leading Bosnian Muslim political dissident. He was inspired in this endeavor by Islamists of international renown, such as Muhammad Iqbal and Sayyid Qutb, which he used to differentiate himself from rival Bosnian Muslim Islamic thinkers. His incorporation of anti-­liberal ideas of ethnic separatism and anti-­ secularism from these authors into his discourse has regrettably marred his political legacy.

The United States The agrarian revolt of the 1890s in the United States, principally in response to profound industrial, commercial and social dislocations, led to the formation of the People’s Party in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1892. Its platform challenged the status quo, the dominant economic order, and the political establishment of Republicans and Democrats. Its adherents, known as populists, moved American politics to the left. This mass movement had a marked impact on American political culture; their expressions of discontent echo through the twentieth and twenty-­first centuries. With the resurgence of the post-New Deal right in its several manifestations, each with transformed populist rhetoric in its service, a vehement debate over the historical understanding of populism—its nature and legacy—emerged and has continued ever since. The debate also has gained a deeper sophistication, brought about by a longer perspective in US history and a broader comprehension of populist movements in other countries and regions of the globe. As mentioned above, the work of Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter (1916–70) has been one important source of debates about the nature and legacy of populism in the United States. Gary Marotta, a student of Hofstadter in the mid-1960s, explicates Hofstadter’s thesis, his analysis of the dark side of populism, its “ambiguous character” as at once reformist and reactionary, and its historic connections—socially, rhetorically, and psychologically—to the rise of the Radical Right. The transformation of populism from left to right, Marotta argues, is inherent in the ambiguous character of populism itself, just as Hofstadter predicted. Its crankiness, its paranoid style, its bigotry, its anti-­intellectualism, its revolt against perceived elites and privilege, its status anxiety, its self-­serving cupidity—all have resurfaced in the right-­wing populism of today. Throughout, Marotta links Hofstadter’s thesis to the historiographical debates on populism, concluding that his essential insights into its dark side endure and constitute a warning. Because of the centrality of Hofstadter’s thesis, Marotta probes

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his biography for the sources of his insights, finding them in his identity as a Jewish intellectual. He traces Hofstadter’s life and intellectual influences, the impact of the Depression and New Deal in shaping his radicalism, and his responses to the rise of the Radical Right and the New Left. Hofstadter, though eventually shying away from his early radicalism, remained sympathetic to the left, and was always repelled by authoritarianism, anti-­intellectualism, racism, and anti-Semitism. Hofstadter, Marotta argues, remained suspicious of vulgar mass movements, no matter their political pretense. Charles Postel, one of the leading contemporary scholars of American populism, argues in The Populist Vision (2007) that the movement was a farmer-­labor coalition similar to reform labor and democratic socialist movements elsewhere. The populists demanded a progressive income tax, farm credits, access to higher education, the eight-­ hour day, and government control of banks and railroads. Many of them were women demanding more autonomy and rights. The principal legacy of populism stems from the fact that when the Populist Party failed, its supporters went into the farmer-­labor reform wings of the Democratic and Republican Parties, or joined the Socialist Party, and thereby formed a constituency for the realization of much of the populist program in the Progressive Era. As for Hofstadter’s analysis, Postel appreciates his insights about the “hard” or business side of the American populists, but considers that Hofstadter was mistaken regarding the “soft” side of supposed populist delusion and irrationality. While Postel believes that much of the scholarship has tended to overstate the extent to which the populists championed racial equality, he does not accept Hofstadter’s exaggerated claims that the populists were a special source of the politics of intolerance and unreason in the United States. In that regard, Postel says there is a lack of evidence for the Hofstadter thesis that the Cold War radical right and similar conservative movements were descendants of the populists of the 1890s. In the second half of his essay, Postel discusses how conservative movements have been rooted in a different historical legacy. During the populist years, corporate conservatives forged a militant opposition to defeat farm and labor reform. Postel views this “anti-­populist” legacy as a predecessor of later conservative mobilizations against perceived threats to corporate power, including the Liberty League of the 1930s, the John Birch Society during the Cold War, and the Tea Party in the age of Obama. Ronald Formisano, author of For the People: American Populist Movements from the Revolution to the 1850s (2007) and the Tea Party (2012), brings a longer perspective to populist protest movements. Like Marotta and Postel, he is focused on the character of populism, whether it is progressive or reactionary. He contends, indeed, that there are two forms of the movement, progressive and reactionary. Progressive populism, he says, is concerned for fairness, justice, equality; reactionary populism cares more for morality and authority, is culturally illiberal and more socially exclusive. Both distrust the status quo and conventional political parties. Such “ideal type” categories, however, seldom exist historically, since populist movements generally combine both progressive and reactionary features. In this regard, Formisano reviews populist movements from the early Republic, the Jacksonian movement of the 1830s, the Know Nothings of the 1840s, the Farmers Alliances of the 1880s, the People’s Party of the 1890s, the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) of the 1930s, the

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Civil Rights movement and the role of George Wallace in the “White Backlash” of the 1960s and 70s, the Ross Perot campaign of 1992, and the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements of the twenty-­first century. All of these movements displayed elements of populism, some progressive, some reactionary, with most confounding left-­right categories. Populist rhetoric and frustration, he argues, was built into US history from the start, with the language of populism embedded in the Revolution and the great documents of state, but frustrated by the mechanics of government, out of a fear of mass democracy by the designers of the Constitution. “ ‘We the People,’ ” writes Formisano, “explicitly invited its citizens to regard themselves as the rulers—though in fact they were not, nor would they be.” Populist movements and leaders, he concludes, have shared a common language, but there is “No one Populist tradition in the case of social movements.”

Latin America The essay co-­authored by Gillian McGillivray and Thomas D. Rogers uses Mexico as a platform to jump off into a larger study of the Caribbean region, arguing that Lázaro Cárdenas’ program of populist land distribution to peasants sheds light on various other “agrarian, export commodity-­based” populist movements. Through this lens it is clear that many of the regimes labeled earlier as “dictatorships” had many populist qualities. This essay suggests that Depression Era leaders held power by adopting both populist rhetoric and patron–­client relationships. This comparative approach allows for a greater understanding of the identity and racial politics in Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, and the West Indies. By making broad claims about the similarities shared by movements in the region—such as an emphasis on the inclusion of peoples of Native and African descent in the political process—this essay helps to flush out the difference between Depression Era and postSecond World War politics in the region. Furthermore, the case studies in the essay— especially those of the Somoza family in Nicaragua, Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, and Fulgencia Batista in Cuba—shed important light on the political, social and social-­psychological dynamics at work in the transformation of progressive populist movements into authoritarian regimes. Joel Wolfe’s essay gives a broad view of Brazil’s experience with populist leadership during the mid-­twentieth century. Wolfe argues that unlike unmistakable populist experiments in Argentina and Mexico, Brazilian populism is a bit more nuanced. Instead of rushing to include large segments of the population into the political structures, Getúlio Vargas first had to build those structures. In other words, Vargas needed to overcome the strong regional loyalties of Brazilians, rather than focus on the immediate needs of workers and peasants as Perón or Cárdenas did. According to Wolfe, what the Vargas administration needed was a functioning bureaucracy, which he constructed by expanding “the federal government’s power and [its ability to] promote national economic and social development.” As a result, Vargas was forced to build strong top-­down political and economic structures. For example, in order to promote economic development he quickly created the Departamento Administrativo do Serviço Público. He also chose to focus on cultural projects that were designed to

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foster a sense of loyalty to the nation rather than local or regional fealty; these projects included the creation of a national football club and the promotion of Grand Prix racing. In the end, Wolfe contends that it was Vargas’s successor, Jucelino Kubitscheck, who was the true populist. It was Kubitscheck who implemented populist policies that raised salaries, started the first auto manufacturing in Brazil, and built large hydroelectric plants that increased opportunities for many of Brazil’s working families. Nonetheless, Wolfe argues, without the foundation provided by Vargas, Kubitscheck’s populism would have been unlikely. In his essay Matthew B. Karush provides a historiographic review of the Spanish and English literature of Peronism. Karush argues that although theorists and historians have had a great deal of difficulty understanding the inconsistencies of the movement, in the end he argues that new methods and sources have given us a much clearer understanding of this particular populist movement. Starting with Ernesto Laclau’s now classic interpretation of Peronism, Karush outlines how that position attacked the then dominant theory proposed by Gino Germani: that Argentina’s working class were irrational. Karush maintains that revisionist historians, under the influence of Laclau, began to see Peronists as neither holding authoritarian values nor as irrational, and “restored both contingency and complexity to the history of Peronism.” Significantly, Karush demonstrates that, according to this new historiography, the Peronists’ understanding of their movement—“ranging from Catholic versions on the right to revolutionary ones on the left”—was based on how they interpreted their individual roles in the party. These newer interpretations come from historians who have worked with oral histories such as Daniel James and Natalia Milaneso to give us a clearer understanding of the way that the movement has been experienced by everyday Argentines. As a result, Karush suggests that those who supported the movement did so because it was Perón who was able to “mobilize thousands of Argentines around a new political identity, but he built that identity out of . . . existing elements.” Karush’s essay demonstrates that historians in recent decades have made headway toward understanding Peronism by moving beyond what appears on the surface as Peronism’s irrationality. Bridget María Chesterton’s essay studies populism in one of Latin America’s least known nations: Paraguay. Wedged between two nations famous for their populist movements, Brazil and Argentina, historians have tended to overlook this small, landlocked country. If this is true in a broad historical sense, it is even more so when considering Febrerismo: a short-­lived early twentieth-­century political movement in this nation. This oversight can be attributed, according to Chesterton, to the powerful belief held by both scholars and everyday Paraguayans about the notion of Paraguayan exceptionalism. While Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Peru, Cuba, and other Latin American nations experienced well-­studied populist movements, the literature on Paraguayan history seems to exempt the landlocked nation from such scrutiny. However, Chesterton demonstrates that like the majority of other Latin American nations, Paraguay also experienced an important and influential populist movement in the 1930s in the form of Febrerismo, led by Colonel Rafael Franco, a hero of the 1932–5 Chaco War. Because of the dearth of traditional sources that would be useful to track the influence and ideas of Febrerismo, Chesterton turns to the plays of Julio Correa and Luis Ruffinelli to

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explore how popular culture reflected the hopes and values of Paraguay’s soldier/ agriculturalist during and after the Chaco War and the rise of Febrerismo. Chesterton postulates that Paraguay’s popular culture shared many traits with melodramatic tendencies throughout the region. She demonstrates how drama and poetry explored and exposed populist ideas and, in particular, how and why Paraguay’s rural classes felt entitled to full political participation after their sacrifices in defending the country during the war.

Historical theories of populism Much recent scholarship on fascist movements in Europe has highlighted the populist dimensions of fascist ideology. Such scholarship raises the question of how and why radical right-­wing fascist movements were able so successfully to appropriate ideas and forms of political organization from progressive populist movements of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In his essay John Abromeit seeks an answer to this question by examining the transformations of the discourse of “virtuous producers and immoral parasites” from the French Revolution to fascist ideology in the 1920s. He argues that this “producerist populist ideology” combined ideas from classical Republican political theory and modern liberal political economy. Through an examination of Abbe Sieyès and the Jacobins, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Georges Sorel and his reception among French and Italian fascists, Abromeit seeks to demonstrate how the content of producerist populist ideology remained remarkably constant, even as it served different political functions in its bourgeois, socialist, and fascist forms. Because this ideology was deeply rooted in Western European political traditions and enjoyed approval among wide sections of the population, it could become a powerful source of the intellectual and emotional appeal of fascist ideology. At the same time, by examining those aspects of the bourgeois and socialist incarnations of producerist populism that were not or could not be appropriated by fascists, Abromeit also examines the important breaks that existed between them. Only by identifying both the continuities and breaks is it possible to explain how early twentieth-­century fascist movements appropriated nineteenth-­century progressive populism. Mark Loeffler’s essay also addresses the “producerist” dimensions of populist discourse. He focuses in particular on the ways that “the people” have been defined as “producers,” and have been opposed with money and finance as the relevant enemy “parasites.” In the aftermath of turns from class-­based and modernization-­theoretical definitions of populism toward discursive approaches, he seeks to develop critical perspectives on these kinds of producerism. He first explores examples from Britain and Germany. Combined with other examples in this volume, this exemplifies the transnational currency of these discourses. Loeffler argues that this currency in turn helps to specify the kinds of theoretical approaches that would be necessary to account for why producerist populisms became meaningful and compelling historically. To begin developing such an approach, he first turns to recent exchanges on populism between Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek. For Loeffler as for many other contributors to this volume, Laclau’s interventions have been fundamentally important in problematizing the materialist reductionism of previous approaches to populism.

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However, Loeffler also argues that their exchange clarifies some of the limitations of Laclau’s analysis, specifically with regard to developing critical approaches to populism and illuminating the historical conditions of possibility of populist political-­economic discourse. Loeffler then begins to sketch a more adequate approach to producerist discourses. He bases this on a reading of the Marxian critique of political economy that subverts traditional Marxist forms of materialist, class-­based reductionism. He argues that we can best understand the widespread historical plausibility of populist producerist discourse on finance by recovering its relation to historically determinate forms of social practice that are constitutive of capitalist society, yet that also have the propensity to appear in ways that obscure capitalism’s core dynamics.

Recent tendencies Since the mid-1980s many new right-­wing populist parties have emerged in Europe and some have become a powerful and seemingly permanent presence in their countries’ political landscapes. Perhaps the best known among them is the Front National in France, which shocked the world in 2002 when its leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, came second in the first round of the presidential elections. Since then, and particularly in response to the ongoing economic crisis in Europe, new right-­wing populist parties have emerged. In his essay, Cas Mudde provides an overview of populist radical right parties, and he argues that they have three defining characteristics: nativist nationalism and xenophobia; an authoritarian emphasis on law and order; and a populist belief that politics should express the general will of the “pure people” and not a “corrupt elite.” After elaborating which parties throughout Europe fit these criteria, Mudde addresses the questions of why they have been electorally successful and whether or not they pose a political threat. On the one hand, Mudde argues that the disproportionate attention these parties have received in the media and the academy has made them seem more threatening than they really are. The threat they pose cannot be compared to the 1930s, because liberal democracy rests upon much more solid foundations in Europe today. On the other hand, their emergence since the 1980s as the “most successful new party family of postwar Europe,” does represent the most significant challenge yet to liberal democracy and has made clear that the seemingly extreme positions they have taken on issues such as crime and immigration have resonated deeply with large sections of electorate, which also explains why these positions have since been adopted by many of the mainstream conservative parties. In his widely read and fiercely debated What’s the Matter with Kansas?, Thomas Frank argued that the resurgence of conservative political power in the United States in the Reagan and Bush era could be explained largely in terms of Republicans’ success in transforming economic populism into cultural populism. Redefining the enemy of the people as a cosmopolitan, liberal cultural elite, allowed conservatives to deflect people’s attention from economic inequalities upon which American populists had traditionally focused. In his essay Peter Breiner explores the ways in which this transformation of progressive economic into conservative cultural populism was overdetermined by the historical relationship between economic populism and reform liberalism in the United States. Through a brief examination of this relationship at six

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different junctures in time—from the People’s Party of the 1890s to the New Left of the 1960s—Breiner demonstrates how both reform liberals’ fear of economic populists and economic populists’ inability to transcend the limits of a Lockean, patriotic vocabulary of protest, made it easy for conservatives to exploit the tensions between liberals and populists, and ultimately to harness populist energies for its own political aims. But, according to Breiner, the more recent decline in the political effectiveness of conservative cultural populism and Barack Obama’s cautious overtures to economic populism may indicate that a new chapter in this history has begun. Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, Rafael Correa in Ecuador, and Evo Morales in Bolivia have all consciously sought to appropriate and transform traditions of progressive populism in Latin America. At the same time, their critics have pointed to authoritarian excesses that allegedly jeopardize liberal-­democratic rights and institutions. After a brief theoretical overview of the relationship between populism and liberal democracy, Carlos de la Torre examines the political movements and leadership styles of Chavez, Correa, and Morales to provide insight into the tensions between populism and liberal democracy in recent years in Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia. Some of the populist traits shared by all three include a “messianic” approach to politics, in which they portray themselves as saviors of “the people” who are making a radical break with the corrupt past and ushering in new epochs in the history of their countries. All three also rely on a Manichean rhetoric of “the people” vs. the “oligarchia” and view politics as the direct expression of the “will of the people.” Their populism has succeeded in bringing more people into the political process, while at the same time unleashing powerful authoritarian tendencies. De la Torre argues that the excesses of Chavez, Correa, and Morales must be seen, at least in part, as a response to the corruption and exclusionary policies of the regimes they replaced, which did not always respect the rule of law and democratic procedures either. There is, in other words, a danger that “the baby of liberal democracy” will get thrown out with the “dirty water of neoliberalism, patrimonial and clientelist political systems,” but only the future will tell how serious it is.

Notes   1 See, for example, Michael Rogin, The Intellectuals and McCarthy: The Radical Specter (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967) and Lawrence Goodwyn, Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America (New York: Oxford UP, 1976).   2 See, for example, Charles Postel’s essay in the present volume.   3 See Gary Marotta’s essay in the present volume.   4 Cas Mudde.   5 We could have included additional sections on Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, where populism has also played and continues to play an important role—as the Arab Spring has recently demonstrated. We hope that other scholars with more expertise in these areas will put together a volume similar to our own, in order to make the comparative historical study of populism truly global and to see if the hypotheses we have advanced here hold up in different historical and geographical contexts.   6 For example, Michael Conniff (ed.), Populism in Latin America, 2nd edn (University of Alabama Press, 2012).

Introduction

xxix

  7 For example, Nicos P. Mouzelis, Politics in the Semi-Periphery: Early Parliamentarism and Late Industrialization in the Balkans and Latin America (London: Macmillan, 1986) and, more recently, Cas Mudde and Cristobal Rovira Kaltwasser (eds.), Populism in Europe and the Americas: Threat or Corrective for Democracy? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).   8 Although our geographical focus is not as broad as theirs was, it is deeper insofar as we have included at least three essays on each of the regions we address.   9 In the table we refer to the authors of the articles in the volume with the following abbreviations: Geoff Eley (GE), Peter Fritzsche (PF), Larry E. Jones (LEJ), Joel Wolfe (JW), Matthew Karush (MK), Gillian McGillivray and Thomas Rogers (GMTR), Bridget Chesterton (BC), York Norman (YN), Nenad Stefanov (NS), Mark Biondich (MB), Gary Marotta (GM), Charles Postel (CP), Ron Formisano (RF), Cas Mudde (CM), Carlos de la Torre (CdlT), Peter Breiner (PB), John Abromeit (JA), and Mark Loeffler (ML). 10 We draw, in particular, on the writings of Ernesto Laclau, Margaret Canovan, and Paul Taggart. 11 PF, CM, MB. See also Canovan, Populism (London: Junction Books, 1981), 294 and Canovan, The People (Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA: Polity, 2005). 12 For a discussion of the importance of the “heartland” in populist ideology, see Paul Taggart, Populism (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 2000). 13 MB, GM, LEJ, CM, MK. 14 MK, PF, GE. On the dynamics involved in the formation of new collective identities in populist movements, see Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005), esp. chapters 4 and 5. Here it is also important to note that populism is not truly universalist or humanist, insofar as it always needs an outgroup in contrast to which it constructs “the people.” For example, as Margaret Canovan points out, the “herrenvolk” populism of Andrew Jackson was based on an egalitarianism of white males, which went hand in hand with racism against Black and Native Americans. Canovan, The People, 29. 15 RF, GMTR, LEJ, PF. 16 CdlT, MK, JA. 17 GE, PF, CP, JA, YN. 18 PF, GE, CM, JA, MB, CdlT, GMTR. 19 “Anti-­liberal” here means critical of classical (European) political liberalism, especially the ideas of representative government; decision making through rational debate and compromise; and respect for the rights of minorities. 20 PF, GE, GM, MB, YN. Isaiah Berlin defined populism primarily in terms of this hostility to cosmopolitanism and its ideological emphasis on rootedness and belonging. Isaiah Berlin, “To Define Populism,” Government and Opposition 3: 2 (April 1968), 137–80. 21 CldT, JA, JW, CM, CdlT, YN. 22 MK, YN. See also Laclau, Politics and Ideology within Marxist Theory (London: Verso, 1979), 81–142. 23 JA, ML, PB, RF, CP, PF. 24 GMTR, MK, JW, CM, CldT, MB, YN, PF, CP. 25 JW, GMTR, GE, CP, JA, PB, ML. 26 GE, PF, MK, CP. See also Laclau, On Populist Reason, 65ff. 27 This is the case with what Margaret Canovan calls “peasant populism” (in Populism, 110f.) and what Mark Biondich and Nenad Stefanov describe in their essays

xxx

28 29 30 31 32 33

34 35

36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61

Introduction as the “peasantism” of populist movements in the Balkans in the early twentieth century. BC, MK. PB, ML, CP, GMTR, MB. GMTR, NS, MB, YN, MK. MK, JW, CM. GMTR, CP, PB, RF, PF. PB, MK, JW, PF. This is also why, as Max Horkheimer pointed out, social psychology is more useful in explaining reactionary than progressive social movements. See, for example, Horkheimer, “Egoism and Freedom Movements: On the Anthropology of the Bourgeois Epoch,” Between Philosophy and Social Science: Selected Early Writings (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 95–110. CP, MB. On this point, see also Laclau, On Populist Reason, 72f. When populist leaders are genuine representatives of “the people,” that is, when they have risen from humble origins and these origins are visible in their appearance or mannerisms, it facilitates this process of identification. The importance of this social-­psychological mechanism is made clear by the efforts of populist politicians who do not hail from “the people” to affect such appearance and mannerisms. Gillian McGillivray and Thomas Rogers illustrate this dynamic in their essay in this volume. MK, GMTR, JW, MB, CldT, RF, NS. NS, CP, LEJ, RF, PF, MK, JW, GMTR. NS, LEJ, CdlT, PB, PF, GMTR, MK. CP, YN, MB. GM, RF. PB, NS, CP. CdlT, PF. CdlT. See also, Margaret Canovan, The People, 91ff. CldT. Ibid. CldT. Ibid. PF. Ibid. GMTR, CP. MK, MB, GMTR. RF, CP, MB, GMTR. RF, GM. LEJ, JA. GE, PF, JA. GMTR, NS, MB, JA, MK. NS, MB, GE, PF, JA, PB. NS, LEJ. Whether or not such a radical decentralization of power is possible in modern societies is another question. See footnotes 21–23 above. Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, trans. Ellen Kennedy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 13–14. Giovanni Gentile, Origins and Doctrine of Fascism, trans. A. James Gregor (New Brunswick: Transaction, 2002), 5ff. GE. MK, GMTR. ML, GM, RF.

Introduction

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62 MK, GMTR, PF, JW, JA. See also Edmund Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (New York: Norton, 1988) and Horkheimer, “Egoism and Freedom Movements.” 63 JW, MK, CdlT, PF. 64 See, for example, Dan Hancox, “Why Ernesto Laclau is the Intellectual Figurehead for Syriza and Podemos,” The Guardian (US edition), February 9, 2015; and Yannis Stavrakakis and Giorgos Katsambeki, “Left-­wing Populism in the European Periphery: The Case of SYRIZA,” Journal of Political Ideologies 19: 2 (2014), 119–42. 65 See Sebastian Budgen and Stathis Kouvelakis, “Greece: Phase One,” Jacobin, January 22, 2015 (https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/01/phase-­one/). 66 For example, Stathis Kouvelakis, one of Syriza’s leading theorists, had the following critical response to the article cited above by Dan Hancox: “I would recommend my Essex colleagues, and the journalists reproducing uncritically their statements, to be a bit more cautious in their efforts to ‘sell’ the ‘brand-­name’ of their institution, Ernesto Laclau, at least as far as Syriza is concerned. There is little I think that can be more irritating for any Syriza activist that this attempt to present the ‘populism’ and the rejection of class references the ‘key to Syriza’s sucess.’ Syriza and Podemos have many things in common but also substantial differences, their way to organize and their intellectual culture is one of them.” Stathis Kouvelakis, Facebook.com, March 31, 2015. See also Kouvelakis’s critical remarks on Laclau at the end of the interview with Sebastion Budgen cited above. 67 Some commentators have argued that the coalition with ANEL was not motivated by any shared populist convictions, but was instead instrumental, insofar as ANEL was the only other significant Greek party that shared Syriza’s uncompromising rejection of European economic austerity policies. Theodora Oikonomides, “Syriza— Independent Greeks: Strange Bedfellows,” Analyze Greece! News and Left Politics, January 25, 2015 (http://www.analyzegreece.gr/topics/elections-250102015). 68 See, for example, Preethi Nallu, “The Real Winners of Greece’s elections: Refugees,” Integrated Regional Information Networks (IRIN): Humanitarian News and Analysis, January 26, 2015. In light of the powerful xenophobic tendencies that exist in Greek society as a whole, Syriza’s decidedly non-­populist position on Greek and European immigration policy is all the more remarkable. See Caitlin Katsiaficas, “A New Day for Greek Migration policy? The New Government and Prospects for Reform,” Bridging Europe, BREF Commentary no. 33, March 3, 2015. 69 See Geoff Eley, A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005) and William H. Sewell Jr., Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 22–80. 70 V.P. Gagnon, The Myth of Ethnic War: Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004).

Part One

New Historical Perspectives on Populism

Section I

Right-Wing Populism and the Rise of National Socialism in Germany

1

The Role of “the People” and the Rise of the Nazis Peter Fritzsche

Politics over the course of the Weimar Republic was structured by confessional and class cleavages which manifested themselves not only in the relative electoral stability of political Catholicism and social democracy, but in the fierce political antagonisms between the nationalist right and the socialist left. But Weimar politics were also dynamic, dominated as they increasingly were by the formation of a confrontational and self-­confident anti-­republican front that culminated in the rise of the National Socialists who, by 1930, were hegemonic in bourgeois Protestant districts even as they attracted significant numbers of Catholic and working-­class voters. The Nazis certainly did not represent all German people, since the number of Communist and Social Democratic votes—not to even factor in the Catholic Center Party—remained larger than the National Socialist vote in the two key 1932 Reichstag elections before Hitler’s appointment to the Chancellorship in January 1933. However, the social make-­up of both the Nazi electorate and the party membership extended well beyond Nazism’s unmistakable Mittelstandsbauch. The Nazis were more reflective of the population than any other party in the Weimar Republic. As a Volkspartei, with significant Catholic and working-­class support as well as a strong middle-­class base, the Nazis could claim to speak for the German “people” with some credibility. Moreover, they were also the greatest beneficiaries of the growing political prestige of the idea of the “people,” or the Volk, in the 1920s. Increasing numbers of German citizens identified with and believed they belonged to the Volk, a virtuous but victimized and politically unrepresented whole. The National Socialists were at once the clearest articulation of this populist discourse and its most industrious producer. Populism is a useful category of analysis with which to regard National Socialism not simply because of the aggressive, vernacular style of the party’s political campaigns or because of the diverse social composition of its electorate, but because of the centrality of the construct of the “people” in the party’s presentation of itself. The aim of Nazism was the realization of a racially purified “people’s community” or Volksgemeinschaft, which relied on violence and exclusion even as it promised to overcome the deep divisions among Germans. The idea of the “people” was both the rhetorical ground on which the National Socialists operated and the horizon for which they reached.

6

Transformations of Populism in Europe and the Americas

Although related to democracy, especially in terms of style, Weimar-­era populism was not a democratic concept. The concept of the “people” or the “people’s community” had something profoundly embattled about it. When political protagonists invoked the “people” they did so in a way that revoked its self-­evident or presumptively true nature. The “people” was always a being existentially endangered and politically displaced. Indeed, it was first imagined as a being under threat. By way of illustration, references to “small-­town America” are closely allied with fantasies of either its ruin or its resurrection, but the very act of referencing such a bucolic America withdraws its clean bill of health. It is not something unmistakably in front of us.1 Likewise, to designate something “traditional” is no longer to be within the fold of tradition. Although the “people” is a vague and undifferentiated term, the concept gains credibility in an era of crisis when previously established elites are in disarray, when previously legitimate social groupings have been displaced, and when constituents feel a general sense of jeopardy. The “people” is constituted through a general apprehension of calamity and through the struggle to overcome it. However, as long as the political and economic hierarchies of the old order remain in place, the notion of the “people” has little mobilizing potential. By the same token, as long as particular social and economic interests remain of overriding concern to specific constituencies, class, estate, and profession will matter more than the idea of the “people.” According to Ernesto Laclau, the “people” emerges as a sensible entity only when particular interests and resentments link up in a chain so that each mirrors the distress of the whole.2 In this chain of associations, the trials of the worker or the tribulations of the farmer stand in for the suffering of the “people” as such, while the depredations of the bosses or the bankers are all regarded as illegitimate usurpations. The “people” manifests itself when individuals see their own agonies well reflected in the fate of the nation and its various parts. Thus large-­scale catastrophes such as war or economic depression can fortify a general sense of common suffering. In Germany, the idea of the Volksgemeinschaft was intimately related to the Sonderleidensweg charted by military defeat, Versailles, the inflation, and the Great Depression. Of course, citizens feel attached to the “people” for different reasons, and may well fundamentally disagree with one another even when standing together at a rally or a demonstration, but each participant shares in common the feeling that “they” are menacing “us.” A highly potent energy emerges from the righteous indignation that “outsiders” or “elites” wield overwhelming and endangering power. Populism derives its power from the recognition that basic political legitimacy has to be reordered. My brief theoretical summary of the constitution of the populist idea of the “people” applies only in part to the specific political conditions of Weimar Germany. The constitution of the subject of the “people” was promoted by the illegitimacy of both the old Imperial order and the new republican one, but was mostly confined to nationalist and Protestant precincts. Much of its energy was fueled by the sense of danger allegedly posed by Social Democrats and Communists, and thus its promise was heavily qualified by middle-­class hostility to the political struggles of most working-­class Germans, who could hardly be considered illegitimate outsiders. Even so, over the course of the 1920s, new aggregating notions of insiders and outsiders, victims and victimizers, and of the common good emerged. These dramatically transformed the conduct and substance of

The Role of “the People” and the Rise of the Nazis

7

right-­wing nationalist politics. The social reach of local associational life extended well beyond its prewar contours and the importance of grass-­roots unity efforts to resist local Social Democrats increased, as did the willingness and capacity of nationalists to demonstrate their political power in the streets. Moreover, the authority of established elites and notables declined; with the rise of National Socialism came the end of the power of local notables, the “pillars of the community” who had survived the 1918 November Revolution. For a time, in the first years of the republic, the special interests which the liberal and conservative parties carefully balanced on election lists had the effect of pitting various constituencies against each other, but eventually particular grievances were reconceived as specific, yet conceptually interchangeable instances of the more general neglect that the “people” had suffered at the hands of the old parties. For this reason, quite peripheral groups such as the rural protest group, the Landvolk, in Schleswig-Holstein attracted considerable attention in the early 1930s, catching the imagination even of novelists such as Hans Fallada and Ernst von Salomon; the “Landvolk” became a poignant representation of the Volk in the Land in general.3 And despite increasingly violent confrontations with Social Democrats and Communists, more middle-­class Germans, especially young people, cherished the idea of (finally) integrating the workers into the body of the nation. The rhetorical emphasis on “social justice” created imaginary planks over which to retrieve German workers from the Marxist leaders who had allegedly misled them. In the end, this dynamic created a vibrant stage for middle-­class politics, eviscerated the legitimacy of the liberal and conservative parties both locally and nationally, and shaped a “national socialist” space in which Hitler’s National Socialists would timber and frame their powerful movement. To designate this dynamic as “populist” makes sense to me. It draws attention to the confident grass-­roots style of political protagonists, the broadened social coalitions in which they operated, and the sense of victimhood and entitlement which the idea of the “people” made sensible and enhanced. Weimar populism is not so much an ideological category on par with Social Democracy, but an expression of commonly held ideas of the whole that created an enormous amount of political energy. When the Nazis assumed power, their constituents believed that the moment of Germany’s salvation had come. Hence all the references in 1933 to the “chains” that the “people” had cast off and the voice they had found. Different experiences enfranchise constituencies in various ways by making credible or not notions of social commonality. In the case of twentieth-century Germany, the disaster of the First World War and the shame of Versailles had the effect of making visible and poignant the German “people.” The nation mattered more because it had vividly inscribed itself on individual bodies who on the battlefront had been mobilized, captured, maimed, and killed, or who on the home front had been pressed into work, separated from their families, and made vulnerable to malnutrition and disease. The striking relationship between the individual body and the national body held for the postwar period as well. The Treaty of Versailles, the “bleeding borders” that came with the Polish Corridor (1919) and the partitioning of Silesia (1921), and the French invasion of the Ruhr (1923) were deeply felt by Germans of all classes. Moreover, the effects of the 1922/3 inflation were so sweeping and the pain it inflicted so general, and its appearance so fused in the public mind with the Treaty of Versailles, that it exposed the national fate

8

Transformations of Populism in Europe and the Americas

shared by all Germans, gave stark expression to national character and suffering, and thereby spurred programs for the salvation of the “people.” The difficult terms of war and peace imposed what Ernst Renan, with France’s defeat in 1870 very much in mind, referred to as the “daily plebiscite” of nationalism in which the sum of individual experiences was re­imagined as the general fate of a living, breathing, injured collectivity.4 To be sure, gnawing mistrust among German citizens, especially in the later war years and throughout the Weimar Republic, continually mocked the idea of national community. In many parts of Germany, civil war conditions prevailed for a year or more after the November 1918 Revolution. Outside working-­class circles, Social Democrats were widely feared as laboring men and women demonstrated on the streets with their red flags. General strikes in 1919 showed the “behind-­the-scenes” power of workers that bourgeois Germans had hitherto never imagined. But even middle-­class constituencies were deeply divided over economic issues such as debt, taxation, and welfare measures. Shopkeepers mistrusted department stores, consumer cooperatives, and itinerant salesmen. At the same time, Catholics remained wary of Protestant influence, and Saxons and Bavarians mistrusted Prussians. Nonetheless, at the end of the war, the vocabulary of Volk and Volksgemeinschaft had worked itself deep into the political language of Germans. Increasingly, citizens measured the health of the nation in terms of the imagined entitlements denied to common people. To illustrate the power of this populist vocabulary, I want to briefly introduce a single witness who over the course of the Weimar Republic commented extensively about the political condition of Germany in a populist register. Born in 1899, Franz Göll was not necessarily typical, but the diary entries written by this white-­collar clerk are telling. Unlike most German men, Göll was certified as unfit for service during the First World War. He lived in a small Berlin apartment with his mother and shared with her the strain of standing in line for rationed goods. As Belinda Davis has shown, the everyday politics of food was crucial in constituting a wartime discourse of “us” versus “them,” the disenfranchised “people,” represented physically and rhetorically in this case mostly by women and children, gathered together against the state, the bureaucracy, the military, and war profiteers.5 He reported on the revolution on November 9, 1918: “For too long the German people let itself be used as a tool in the hands of the ‘big and powerful.’ Who else constitutes the German fatherland but the people . . . Shame on those who lied to the people, those who infatuated by the dynasty, unrepentantly sacrificed its great strengths to egotistical aims, which they dressed up as idealism.”6 Göll’s rhetoric clearly conjures up an authentically German majority that has been beleaguered by an illegitimate but powerful minority, which revolutionary action promises to clear away. In this case, the revolution exposed or brought to light the “people.” However, Göll’s early enthusiasm for political reform soured in the wake of party political conflicts which led him to remark that “not everybody can rule”; “the national existence of the people requires a Führer,” a theme he elaborated over the following years.7 In other words, the political mediations of parliamentary democracy divided the people, while a single leader reunified and thereby restored it. Over the course of the 1920s, Göll continued to regard Germany’s condition in terms of “us,” a virtuous and duped whole, and “them,” suspect outsiders who appeared in a variety of guises. During the inflation, Göll caressed the “people,” whose presence

The Role of “the People” and the Rise of the Nazis

9

he felt through the predators who preyed on it. “There are people,” he wrote in 1922 who “treat the world around them as an object for their own advancement.” These were “the blowhards, the shammers, the wheeler-­dealers, the prigs,” who were especially dangerous when they were able to hide behind a “system.”8 A few years later, Göll rewrote the list of suspects in terms more compatible with the frenetic activity of the “Golden Twenties” and the new American customs they introduced. Now it was “sports stars (boxers, cyclists, footballers etc.)” as well as “unscupulous go-­getters” who were the ones who knew how to get ahead.9 In the depths of the Great Depression, he switched characters once again. “The ruthless hotshot” was no longer the celebrity hailed by the mass media but “the con man, the spy, the Jew,” darker, more camouflaged figures.10 Göll’s commentaries are a perfect illustration of how completely different associations all work to create the image of a helpless whole beset upon by any number of illegitimate predators. His commentaries have the effect of producing homogeneity by effacing the social, political, and economic differences among Germans and replacing them with the single opposition of the people and its enemies. The inflation, especially, was fertile ground for imagining the “people” by conjuring up its virtuousness and its helplessness. Observers such as the Berlin journalist Hans Ostwald who, before the war, celebrated the carnivalesque variety of city life, now honored the basic sameness—the thrift and hard work—of the German people who found themselves trapped in a house of horrors. Ostwald’s images of city inhabitants remained largely the same, but the value he placed on difference had shifted dramatically.11 Both Göll and Ostwald displaced difference to locate jeopardy outside the subject—the people—that the displacement thereby constituted. The populist moment is achieved when constituents “wean” themselves from previous attachments and loyalties to “embrace” the newly conjured up whole, the “people.”12 Difference is not only not located in the “people,” but, once exported to outsiders who carry the burden of difference, becomes much more threatening. The entries in Göll’s lists are formally interchangeable, but by 1931 they described a rather more violent conception of the condition in which the “people” found itself than the listings had in 1922 or even 1930. In the populist moment, the “people” acquire the condition of sameness which is expressed in their virtuousness and of endangerment, which is posed by very different sorts of outsiders. Of course, the danger allegedly posed by “the Jew” is more easily identified and eliminated than the danger posed by “the con man” or “the spy.” There is nothing automatic about this process of de-­identification and re-­ identification, and the political dynamic could proceed in reverse so that sentimental notions of the “people” might crumble when sober experience made descriptions of class conflicts or status distinctions more compelling. In the case of Germany, the November 1918 Revolution was deeply divisive. For the middle classes, the revolution, with its factions, strikes, and councils, carried echoes of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia a year earlier. After the civil strife of 1919, nationalists would revere for decades the military leaders who had liberated them from “red” rule (Franz von Epp, Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, Georg Maercker). The fear of the socialists sat deep—deep enough that the brutal vigilante justice that the Nazis meted out to Social Democrat leaders in February and March 1933 could be justified as revenge for what Social Democrats were said to have done to Imperial authorities in November 1918.13 Not even Victor

10

Transformations of Populism in Europe and the Americas

Klemperer, a Jewish convert to Protestantism, someone who understood the political stakes facing Germany in 1933 quite clearly, could conceive of voting for the proletarian Social Democrats; he repeatedly threw his vote away by voting for the German State Party. Yet as much as the revolution divided Germans in the 1920s, it was at first a more popular affair, as Göll’s words suggest. It was not just German workers who felt liberated by the revolution. Philipp Scheidemann’s words on November 9, 1918 expressed the hopes of millions of people: “The German people have triumphed all along the line. What was old and rotten has collapsed. Militarism is finished! The Hohenzollerns have abdicated. Long live the Republic!”14 The first weeks were, as Ernst Troeltsch described it, the “dreamland of the armistice,” where hopes for a better German future flourished. The conviction that a new page had to be turned in German history reached deep into the conservative camp.15 Indeed, the very names of the right-­wing parties, the German People’s Party and the German National People’s Party, illustrated the new democratic contours to German politics. Constituencies of all political stripes started to organize in a massive wave of grass-­roots democratization. Political polarization quickly set in, but many nationalists acknowledged that the revolution had been necessary, if insufficient or misguided.16 The impact of the revolution could even be seen when its opponents later quoted Scheidemann’s lines with bitter irony: “The German people have triumphed all along the line.” That it had not triumphed in the republican system did not mean that it should not have triumphed. Hitler himself referred to himself as a “revolutionary against the revolution.”17 Hitler was hardly alone in mobilizing against the revolution, or in using the democratic forms the revolution had fashioned. The German revolution was not composed of one single movement that swept long-­suffering proletarians down Unter den Linden and into power. The presence of workers was massive, but middle-­class constituencies adjusted to the new circumstances with astonishing speed, organizing political parties, bourgeois councils (Bürgerräte), and economic interest groups. Military demobilization was followed rapidly by political remobilization into the Freikorps and, in far greater numbers, into “Home Guards”—Einwohnerwehren—and veterans’ associations. By the end of December 1918, all political parties were feverishly organizing for the upcoming elections to the National Assembly. Citizens poured into the meeting halls and tavern rooms, taking every available seat. And far from sitting passively, audiences stomped, hooted, and applauded speakers. Parties rapidly established offices, enlisted activists, and recruited members. But it was as members of economic and social constituencies that most Germans mobilized, after the revolution. Every grouplet, from the League of Blinded Warriors to the Association of Newspaper Vendors and the League of German Canteen Leaseholders, required an interest group, an office, a telephone, and a regular publication to obtain social recognition and, with luck, parliamentary protection. It was on the basis of occupation that millions of Germans learned to articulate common interests and to insist on rights and entitlements. While the pursuit of interest was necessarily divisive, it also reflected a larger process of political enfranchisement anchored in the idea of the Volksgemeinschaft. The new liberal and conservative parties energetically courted interest groups, carefully tailoring their electoral lists to balance diverse interests. Some observers such as Oswald Spengler were horrified that republican Germany appeared to be nothing but a

The Role of “the People” and the Rise of the Nazis

11

German-­speaking “pile of interests.”18 But actually, more often than not, interest groups felt underrepresented when faced with the clout of organized labor and big business. Both the German People’s Party and the German National People’s Party experienced increasing difficulty in balancing the competing claims while articulating a broader political message. Eventually, they lost rather than gained voters, as constituents peeled away to form special interest and single-­issue parties such as the People’s Justice Party, the Business Party, and the Landvolk, all of which took larger and larger slices of the vote in national and especially local elections through the Reichstag election of 1930. While the exfoliation of economic interest and the fragmentation of the political parties expressed a populist discourse of entitlement, it also confirmed the degree to which Weimar-­era Germans continued to believed that occupation was the key to political representation. The style and inflection of middle-­class interest politics was unmistakably populist, but the special-­interest parties themselves did not coalesce into a populist movement in which many sorts of “little people” assembled to demand an end to the “system.” The scrupulous attention to occupation was only one side of the coin, however. The increasingly well-­organized activity of patriotic groups militated against occupational fragmentation. The typical picture of provincial sociability in the Weimar Republic— imagine a late summer Schützenfest—included all sorts of interest groups—property owners, civil servants, employee groups, the guilds—but it also included singing groups, veterans’ associations, and athletic clubs. Indeed, the roster of voluntary associations that can be taken from any local telephone directory reveals the growing density of organizational life in the provinces. Where there had been two clubs before the war, there were three after the war, and four by the early 1930s. The social reach of clubs also lengthened to include artisans, clerks, and even workers. Most astonishing, however, is the political salience of local sociability. Throughout the 1920s, new patriotic and paramilitary formations choreographed the nation in homespun ceremonies, parades, and rallies that owed little to the conventions of Wilhelmine patriotic festivity, the ceremonial initiatives of the republican state, or even the fraternal class culture of prewar social democracy. Here the veterans’ group, the Stahlhelm, was the principal innovator. In street demonstrations, military field exercises, and annual excursions into “red” cities such as Hamburg and Berlin, the Stahlhelm organized opposition to the republic and the socialist left and expressed a common sense of purpose in nationalist circles. If occupation divided middle-­class constituents, the nationalist rituals of the Stahlhelm, which celebrated the Volksgemeinschaft and wartime unity, reassembled them. The Stahlhelm was also crucial to the election of Paul von Hindenburg as President in 1925, the result of a broad-­based campaign effort that energized patriots in thousands of neighborhoods across Germany.19 The election essentially established the anti-­republican front: there is no better predictor of the Nazi vote in 1932 than the Hindenburg vote in 1925.20 The Stahlhelm, the Hindenburg election, and an increasing number of street battles with the Social Democrats gave form and substance of the national opposition. It prepared the de-­identification with occupational interest groups and the re-­identification with the embattled nation. If occupational interests dramatized the struggle for survival in the Weimar Republic, the national opposition formulated much more clear “us/them” terms in which the fate of the nation was at stake.

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Transformations of Populism in Europe and the Americas

What qualified the ideal notion of the nation or the “people” was the deep divide that separated the nationalist right from the socialist left. Local associational life upheld these divisions, so that in Weimar Germany clubs frequently came in pairs, one working-­class, one not. Goslar even had two separate voluntary fire companies.21 When nationalist housewives needed to hire a new maid, they worried about getting a “red” or a “dissident.” At the same time, however, the border was somewhat porous. Young nationalists championed the industrial workers of the Ruhr who called a general strike during the French occupation of the region in January 1923. Some even spent their summers as a Werkstudent, or work student, laboring in factories and living among workers. The Stahlhelm also made some gains recruiting workers into its ranks, even as it battled Social Democrats and Communists. Indeed, about one in every four workers in Germany identified with national opposition; the Nazis would push these numbers up and, after 1933, institutionalize the journey of the Werkstudent, by compelling middle-­class Germans to spend six months fulfilling their Reich Labor Service in camps in which they were easily outnumbered by farm boys and working-­class kids. One of the reasons the Nazis were attractive to middle-­class youth was their commitment to integrate workers into the body of the nation and to struggle against “class privilege,” as Melita Maschmann remembered it.22 If associational life in nationalist precincts and its politicization by the Stahlhelm in the mid-1920s created a “national-­socialist”—with a small “n” and a small “s”— consensus that was populist in style, it was the National Socialists themselves who successfully created a populist insurgency. They adopted much of the populist language of rights and entitlements but did so in ways that broke down the exclusiveness of particularist occupational identifications. By 1932, the special interest parties had disappeared from the political landscape. The Nazis explicitly rejected a politics organized around a “pile of interests” and railed against the Weimar “system” and its corruption of the people. And the Nazis attracted more support from Catholics than any non-Catholic party, and more support from workers than any non-­socialist party, successes that were themselves appealing to an electorate drawn to images of the unity of the German “people.” The Nazis were not a “catch-­all party of protest,” because inchoate protest voters do not all vote the same way, and prove to be capricious over time.23 But in fact, in the crucial last three years of the republic, the movement of voters who either switched party alliances or cast ballots for the first time went only in two directions: to the Nazis and to the Communists, who, however, in sociological terms were not much more than the party of the unemployed.24 The Nazis also accelerated what the Stahlhelm and the nationalist opposition to the Republic had set in motion: the re-­identification with the image of an embattled nation that was jeopardized by its republican functionaries, threatened by its former enemies in the “Great War,” and, in the eyes of more and more Germans, corrupted by Jews and other “con-­men” and “spies,” as Franz Göll put it as he stepped up to embrace the Nazis. The Nazis effectively created a political movement that saw itself as representing the German “people” whose trials and tribulations would be mended by the destruction of the “system.” The “people” were a political construct, but one with considerable political effect. After 1933, the willing and also unwilling enrollment of so many Germans in the Nazi project and the complicity such enrollment compelled in the crimes the Nazis committed guaranteed

The Role of “the People” and the Rise of the Nazis

13

that the “German people” would remain an identifiable, if haunted political entity well after the end of the Third Reich.

Notes   1 Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York: Basic Books, 1993).   2 Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (New York: Verso, 2005), 17, 203.   3 Hans Fallada, Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben (Berlin: Ernst Rowohlt, 1931) and Ernst von Salomon, Die Stadt (Berlin: Ernst Rowohlt, 1932). See also Peter Fritzsche, Rehearsals for Fascism: Populism and Political Mobilization in Weimar Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).   4 Ernst Renan, Was ist eine Nation: Rede am 11. März 1882 an der Sorbonne (Hamburg: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1996).   5 Belinda J. Davis, Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).   6 Entry for November 9, 1918, Franz von Göll, “Tagebuch 6.X. 1916—31.XII. 1918; 2. Buch,” Landesarchiv Berlin, E Rep. 200–43, Acc. 3221, Nr.2. For various reasons, I have elected to refer to Franz von Göll as Franz Göll. See Peter Fritzsche, The Turbulent World of Franz Göll: An Ordinary Berliner Writes the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 4–5.   7 Entry for January 1, 1919, “Tagebuch 1. Jan. 1919 – 31.XII. 1932; 3. Buch,” Landesarchiv Berlin, E Rep. 200–43, Acc. 3221, Nr. 3.   8 Entry for February 2, 1922, “3. Buch.”   9 Entry for February 10, 1930, “3. Buch.” 10 Entry for March 22, 1931, “3. Buch.” 11 Peter Fritzsche, “Vagabond in the Fugitive City: Hans Ostwald, Industrial Berlin, and the Grossstadt-Dokumente,” Journal of Contemporary History 29 (1994), 385–402. 12 Peter Worsley quoted by Franciso Panizza, “Introduction: Populism and the Mirror of Democracy,” in Panizza (ed.), Populism and the Mirror of Democracy (London: Verso Books, 2005), 5. 13 Elisabeth Gebensleben to her daughter Irmgard Brester, March 14, 1933, in Hedda Kalshoven, Ich denk so viel an Euch: Ein deutsch-­holländischer Briefwechsel (Munich: Luchterhand, 1995), 178. 14 Alfred Niemann, Kaiser und Revolution (Berlin: August Scherl, 1922), 139. 15 Klemens von Klemperer, Germany’s New Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957). 16 Peter Fritzsche, “Breakdown or Breakthrough? Conservatives and the November Revolution,” in Larry Eugene Jones and James Retallack (eds.), Between Reform, Reaction, and Resistance: German Conservatism in Historical Perspective (Providence: Berg, 1993), 299–328. See also Heinrich August Winkler, Weimar 1918–1933: Die Geschichte der ersten deutsche Demokratie (Munich: Beck, 2005). 17 Quoted in Alan Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (New York: Penguin, 1990), 62. 18 Spengler quoted in Kurt Sontheimer, Antidemokratisches Denken in der Weimarer Republik: Die Ideen des deutschen Nationalismus zwischen 1918 und 1933 (Munich: Nymphenburger Verlagshandlung, 1968), 265. 19 In general, Peter Fritzsche, Rehearsals for Fascism: Populism and Political Mobilization in Weimar Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).

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20 Jürgen Falter, Hitler’s Wähler (Munich: Beck, 1991), 123–5. 21 Fritzsche, Rehearsals for Fascism, 78–9. 22 Michael Kater, “The Work Student: A Socio-Economic Phenomenon of Early Weimar Germany,” Journal of Contemporary History 10 (1975), 71–94; Melita Maschmann, Account Rendered: A Dossier on my Former Self, ed. Geoffrey Strachan (London: Abelard-Schuman, 1964), 10–11. 23 Thomas Childers, The Nazi Voter: The Social Foundations of Fascism in Germany, 1919–1933 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), 268. 24 See Falter, Hitler’s Wähler.

2

Conservatives—Radical Nationalists—Fascists: Calling the People into Politics, 1890–1930 Geoff Eley

My starting point for this chapter is a reflection on the shifting theories and historiographies of fascism between the 1960s and the present. Interestingly, historians by disciplinary affiliation have played only minor roles in the successive phases of theoretical debate, whether during the 1960s (dominated by theorists of totalitarianism and mass society), the turn of the 1980s (shaped by state theory and historical sociologies), or most recently since the 1990s, when scholars in the literary disciplines, history of art and aesthetics, film studies, and cultural studies more broadly began setting the tone. The trend overall has been away from social histories toward culturalist approaches of one kind or another: new intellectual histories of Nazism and Italian Fascism; critical readings of French fascist intellectuals; studies of fascist aesthetics and the fascist spectacle; monographic scholarship across the whole range of the arts; studies of fashion, consumption, and all aspects of popular culture; historical scholarship oriented towards everyday life; studies of sexuality; and so forth. By the turn of the new century, a new body of generalizing scholarship had begun to coalesce around the fallout from this shift, with Roger Griffin’s influence very much at the center.1 In the meantime, discussion has begun diversifying once again, with a new crop of general overviews, source collections, and comprehensive anthologies. With a few notable exceptions (Robert Paxton, Michael Mann) most commentators converged to a primary emphasis on ideology and culture.2 Fascism is now approached less as the consequence of societal crisis and political breakdown than via the symptomatology of a cultural crisis of modernity. Seen earlier as the effect of political backwardness or a society’s failed modernization, a “revolt agianst modernity” or even a species of “anti-­modernism,” fascism returns as an ultra-­ nationalist and “palingenetic” appropriation of modernist energies (Roger Griffin).3 The Marxist version of this shift ran from political theory and materialist sociology (Nicos Poulantzas, the Frankfurt School, Antonio Gramsci) to culture and aesthetics (Walter Benjamin). A series of further discussions then also converge: the still proliferating literatures on the Holocaust, including a now massive new historiography which accepts the “racial state” as the Third Reich’s defining reality; current interest in states of emergency and states of exception, coalescing around renderings of the

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thought of Hannah Arendt, Carl Schmitt, and Giorgio Agamben; the study of fascist aesthetics in their complicated and ambivalent relations to modernism.4 With particular respect to our understanding of Nazism, and for my immediate purposes in this essay, I am interested in the main patterns in the historiography of the NSDAP’s rise during the 1920s and early 1930s, what used to be called the “movement” as opposed to the “regime” phase of its history. Emerging from the 1970s, that historiography showed all the strengths of the ascendant social history of the time, including systematic sociologies of the Nazi Party and its electorate, similar studies of the SA, the beginnings of work on the youth and women’s auxiliaries, sophisticated analyses of the movement’s varying strength across regions and localities of different types, and accounts of its appeal to a wide range of social groups and constituencies. The main arc of that research ran from the classic accounts by William Sheridan Allen on Northeim and Jeremy Noakes on Lower Saxony, published in 1965 and 1971, to the six volumes of Martin Broszat’s “Bavaria Project” appearing between 1977 and 1983.5 The early 1980s also saw Michael Kater’s book on the sociology of the party, those of Mathilde Jamin, Richard Bessel, Conan Fischer, and Eric Reiche on the SA, and of course that of Thomas Childers on the Nazi electorate, slightly preceded by Richard Hamilton and eventually followed by Jürgen Falter.6 A very good cross-­section through the scholarship of that time can be found in the volume Childers edited in 1986 on the range of appeals and types of mobilization that helped compose the Nazi Party’s overall consituency.7 The culmination of this intensely accumulating monographic scholarship was Peter Fritzsche’s 1990 book based on his earlier dissertation, Rehearsals for Fascism: Populism and Political Mobilization in Weimar Germany. Fritzsche’s book marked the apex of this social history of the rise of the Nazis. It was followed by a definite and still-­ continuing hiatus. It also underpinned Fritzsche’s later synthesis, Germans into Nazis, which still stands for a remarkably solid historiographical consensus about the Third Reich’s popular legitimacy, based in well-­established claims regarding its successful eliciting of broadly based societal support and the resultant popular consent. This presumption of a reliable reservoir of popular conformity and acquiescence is now so widely shared as to form the common sense of the field. Fritzsche’s own more recent book, Life and Death in the Third Reich, then further elaborates his argument for the years of the regime itself and the remade social order, showing how those dependable reserves of positive identification could become concretely reproduced. On the basis of the vast intervening research on the years after 1933, he explores the terrible effectiveness of the efforts required of Germans as they thought themselves into the morally coercive world of the Volksgemeinschaft (community of the people-­racenation). He asks: how did Nazism connive so successfully at the “intimacy of complicity,” as Pamela Swett called it in her review of the book.8 Building on Noakes’ earlier pioneering study of Lower Saxony, Rehearsals for Fascism explored the texture of civic life to show how the Nazis could draw on existing patterns of political sociability and associational culture to supplant the staid and orderly politics practiced by the local bourgeois notability (Honoratiorenpolitik), instating instead their own variants of an unruly right-­wing populism. In developing this argument, Fritzsche could rely upon four major building blocks: Childers’ study of the Nazi electorate; the authoritative analyses of party-­political fragmentation in Larry

Calling the People into Politics, 1890–1930

17

Jones’ magnum opus on Weimar liberalism and the collapse of the political center (1988); Rudy Koshar’s 1986 book on the rise of Nazism in Marburg, which charted the NSDAP’s conquest of the established associational networks of bourgeois political cohesion; and for an earlier period my own Reshaping the German Right (1980), which derived the necessary dynamic for a populist radicalization from the conflicts between two distinct modes of politics of the right.9 Shifting focus away from either the economic privations of the Great Depression or nationalist resentments at the humiliation of Versailles, Fritzsche traces the origins of Nazism’s appeal to a transformation of the right beginning much earlier under the Kaiserreich, whose populist breadth was dramatically revealed in the patriotism of August 1914. He thus embeds Nazism’s distinctiveness in a larger story of patriotic concentration, whose possibility was enabled by the surrounding democratization of the early twentieth century. This “political invigoration” began with the “ideas of 1914” and continued through the crisis of 1918–19. “The twenty-­year period beginning in 1914,” he argued, “was characterized by the steady advance of a broad populist revolution that was animated by war, drew strength from the Revolution of 1918, menaced the Weimar Republic, and finally culminated in the rise of the Nazis.”10 His argument about populism hinges on a new right’s ability to learn from, appropriate, and redeploy the opportunities opened by the democratic breach of 1918: “Better than anyone else, the Nazis twisted together ideas from the political left and right, crossing nationalism with social reform, anti-Semitism with democracy, fear of the future with hope for a new beginning. This radical rebelliousness destroyed old authoritarian structures as much as it attacked liberal principles.”11 This situates the Nazis firmly inside a much longer-­running ideological project of national renewal descending from 1914, whose particular breadth of appeal was ordered around the ideal of the Volksgemeinschaft. There are some problems. Fritzsche overstates the contrast with pre-1914, and constructs one familiar straw man around class (“In an age of mass mobilization, class came less and less to determine political allegiances”), implying that ties between workers and the labor movement had now become loosened, thereby laying the ground for the more eclectic appeal of a “people’s party” (Volkspartei), which the Nazis then projected so aggressively.12 Nazism gained an opening, he seems to argue, because working people became un-­moored from the class-­based loyalties and patterns of affiliation that previously had anchored them more securely to a Social Democratic Party (SPD) claiming their natural allegiance. Yet whether political loyalties ever mapped quite so directly in this way onto particular patterns of class-­belonging may be doubted. Before 1914, after all, the SPD was hardly the exclusive recipient of German workers’ support, but continued to compete with others for their loyalties, most patently with the Catholic Center Party, but with left liberalism of various hues too. Social democracy’s ability to harmonize heterogeneous interests within and across its presumed working-­class support—by claiming to overcome differences of gender, age, skill, occupation, region, religion, ethnicity, roughness, and respectability—had always displayed limits. Yet conversely, the party only ever attained its greatest popular resonance by managing to broaden its appeal to other sources of support beyond industrial workers per se. In other words, the exigences of mass mobilization were already a condition of German politics even before the

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transformative impact of the First World War, as Fritzsche wishes to present it. What had changed was the novel access of a radical nationalist right to those resources of popular politics along with its startlingly new adroitness in exploiting them. In these terms the discourse of Volksgemeinschaft described an overall climate of political contestation, one initially formed from the overheated patriotic solidarities proclaimed in the “spirit of 1914,” and then distended rapidly into a context of complexly competing claims and rhetorics. As various commentators have pointed out, the idea was not originally the property of the right alone. Long accustomed in their own tradition to the language of the Volksstaat (people’s state), Social Democrats now quickly adjusted to this new wartime slogan, with its intimations of present equality and inclusion, not least because the possibility of democratizing the state still remained hostage to future political reform and the uncertain achievement of a new Constitution. The necessity of the hour was “to stand together with the Volksgemeinschaft,” declared the former SPD leftist and future Prussian Education Minister Konrad Haenisch at the party congress in 1916.13 By justifying the needs of patriotism and national survival during the war via the tendentially egalitarian rhetorics of sacrifice, participation, and community, the Imperial government encouraged—against its own intentions— growing expectations of change and democratic redress, creating a powerful discourse of equivalence that yoked patriotism to citizenship and reform. The revolutionary breakthrough of 1918–19 then radicalized those popular-­democratic openings. As the Reich fell apart and the Kaiser left so ignominiously, the parties of the right regrouped, self-­consciously offering themselves as people’s parties with new populist names.14 Across the party-­political spectrum, appeals to the Volksgemeinschaft remained the common currency of the 1920s. With the exceptions, interestingly, of the Communists and the NSDAP, each of the major parties integrated such references into their programs. “The people” became the recurring and predictable addressee. If Weimar politicians couched their appeals principally in the terms of nationhood, then the revolutionary period had given that discourse a powerful democratic inflection, constructing “the people as a social organism, rather than as an ethnic community.” Precisely the reigning fragmentation and sectional divisiveness, cast into bitter relief by “the memory of the mythically inflated war community (Kriegsgemeinschaft)” and the shame of Versailles, conferred on the Volksgemeinschaft its talismanic power: “All parties, from both the right and the left, appealed to the community of the German people, to their unity, and to social harmony.”15 The very plasticity of the concept helped shift the terms of political exchange, enabling certain questions to be posed more easily than others. The democratic promise of deriving one’s legitimacy from the sovereignty of “the people” as opposed to the now-­discredited monarchy, together with the presumption of social harmony and social inclusiveness, held significent space for the left. It was only later in the 1920s, and especially after 1930, that the right successfully commandeered the language of the Volksgemeinschaft directly for itself, aggressively stressing its ethnic and racial meanings, with a rabidly adversarial and exclusionary charge.16 Yet, even as it sought to trumpet the health and wholeness of the people, the right’s own disunity, its abiding fragmentation, proved chronically disabling. For the most self-­conscious of the Wilhelmine radical nationalists—Pan-Germans and their allies— this had always remained the single most distressing meta-­motif of bourgeois politics,

Calling the People into Politics, 1890–1930

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a bitterly recurring lament, going all the way back to the 1890s. Here Fritzsche rightly emphasizes the Nazis’ singular success. They assembled for the first time a unitary encompassing frame inside which the right as a whole could gather. Fritzsche builds this argument from the growing coalescence in the mid-1920s of a self-­confident and confrontational anti-Republicanism, whose advocates simultaneously drew upon the new democratic capacities enabled by 1918–19 while turning them against the central political values around which the Weimar Republic per se was constituted. That antiRepublican animus was aimed against the main political agency sustaining the new system, namely, social democracy and its elaborate machinery of class-­oriented collective organization, labor-­corporative economic clout, redistributive welfarism, and socially egalitarian cultural improvement. Inside this hatred of the SPD prowled a still more virulent anti-Bolshevism which, while directed formally against the Communists, was always liable to be turned against the left tout court, recklessly conflating all supporters of the Republic into a single demonized category of the anti-­ nation. Animus against the Republic had other salient drives too, including a vicious disregard for the legitimacy of parliamentary negotiation. Right-­wing critics derogated the legislative process into a corrupt and cynical game of self-­interested horse-­trading that sacrificed the national welfare to powerful particularist interests and short-­term party-­political gain. It was here that veneration of the nation also did its work, driven especially by three toxically contingent beliefs—the shame of Versailles and the legend of the “stab in the back”; the dogma of the struggle for existence of the world’s great empires, recast via the geopolitical language of Lebensraum and the growing racialization of nationalist thought since the early 1900s; and finally, the more general “biologizing” of nationalist thought, the slow normalizing of eugenicist models, “the racial vernacular” of a commonly held Social Darwinism, and the rampant diffusion of an exclusionary xenophobia concentrated around fear and hatred of the Jews. This was the ground from which a right-­wing populism could stage its appeal. Here Fritzsche develops a more particular argument based on the mid-1920s, when (he argues) conditions came together to make the Nazis’ spectacular success in the 1930 elections intelligible. Neither the relative stabilizing of the polity after 1923–4 nor the nascent pragmatism seemingly gaining influence in the DNVP can belie the degree to which large sections of the anti-Republican electorate were no longer willing to relent from postures of irreconcilable obduracy. Widening sectors of rural and small-­town opinion (farmers, artisans, professionals and civil servants, small traders and property-­ owners of all kinds) were deserting the ground of a positive citizenship that acknowledged, or acquiesced in, what had changed in 1918–19. In illustration, Fritzsche cites the case of the Potsdam DNVP Reichstag deputy Gustav Budjahn, who in 1928 sought renomination with “a lengthy list of the fifty-­five often minutely defined interest groups in which he had contact. They included the League of German Brewers, the Association of German Butchers, the Association of German Railway Retailers, the Central Organization of German Watchmakers, the League of German Canteen Leaseholders serving the Reichswehr and Police, as well as the League of Blind Warriors.”17 Most readily visible in its associational mosaic, this middle-­class constituency was already abandoning the so-­called “parties of the middle” (DNVP, DVP, DDP) even before the palpable collapse of 1928–30. The DNVP lost 30 percent

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Transformations of Populism in Europe and the Americas

of its vote between 1925 and 1928; the DDP’s national membership plummeted from 800,000 in 1919 to 135,000 in 1924 and 113,000 in 1927; from over 300 branches in Braunschweig in 1920, the DVP shriveled to only 100 in 1925 and a mere 33 in 1929.18 Yet, amid this dissolution, Fritzsche also detects a recharged rallying of “bourgeois sociability” that “sustained an embracing sense of civic identity and kept the community from fragmenting completely into social castes and economic factions.”19 Fracturing away from the existing “parties of order” (as the “bourgeois parties” were known under the Kaiserreich), their supporters cleaved to a ground of patriotic fantasy where the nation could be once again made whole. Hungry to reoccupy public space, this antiRepublican breadth of opinion became galvanized around the presidential campaign of Hindenburg in 1925, notably driven forward by the organized muscle of the Stahlhelm.20 In other words, both the growing fragmentation of non-­socialist politics around interest-­based claims and the disbelief in existing party forms became radicalized during these years, just as the Hindenburg election delivered such a compelling demonstration of the efficacies of patriotic rallying in the form of an extra-­ parliamentary civic mobilization. In those terms the potential coalescence of a highly mobilized patriotic front against the Republic was already inscribed in the politics of the years 1925–8 before either the onset of the Depression, the ratcheting up of nationalist campaigning against the Young Plan, or the huge surge in the Nazi popular vote in the 1930 elections (rising to 18 percent from only 2.6 percent in 1928). The already-­unfolding logic of that patriotic coalescence is too easily obscured by the still-­ insignificant level of Nazi votes in June 1928, in other words.21 On this basis Fritzsche is able to historicize Nazi success to a context deeper than the world economic crisis of 1929, but not so deep as to sink back into the Sonderweg. That context was defined by the 1920s as a whole, when “both middle-­class and working-­class Germans mobilized to recreate the nation-­state as a social compact.” On the right more specifically, “nationally-­minded Germans repeatedly sought out a politics that propounded an emphatically ‘national socialist’ worldview, one that promised Germany’s economic and military resurgence as well as social reconciliation.” While the NSDAP proved the ultimate beneficiary, the superordinate political logic was one tending toward a far broader stance of National Opposition, “whether articulated by Hitler, by the Stahlhelm, or by other radical groups . . . Support for or opposition to the Nazis should not obscure the primary dynamic of German politics in the twentieth century, which was the formation of a radical nationalist plurality that repudiated the legacy of Germany conservatism as thoroughly as it rejected the promise of Social Democracy.” In these terms, the politics of the Nazis was crucially enabled by “the wider context of political insurgencies in the twentieth century, from July and August 1914, to November 1918, to Hindenburg’s election in April 1925.”22 Fritzsche certainly sees the NSDAP’s exceptional dynamism. Its ability to overcome the right’s persisting divisiveness on a rising tide of electoral success between 1928 and the summer of 1932 had no precedent. It not only subsumed the old organizational disunity, rallying the right’s variegated constituencies into a unitary framework, but also assembled a mass popular base of exceptional breadth, centering on the peasantry and petty bourgeoisie, while reaching far into the wage-­earning population. In that regard, it “succeeded where the traditional parties of the bourgeois center and right had

Calling the People into Politics, 1890–1930

21

repeatedly failed, becoming the long-­sought party of middle-­class concentration” (Sammlung).23 It prospered at the expense of the liberal parties and the DNVP, obliterating the former altogether and slashing the latter’s support from 14.2 percent in 1928 to a mere 5.9 percent in July 1932. Yet, as Fritzsche, Childers, Heidrun Holzbach, and others have shown, the humbling of the DNVP hardly represented the dissolution of a stable and solidly founded entity. On the contrary, from its beginnings, the DNVP remained an extremely weak and volatile formation, and by the 1928 elections was already deep in crisis, even before Alfred Hugenberg’s drive for control exacerbated things still further by poisoning relations with the party’s remaining popular groups. The NSDAP then emerged from the pack in 1928–30 as the most dynamic agency capable of bringing together the disparate and unpredictable range of right-­wing constituencies into a single movement.24 Having laid out Fritzsche’s analysis very sympathetically, I see at least four areas of difficulty. First, while Fritzsche sees Nazism’s striking success, which he implicitly ascribes to the suppleness of its programmatic ideology and political modus operandi, that distinctiveness nonetheless dies back into the broader arguments about “National Opposition” in the 1920s. As a result, the renewed focus of recent historiography on the singularities of Nazi ideology (I am thinking here of work by Michael Wildt, Ulrich Herbert, Peter Longerich, and others focusing on the SS and aspects of the “racial state”), tends once more to recede, as does the related centrality for Nazi thinking of anti-Semitism and the Judeocide.25 If scholarship currently foregrounds the particular shaping of the outlook of those younger Nazi cohorts who came during the 1930s to supply the uniformed cadres of the higher and middle-­ranking SS officialdom— the so-­called “war youth generation”—there remains much scope for probing the distinctiveness of the party’s activist culture more generally as it coalesced during the mid-1920s.26 Given the importance of the Volksgemeinschaft to Fritzsche’s own account, and its salience for how Wildt and others now approach popular conformity after 1933, it becomes vital to reconstruct how the characteristically Nazi version of this idea became formed, above all in its racialized, exclusionary, and morally coercive dimensions. In what precise ways did it inform the thinking and practice of NSDAP members? What was particular to the ideological outlook of those activists of the right who found their home in the NSDAP? How were they distinguishable from the wider networks of right-­wing activists and voters whom Fritzsche finds converging in the Hindenburg election? Were the völkisch militants who found their way to the Nazis during the mid-1920s marked out from right-­wing groupings and networks at large, or did the wider National Opposition function more as a single milieu?27 The second area of difficulty is that, by its emphasis on 1914 and 1918, Fritzsche’s argument has some evident affinities with Roger Griffin’s “palingenetic” idea of fascism. This is what Fritzsche says in conclusion: National Socialists captured the political imagination of almost one in every two voters because they challenged the authoritarian legacy of the empire, rejected the class-­based vision of Social Democrats and Communists, and both honored the solidarity and upheld the chauvinism of the nation at war. They thus twisted together strands from the political Left and the political Right without being loyal

22

Transformations of Populism in Europe and the Americas to the political precepts of either camp. Mobilizing enormous energies and profound expectations for a new beginning, reimagining the nation as a new, fiercely nationalistic body politic, and willing to bloody the streets to realize their aims, the Nazis seized power in January 1933 in what amounted to a national revolution.28

Yet, Fritzsche gives less decisive weight either to the crucible of war and revolution or to the specific type of “futural” modernism Griffin attributes to fascist intellectuals during that time. Rather, he stresses the later clarifications after 1924–5, which paradoxically developed from the enabling conditions of democratization established as a result of 1918–19. This reflects a preference in practice for the explanatory primacy of the social histories of politics and the associated cultural patterning, perhaps, as opposed to the power of ideas and ideology as such. But it also radically underestimates the impact of the war on political culture, in my view, whether in the polarizing stakes of wanting actively to profess the nation, in the militarized re-­embodiment of the mass, in the seductions of the aesthetics of violence, or in the conventionalizing of a language of extremes. Once we begin thinking comparatively about other European cases, such as pre-­eminently the Italian, but also the French and those of East-Central Europe, this relative deficit of an argument about the consequences of the wartime becomes quite disabling.29 Thirdly, in common with Griffin (though not as egregiously), Fritzsche neglects the conjuncture of counter-­revolutionary violence that extended from November 1918 until the end of 1923. When fascists began beating up and killing socialists rather than just arguing with them on the speaker’s platform, they accomplished the vital political breach—the Zivilisationsbruch—that set the scene so powerfully for the next three decades. The violence perpetrated in those years against the bodies of opponents, sutured to the related legacies of violence deriving from the First World War, decisively shaped the political imaginary of the interwar period, marking in particular the boundaries of belonging to the nation, especially inside the morally coercive territories of the Volksgemeinschaft. The terms through which “the people” might be addressed during the 1920s became heavily inscribed with these possible meanings.30 Fourthly, Fritzsche begins his discussion too abruptly in the summer of 1914. As might be expected, I have strong views about the importance of the preceding Wilhelmine years, based on the effects of a radical nationalism that contributed decisively to the general radicalization of the right between 1907–8 and 1912–13.31 As a positive political conception stressing “the primacy of the national” (Primat des Nationalen) and the necessity of imperialist expansion for settling domestic disunity, both attuned to the potentials of mass politics and scathingly critical of their neglect by the governmentally aligned politicians of the older and more conservative right, radical nationalism forms a key element of continuity across the divide of 1914–18. Aside from its extremism in foreign policy, complemented by astringently nationalist demands at home (for example, in relation to the Poles), radical nationalists were the strongest advocates of an emergently “German-­national” (deutschnational) standpoint in German politics before 1914, consistently urging a forthrightly centralist-­ authoritarian, as against a federalist and pluralist, idea of the state. Anti-­socialist to the bone, they were no less fervently hostile to conservative particularisms and

Calling the People into Politics, 1890–1930

23

traditionalisms of all stripes. As the hard-­headed advocates of a national financial reform to enable the arms race and maximize Germany’s “national efficiency,” they had no patience with the landed interests’ fiscal immunities. They also pressed for a program aimed toward winning the support of the Mittelstand, old and new. Above all, they pioneered a populist ideal of political mobilization in the pre-1914 right, which sought to capitalize on the new media and techniques of mass agitation in order to grasp the urgency of fighting the increasingly successful SPD on its own ground. When the conservative governing and party establishments proved so impervious to their pleas, radical nationalists’ appeals to the people turned over time into a full-scale repudiation of the existing bases of right-­wing political legitimacy. In the course of that conflict, coming to a head during 1907–8, a more traditionalist mode of authoritarianism—one that was monarchist, aristocratic, socially exclusive—was forced increasingly onto the defensive, giving way to something far more activist and extreme. That such a right-­wing radicalization had occurred already before 1914 decisively stacked things against the chances of a stable center-­right politics of parliamentary conservatism emerging later on. Having opened such an unyieldingly rejectionist front against the deliberative proceduralism of parliamentary politics— against the good-­faith pluralism, give-­and-take of debate, and practices of legislative negotiation that required reliably consensual encouragement if a parliamentary system was to work—this newly intransigent radical-­nationalist right was never able to accommodate to such protocols after 1918, let alone embrace the rules as its own. A deepening of context and lengthening of perspective will help in this way to situate what was really distinctive in the later radicalizations that culminated in Nazism. By reaching back at least to the early 1900s, we are able to engage the pan-European crisis of suffrage and constitutionalism of 1904–7, together with the transnational labor militancy of the same period. If these events have a powerful presence in German labor history of the pre-1914 era, they are barely noticed by the mainstream historiography of German politics in the Wilhelmine years. Yet the rising temperature of anti-­socialist anxieties in Germany, reaching genuine panic levels by 1912–13, increasingly drove an incipient realignment of the right, just as the varying outcomes of these far-­reaching socio-­political conflicts across Europe as a whole decisively shaped the national political constellations that accompanied the First World War. We should likewise consider the political field of force produced by the course of capitalist industrialization and its social relations, country by country, in the same period, because this too vitally influenced the political alignments accompanying the outbreak of war. Each of these twin histories—the willingness of the right to part company from the existing political rules, the polarizing social consequences of capitalist industrialization—presented a particular challenge for political liberalism. The regime of political order associated with the latter, namely the parliamentary constitutionalism inaugurated across Europe in the 1860s and then cumulatively strengthened during the next three decades, was passing into crisis. How liberals were able to respond, again country by country, powerfully structured the options available to left and right under the coming circumstances of wartime and the postwar revolutionary conjunctures. This proved especially fateful for the fortunes of liberalism’s more radical versions. In France, for example, the longevity and cultural embeddedness of popular

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republicanism allowed much scope for the broadening of political coalitions to the left under the sign of democratic patriotism, from Dreyfus at the turn of the century through the regroupments of the following decades to the Popular Front of the 1930s. In Germany, in contrast, the historic break between liberalism and social democracy after the 1860s left far less space for any democratic patriotism of comparable breadth, so that in each conjuncture of threatening polarization, whether on the eve of the First World War, during the final wartime years of 1917–18, amid the revolutionary upheavals of 1918–23, or in the context of the later 1920s addressed by Fritzsche, a potential center-­left coalition never found the sustained opportunity to stabilize. In Italy, to take yet a third case, Mussolini’s Fascists very effectively mobilized the suppressed Mazzinian tradition of unfulfilled radical nationalist hopes left over from the 1860s and 1870s, which they were then able to recover and transform. All three of these problems—the crisis of constitutionalism and the anti-­socialist radicalization of the right, the sharpening societal tensions arising from capitalist industrialization, and the predicament of political liberalism—vitally affected the question of populism, whether before the First World War or in the 1920s. As appeals to popular legitimacy or the “people in general” became ever more salient across the political spectrum, their particular content or purposes became harder and harder to distinguish. This ever-­widening ground of contestation was defined by highly malleable and mobile terms of collective identification, what Ernesto Laclau calls logics of equivalence and antagonism.32 If “the people” were to be called into politics, that is, what were they to be mobilized for, and what were they being rallied against? How was the category bounded, and whom did it include or exclude? In what way might the people be deemed sovereign? How might they acquire or be accorded agency? How did “the German people” map discursively onto “the German nation” or “the German race”? Who were “the people” of the Volksgemeinschaft? Peter Fritzsche is right in seeing this populist language—appeals for legitimacy that made “the people” ever more insistently into the primary addressee—as being produced from the crucibles of wartime, the subsequent revolutionary crisis, and the counter-­ revolutionary instabilities they left behind. My own argument would trace the genealogies earlier too, finding key breaking-­points with the older languages of Conservatism and National Liberalism in the years before 1914. By the turn of the century the German right had in the main still cleaved to earlier principles of rule and legitimation, those stressing Kaiser and Reich, rank and privilege, the natural authority of the “productive estates,” and the laws of precedence in a propertied social order. Contrasting rhetorics of the “national-­popular,” stressing the ideals of citizenship and the sovereignties of nationhood, had long been a staple in the discourse of the left. But when radical nationalists began breaking into this discursive territory too, calling upon the righteous indignation of citizen-­patriots to rouse a movement against the established parties, the appointed goverment, and even the Kaiser himself, they crossed the Rubicon. That willingness to invoke “the people” on the part of a new right—the vociferously adversarial “national Opposition” starting to form in the prewar decade around the Pan-Germans—was a quite new departure. In proposing his own framework of populism, Fritzsche rightly highlights the novelty of Nazism, specifically its accomplishment in surmounting the earlier

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25

divisiveness and ineffectuality of its right-­wing predecessors. In concluding, he cites my own description of this distinctive contribution: “Thus the National Socialist seizure of power in 1933 was the triumph of a ‘right-­wing Jacobinism’ in which a variety of working-­class and middle-­class groups sought political voice and policies of change in the name of the German nation.”33 By 1933, on that basis, the NSDAP had become “a popular political formation without precedent in the German political system.” This occurred at a level of organization (its dynamism as a movement) no less than of sociology (its remarkably heterogeneous breadth). It not only subsumed the earlier, chronically disabling fragmentation of the party-­political right. It demonstrated an unprecedented capacity for rallying a broadly based coalition of the subordinate classes as well, centering on the Protestant rural and small-­town populations (peasantry, petty bourgeoisie), but stretching deep into the various categories of wage-­earners. It managed this on the terrain of ideology, by suturing an otherwise disjointed ensemble of discontents within a totalizing populist framework—namely, the radicalized ideological community of the German Volk, the people-­race-nation. The resulting combination was extraordinarily potent—activist, communitarian, anti-­plutocratic, and popular, but at the same time virulently anti-­socialist, anti-Semitic, intolerant of diversity, and aggressively nationalist. In Germany this right-­wing Jacobinism was all the more distinctive because of the absence of a strong existing tradition of popular radical nationalism on the right until the start of the century. In Fritzsche’s approach to fascism—in defining what made “Germans into Nazis”— there is ultimately an interesting tension. On the one hand, he rightly emphasizes what made the Nazis different, namely their effectiveness as a party of right-­wing concentration, their ability to succeed where earlier efforts so consistently failed. Yet on the other hand, he writes directly against that distinctiveness, by stressing all the ways in which Nazism was continuous with the right’s wider milieu, whether as a new populist formation first enabled by the “spirit of 1914” or as the broad convergence around the Hindenburg election in 1925. How should we reconcile these countervailing judgments? The language of populism—laying claim to the people’s will, calling the people into politics, rallying them for the struggle against enemies bent on Germany’s destruction—provides the best clue. Combining together widely disparate and heterogeneous interests and demands, the ideal of the Volksgemeinschaft promised to make a damaged and corrupted Germany once again whole. If the momentum for Nazi success had already been building well before the dramatic gains of the 1930 elections—if the materials for an unprecedented right-­wing coalescence had already been assembled in the Hindenburg election five years before, as Fritzsche suggests— then it must be to this crucial gestation, to the Nazis’ characteristic languages of the people, and to the unifying qualities of their particular populist practice, that we will need to look.

Notes   1 Beginning with The Nature of Fascism (London: Pinter, 1991; repr. Routledge, 1993), Roger Griffin revived discussion of fascism in the English-­speaking world with a series

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  3

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Transformations of Populism in Europe and the Americas of major publications, including his edited anthologies Fascism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) and International Fascism: Theories, Causes, and the New Consensus (London: Arnold, 1998). See also the more recent Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), and Matthew Feldman (ed.), A Fascist Century: Essays by Roger Griffin (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). For an extensive anthology of debates organized around Griffin’s work, see: Roger Griffin, Werner Loh, and Andreas Umland (eds.), Fascism Past and Present, East and West: An International Debate on Concepts and Cases in the Comparative Study of the Extreme Right (Stuttgart: Ibidem-Verlag, 2006). See Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (London: Allen Lane, 2004), and Michael Mann, Fascists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Significant general works include Roger Eatwell, Fascism: A History (London: Chatto and Windus, 1995); Mark Neocleous, Fascism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Aristotle A. Kallis, Fascist Ideology: Territory and Expansionism in Italy and Germany, 1922–1945 (London: Routledge, 2000); Kevin Passmore, Fascism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Daniel Woodley, Fascism and Political Theory: Critical Perspectives on Fascist Ideology (London: Routledge, 2010). Key readers and source collections include: Aristotle A. Kallis (ed.), The Fascism Reader (London: Routledge, 2003); Roger Griffin and Matthew Feldman (eds.), Fascism: Critical Concepts, 5 vols. (London: Routledge, 2005); Constantin Iordachi (ed.), Comparative Fascist Studies: New Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2010). See also Griffin, “The Reclamation of Fascist Culture,” European History Quarterly 31:4 (2001), 609–20; David D. Roberts, Alexander De Grand, Mark Antliff, and Thomas Linehan, “Comments on Roger Griffin, ‘The Primacy of Culture’,” Journal of Contemporary History 37:2 (2002), 259–74. Those earlier approaches may be sampled via several key anthologies: Stuart J. Woolf (ed.), The Nature of Fascism (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968); Gilbert Allardyce (ed.), The Place of Fascism in European History (Engelwood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971); Henry A. Turner (ed.), Reappraisals of Fascism (New York: Franklin Watts, 1975); George L. Mosse (ed.), International Fascism: New Thoughts and New Approaches (London and Beverly Hills: Sage, 1979). For “palingenetic myth,” see Griffin, Nature of Fascism, 32–6. For the latter field of thinking, see Woodley, Fascism and Political Theory, 21–48, 77–104. For Poulantzas, see Jane Caplan, “Theories of Fascism: Nicos Poulantzas as Historian,” History Workshop Journal 3 (Spring 1977), 83–100; and for Benjamin, Lutz Köepnick, Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Power (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 1–26, 177–238; Andrew Hewitt, Fascist Modernism: Aesthetics, Politics, and the Avant-Garde (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 161–94. See William Sheridan Allen, The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German Town, 1922–1945 (New York: Franklin Watts, 1984; orig. edn. 1965); Jeremy Noakes, The Nazi Party in Lower Saxony, 1921–1933 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971); Martin Broszat et al. (eds.), Bayern in der NS-Zeit, 6 vols. (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1977–83). Michael Kater, The Nazi Party: A Social Profile of Members and Leaders, 1919–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983); Mathilde Jamin, Zwischen den Klassen: Zur Sozialstruktur der SA-Führerschaft (Wuppertal: Peter Hammer Verlag, 1984); Richard Bessel, Political Violence and the Rise of Nazism: The Storm Troopers in Eastern Germany 1925–1934 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984); Eric G. Reiche,

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  9

10 11 12 13

14

15

16

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The Development of the SA in Nürnberg, 1922–1934 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Conan Fischer, Stormtroopers: A Social, Economic, and Ideological Analysis 1929–35 (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1983); Thomas Childers, The Nazi Voter: The Social Foundations of Fascism in Germany, 1919–1933 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983); Richard F. Hamilton, Who Voted for Hitler? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982); Jürgen Falter, Hitler’s Wähler (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1991). Thomas Childers (ed.), The Formation of the Nazi Constituency 1919–1933 (London: Croom Helm, 1986). H-German, H-Net Reviews. June, 2008, http://www.h-­net.org/reviews/showrev. php?id=14642. See Peter Fritzsche, Rehearsals for Fascism: Populism and Political Mobilization in Weimar Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Fritzsche, Germans into Nazis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Fritzsche, “The NSDAP 1919–1934: From Fringe Politics to the Seizure of Power,” in Jane Caplan (ed.), Nazi Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 48–72; Fritzsche, Life and Death in the Third Reich (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). For extensive commentary, see Geoff Eley, Nazism as Fascism: Violence, Ideology, and the Ground of Consent in Germany, 1930–1945 (London: Routledge, 2013). Childers, Nazi Voter; Larry Eugene Jones, German Liberalism and the Dissolution of the Weimar Party System (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); Rudy Koshar, Social Life, Local Politics, and Nazism: Marburg, 1880–1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986); Geoff Eley, Reshaping the German Right: Radical Nationalism and Political Change under Bismarck (London: Yale University Press, 1980; new edn. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991). Jacket description, Fritzsche, Germans into Nazis. Ibid. Ibid., 202. Gunther Mai, “ ‘Verteidigung’ und ‘Volksgemeinschaft’: Staatliche Selbstbehauptung, nationale Solidarität und soziale Befreiung in Deutschland in der Zeit des Ersten Weltkrieges (1900–1925),” in Wolfgang Michalka (ed.), Der Erste Weltkrieg. Wirkung, Wahrnehmung, Analyse (Munich: Piper, 1994), 591. Notably, the German-National People’s Party (Deutschnationale Volkspartei, DNVP) and the German People’s Party (Deutsche Volkspartei, DVP). The political community of the nation was already construed in overtly racial terms by the various völkisch formations, the most important of whom were the German-Völkisch Defence and Combat League (Deutschvölkischer Schutz- und Trutzbund, 1919–23) and the GermanVölkisch Freedom Party (Deutschvölkische Freiheitspartei, DVFP) formed in 1922. The best guides here are Stefan Breuer, Die Völkischen in Deutschland. Kaiserreich und Weimarer Republik (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2008); Uwe Lohalm, Völkischer Radikalismus. Die Geschichte des Deutschvölkischen Schutz- und Trutz-Bundes 1919–1923 (Hamburg: Leibniz-Verlag, 1970). Thomas Mergel, “Dictatorship and Democracy, 1918–1939,” in Helmut Walser Smith (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Modern German History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 424; also Mergel, “Führer, Volksgmeinschaft und Maschine. Politische Erwartungsstrukturen in der Weimar Republik und im Nationalsozialismus 1918– 1936,” in Wolfgang Hardtwig (ed.), Politische Kulturgeschichte der Zwischenkriegszeit 1918–1939 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2005), 91–127. For current discussions of Volksgemeinschaft, see above all Detlef SchmiechenAckermann (ed.), “Volksgemeinschaft”: Mythos, wirkungsmächtige soziale Verheißung

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17 18

19 20

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Transformations of Populism in Europe and the Americas oder soziale Realität im “Dritten Reich”? Zwischenbilanz einer kontroversen Debatte (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2012); Michael Wildt, “Die Ungleichheit des Volkes. ‘Volksgemeinschaft’ in der politischen Kommunikation der Weimarer Republic,” in Frank Bajohr and Michael Wildt (eds.), Volksgemeinschaft. Neue Forschungen zur Gesellschaft des Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2009), 24–40; Wildt, Hitler’s Volksgemeinschaft and the Dynamics of Racial Exclusion: Violence Against Jews in Provincial Germany, 1919–1939 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012); Mergel, “Führer, Volksgemeinschaft und Maschine”; Norbert Götz, “Die nationalsozialistische Volksgemeinschaft im synchronen und diachronen Vergleich,” in Schmiechen-Ackermann (ed.), “Volksgemeinschaft”, 55–67; Götz, Ungleiche Geschwister. Die Konstruktion von nationalsozialistischer Volksgemeinschaft und schwedischem Volksheim (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2001). For the First World War, see Mai, “ ‘Verteidigung’ und ‘Volksgemeinschaft’ ”; Steffan Bruendel, Volksgemeinschaft oder Volksstaat? Die “Ideen von 1914” und die Neuordnung Deutschlands im Ersten Weltkrieg (Berlin: Akadamie Verlag, 2003); Jeffrey Verhey, The Spirit of 1914: Militarism, Myth and Mobilization in Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). For pertinent aspects of Social Democratic and Communist discourse in the 1920s: Stefan Vogt, Nationaler Sozialismus und Soziale Demokratie. Die sozialdemokratische Junge Rechte 1918–1945 (Bonn: Dietz, 2006); Timothy S. Brown, Weimar Radicals: Nazis and Communists between Authenticity and Performance (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009). Fritzsche, Rehearsals for Fascism, 44. Ibid., 192–93, and Fritzsche, Germans into Nazis, 180. The post-1919 polity became grounded in far denser networks of organized interests than before 1914: “Just a glance at town address books for 1913, 1919, and 1925 reveals the growing density of organizational life in the provinces. Where there had been two clubs before the war, there were three after the war and four by the early 1930s. In Marburg, Celle, and Uelzen, to take examples at hand, the war had spurred burghers to organize relief efforts, prepare patriotic campaigns, and establish self-­help groups, a tendency the revolution amended. After 1918 the social reach of clubs lengthened to include the postman, the clerk, and the grocer. Senior civil servants, well-­to-do merchants, and professionals continued to dominate leadership posts, but not to the degree that they had before the war. All this was testimony to the widespread impact of egalitarian ideas after the November Revolution.” (Ibid., 132–33.) And: “for much of the conservative right, the postrevolutionary polity was composed of self-­absorbed economic entities, the so-­called Stände, artisans, civil servants, or commercial employees who regarded public life only through the prism of particular corporate rights and group entitlements.” (Ibid., 119.) Ibid., 133. The Stahlhelm, Bund der Frontsoldaten (Steel Helmet, League of Frontline Soldiers) was formed in December 1918 on the initiative of the Magdeburg chemical industrialist Franz Seldte (1882–1947) and became effectively a paramilitary complement to the DNVP. For Fritzsche it figures as the crucial vector of right-­wing concentration in the mid-1920s. See Rehearsals for Fascism, 166–89. The classic work is Volker R. Berghahn, Der Stahlhelm: Bund der Frontsoldatn 1918–1935 (Dusseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1966). See also Anna von der Goltz, Hindenburg: Power, Myth, and the Rise of the Nazis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 65–103. The general tendency has been to highlight 1928–30 as the key period in the Nazis’ dramatic leap into popularity by

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emphasizing the stark disparity between their results in these two elections. The contribution of Fritzsche’s Rehearsals for Fascism was to call attention to the preceding period of the mid-1920s, usually seen as a time of the Republic doing well, when the Hindenburg election demonstrated the breadth of an anti-Republican patriotic disaffection that was already coalescing around an emergent right-­wing consensus waiting to be given a rallying-­point of continuity. In Germans into Nazis, 137–214, Fritzsche reiterated this argument in more synthetic and generalized form. The quotations are each taken from ibid., 212–13. Childers, Nazi Voter, 262. This distinction of the NSDAP—its place in the longer political trajectory of the efforts at realizing “the long-­sought party of middle-­class concentration” going back to the 1890s—coexisted simultaneously with its character as a “people’s party.” Debates that raged around the latter between the 1960s and 1980s seem largely to have been settled. See Mergel, “Dictatorship and Democracy,” 434–5: “[The NSDAP] benefited mainly from mobilizing those who had been non-­voters, those who were generally dissatisfied with Weimar Germany, and those who had little enthusiasm for politics. In addition, the Nazis were able to benefit from swing voters from all parties, primarily from the liberal center and from smaller interest parties, although voters also switched from the Social Democrats to the NSDAP on a large scale. As intensive research activity since the 1980s has shown, the party drew voters from all strata.” See especially the following: Heinrich August Winkler, “Mittelstandsbewegung oder Volkspartei? Zur sozialen Basis der NSDAP,” in Wolfgang Schieder (ed.), Faschismus als soziale Bewegung: Deutschland und Italien im Vergleich (Hamburg: Hoffmann and Campe, 1976), 97–118; Jürgen W. Falter, “The First German Volkspartei: The Social Foundatons of the NSDAP,” in Karl Rohe (ed.), Elections, Parties, and Political Traditions. Social Foundations of German Parties and Party Systems, 1867–1987 (New York: Berg, 1990), 53–81; Falter, “The Social Bases of Political Cleavages in the Weimar Republic, 1919–1933,” in Larry Eugene Jones and James Retallack (eds.), Elections, Mass Politics, and Social Change in Modern Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 371–97; Falter and Michael H. Kater, “Wähler und Mitglieder der NSDAP: Neue Forschungsergebnisse zur Soziographie des Nationalsozialismus 1925 bis 1933,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 19 (1993), 155–77; Detlef Mühlberger, The Social Bases of Nazism, 1919–1933 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Conan Fischer (ed.), The Rise of National Socialism and the Working Classes in Weimar Germany (Providence: Berghahn Books, 1996); ClausChristian W. Szejnmann, Nazism in Central Germany: The Brownshirts in “Red” Saxony (New York: Berghahn Books, 1999), 205–39. Thomas Childers, “Interest and Ideology: Anti-System Politics in the Era of Stabilization, 1924–28,” in Gerald D. Feldman (ed.), Die Nachwirkungen der Inflation auf die deutsche Geschichte 1924–1933 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1985), 3. For the impact of Hugenberg’s ascent to leadership of the DNVP, see Heidrun Holzbach, Das “System Hugenberg.” Die Geschichte bürgerlicher Sammlungspolitik vor dem Aufstieg der NSDAP (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1981), esp. 192–240; also Maik Ohnezeit, Zwischen “schärfster Opposition” und dem “Willen zur Macht.” Die Deutschnationale Volkspartei (DNVP) in der Weimarer Republik 1918–1928 (Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 2012). See Ulrich Herbert, Best: Biographische Studien über Radikalismus, Weltanschauung und Vernunft 1903–1989 (Bonn: Dietz, 1996); Michael Wildt, An Uncompromising Generation: The Nazi Leadership of the Reich Security Main Office (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009); Peter Longerich, Heinrich Himmler (Oxford:

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Transformations of Populism in Europe and the Americas Oxford University Press, 2012); Mark Roseman, “Beyond Conviction? Perpetrators, Ideas, and Action in the Holocaust in Historiographical Perspective,” in Frank Biess, Mark Roseman, and Hanna Schissler (eds.) Conflict, Catastrophe, and Continuity: Essays on Modern German History (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), 83–103; Michael Thad Allen, The Business of Genocide: The SS, Slave Labor, and the Concentration Camps (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Isabel Heinemann, “Rasse, Siedlung, deutsches Blut”: Das Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt der SS und die rassenpolitische Neuordnung Europas (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2003); Lutz Hachmeister, Der Gegnerforscher: Die Karriere des SS-Führers Franz Alfred Six (Munich: Beck, 1998); Götz Aly and Susanne Heim, Architects of Annihilation: Auschwitz and the Logic of Destruction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany, 1933–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). For my own treatment of Nazi ideology, see Geoff Eley, Nazism as Fascism: Violence, Ideology, and the Ground of Consent in Germany, 1930–1945 (London: Routledge, 2013). The “war youth generation” refers to those born between 1902 and 1912 who were themselves too young to have fought in the war, as distinct from those born during the 1890s who shared directly in the “front experience” so famously idealized by Ernst Jünger and others. The idea was initially popularized by Ernst Günther Gründel in Die Sendung der jungen Generation (Munich: Beck, 1932), 31–42. See Andrew Donson, Youth in the Fatherless Land: War Pedagogy, Nationalism, and Authority in Germany, 1914–1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 249, note 15. See especially, Ulrich Herbert, “Ideological Legitimation and Political Practice of the National Socialist Secret Police,” in Hans Mommsen (ed.), The Third Reich between Vision and Reality: New Perspectives on German History 1918–1945 (Oxford: Berg, 2001), 95–108; Wildt, Uncompromising Generation, 21–121; Andrew Donson, “Why Did German Youth Become Fascists? Nationalist Males Born between 1900 and 1908 in War and Revolution,” Social History 31:3 (2006), 337–58; Detlev Peukert, The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), 14–18, 89–95; Jürgen Reulecke, “Im Schatten der Meißnerformel: Lebenslauf und Geschichte der Jahrhundertgeneration,” in Winfried Mogge and Jürgen Reulecke (eds.), Hoher Meißner 1913. Der Erste Freideutsche Jugendtag in Dokumenten, Deutungen und Bildern (Cologne: Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, 1988), 11–32. For suggestive discussion in this regard, see Szejnmann, Nazism in Central Germany, esp. 142–204. Fritzsche, Germans into Nazis, 213–14. See for instance Alan Kramer, Dynamics of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); David Forgacs, “Fascism, Violence, and Modernity,” in Jana Howlett and Rod Mengham (eds.), The Violent Muse: Violence and the Artistic Imagination in Europe, 1910–1939 (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1994), 5–21; Richard Bessel, “The First World War as Totality,” in Richard J. B. Bosworth (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Fascism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 52–69, and “The Front Generation and the Politics of Weimar Germany,” in Mark Roseman (ed.), Generations in Conflict: Youth Revolt and Generation Formation in Germany, 1770–1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 121–36; Glenda Sluga, “The Aftermath of War,” in Bosworth (ed.), Oxford Handbook, 70–87; Omer Bartov, “Fields of Glory,” in Bartov, Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide, and Modern Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 9–43.

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30 For the legacies of violence deriving from the First World War and its aftermaths, see especially Dirk Schumann, Political Violence in the Weimar Republic, 1918–1933: Fight for the Streets and Fear of Civil War (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), and “Europa, der Erste Weltkrieg und die Nachkriegszeit: eine Kontinuität der Gewalt?,” Journal of Modern European History 1 (2003), 24–43; Sven Reichardt, Faschistische Kampfbünde: Gewalt und Gemeinschaft in Italienischen Squadrismus und in der deutschen SA (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2002), and “Fascist Marches in Italy and Germany: Squadre and SA before the Seizure of Power,” in Matthia Reiss (ed.), The Street as Stage: Protest Marches and Public Rallies since the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 169–89; Benjamin Ziemann, “Germany after the First World War—A Violent Society? Results and Implications of Recent Research on Weimar Germany,” Journal of Modern European History 1 (2003), 80–95. 31 See Eley, Reshaping the German Right, 239–348. I am revisiting these arguments in a new book in progress, Genealogies of Nazism: Conservatives, Radical Nationalists, Fascists in Germany, 1860–1930. 32 See especially the following writings by Ernesto Laclau: “Towards a Theory of Populism,” in Laclau, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory: Capitalism—Fascism— Populism (London: NLB, 1977), 143–98; On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005); “Why do Empty Signifiers Matter to Politics?” in Jeffrey Weeks (ed.), The Lesser Evil and the Greater Good: The Theory and Politics of Social Diversity (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1994), 167–78; “Populism: What’s in a Name?” in Francisco Panizza (ed.), Populism and the Mirror of Democracy (London: Verso, 2005), 32–49. See also Francisco Panizza, “Introduction: Populism and the Mirror of Democracy,” in Populism and the Mirror of Democracy, 1–31. For my own earlier discussion in relation to the radical nationalism of the late Wilhelmine years, see Eley, Reshaping the German Right, 184–205. 33 Fritzsche, Germans into Nazis, 210, quoting Geoff Eley, “What Produces Fascism: Pre-Industrial Traditions or a Crisis of the Capitalist State?,” in Eley, From Unification to Nazism: Reinterpreting the German Past (London: Allen & Unwin, 1986), 270, also for the following.

3

Germany’s Conservative Elites and the Problem of Political Mobilization in the Weimar Republic Larry Eugene Jones

On January 31, 1933—the day after Hitler’s installation as Chancellor at the head of a government that brought the Nazis and representatives of Germany’s conservative elites together in a cabinet of “national concentration”—Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, President of the National Federation of German Industry and arguably the most visible of Germany’s industrial magnates, wrote to his brother-­in-­law Baron Tilo von Wilmowsky: “I’m having a hard time finding my way into the new course of events. I am afraid that Harald [Krupp’s sixteen-­year-­old son] was right when he recently remarked that when you bring hydrogen and oxygen together you produce a great explosion.”1 Far from suggesting that Hitler had somehow been installed in power by Germany’s industrial elite, Krupp’s remarks, and particularly the use of his son’s metaphor about the explosive mixture of hydrogen and oxygen, highlight the apprehension and uncertainty with which Germany’s conservative elites greeted the arrival of the Third Reich.2 Yet at the same time the metaphor raises a series of questions that are directly relevant to the themes addressed in this collection of essays. What, after all, was the basis of Krupp’s apprehension? What do Krupp’s remarks suggest about the relationship between Germany’s conservative elites and the Nazi movement at the time of Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor, and why did they feel so threatened by his accession to power? To what extent did Germany’s conservative elites try to use Hitler and his party to provide their own efforts at the creation of a more authoritarian system of government with the popular legitimacy that they themselves so sorely lacked? If so, why had their own efforts to mobilize the political energies of the German people failed so miserably in comparison to the sensational success of Hitler’s NSDAP? What was the relationship of Germany’s conservative elites to the populist appeal of the Nazi movement and to populism in general? And finally, is populism a useful analytical concept for understanding the processes and patterns of political mobilization that culminated in Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor in January 1933 and in the establishment of the Third Reich?

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Weimar populism: a curious construction Before answering these questions, it is important to realize that there has always been considerable skepticism about the use of the term “populism” as an analytical category for understanding German political development in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Part of this stems from a residual skepticism about transferring a term or concept that is part of one political culture to another where it, if it is at all applicable, takes on an entirely different meaning and thus threatens to distort our understanding of the processes and patterns that define that culture. German scholars in particular have demonstrated great reluctance to apply the concept of populism to their own national history and generally regard it as a negative phenomenon associated with the antics of the religious right in the United States, or similar movements in other parts of the world.3 Part of this also may very well stem from an inadequate understanding of just what populism in the United States entailed in all of its myriad complexity, nuance, and paradox.4 The danger is that the more historians and social scientists try to apply the concept of populism to the various phenomena that they like to call populist, the more they are left with either a concept that has been robbed of its specific historical content or a multitude of populisms that have little in common with each other and defy reduction to a simple formula or concept. At this point, the concept of populism loses much, if not all, of its validity as a transnational analytical category. None of this is to belittle the contributions of Geoff Eley and Peter Fritzsche—the two English-­language scholars who have done the most to introduce the concept of populism into the vocabulary of German history—to our understanding of German political culture in the period between 1890 and 1933. Eley’s provocative work on the idea of a German Sonderweg and its place in understanding the contours of modern German history and his study of the German Naval League and the patriotic right in the last years of the Second Empire continue to inform historical research on the political history of the Weimar Republic.5 Similarly, Fritzsche’s book Rehearsals for Fascism from 1990 as well as a seminal essay he wrote on “Weimar Populism and National Socialism in Local Perspective” for a collection of essays on Elections, Mass Politics, and Social Change in Modern Germany that appeared in 1992 played a major role in legitimating the use of populism as an analytical category for understanding the history of Weimar Germany.6 In the latter Fritzsche concluded that “Although there is no straight line that connects 1914 and 1933, the years marked a volatile process of civic invigoration, popular mobilization, and political self-­assertion that was played out in the market squares, tavern rooms, and athletic fields of bourgeois neighborhoods and that fashioned the virtues of self-­reliance and community on which Nazi appeal would rest.”7 This was a theme that Fritzsche would reprise, though in greater detail and on a far more elaborate scale, in his book Germans into Nazis that appeared in 1999.8 In short, the work of Eley and Fritzsche has done much to define the conceptual parameters of recent scholarship on the political history of the Weimar Republic. Still, skepticism about utility of populism as a category of analysis for understanding Weimar political culture has not abated. And much of this centers around two points: first, one can legitimately question the extent to which the “process of civic invigoration,

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popular mobilization, and political self-­assertion” that lies at the heart of Fritzsche’s argument actually represented an act of spontaneous self-­mobilization on the part of Germany’s urban and rural middle classes in which Germany’s conservative political elites had little, if any role. Second, it is not altogether clear whether the insertion of “populism” into the vocabulary of Weimar political life has provided historians and scholars from other disciplines with a useful and reliable conceptual construct for understanding the rise and eventual triumph of Nazism. Maybe, but if so, it works only by reducing populism to a series of public rituals and demonstrations that effectively robbed it—populism, that is—of its specific political content. What this leaves are the forms but not the substance of populist politics. The purpose of this essay, therefore, is to revisit the question of populism and its place in understanding Weimar political culture with specific focus on the relationship between Germany’s conservative political elites and the process of bourgeois self-­ mobilization that Fritzsche sees as one of the most salient features of Weimar political life. In doing so, however, this essay will draw a distinction between what one might call populist moments in the political history of the Weimar Republic—and some of these will be discussed in somewhat greater detail in the course of the following remarks— and populism as a movement with a semi-­coherent ideology and set of political objectives. At the same time, the essay will focus on the ways in which Germany’s conservative elites responded to the populist impulses that were at work in Weimar political culture and how they sought, but ultimately failed, to organize these impulses into a coherent political force. The goal then is to sketch the outlines of an alternative and hopefully more nuanced way of looking at the place of populism—if one may be so bold as to use that term in light of the reservations stated above—in the political culture of the Weimar Republic. Certainly no one can deny the profound way in which Geoff Eley’s work on the German right in the period before the First World War has informed historical thinking on the German right in the Weimar Republic. At the same time, however, it is important to realize—and this is something that initially escaped the attention of most of those who were writing on the German right—that the German right after 1918 was not the same as the German right before the First World War. For not only had the party political organization of the German right undergone a profound transformation as a result of the war and revolution, but the extra-­parliamentary right—the conglomerate of organizations that Eley discussed in his book Reshaping the German Right9—was no longer the same as it had been before the war. In the first place, many of the organizations that Eley discussed no longer existed or, if they did, no longer exercised the sort of influence on the public sector that they had exerted in the Second Empire. Of the various organizations on the patriotic right before the First World War, only the Pan-German League (Alldeutscher Verband, or ADV) survived into the Weimar Republic to play a significant role in Weimar political culture.10 What emerged in their stead were veterans’ organizations, the so-­ called political combat leagues like the Civil Defense Leagues or Einwohnerwehren of the early Weimar Republic, the Young German Order (Jungdeutscher Orden), and the Stahlhelm.11 But even here there had been a significant change in the leadership of the patriotic right. Before the war the leadership of organizations like the Pan-German League, the German Naval League (Deutscher Flottenverein), and the League for the

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35

Eastern Marches (Deutscher Ostmarkenverein) had been recruited almost exclusively from disaffected elements of Germany’s National Liberal constituency. After the war, however, if one looks at the social pedigree of those who moved into leadership positions in organizations like the Pan-German League, the Stahlhelm, and the United Patriotic Associations (Vereinigte Vaterländische Verbände Deutschlands)—and this is particularly true of the leadership of their state and regional organizations—the titled nobility is much more prominently represented in the leadership and activities of the patriotic right than it had been before the war. And here one encounters a phenomenon that has not been fully accounted for in the political histories of the Weimar Republic, a phenomenon that, for the lack of anything better, might be labeled a “displaced elite.” What is meant by this is the fact that many of those from aristocratic backgrounds who had contemplated a career in the military or civil service, only to find those career paths blocked by the events of 1918–19, began to assume more and more of a leadership role in those organizations that were most resolutely opposed to Germany’s new republican system and the odium of defeat with which it was so intimately identified.12

Populist moments in Weimar Germany The following section will first identify four populist moments in the history of the Weimar Republic—the November Revolution of 1918, the wave of national protests against the imposition of the Versailles Peace Treaty in the summer of 1919, the revaluation crisis of the early and mid-1920s, and the peasant revolt of the late 1920s— and will then explore the ways in which Germany’s conservative political elites tried to respond to them. In each case the goal will be to demonstrate how Germany’s conservative elites tried but ultimately failed to organize the populist impulses that had surfaced at these discrete moments into a coherent political response. The November Revolution of 1918 and the turmoil that lasted through at least the suppression of the Kapp putsch in the spring of 1920 did not catch Germany’s conservative elites by surprise. In point of fact, they had been anticipating something of the sort since the summer of 1918 and had already taken the preliminary steps toward the creation of a conservative Sammelpartei that would unite a badly fragmented German right into a comprehensive and cohesive political force. These aspirations were finally realized in the last days of November 1918 with the founding of the German National People’s Party (Deutschnationale Volkspartei, or DNVP).13 From the very beginning the founders of the DNVP regarded their party as a revolutionary new party that was not constrained by the petty partisanship of the past and that sought to give expression to the new political energies that had been released by the shock of defeat and revolution. In this respect, the new party’s profile was informed by the ideas of a group of young conservative idealists who had coalesced around the person of Ulrich von Hassell and who sought to infuse it with the much vaunted “ideas of 1914” and the sense of national unity across the cleavages of class, confession, and region to which the outbreak of the First World War had supposedly given birth. In their eyes, the DNVP would become a party of the people, a party that would unite those from diverse social backgrounds into a dynamic and cohesive political force, a party that

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would take the ideal of the national community, or Volksgemeinschaft, and translate it into political reality.14 But in the inner-­party deliberations that accompanied the adoption of a new party program and that preceded the Reichstag elections of May 1920, the young conservatives around Hassell lost out as old-­line Prussian conservatives, personified by Count Kuno von Westarp, the last parliamentary leader of the prewar German Conservative Party (Deutschkonservative Partei) and a perfect example of the “displaced elite,” asserted themselves and took over control if not of the party itself, then most certainly of the promulgation of a new party program and the nomination of candidates for the 1920 Reichstag elections. As a result, the Grundsätze der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei that the DNVP published with great fanfare in the spring of 1920 bore the indelible imprint not of the young conservatives around von Hassell, but of Westarp and his ilk.15 So frustrated were certain members of the DNVP’s left wing by their party leadership’s failure to disavow the incipient anti-Semitism of the prewar German right that they left the party in protest.16 To be sure, this had little effect upon the outcome of the election. But for all intents and purposes, the populist impulse within the DNVP had been effectively squelched. The efforts of von Hassell and his associates to revitalize German conservatism by infusing it with the ideas of August 1914 overlapped the second populist moment in the history of the early Weimar Republic. The publication of Allied peace terms in May 1919 provoked a wave of national protest that was unprecedented in German history. On May 12 the Social Democratic Chancellor Philipp Scheidemann and representatives from all of Germany’s parties, with the exception of the fledgling German Communist Party (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands), denounced the peace terms that the German delegation at the Paris peace conference had just received from the Allies in a demonstration of national solidarity that was reminiscent of the national fervor that had accompanied the outbreak of the First World War.17 At the DNVP party congress in Berlin from July 12–13, 1919, Westarp and the leaders of the DNVP moved quickly to establish their party at the head of the movement of national protest against the Versailles Peace Treaty.18 But no party held a monopoly on the anger and indignation that broad segments of the German population felt over the humiliation of Versailles, as all parties, including not just those that sat in the national government but also the Independent Socialist Party (Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands) on the extreme left of the political spectrum, demanded rejection of the treaty.19 Repeated assaults against German sovereignty, in the form of the London Ultimatum of May 1921, the partition of Upper Silesia later that fall, and lastly the Allied occupation of the Ruhr basin in January 1923, continued to inflame the German public throughout the early years of the Weimar Republic and severely compromised the legitimacy of those parties that were closely identified with Germany’s new republican order. Yet despite the fact that the DNVP waged a relentless struggle against the foreign policies of Weimar’s political leadership and obviously benefited from the rising tide of national frustration that reached a climax after the occupation of the Ruhr, it never quite succeeded in placing itself at the center of the national opposition, in part because of internal disputes like the one that led to the secession of its radical racist wing in October 1922, but more importantly because it found itself outflanked by the new and more militant organizations that began to take shape on Germany’s paramilitary right,

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37

not the least of which was the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (National Sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or NSDAP).20 The difficulties the DNVP faced in trying to mobilize a mass popular base became all too apparent during the revaluation crisis of the early and mid-1920s. No piece of legislation in the early years of the Weimar Republic provoked more in the way of public outcry than the revaluation provisions of the Third Emergency Tax Decree of February 14, 1924. By limiting the revaluation of private paper mark debts to 15 percent of their original gold mark value and by exempting all governmental obligations from any revaluation whatsoever until a final settlement of the reparations question had taken place, the Third Emergency Tax Decree had the effect of making permanent the losses that literally millions of Germany’s private investors had suffered as a result of the runaway inflation of the early 1920s. Savings organizations throughout the country protested bitterly at the way in which they and those who had invested their savings in accounts that were now reduced to a fraction of their original worth had been betrayed by Germany’s political leaders and the special economic interests they allegedly served. This protest was fueled by a sense of rage and betrayal that was directed first and foremost against the political parties that were represented in the national government and the organized economic interests that held them hostage.21 In a cynical attempt to mobilize the anger the small saver felt toward the parties to which he had entrusted his welfare, the DNVP committed itself in its campaign for the May 1924 Reichstag elections to the full and equitable restoration of all those paper mark assets that had been destroyed by the inflation. This pledge combined with the crusade against the Dawes Plan and a heavy dose of anti-Semitism to propel the DNVP to a smashing victory at the polls and gave new life to the hopes of Germany’s small investors that it still might be possible to secure a redress of their grievances.22 The DNVP repeated its victory at the polls in December 1924 as the party succeeded, at least for the moment, in harnessing to its own political agenda the populist impulses that had manifested themselves in the protest against the emergency tax legislation earlier that year.23 But the DNVP, after entering the national government in January 1925, now found itself confronted with the hard realities of Germany’s fiscal situation, and was instrumental in passing a new revaluation law in the summer of 1925 that established 25 percent of the original gold mark value for mortgages and other private debts, 15 percent for industrial obligations, and 5 percent—a figure later reduced by the Reichstag to 2.5 percent for those assets that had changed hands since July 1, 1920—for war bonds and other forms of public indebtedness.24 Now the anger and outrage that had been directed at the government parties in the 1924 parliamentary elections were redirected at the DNVP, the party that had so cynically championed the cause of the private investor in the 1924 elections, only to betray that trust once it was in power. It was only a matter of time before the small investor, spurred on by the organizations that had coalesced behind his struggle for a full and equitable revalution of the paper mark assets that had been destroyed by the great inflation, founded a party of his own in the People’s Justice Party (Reichspartei für Volksrecht und Aufwertung, or VRP), a party that articulated its goals in the language and rhetoric of populism.25 The revaluation crisis of the early and mid-1920s reveals the inability of Germany’s conservative political elites, here represented by the DNVP party leadership, to

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mobilize the populist impulses in Weimar political culture. Another instance of this failure can be seen in the case of the Rural People’s Movement, or Landvolkbewegung of the late 1920s. That agriculture did not share in the benefits of Germany’s short-­lived economic stabilization in the second half of the 1920s is an undisputed truism of Weimar political history. In fact, the situation of German agriculture deteriorated dramatically after the stabilization of the mark at the beginning of 1924, with widespread rural indebtedness as the principal hallmark of this crisis.26 By the beginning of 1928 the situation in the German countryside had become so desperate that the peasants decided to take matters into their own hands. On January 28 more than 140,000 farmers from Schleswig-Holstein staged a massive demonstration throughout the province against high taxes, high interest rates, and foreign imports in an attempt to attract national attention to the plight of the small independent peasant proprietor.27 This demonstration—and similar demonstrations in Oldenburg, Silesia, and throughout Lower Saxony—was organized by local peasant leaders and was directed in part against the social and political pre-eminence of Germany’s rural elites, evoking in the eyes of conservative farm leaders like the venerable Theodor Körner in Württemberg the specter of a new peasants’ war along the lines of that of 1525.28 Germany’s rural elites—in other words, the leaders of the ultra-­conservative National Rural League (Reichs-Landbund) in Thüringia, Württemberg, Brandenburg, and elsewhere—responded by organizing similar demonstrations under their own auspices.29 But hopes that this might contain the burgeoning movement of peasant protest were to no avail. The immediate prelude to the May 1928 parliamentary elections witnessed the emergence of two new agrarian parties, one the German Peasants’ Party (Deutsche Bauernpartei) under the leadership of peasant leaders who were loyal to the existing system of government and sought to achieve their objectives within the framework of Weimar democracy, and the other the Christian-National Peasants and Farmers’ Party (Christlich-Nationale Bauern- und Landvolkpartei) under the leadership of conservative pragmatists determined to place the representation of agricultural economic interests ahead of their ideological opposition to the Weimar Republic.30 In the meantime, the leaders of the DNVP sought to stem the rising tide of peasant discontent by rushing forward with an emergency farm program on February 22,31 while their allies in the leadership of the National Rural League wrestled with the effects of two new agrarian parties on the stability and internal unity of their own organization.32

The failure of conservative populism Conservative efforts to contain both the fury of small investors who felt betrayed by the DNVP’s support for the 1925 revaluation law, or the explosion of rural discontent that wracked the German countryside in the first months of 1928, proved feeble and unsuccessful. In the May 1928 Reichstag elections the DNVP went down to a devastating defeat that stemmed in no small measure from its failure to assuage the rage of Germany’s private investors and the anxiety of the small, independent peasant proprietor.33 The peasant revolt would continue unabated through the remainder of

Political Mobilization in the Weimar Republic

39

1928 and into the spring and summer of 1929, graduating into more radical expressions of discontent, with tax strikes and the fire-­bombing of tax offices, sentry houses, and other government buildings. In the meantime, the DNVP’s defeat in the 1928 national elections triggered an internal party crisis that resulted in the election of film and press magnate Alfred Hugenberg to the party’s national chairmanship.34 An uncompromising opponent of Germany’s republican system of government, Hugenberg had deployed his wealth of resources in an attempt to lay the foundation for a broadly based nationalist movement in the early years of the Weimar Republic.35 But he had been bitterly disappointed by the fruit of the DNVP’s experiments at government participation in 1925 and 1927, and now sought to polarize the German party system into two mutually antagonistic camps through the destruction of the various parties that stood between the DNVP and the Marxist left.36 The ideological axis around which Hugenberg and the leaders of the DNVP now sought to unite Germany’s badly fragmented bourgeoisie was anti-Marxism.37 At the same time, Hugenberg and the leaders of the German right sought to tap into the populist resentment that had manifested itself in the revaluation movement of the mid-1920s and the Rural People’s Movement of the late 1920s by using a special paragraph of the Weimar Constitution that provided for the introduction and passage of legislation by popular initiative. In July 1929 Hugenberg joined the leaders of the Stahlhelm, the Pan-Germans, the National Rural League, the Christian-National Peasants and Farmers’ Party, and a host of smaller right-­wing organizations, along with Adolf Hitler’s militantly anti-Semitic National Socialist German Workers’ Party, in a crusade to block ratification and implementation of the Young Plan that Germany had just concluded with the Allies in the search for a permanent solution to the reparations problem.38 But the campaign against the Young Plan proved an utter fiasco that aggravated an already precarious situation within the DNVP and triggered a major secession on the party’s left wing.39 Then, in the summer of 1931, the Stahlhelm reprised this tactic by introducing a referendum to force the dissolution of the Prussian state parliament. But neither of these two attempts to exploit the populist impulses that were at work in German political life was particularly successful. Only 10.02 percent of the German electorate lent their signatures to the referendum against the Young Plan, while the referendum to force the dissolution of the Prussian state parliament received only about two-­thirds of the signatures it needed to take effect.40 This was conservative populism at its worst. In neither case were the leaders of the German right able to mobilize the popular enthusiasm of the German electorate. In neither case were the leaders of the German right able to establish themselves and the organizations they represented as a credible populist force. In neither case were they able to translate the populist impulses that were clearly at work in Weimar political culture into a unified and coherent political movement. By now even the Stahlhelm had despaired of this particular variant of conservative populism and was looking around for alternatives to the tactics that had failed so miserably in the referenda of 1929 and 1931.41 But not even this would deter the leaders of the German right from undertaking one last attempt, the Harzburg rally of October 1931. The brainchild of the DNVP’s Hugenberg, the Harzburg rally brought together all of the major organizations on the German right, including a much strengthened and energized Nazi Party, for a

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demonstration that they hoped would bring about the fall of the national government and thus set the stage for the assumption of power by the forces of the “national opposition.”42 But rivalries between Hitler’s NSDAP and the more conservative members of the national opposition turned the Harzburg rally into an empty farce, and in the spring of 1932 the last vestige of unity on the German right vanished in the futile search for a single candidate to oppose Reich President Paul von Hindenburg’s bid for reelection.43 With the pathetic collapse of the Harzburg Front, conservative populism had exhausted itself as a force in German political life and no longer posed a viable alternative to the energy and dynamism of the Nazi movement. Nowhere was the bankruptcy of conservative populism in the Weimar Republic more apparent than in the 1932 presidential elections. The election featured two men of mythic stature, both of whom relied upon the power of myth and charisma to legitimate their respective claims to the political leadership of the German nation. As the celebrated hero of Tannenberg and the last commander-­in-­chief of the German forces in the First World War, Paul von Hindenburg had been elected as the Reich President in 1925, to the great jubilation of the German right in anticipation that he would initiate a fundamental change in the system of government that Germany had inherited from the November Revolution.44 With the appointment of Heinrich Brüning, a former trade unionist and fiscal expert who stood on the right wing of the German Center Party (Deutsche Zentrumspartei), to the chancellorship in the spring of 1930, Hindenburg and his entourage thought that at long last they had found the man who would carry through the reform of state and economy for which the German right had been longing.45 But after two years of unremitting economic hardship and a political stalemate that had left Brüning dependent upon the toleration of the Social Democrats in order to secure legislative approval of the measures he deemed necessary to combat the economic crisis, the German right began to turn against the man whom it had elected to the Reich presidency in 1925 at the same time that the Social Democrats and Center, the two parties that had most strongly contested his election in 1925, sought to enlist Hindenburg’s charisma in defense of the existing political system.46 The challenger was Adolf Hitler, whose party’s meteoric rise since the outbreak of the Great Depression totally upset the political calculations of Hugenberg and the other elements on the non-Nazi right. Whereas Hindenburg was a venerated and easily recognized icon of conservative political aspirations, Hitler was something of a political parvenu whose rise to prominence stemmed in no small measure from the myth about his origins, his wartime record, and his instinctive gifts as a political leader that he and a handful of his closest cronies had patched together in the turmoil of postwar Munich.47 Both jealous and suspicious of Hitler’s growing popularity, Hugenberg and the leaders of the Stahlhelm tried to walk a fine line between supporting Hitler and conceding the election to Hindenburg by nominating one of their own, the Stahlhelm’s Theodor Duesterberg, for the Reich presidency once it became clear that a Hitler candidacy could no longer be averted.48 But Duesterberg polled a paltry 6.8 percent of the popular vote and finished a distant fourth behind Hindenburg, Hitler, and the Communist candidate Ernst Thälmann in the first round of voting on March 13, 1932. Recognizing the hopelessness of his own candidacy, Duesterberg withdrew from the run-­off election that was scheduled for the second week of April and urged his

Political Mobilization in the Weimar Republic

41

supporters to vote for Hindenburg against Hitler, while Hugenberg and the Stahlhelm leadership refused to choose between Hindenburg and Hitler and simply urged their followers to abstain from voting in the second presidential ballot.49 Although Hitler had failed to prevent Hindenburg’s reelection, the Nazi party leader nevertheless emerged from the 1932 presidential campaign as the big winner. Not only had Hitler and his party succeeded in increasing his share of the popular vote from 30.2 percent in March to 36.7 percent in April, but his support had come almost exclusively from those elements that had made Hindenburg’s election possible seven years earlier, whereas Hindenburg, on the other hand, had received the bulk of his support from those who had opposed his election in 1925.50 While the conservatives who had spearheaded Hindenburg’s reelection bid no doubt played a critical role in providing him with his margin of victory, their failure to mobilize but a fraction of those who had supported his bid for the Reich presidency in 1925 underscored just how superfluous the moderate right had become as a force in Weimar politics.51 At the same time, the non-Nazi elements of the so-­called national opposition had been left demoralized, emotionally exhausted, and very much on the defensive by the outcome of the election. Frantic efforts on the part of Germany’s industrial elite to force the parties of the middle and moderate right into a united bourgeois party capable of withstanding the challenge of Nazism failed to overcome the factionalism that had become so deeply embedded in the fabric of Weimar party politics and only confirmed the impotence of those forces that stood between the Center and DNVP.52 Hopelessly divided and with their resources stretched to the limit, the non-Nazi right and the conservative elites it sought to serve were no longer capable of meeting the Nazi challenge, a fact that became all too apparent when Hitler and his supporters went on to poll 38.3 percent of the popular vote in the Prussian state elections of April 24, 1932 and 37.3 percent in the Reichstag elections of July 31, 1932. Even with the support of the Stahlhelm, the DNVP polled only 6.9 and 5.9 percent respectively of the popular vote in the two elections.53 Conservative populism, if in fact such a construction had ever existed, had clearly spent itself as a factor in German political life.

Nazi populism: a construct in search of reality What does all of this mean? At the very least, it suggests that conservative populism was never a viable option in the Weimar Republic. To be sure, there were populist moments when outrage over specific issues like Versailles, the revaluation question, and the rural unrest of the late 1920s surfaced to galvanize the energies of specific sectors of the German population. But at no point in the history of the Weimar Republic were Germany’s conservative elites able to transform this into a coherent political response or sustain it over a significant period of time. Here one could very easily argue that the failure of Germany’s conservative elites to enlist the populist impulses that were doubtlessly at work in Weimar political culture in service of their own political agenda meant that these impulses gravitated into the orbit of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. One could even go so far as to say that had Germany’s conservative elites succeeded in tapping into the populist impulses of Weimar political

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life, the Nazis would never have come to power. But, as Geoff Eley suggests in an essay on conservatives and radical nationalists from 1912 to 1928 that appeared in 1990, when the radical nationalists finally gained control of the DNVP with Hugenberg’s election to the party chairmanship in October 1928, this “occurred on a badly reduced popular base” that would become only smaller as Hugenberg and his Pan-German cronies purged the party of all those who did not support his political agenda or accept his dictatorial style of party leadership.54 This was perhaps the ultimate irony of conservative populism. Whether this was due to Hugenberg’s political ineptitude or his lack of personal charisma, the simple fact of the matter was that as much as the radical nationalists wanted to unite the German people into a dynamic national force that transcended the cleavages of class, confession, and region, their particular version of national unity was so narrow that it necessarily alienated precisely those elements in the middle classes, white-­collar workforce, conservative labor, and organized agriculture upon whom the success of their strategy ultimately depended. The failure of conservative populism also meant that the populist groundswell upon which the radical nationalists had been counting gravitated more and more into the orbit of the Nazi Party. But to argue that the Nazi Party somehow represented a specifically German form of populism is a serious misreading of the parallels between populism and Nazism. To be sure, the Nazi movement displayed a number of similarities with populism in the United States and other countries. Not only did the Nazis employ a rhetoric that was distinctly populist and directed against established political and economic elites, but in a manner typical of populist movements in the United States and elsewhere the Nazis sought to mobilize the periphery against the center, to give a voice to those who found themselves excluded from any sort of meaningful role in German political life against the metropolitan power centers of the Weimar political establishment. But much of this was pure sham. For as much as the Nazis used slogans like “Los von Berlin” to mobilize the resentment of those who stood on the margins of German political life, one must not lose sight of the fact that this crusade was orchestrated from precisely those power centers that the Nazis castigated so mercilessly in their official propaganda. The Nazi assault against the Weimar Republic was not a movement that somehow arose spontaneously out of the frustration, hardship, and suffering of those in German society who had been marginalized by the course of German political and economic development since the beginning of the First World War but a highly centralized and carefully controlled campaign that relied upon a party organization that was without precedent in the annals of German party politics and that systematically subjected the party’s district and local organizations to an iron discipline that left them with little autonomy or capacity for spontaneity.55 The November Revolution, the repudiation of Versailles, the revaluation movement, and the Rural People’s Movement of the late 1920s all represented authentic expressions of a populist impulse in Weimar political culture. What Nazism offered, on the other hand, were the forms, rituals, and external trappings of populist politics, but not the substance of populism—and certainly not its emancipatory ethos. Moreover, Nazi populism—if indeed one can use that term—was directed very much against the populist impulses that had been galvanized by the collapse of the Second Empire and the founding of the Weimar Republic. In so far as populism in the United States

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and many other places as well aspired to empower those who were economically marginalized and excluded from the corridors of power, neither Nazism nor the conservative populism of Hugenberg, the Stahlhelm, and the Pan-Germans fit the bill. What both sought—and in many respects this was what constituted the basis of the governmental coalition that came together in January 1933—was the political demobilization of the German people during a period of intense social and economic mobilization through a pseudo-­populism that appropriated the forms and trappings of populist politics but in the final analysis amounted to little more than the deliberate, systematic, and brutal disenfranchisement of the German people.

Notes   This essay is based upon extensive primary research in a wide range of private and public archives. For the sake of brevity, however, I have chosen with several obvious exceptions to forgo references to unpublished materials and limit my citations to the most important and relevant secondary literature.   1 Krupp to Wilmowsky, January 31, 1933, in the Familienarchiv Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, Krupp-Archiv Essen-Hügel, FAH 23/507.   2 For an elaboration of this argument, see Larry Eugene Jones, “Nazis, Conservatives, and the Establishment of the Third Reich, 1932–34,” Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte 23 (1994), 41–64.   3 For example, see the recent anthologies on populism by Frank Decker (ed.), Populismus. Gefahr für die Demokratie oder nützliches Korrektiv? (Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2006), and Richard Faber and Frank Unger (eds.), Populismus in Geschichte und Gegenwart (Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann, 2008), neither of which explore or even suggest the possibility of using populism as an analytical category for understanding the political history of the Weimar Republic or as an explanatory concept for the rise of Nazism.   4 For an excellent recent discussion of populism in the United States, see Charles Postel, The Populist Vision (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).   5 In particular see David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).   6 For the two works cited, see Peter Fritzsche, Rehearsals of Fascism: Populism and Political Mobilization in Weimar Germany (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), and Peter Fritzsche, “Weimar Populism and National Socialism in Local Perspective,” in Larry Eugene Jones and James Retallack (eds.), Elections, Mass Politics, and Social Change in Modern Germany: New Perspectives (Washington, D.C., and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 287–306.   7 Fritzsche, “Weimar Populism,” 305.   8 Peter Fritzsche, Germans into Nazis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), esp. 161–96. For further elaboration of this thesis, see Peter Fritzsche, “Between Fragmentation and Fraternity: Civic Patriotism and the Stahlhelm in Bourgeois Neighborhoods during the Weimar Republic,” Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte 17 (1988), 123–44.   9 Geoff Eley, Reshaping the German Right: Radical Nationalism and Political Change after Bismarck (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980), esp. 41–100.

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10 There has been a plethora of recent studies on the Pan-German League. On the ADV’s role in the Weimar Republic, see Rainer Hering, Konstruierte Nation. Der Alldeutsche Verband 1890 bis 1939 (Hamburg: Christians, 2003), 110–61; Barry A. Jackisch, The Pan-German League and Radical Nationalist Politics in Interwar Germany, 1918–39 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), esp. 87–184; and the recently completed dissertation by Björn Hofmeister, “Between Monarchy and Dictatorship: Radical Nationalism and Social Mobilization of the Pan-German League, 1914–1939” (Ph.D., Georgetown University, 2012), esp. 114–84, as well as the excellent biography of the Pan-German leader Heinrich Claß by Johannes Leicht, Heinrich Claß 1868–1953. Die politische Biographie eines Alldeutschen (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2012). 11 For the impact of the First World War on German political culture, see the fascinating study by Boris Barth, Dolchstoßlegende und politische Desintegration. Das Trauma der Deutschen Niederlage im Ersten Weltkrieg 1914–1933 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 2003), esp. 301–405. On the emergence of the paramilitary right in the early Weimar Republic, see the overview by James M. Diehl, Paramilitary Politics in the Weimar Republic (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1977), 23–151. For an analysis of this phenomenon in a somewhat broader geographical context, see Robert Gerwarth, “The Central European Counter-Revolution: Paramilitary Violence in Germany, Austria and Hungary after the Great War,” Past and Present 200: 1 (August 2008), 175–209, and Robert Gerwarth and John Horne, “Vectors of Violence: Paramilitarism in Europe after the Great War, 1917–1923,” Journal of Modern History 83 (2011), 489–512. 12 For a ground-­breaking study of the German nobility in the late Wilhelmine and late Weimar periods, see Stefan Malinowski, Vom König zum Führer. Sozialer Niedergang und politische Radikalisierung im Deutschen Adel zwischen Kaiserreich und NS-Staat (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2003). See also the insightful essay by Eckart Conze, “ ‘Only a dictator can help us now’: Aristocracy and the Radical Right in Germany,” in Karina Urbach (ed.), European Aristocracies and the Radical Right, 1918–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 129–47. See also the informative regional study by Shelley Baranowski, The Sanctity of Rural Life: Nobility, Protestantism, and Nazism in Weimar Prussia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). 13 For the most recent treatment of the founding of the DNVP, see Maik Ohnezeit, Zwischen “schärfster Opposition” und dem “Willen zur Macht.” Die Deutschnationale Volkspartei (DNVP) in der Weimarer Republik 1918–1928 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 2012), 30–40. 14 In particular, see Ulrich von Hassell, “Wir jungen Konservativen. Ein Aufruf,” Der Tag, November 24, 1918. For further information on Hassell and his circle of young conservative activists, see Gregor Schöllgen, “Würzeln konservativer Opposition. Ulrich von Hassel und der Übergang vom Kaiserreich zur Weimarer Republik,” Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 38 (1987), 478–89. See also Peter Fritzsche, “Breakdown or Breakthrough? Conservatives and the November Revolution,” in Between Reform, Reaction, and Resistance: Studies in the History of German Conservatism from 1789 to 1945 (Providence, RI, and Oxford: Berg, 1993), 299–328. 15 The resurgence of the old-­line conservatives within the DNVP is best described in Kuno von Westarp, Konservative Politik im Übergang vom Kaiserreich zur Weimarer Republik, ed. Friedrich Freiherr Hiller von Gaertringen with assistance from Karl J. Mayer and Reinhold Weber (Düsseldorf: Droste, 2001), 89–112. 16 Among those who left the party were Siegfried von Kardorff and Johann Victor Bredt, both members of the more moderate Free Conservative Party (Freikonservative Partei) before the war. For further details, see Ohnezeit, DNVP, 211–12.

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17 Arno J. Mayer, Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking: Containment and Counterrevolution at Versailles, 1918–1919 (New York: Knopf, 1967), 765–77. 18 In this respect, see the speech by Westarp in Der erste Parteitag der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei am 12. und 13. Juli 1919 in Berlin. Stenographischer Bericht (Berlin: Verlag der “Post” GmbH, 1919), 15–17. See also Ohnezeit, DNVP in der Weimarer Republik, 184–93. 19 For example, see Annehmen oder Ablehnen? Die Unabhängige Sozialdemokratie und der Friede (Berlin: Verlagsgenossenschaft “Freiheit,” 1919). 20 On the rise of the paramilitary right in the early Weimar Republic, see Diehl, Paramilitary Politics, 47–151. On the cult of violence and the decay of civility that accompanied the rise of the paramilitary right, see the two essays by Bernd Weisbrod, “Gewalt in der Politik. Zur politischen Kultur in Deutschland zwischen den beiden Weltkriegen,” Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 43 (1992), 391–404, and “Kriegerische Gewalt und männlicher Fundamentalismus. Ernst Jüngers Beitrag zur konservativen Revolution,” Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 49 (1998), 542–58. On the role that this played in the rise of Nazism, see Richard Bessel, “Violence as Propaganda: The Role of the Storm Troopers in the Rise of National Socialism,” in Thomas Childers (ed.), The Formation of the Nazi Constituency, 1919–1933 (Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1986), 131–46. 21 On the rage of the small investor in 1923–24, see Larry Eugene Jones, “Inflation, Revaluation, and the Crisis of Middle-Class Politics: A Study in the Dissolution of the Weimar Party System, 1923–28,” Central European History 12 (1979), 143–68, esp. 148–50. 22 On the DNVP’s campaign for the May 1924 Reichstag elections, see Dirk Lau, Wahlkämpfe der Weimarer Republik. Propaganda und Programme der politischen Parteien bei den Wahlen zum Deutschen Reichstag von 1924 bis 1930 (Marburg: Tectum, 2008), 265–70. See also Ohnezeit, DNVP, 247–52. On the role that the revaluation issue played in the election campaign, see Jones, “Inflation, Revaluation, and the Crisis of Middle-Class Politics,” 152–3. 23 Jones, “Inflation, Revaluation, and the Crisis of Middle-Class Politics,” 155–7. For further information on the DNVP and the December 1924 Reichstag election, see Lau, Wahlkämpfe, 302–12, and Ohnezeit, DNVP, 277–82. On the political impact of the revaluation question, see Thomas Childers, “Inflation, Stabilization, and Political Realignment in Germany 1924 to 1928,” in Gerald D. Feldman et al. (eds.), Die deutsche Inflation. Ein Zwischenbilanz/The German Inflation Reconsidered: A Preliminary Balance (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1982), 409–31. 24 For the details of the 1925 revaluation settlement, see Michael Hughes, Paying for the German Inflation (Chapel Hill, NC, and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 139–58. 25 On the founding of the VRP, see Jones, “Inflation, Revaluation, and the Crisis of Middle-Class Politics,” 162–4. 26 On rural protest in the late Weimar Republic with particular emphasis on the role of the Rural People’s Movement, see Hans Beyer, Die Agrarkrise und die Landvolkbewegungen in den Jahren 1928–1932. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte “revolutionärer” Bauernbewegung zwischen den beiden Weltkriegen (Itzehoe: Heimatbund für den Kreis Steinberg, 1972). 27 For further details, see Gerhard Stoltenberg, Politische Strömungen im schleswig-­ holsteinischen Landvolk, 1918–1933. Ein Beitrag zur politischen Meinungsbildung in der Weimarer Republik (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1962), 107–12.

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28 Theodor Körner, Bauernpolitik oder Bauernkrieg. Eine Darlegung der Ziele und Aufgaben des Württembergischen Bauern- und Weingärtnerbundes (Stuttgart: Th. Körner, n.d. [1932]). 29 In this respect, see the methodologically sophisticated comparative essay by Jürgen Bergmann and Klaus Megerle, “Protest und Aufruhr der Landwirtschaft in der Weimarer Republik (1924–1933). Formen und Typen der politischen Agrarbewegung im regionalen Vergleich,” in Jürgen Bergmann et al. (eds.), Regionen im historischen Vergleich. Studien zu Deutschland im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1989), 200–87. On conservative efforts to contain the tide of agrarian unrest, see the two studies by Dieter Gessner, Agrarverbände in der Weimarer Republik. Wirtschaftliche und soziale Voraussetzungen agrarkonservativer Politik vor 1933 (Düsseldorf, 1976), and Agrardepression und Präsidialregierungen in Deutschland 1930–1933. Probleme des Agrarkonservatismus am Ende der Weimarer Republik (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1977). 30 For further details, see Larry Eugene Jones, “Crisis and Realignment: Agrarian Splinter Parties in the Late Weimar Republic, 1928–1933,” in Robert G. Moeller (ed.), Peasants and Lords in Modern Germany: Recent Essays in Agricultural History (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1986), 198–232, esp. 203–7. 31 Kuno von Westarp, Bauernnot—Volksnot. Das Arbeitsprogramm des Reichstages und das landwirtschaftliche Programm der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei. Reichstagsrede vom 22. Februar 1928, Deutschnationale Flugschrift, no. 317 (Berlin: Deutschnationale Schriftenvertriebsstelle, 1928). See also Ohnezeit, DNVP in der Weimarer Republik, 411–13, and Andreas Müller, “Fällt der Bauer, stürzt der Staat.” Deutschnationale Agrarpolitik 1928–1933 (Hamburg: Herbert Utz, 2003), 52–6. 32 On the conflict within the RLB, see Stefanie Merkenich, Grüne Front gegen Weimar. Reichs-Landbund und agrarischer Lobbyismus 1918–1933 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1998), 289–92. 33 On the DNVP’s defeat in the 1928 Reichstag elections, see Lau, Wahlkämpfe, 347–53, 379–83, and Ohnezeit, DNVP, 414–24. 34 On Hugenberg’s election, see John A. Leopold, “The Election of Alfred Hugenberg as Chairman of the German National People’s Party,” Canadian Journal of History 7 (1972), 149–71, as well as two more recent contributions to this episode in the history of the DNVP by Heidrun Holzbach, Das “System Hugenberg”. Die Organisation bürgerlicher Sammlungspolitik vor dem Aufstieg der NSDAP (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1981), 192–240, and Ohnezeit, DNVP in der Weimarer Republik, 425–48. 35 In this respect, see Holzbach, “System Hugenberg,” 65–166. 36 For example, see Hugenberg, “Block oder Brei?,” Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger, August 26 and 28, 1928, nos. 404 and 406. 37 In this respect, see the speeches by Karl Veidt, Magdalene von Tiling, Wilhelm Jaeger-Celle, and Otto Schmidt-Hannover, as well as Hugenberg’s keynote address, Klare Front zum Freiheitskampf! Rede gehalten auf dem 9. Reichsparteitag der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei in Kassel am 22. November 1929, Deutschnationale Flugschrift, no. 339 (Berlin: Deutschnationale Schriftenvertriebsstelle, 1929), in the official report of the DNVP Kassel party congress, November 21–23, 1929, in Unsere Partei 7: 23 (December 1, 1929), 389–415, esp. 392–7, 400–1. 38 Volker R. Berghahn, “Das Volksbegehren gegen den Youngplan und die Ursprünge des Präsidialregimes 1928–1930,” in Dirk Stegmann, Bernd Jürgen Wendt, and PeterChristian Witt (eds.), Industrielle Gesellschaft und politisches System. Beiträge zur

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39 40 41 42

43 44 45

46

47

48 49 50

47

politischen Sozialgeschichte. Festschrift für Fritz Fischer zum siebzigsten Geburtstag (Bonn: Verlag Neue Gesellschaft, 1978), 431–46. For a more recent discussion of the referendum against the Young Plan, see Maximilian Terhalle, Deutschnational in Weimar. Die politische Biographie des Reichstagsabgeordneten Otto Schmidt (-Hannover) 1888–1971 (Cologne, Weimar, and Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2009), 207–36. In this respect, see the provocative article by Thomas Mergel, “Das Scheitern des deutschen Tory-Konservatismus. Die Umformung der DNVP zu einer rechtsradikalen Partei 1928–1932,” Historische Zeitschrift 276 (2003), 323–68. On the failure of the two referenda from the perspective of the Stahlhelm, see Volker R. Berghahn, Der Stahlhelm-Bund der Frontsoldaten 1918–1935 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1966), 122–31, 169–78. Blank to Reusch, August 11, 1931, in the unpublished Nachlaß of Paul Reusch, Rheinisch-Westfälisches Wirtschaftsarchiv, Cologne, Abt. 130, 4001012024/9. On the rally in Harzburg, see Larry Eugene Jones, “Nationalists, Nazis, and the Assault against Weimar: Revisiting the Harzburg Rally of October 1931,” German Studies Review 29 (2006), 483–94. On the strategic considerations that informed the aspirations of the non-Nazi right at Harzburg, see Jackisch, Pan-German League, 171–3, and Leicht, Claß, 374–9. Volker R. Berghahn, “Die Harzburger Front und die Kandidatur Hindenburgs für die Reichspräsidentenwahlen 1932,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 13 (1965), 64–82. Peter Fritzsche, “Presidential Victory and Popular Festivity in Weimar Germany: Hindenburg’s 1925 Election,” Central European History 23 (1990), 205–24. On the calculations that informed Brüning’s appointment as Chancellor, see the authoritative Hindenburg biography by Wolfram Pyta, Hindenburg. Herrschaft zwischen Hohenzollern und Hitler (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2007), 555–75, as well as the two superb Brüning studies by William L. Patch, Jr., Heinrich Brüning and the Dissolution of the Weimar Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 72–89, and Herbert Hömig, Brüning. Kanzler in der Krise. Eine Weimarer Biographie (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2000), 149–57. The charismatic qualities of Hindenburg’s political leadership have received considerable attention in recent historical literature. On the role and function of the Hindenburg myth, see in particular Wolfram Pyta, “Paul von Hindenburg als charismatischer Führer der deutschen Nation,” in Frank Möller (ed.), Charismatische Führer der deutschen Nation (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2004), 109–47; Jesko von Hoegen, Der Held von Tannenberg. Genese und Funktion des Hindenburg-Mythos (Cologne: Böhlau, 2007); and Anna von der Goltz, Hindenburg: Power, Myth, and the Rise of Nazism (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). For further details, see Ludolf Herbst, Hitlers Charisma. Die Erfindung eines Deutschen Messias (Frankfurt a.M.: S. Fischer, 2010), 54–95. On the fictional reconstruction of Hitler’s wartime record, see Thomas Weber, Hitler’s First War: Adolf Hitler, the Men of the List Regiment, and the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), esp. 255–87. For further details, see the forthcoming book by Larry Eugene Jones, Hitler versus Hindenburg: The 1932 Presidential Elections and the End of the Weimar Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Terhalle, Deutschnational in Weimar, 301–2. Jürgen W. Falter, “The Two Hindenburg Elections of 1925 and 1932: A Total Reversal of Voter Coalitions,” Central European History 23 (1990), 225–41.

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51 In this respect, see Larry Eugene Jones, “Hindenburg and the Conservative Dilemma in the 1932 Presidential Elections,” German Studies Review 20 (1997), 235–59. 52 For further details, see Larry Eugene Jones, “Sammlung oder Zersplitterung? Die Bestrebungen zur Bildung einer neuen Mittelpartei in der Endphase der Weimarer Republik 1930–1933,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 25 (1977), 265–304, esp. 280–1, as well as the more recent study by Wolfgang Zollitsch, “Das Scheitern der ‘gouvernementalen’ Rechten. Tilo von Wilmowsky und die organisierten Interesen in der Staatskrise von Weimar,” in Wolther von Kieseritzky and Klaus-Peter Sick (eds.), Demokratie in Deutschland. Chancen und Gefährdungen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1999), 254–73, esp. 264–6. 53 On the Nazi electoral breakthrough in the early 1930s, see Jürgen Falter, Thomas Lindenberger, and Siegfried Schumann, Wahlen und Abstimmungen in der Weimarer Republik. Materialien zum Wahlverhalten 1919–1933 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1986), 73, 102. See also Jürgen Falter, “Die Wahlen des Jahres 1932/33 und der Aufstieg totalitärer Parteien,” in Everhard Holtmann (ed.), Das Ende der Demokratie (Munich: Bayerische Landeszentrale für politische Bildungsarbeit, 1995), 271–314. 54 Geoff Eley, “Conservatives and Radical Nationalists in Germany: The Production of Fascist Potentials, 1912–28,” in Martin Blinkhorn (ed.), Fascists and Conservatives: The Radical Right and the Establishment in Twentieth-­century Europe (London: Unwin Hyman, 1990), 50–70, 67. 55 In this respect, see the insightful article by Detlev Mühlberger, “Central Control versus Regional Autonomy. A Case Study of Nazi Propaganda in Westphalia, 1925–1932,” in Thomas Childers (ed.), The Formation of the Nazi Constituency, 1919–1933 (Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1986), 64–103. Although both are dated, the best studies on the Nazi party organization in the Weimar Republic remain Dietrich J. Orlow, The History of the Nazi Party, 1919–1933 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, n.d. [1969]), and Wolfgang Horn, Führerideologie und Parteiorganisation in der NSDAP (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1972).

Section II

Populism in the Balkans from the Late Nineteenth Century to the Present

4

Nationalism and Populism in the Balkans: The Case of Croatia Mark Biondich

Croatian politics for much of the twentieth century turned on the twin axes of the social and national questions. Croatia’s multi-ethnic character and the pre-1945 social divide between urban educated society and the socially dominant countryside were core issues at the heart of Croatian (and later Yugoslav) politics. After 1945, with the rise of Communism in Yugoslavia, nationality issues and the national question were the key nodes in Croatian politics. The purpose of this chapter is not to identify varieties of populism or to determine whether there is indeed a universal form of populism. For the purposes of this study, populism is understood to refer to protest movements directed against established political regimes, social orders, and ruling ideologies. These movements are not necessarily undemocratic, although in practice they have contributed to the strengthening of such tendencies. These movements almost by definition spoke on behalf of the homogeneous “people” (narod), understood in the Croatian context to be one and the same as “the nation,” which was regarded as the sole authority in and the cornerstone of political society. Indeed, the populist mission has more often than not ostensibly been to hand power back to “the [Croat] people,” who had allegedly repeatedly been denied their rights by perfidious elites of one form or another.1

Modernization and the roots of populism in the Balkans In the period between 1878 and 1914, the newly independent Balkan states attempted to make the leap towards modernity. The region’s political and intellectual elites were, with some exceptions, deeply impressed with the achievements of Europe, which was their paragon of modernity and “progress.” They practically equated modernization with “Europeanization”—as was the case after 1989—that is, with the advance of technology, the growth of industry and commerce, urbanization, the establishment of efficient, centralized state power, and the institutional trappings of parliamentary democracy. During these decades, the Balkans witnessed the growth of towns, ambitious public works projects, the creation of communication networks, and the commercialization of national economies, in addition to the spread of schools, literacy,

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and higher education. In 1914 the Balkans remained overwhelmingly rural, with numerically insignificant and socially marginal proletariats and bourgeoisies, although urbanization, the advent of new technologies, and the establishment of modern bureaucratic states had nonetheless already undermined traditional rural society. The role of the state in promoting development was pronounced, as state revenues were invested in the formation of state administrations, modern militaries, and gendarmeries. This entailed growing government indebtedness, eventually leading to greater foreign control over national economies and a concomitant dependence on European capital markets. While it may be true that the Balkans had by 1914 experienced only the beginnings of industrialization and an “uneven” pattern of development, it is also undeniable that the path to modernity had been entered upon.2 In most Balkan states, political elites were an outgrowth of national liberation struggles of the nineteenth century that relied on the state for social status and power. The decidedly centralized state apparatuses and politicized bureaucracies that governed these states proved to be attractive instruments of social advancement. The state was seen by many in the Balkan region as the only agent capable of mobilizing the necessary resources needed to pursue social and economic reform and the concomitant tasks of state-­building and national integration; the state alone possessed the power needed to mobilize national resources, carry out modernizing reform, safeguard the national interest, and thus achieve national integration. In this context, political power in the Balkan states was not wielded by liberalizing bourgeois elites, but by intelligentsias and politicized bureaucracies. They were determined to adapt their societies to the organizational patterns of the European state. As state-­building was integral to the modernist project, the result was highly centralized Balkan states with relatively large administrations. Balkan political elites were dependent on the power and prestige of the state, and the only viable avenue of employment for many educated Greeks, Serbs, Bulgarians, Romanians, and others was the state bureaucracy, whose growth intensified noticeably at the turn of the twentieth century. The emergence of bureaucratic ruling elites had a powerful impact on political culture, as existing social realities reinforced the vertical exercise of political authority. In the absence of strong party political systems, the emphasis in politics at this time was on personalities, rather than party programs or ideologies per se. The growth and expansion of the Balkan state was accompanied, as was the case elsewhere in Europe, by new demands on the citizenry. In a region where the peasantry comprised a majority of the population, state-­building naturally entailed coercing peasants into supporting modernization. While the progress that was achieved from the last two decades of the nineteenth century onwards was financed by foreigners and high taxation, it was necessarily borne by the Balkan peasant who was compelled to conform to nascent state structures in the name of modernity. Although the condition of the Balkan peasant varied considerably from one country to the next, the typical peasant remained by 1914 quite poor, with small and inefficient plots predominating. In Bulgaria and Serbia the peasants owned the land and smallholdings were the norm, whereas in the Romanian lands, Transylvania and Croatia, the native nobilities held title to roughly half the arable land. Modernization and the penetration of the market into the Balkan countryside wrought significant changes to traditional rural life,

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leading to significant if ephemeral resistance. The Serbian Timok Rebellion (1883), during which Serb peasants attacked local officialdom and briefly neutralized state authority, is emblematic of popular resistance to state-­building in the Balkans. That same year the so-­called “national movement” occurred in Croatia, which was largely motivated by difficult rural economic circumstances and a substantial increase in taxation resulting from the growth of a semi-­autonomous Croatian state apparatus within the Austro-Hungarian monarchy after 1868. In Croatia as elsewhere in the Balkans, the new bureaucratic state collected taxes in money, forcing peasants into the market and increasing their need for credit. The peasants’ struggle against exploitation quickly became a clash against the city, where the modernizing state bureaucracy had replaced the gentry as a veritable new scourge. During the 1883 rebellion in Croatia, peasants attacked the local intelligentsia and government officialdom. A similar situation prevailed in Romania. The enormous divide between landed elite and peasant, greater in Romania than elsewhere in the Balkans, led to several peasant disturbances, as in 1888 and, far more ominously, during the great peasant revolt of March 1907. Even in Bulgaria, where rural conditions were generally more favorable, the situation of the peasants deteriorated rapidly after autonomy was achieved in 1878. Most peasants believed they were overtaxed compared to the towns while receiving few benefits in return, harboring a deepening resentment against the town and nascent state bureaucracy. It is hardly surprising that, in light of these growing social crevices within modernizing Balkan society, the years around the turn of the century witnessed the proliferation of populist parties: the Romanian Peasants’ Party (1895; recast in and after 1918); the Bulgarian Agrarian National Union (1899–1901) of Aleksanduˇr Stamboliiski; and, the Croat Peasant Party (1904) of Stjepan and Antun Radić. Even the Serbian People’s Radical Party (1881) originally represented a populist reaction to modernization, combining socialist, anarchist, and peasantist elements into a militant program. These parties shared a number of common characteristics that gave them a populist tenor, including the shared belief that society should be remodeled to reflect the peasant majority’s values and interests, a social and economic program that emphasized peasant needs and the belief that the peasantry’s numeric preponderance necessitated a greater political role for that social group. They generally regarded the primary role of the state as safeguarding the prosperity of “the people” as a national community, rather than personal rights or civic freedoms as such. The fact that “peasantist” parties were formed at all demonstrates that a wide chasm separated the peasantry from existing urban elites; distrustful of the traditional parties, peasants turned to the emerging agrarian populist movement.3 There was abundant cause for such disenchantment. By the turn of the twentieth century, parliamentary regimes existed in much of the Balkans and were based on relatively liberal constitutional systems by the standards of the time. In practice, however, these regimes restricted popular participation. The modernizing Balkan states were controlled by oligarchs or professional politicians, even while maintaining some pluralism through legislative assemblies, which were in most cases, with the exception of Romania, Montenegro, and Croatia, theoretically elected through universal manhood suffrage. These restrictive parliamentary governments were reformed to

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varying degrees only after military coups in Serbia (1903) and Greece (1909), or following the Great War, as in Bulgaria, Romania, Croatia, and the other Balkan provinces of the former Habsburg monarchy, which joined with Serbia and Montenegro in December 1918 to form the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (“Yugoslavia”). In short, the nature of modernization in the Balkans inevitably led to disenchantment, creating fertile soil for “populist” movements that manifested themselves in nascent agrarian or peasantist parties. The seemingly ever-­growing chasm between the Europeanized cultural elites (the intelligentsia) and the political classes on the one hand and peasant majorities on the other was clearly visible to all, and increasingly deliberated. The former were increasingly criticized for losing touch with “the people”— in the Balkan context, this invariably meant the peasantry—and for betraying popular (that is to say “national”, as this was often conflated to mean one and the same) ideals. In formulating their political programs, peasantist leaders in Croatia and elsewhere in the Balkans drew on the example of Russian populism. This is hardly surprising, given the similarities between the Russian and Balkan (particularly the South Slav) countryside, the comparable communal institutions (the Russian peasant mir and South Slavic zadruga), and the common challenges posed by modernity. There was also a common idealization of the peasant, autochthonous culture and customs. The roots of Balkan (and Croatian) populism are thus to be found in the particular nature of modernization in the region; it was within this context that agrarian or peasantist movements emerged, offering their own (and supposedly distinct) paths to development premised on the existence of a socially dominant peasantry that had been victimized by a seemingly flawed, state-­directed modernization. As political modernization entailed the theoretical broadening of the franchise, the logic of peasantists everywhere was simple enough: the transition to democratic governance would be incomplete unless the peasant majority obtained and exercised its political rights. This was the basic premise of peasantist leaders everywhere, from Stamboliiski’s BANU to the Radićes’ Croat Peasant Party.

Populism in Croatia: the Croat Peasant Party, 1904–45 The establishment in December 1904 of the Croat Peasant Party (hereafter, HSS)4 was part of the agrarian populist wave, and marked the appearance of one of the most important agrarian parties in the region. It also represented an important turning point in Croatian politics, although its full impact was not felt until after 1918. The HSS remained a relatively minor party during the remainder of the Austro-Hungarian period (1904–18) because of the highly restrictive electoral franchise in Croatia, but its prewar articulation of a peasantist ideology enabled it to become a veritable national mass movement in the post-1918 period, and the most important Croatian political party to 1945. The HSS’s ideology represented an eclectic synthesis of liberal and socialist principles, combining recognition of private property, democratic principles and limited state intervention in society with an emphasis on peasant (collective) rather than individual rights and opposition to the economic principle of laissez-faire. The party program explicitly declared that it was against “capitalist insatiability,” giving

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the party’s ideology a decidedly anti-­capitalist dimension. It would be incorrect, however, to conclude that the Radićes, or most peasantist leaders in the region, were Luddites or backward-­looking conservatives who vainly hoped to reverse the tide of modernization. What peasantists proposed, as Roman Daskalov has observed, was not an alternative to industrialization itself, but to an inadequate industrialization.5 However, most contemporary critics dismissed peasantist leaders (including the Radićes) as hopeless romantics, sentimentalists or as demagogues. The key turning point for Croatian agrarianism was the First World War, as political changes and the introduction of universal manhood suffrage paved the way for peasant representation. Wartime casualties and the introduction of a system of obligatory delivery of food production and inflationary pressures all took their toll on the peasantry. Furthermore, the wartime anti-Slav chauvinism of the Austro-Hungarian authorities, who suspected most Slavs of treachery for the simple reason that they were neither German nor Magyar, contributed to the stirrings of the non-­dominant nationalities. By 1918 much of the Croatian countryside was in open revolt against the city and the old regime, helped in no small measure by the return of former prisoners of war from Russia. This radicalization contributed to the HSS’s transformation from a minor party into a national mass movement. Croatia’s intellectual and political elite was, as a consequence of the peasantry’s revolt against the city in 1918, cast aside. But in the heady days of 1918, this elite, which at the time was overwhelmingly committed to Yugoslavist unitarism, worked to bring about the formation of a new state, known formally as the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. The First World War thus produced another form of “liberation,” namely national, although in reality this proved to be problematic since the substance of that liberation remained to be determined at the time of Yugoslav unification on December 1, 1918. Radić’s national ideology, and hence the national program of the HSS, acknowledged the importance of Slavic reciprocity and struck a delicate balance between Croat political rights and cultural Yugoslavism. Radić was a Croat nationalist, but remained committed to his Slavophile ideas and recognized that Croats and Serbs, in linguistic and even cultural terms, formed part of a larger Slavic family. But this did not translate into support for Yugoslav statehood, let alone state centralism. His Slavophile sentiments notwithstanding, Radić never believed that the South Slavs’ political individualities and historical identities should be sacrificed for the sake of a greater Yugoslav community. That is why he and his party opposed Yugoslav unification in 1918–19 and the highly centralist political order that was established according to the 1921 constitution. The peasants had only a vague comprehension of the Yugoslav idea—which was at the time a phenomenon of the intelligentsia—and were being asked to sacrifice their own national identity for the sake of a concept which they did not truly fathom. When that concept descended from the nebulous realm of ideas to the hard ground of reality in 1918, the Croat peasantry quickly experienced the Yugoslav state as a new affliction, even more burdensome than the defunct Habsburg monarchy. Moreover, the Yugoslav state soon came to be seen as a Great Serbian state. Radić’s significance in Croatian politics emerges in this context. In 1918 the popular disturbances in the Croatian countryside demonstrated the existence of deep social fissures in the country. Possessing a peasant populist and Croatian republican platform,

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Radić and his party offered the peasants a program which affirmed not only their political and socio-­economic rights, but their national identity as well. Burdened throughout the 1920s by pressures from the new Yugoslav monarchical state, the Croat peasantry coalesced around “the party of Radić,” which soon became a national mass movement. By 1923, the HSS was the second largest party in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. The cornerstone of its policy, from 1918 until 1925, was peasant republicanism, a demand for a neutral Croat peasant republic and opposition to Yugoslav unification, which had taken a monarchical and centralist form. The HSS’s rhetoric repeatedly criticized Croatia’s intellectual elite for rushing headlong into unification. As pressures from the new Yugoslav monarchical state increased—a state that perpetuated many old, and imposed many new, burdens on the peasantry— peasant solidarity coalesced around Radić’s party. By 1925, Radić’s juggernaut had emasculated the other Croat parties, which were grudgingly forced to recognize his political leadership. This was based on their realization that Radić’s party was the only political force of significance in Croatia, as well as their own disenchantment with Yugoslav centralism. By the mid-1920s Radić’s name had become synonymous with the preservation of Croat national individuality. Indeed, in early 1925 the HSS leadership claimed that “the Croat Republican Peasant Party has become the Croat people.” In light of its repeated electoral returns in Croatia in the 1920s, this claim was essentially correct. The HSS’s leadership placed great emphasis on creating a local party organization, internal democratic practices and fostering party cohesiveness. By the eve of the First World War, it had established a party cadre and a membership which probably ranged in size from 10,000 to 15,000 people. By 1923, however, the party’s central leadership claimed that it had more than one million organized members. It was the party’s grassroots organizational work that set it apart as a modern political party with unparalleled executive deftness in Croatia. And yet the party never managed to sustain its internal democratic machinery. It devoted great attention to organization in its first years and held regular party assemblies between 1905 and 1912, but these became biennial in 1907 and then ceased during the First World War, only to be recommenced intermittently after 1919. In terms of policy formulation and initiative, Stjepan Radić and the central leadership assumed the dominant role. But this was certainly not at variance in any way with the party’s populist nature: Radić saw himself as an interpreter of the people’s will, and his charismatic personality meant that he shaped the contours of party (and hence “national”) policy. As the HSS established its electoral dominance in the 1920s, the party press increasingly equated the HSS’s party platform with Croat national interests, and the party leadership was cast as synonymous with the leadership of the Croat nation. By the late 1920s the party had become, in effect, an informal autocracy. This was never remedied, either in Radić’s lifetime or under his successor, Vladko Maček (1928–45). Moreover, toward the end of Radić’s life a virtual cult of personality had developed around “the Leader” Radić, further testament to the fact that the party had become populist in form and internally undemocratic. Despite this undemocratic trend, “the party of Radić” carried out a veritable national revolution in Croatia, and in this respect it played a progressive role in Croatian politics. In this sense, this early variant of Croatian populism may be said to have had a reformist and

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progressive component, insofar as it advocated for liberal social reforms, supported the franchise for women, and insisted on greater political representation for the peasant majority. Peasant populism inaugurated the era of mass politics and democracy in Croatia. In Croatia, as elsewhere in the Balkans, peasant parties were eventually neutralized and pressured to submit to existing political establishments or revolutionary forces of the right and left. Radić and his party were no exception, as they were compelled (after Radić’s imprisonment in 1925) to recognize the Yugoslav monarchy. Following Radić’s assassination in 1928, the HSS remained the only significant political force in Croatia.6 Under Maček’s leadership, the HSS entered the most difficult period of its history: it was forced to contend with the Yugoslav royal dictatorship (1929–34) of King Aleksandar Karadjordjević; the Great Depression; growing nationality tensions in Croatia and Yugoslavia; an increasingly volatile political climate in which the extremes of the right and left, represented in Croatia by the Ustaša and Communist movements, respectively, contended for power; and, finally, the painful experiences of war and occupation between 1941 and 1945 which overlapped with and culminated in Communist revolution. In the period between 1928 and 1941, the populist mantle in Croatia increasingly passed to native fascists and the radical right, who were violently opposed to the existence of the interwar Yugoslav state and critical of the HSS leadership for its policy vis-à-vis Yugoslavia. If Croat populism originated as a peasant movement predicated on the social question, after 1928 it gradually migrated to the political right as nationalist groups opposed to Yugoslavia used populist rhetoric to undermine the Croat peasant movement, which they saw as an impediment to the resolution of the “Croat Question,” and the Yugoslav state. In Croatia, fascism was associated with Ante Pavelić’s Ustaša movement, which emerged after 1930 as the most radical nationalist group, committed to a program of Croatian independence.7 Its core membership was drawn from the Croat Party of Right (1918–29), whose social base was the Croat petty bourgeoisie and nationalist intelligentsia. Like the HSS, the Croat Party of Right originally opposed the new Yugoslav state. The two parties were the leading opponents of state centralism in Croatia, albeit with quite distinct social constituencies. Given its relatively narrow social base, however, the Croat Party of Right remained a marginal political group and never polled more than 2 percent of the vote in Croatia in the 1920s. After Radić’s assassination in 1928, all Croat political parties and even the leading Croatian Serb party, the Independent Democrats, rallied to the Croatian national cause. The HSS was the nominal leader of this united front, which began to unravel as Pavelić’s nascent Ustaša movement began mapping a distinct political trajectory based on a fundamentally different understanding of the national question in Yugoslavia. After January 1929, the dictatorship of King Aleksandar Karadjordjević systematically worked to indoctrinate the populace into an abandonment of their old “tribal” identities in favor of a new Yugoslav national identity.8 The ideology of integral Yugoslavism was promoted with new vigor by the authorities. The state administration was reformed to do away with historic and cultural entities. In October 1929 the state’s name was officially changed to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. The September 1931 constitution guaranteed personal liberties but simultaneously forbade most forms of

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political activity, while granting the monarch and executive extensive new powers; elections to the National Parliament were no longer by secret ballot and half the members of the Senate were nominated by the King. The state apparatus, army, and judiciary remained firmly in Serbian hands and the new government party, the Yugoslav National Party, was a predominantly Serb affair. In the same period (1931–4), many of the moderate non-Serb leaders spent time in prison and were otherwise harassed by the authorities; Maček would spend nearly six months in detention in 1931 and the better part of 1933–4 in prison for his alleged anti-­state activities.9 King Aleksandar’s Yugoslavist project began to unravel even before his October 1934 assassination in Marseilles by a Macedonian terrorist working for the Ustaša movement. After October 1934, a Regency Council was established, headed by Prince Pavle Karadjordjević, the late King’s cousin. Much of Aleksandar’s system, like the 1931 Constitution, was retained, although the reins of dictatorship were definitely loosened. Prince Pavle was keen to reach a political compromise with the HSS.10 Despite elections in 1935 and 1938, attempts under two different premiers to consolidate the political situation in the country failed. During this period, Maček headed the country’s United Opposition, which brought together the HSS, the Croatian Serb Independent Democrats, and the Serbian Democratic Party and Agrarians. A significant change came only in early 1939, with the appointment of Dragiša Cvetković as premier. In August 1939, Cvetković and Maček negotiated the Sporazum (Agreement), which created a semi-­autonomous Croatian province11 within Yugoslavia that incorporated most regions with a Croat plurality. Croatia had its own elected legislature and autonomy in most internal administrative matters. In 1939 the HSS joined a coalition government in Belgrade, with Maček assuming the position of deputy prime minister of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Pavelić and his movement were committed to Croatian independence at any cost and hoped to exploit revisionist sentiment among Yugoslavia’s neighbors to achieve statehood. Dialogue with Belgrade was rejected out of hand. The decisive rupture between the Ustaše and the HSS came in 1935, following the HSS’s decision to participate in the May 1935 elections and to lead Yugoslavia’s United Opposition.12 The former’s criticism was predicated on the belief that Maček and the HSS were working to reform Yugoslavia instead of working for her destruction. Ustaša rhetoric dismissed Yugoslavism as a failed ideology and Great Serbian project; their message to the Croat people questioned the motives of the current HSS leadership, and they asked how any political agreement with Belgrade was possible.13 Maček’s courtship of the Serbian opposition was denounced as a betrayal of Croat national interests, as the Serbian parties were determined to preserve Yugoslavia and perpetuate Croatia’s subordinate status within it.14 In the Ustaša worldview, all Serbs shared complicity in the exploitation of Croatia and the Croat people.15 An Ustaša leaflet of January 1939 called attention to the point that the HSS had failed to achieve any meaningful political goals in the twenty years of Yugoslavia’s existence. But over that same period, Germany had been reborn as a great power and a handful of Irish nationalists had achieved Ireland’s independence, not through “decrepit” pacifism and negotiation, but by “a policy of resistance and blood.” Ustaša rhetoric repeatedly emphasized “the spiritual and ideological unity of the leader and the nation itself,” and their program of using “all

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legal and illegal means for the accomplishment of national freedom.”16 In short, Pavelić was a man of action while Maček was a failed leader and traitor; he was weakening the Croat liberation struggle through dialogue with Belgrade, repeated references to Yugoslavia and Croat–Serb unity, and his insistence on democratic principles.17 It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the Ustaše railed so vehemently against the HSS after the conclusion of the August 1939 Sporazum. Maček and his party were attacked for betraying the Croat people; their policy was not “an interpretation of the will of the Croat nation, but an attempt to save Yugoslavia at any cost.”18 The HSS was jealously guarding the Croat village from political penetration, but this same village was suffering economically and socially as a result.19 In 1939 the other radical right groups in Croatia, such as the Catholic clericalists, National Socialists, and others, began coalescing around Pavelić and his Ustaša group, breaking completely with the HSS as the undisputed leader of the Croat cause. These groups had been clamoring for independence since at least the mid-1930s. The Croat political right often commented on fascist intervention in Spain, and how fascism in general could be applied in the Croatian case.20 For the political right, democracy and liberalism were no longer assessed as viable solutions to the Croat Question. Yugoslavia’s failed democratic experiment had already confirmed them in this view. Their criticism of liberal democracy became in no uncertain terms an assault on Maček and the HSS. By 1939 the rupture between the mainstream peasant movement and the political right was virtually complete; the two currents of interwar Croat nationalism, represented by the HSS and the political right, parted company for good. The HSS, which had dominated Croatian politics since 1918, now committed itself to the preservation of Yugoslavia at a time of looming crisis in Europe. The Croat political right generally and Pavelić’s Ustaša movement specifically committed themselves to independence at any cost. The Ustaša movement’s populist rhetoric condemned both the Yugoslav (read Serbian) political establishment for perpetuating the Croat people’s subordinate status within Yugoslavia and the HSS for its de facto complicity. This populist rhetoric sought to exploit nationality problems in the 1930s to disgrace established Croat elites and to elicit popular support. To this end, the Ustaša movement repeatedly invoked and utilized the memory of Radić—since 1928 widely regarded as a martyr of the Croat national cause—as did the Croat (and Yugoslav) Communists. Both the right and left vilified Maček; neither the Croat radical right nor the Croat/Yugoslav left had much sympathy for his cautious policy of dialogue with Belgrade. For the former he was a national traitor, for the latter a bourgeois reactionary in peasant garb. During their stint in power between 1941 and 1945, the Ustaše interned him in the notorious Jasenovac camp from October 1941 to March 1942 and then placed him under house arrest for the duration of the war. Maček’s hurried flight from Croatia in May 1945 anticipated a much harsher fate at the hands of Josip Broz Tito’s Communists. By the 1930s, Croat populism had migrated to the radical and fascist right and was premised almost entirely on the instrumentalization of the national question and nationality problems. Native fascism in Croatia, represented by the Ustaša movement, did not result from a structural crisis of society—the weakness of the bourgeoisie and liberal ideology, rapid social change, or fear of Communist revolution—but was a by-­ product of the nationalist struggles arising from Yugoslavia’s vexing and increasingly

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acrimonious national question. Pavelić’s group deliberately modeled itself on Italian fascism, hoping to utilize Italian sponsorship and Croat popular opposition to Yugoslavia in order to achieve independence. The Ustaše had developed a cult of personality around Pavelić, their charismatic “Leader” (Poglavnik) who unquestionably dominated the movement from beginning to end, and who also embodied its ideals and spirit. Their rhetoric was directed at Croatia’s established political elite—that is, Maček and the HSS—and sought to exploit disenchantment among youth and disaffected nationalist elements in Croatia. Many young Croat nationalists, reared during a period of dysfunctional democracy (1919–29) and royal dictatorship, ceased having any meaningful commitment to democracy. Unlike traditional conservatives, however, they were not afraid to engage the masses and adopted an ostensibly populist rhetoric to that end.

War and Communist revolution, 1941–89 Following the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941, Croat nationalists proclaimed the “Independent State of Croatia.” The wartime Croatian state, which included much of present-­day Croatia and all of Bosnia-Herzegovina, was an Italo-German condominium and integral component of the Axis new order in Southeastern Europe. The Ustaša movement assumed control, as Pavelić was transplanted from exile in Fascist Italy to Croatia. In an attempt to safeguard Croatia’s newly won independence, the Ustaša regime proceeded almost immediately to unleash a campaign of mass murder to rid the state of all “undesirable” elements, among whom it counted the Serb and Jewish populations. Of all the Second World War Axis satellite states in East Central and Southeastern Europe, only in the Ustaša-­run Independent State of Croatia did the number of non-Jewish (specifically Serb) civilian victims exceed the number of Jewish victims as a result of deliberate government policy. What is more, the democratically oriented Croatian political groups, headed by the HSS, were effectively marginalized during the war and, in light of the eventual victory of the Yugoslav Communists, ceased having any meaningful impact on Croatian politics. Josip Broz Tito’s Communist Partisans came to power in Yugoslavia in May 1945. In August 1945 a Communist-­dominated Provisional Assembly laid the groundwork for elections to a Constituent Assembly the following month. Harassment of nonCommunist politicians and suppression of their press during the election campaign precluded a fair election. The candidates of the Communist-­backed People’s Front won over 90 percent of the vote in September 1945. The Constituent Assembly dissolved the monarchy and established the Federative People’s Republic of Yugoslavia (later the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia) on November 29, 1945. Two months later it adopted a constitution that provided for a federation of six republics. The country was firmly in the hands of Tito and the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. As there was no democratic political process as such during the Communist period (1945–89), it is virtually impossible to discuss populism in this period. Thereafter Yugoslavia was ruled as a federation of six republics under the highly centralized Communist Party of Yugoslavia. Following the 1948 split with the Soviet

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Union, the Yugoslav Communists initiated several ideological innovations. In 1952 the Party was renamed the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, and a system of workers’ self-­management was introduced that ostensibly distinguished the Yugoslav socialist experiment from the Soviet model. Tito evidently concluded by the early 1960s that strict party centralism would undermine the equality of the country’s nations and nationalities, upset the equilibrium between the six republics and possibly even halt the progress of cautious reform. To that end, after 1962 several liberalizing tendencies emerged. In the face of dissent and internal debate, in 1966 the Yugoslav leadership embarked on a major political shift: decentralization of political and economic authority and decision-­making. Tito opted for toleration of limited debate and accommodation of regional interests. Party and state centralism were progressively restricted while greater rights were conceded to Croats, Bosnian Muslims, and the Albanians in Kosovo. Institutional decentralization now became the norm, as more authority was transferred to the republics and their parties. This proved problematic in practice, as the decline of central planning contributed to republican competition for resources and prerogatives.21 It also gave rise to liberal and nationalist tendencies in both Croatia and Serbia. The Croatian Spring was a cultural-­political movement of the late 1960s that called for greater cultural, economic, and national rights for Croatia within the Yugoslav socialist federation. The movement originated in the 1967 declaration of a group of Croatian linguists and writers on the status of the Croatian literary language, which touched off a discussion in Croatia about national and republican rights within Yugoslavia. The movement gradually won a grass-roots following and the support of reform-­oriented figures within the League of Communists of Croatia, such as Miko Tripalo and Savka Dabčević-Kučar, who sought greater popular validation for their policies. Their objective was not to destabilize Yugoslavia as such, however. In this sense, one cannot characterize the “Croatian Spring” as a populist movement, insofar as established, reformist elites sought to effect change within proscribed limits. In the event, popular demands outpaced the Croatian party reformers and, as a result, Tito and the Yugoslav party leadership interpreted the movement as a dangerous restoration of Croatian nationalism. In December 1971 the Croatian League of Communists was purged of reform elements, including Dabčević-Kučar and Tripalo. Among those arrested was the former Communist general and future president of Croatia, Franjo Tudjman. After 1971 the League of Communists of Croatia was dominated by an orthodox leadership committed to Tito and the Yugoslav status quo.22 The suppression of the Croatian Spring proved important, as it alienated many Croats from socialist Yugoslavism and was seen as proof that Croat national rights could not be genuinely accommodated within socialist Yugoslavia. The purge ushered in a period of “bitter quiescence” in Croatia, which lasted until 1989–90.23

Post-Communism and democratic transition Post-Communism in Croatia was closely intertwined with the disintegration of the Yugoslav state and concomitant war of independence between June 1991 and August

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1995. The early Croatian transition from Communist rule to the first democratic elections, in 1989–90, was noticeably influenced by only one actor, namely, the ruling League of Communists of Croatia. By the late 1980s, this party was deeply divided on the question of reform, but the reformist wing, following the lead of its Slovenian counterparts, gradually succeeded in neutralizing hardline elements and initiating the first steps toward democratization. Croatian society and public opinion did not influence this early transition in any meaningful way, nor did they influence the December 1989 decision of the League of Communists of Croatia to hold democratic elections in Croatia the following year. Rather, the Communist reformers in Croatia, evidently confident of their own electoral victory in spring 1990, did not negotiate with the nascent political opposition on issues such as the nature of electoral system. As a result, and much to the surprise of Communist reformists, the early transition went in unexpected directions. The nationalist Croat Democratic Union (hereafter, HDZ) won the first elections of April–May 1990, ensuring its absolute parliamentary majority and complete control over the next phase of Croatia’s transition, namely, the drafting of a new constitution and concomitant state and institutional building. During this second phase, tensions between Croatia and Serbia escalated rapidly and Croat–Serb relations in Croatia deteriorated appreciably.24 During the early transition in Croatia, both the Croat and Serb populations were mobilized by populist and ethnically exclusive appeals. The Croatian transition to democracy was marked by the emergence of new, alternative movements that questioned the legitimacy of the Communist order. The HDZ was by far the most significant anti-communist movement in Croatia, bringing together disparate political factions, including former and reform Communists, liberal reformers, and hardline nationalists, under the leadership of the former Communist general and dissident Franjo Tudjman. After winning the 1990 elections, the HDZ party/movement sought to transform and institutionalize itself, according to Goran Čular, into a form of political regime.25 The HDZ entered the Croatian political scene in 1989 as an officially registered political party, but from the beginning it resembled a populist movement rather than party. Instead of a clear party program, the HDZ offered a fairly vague platform for democratic transition that was in actual fact dominated by the issue of Croatian state sovereignty. In the context of the growing political conflict between Croatia (and Slovenia) on the one hand and Yugoslavia on the other, the HDZ’s appeal to nationalist sensibilities gave it a significant advantage over its political opponents and especially the reform Communists, who ever since the suppression of the Croatian Spring were seen in Croatia as insufficiently “national” in form. Similarly, its populist rhetoric juxtaposed Croatia’s supposedly “European” values with Serbian “Balkanism.”26 Moreover, Tudjman served as more than a party leader. Despite his Communist pedigree, he was, certainly for his followers, a charismatic persona whose nationalist credentials had already been cemented during his stints in prison. Tudjman acquired the attributes of a charismatic populist who seemed to embody Croatia’s drive for sovereignty. Although theoretically a democrat, Tudjman appeared unwilling or incapable of making the transition from Communist dissident to liberal democratic reformer. He remained to the end a rather dogmatic nationalist intellectual. Nevertheless, Tudjman’s emotional appeal to suppressed nationalist values gave him

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and the HDZ a decidedly populist flair and appeal; their rhetoric claimed that Croat rights were threatened by existing “Yugoslav” elites, whether by the Serbian Communists under Slobodan Milošević or their Croatian counterparts, who were characterized as insufficiently loyal or even disloyal to the nation and its interests. Tudjman and the HDZ played on several Croat national grievances against Yugoslavia, not least of all the belief that Second World War crimes of the Ustaša regime had been exaggerated and used for political ends by the Communist authorities to undermine legitimate Croat aspirations for statehood. The fact that the nationalist revival in Serbia after 1987 under Milošević instrumentalized Ustaša crimes for contemporary political purposes further fueled this sentiment in Croatia. Only Tudjman and the HDZ claimed to hold out the promise of sovereignty and, thereafter, prosperity in a future Croatian state. After the HDZ won the 1990 elections, and in the context of conflict with the Croatian Serbs and Yugoslav state, the party was progressively institutionalized as a semi-­authoritarian regime. Tudjman and the HDZ transferred many of their principles into the institutional framework of the nascent Croatian state. This entailed a restrictive definition of Croatia as the state of the Croat nation, a rather problematic historical revisionism of the crimes of the collaborationist Ustaša regime, and the cultivation of authoritarian practices. Party symbols were conflated with national symbols and, in the context of what became known as the “Homeland War” of 1991–5, the HDZ portrayed itself as a state-­building movement and as the bearer of the national struggle for independence. Critics and political opponents were criticized in the party and state-­ affiliated media as undermining popular morale and even for disloyalty to the nascent Croatian state. What is more, the populist charisma of Tudjman was institutionalized in the form of a semi-­presidential system; Tudjman served as President from May 1990 until his death in December 1999, exercising significant political authority throughout that period. In this manner, the populist nature of the HDZ movement was transplanted to the Croatian state with a deleterious impact on the transition to and consolidation of democracy in the country. The post-Communist transition in Croatia may therefore be divided into two general periods: the first, corresponding to the populist presidency of Franjo Tudjman and the rule of his HDZ from May 1990 to December 1999; and, the second, the period since 2000, during which Croatia has gradually moved toward democratic standards, liberal economic reform, and European Union membership. Despite lingering problems, Croatia has evolved since 2000 as a relatively stable multi-­party democracy. The country joined NATO in April 2009 and the EU in July 2013. Nevertheless, Croatia still has political groups, primarily although not exclusively on the nationalist right, which continue to resort to populist rhetoric in their opposition to NATO, the EU and the country’s cooperation with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), which has been repeatedly criticized for its alleged effort to criminalize Croatia’s war of independence.27 While Croatia’s post-Tudjman politics now revolve largely around two leading parties—the Social Democrats and reformed HDZ, which lead distinct party coalitions—an increasing number of “independent” candidates and populist parties continue to fill a void in a society still suffering from economic lethargy and numerous social problems. They often pin their anti-­elite message on popular fears of the loss of Croat national identity.

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Conclusion This brief overview of the history of Croatian populism has sought to demonstrate that the term should not always be used in a negative light and need not possess negative connotations. The earliest manifestations of Croat populism were rather distinct from later expressions of the phenomenon. The case that has been made here is that agrarian populism, as represented by the Croat Peasant Party, was democratic in form and generally progressive, even though the party became more monolithic and internally autocratic over time. Agrarian populism in Croatia and elsewhere in the Balkans was a movement of radical change that sought not merely to defend peasant social interests but to give that group a voice in politics. Later manifestations of populism turned almost entirely on the national question in Yugoslavia and sought to exploit nationality problems for the sake of Croatian statehood. The other two variants discussed in this essay, the interwar Croat radical right and Tudjman’s HDZ, were authoritarian and semi-­authoritarian movements, respectively, although the latter won repeated electoral victories in the 1990s. What the Croatian case suggests is that populism should not be regarded as an ideology, as it has over time encompassed movements from the democratic left to the far right. In this regard, populism in Croatia has been ideologically inconsistent. Radić and Pavelić were certainly ideological opposites, the former a peasant democrat and the latter a fascist demagogue, but both were populists in their own ways. Apart from their common interest in Croatian statehood, however, there was very little ideological unity between them. Similarly, and as the foregoing discussion has sought to demonstrate, neither the left nor the right can claim ownership of the populist phenomenon. One might be tempted to conclude that, in the Croatian case, populism was a phenomenon of the right since the examples discussed all shared a nationalist nexus. However, Radić belonged to the democratic left, Pavelić to the fascist Right, and Tudjman began on the Communist left and migrated to the semi-­authoritarian right. What unites the three cases under consideration here is their assault on existing political structures and elites, and their common desire either to reform or dislodge those structures. As part of that assault, there was an unvarying and unending appeal to “the people” as part of a strategy of mass mobilization. In this sense, the history of Croat populism appears to confirm Margaret Canovan’s definition of populism as a phenomenon rooted in an appeal to the people against established structures of power and the dominant values of society. The people (narod) here are understood to be a monolithic body and their interests are juxtaposed to those of the political elite. The Croatian case would also appear to confirm Glenn Bowman’s view that the construction of popular identity lies at the core of populist politics. In other words, the appeal to the people against both structures of power and the values of a society requires that populists operate on an “Us versus Them” dichotomy which necessarily requires the delineation of identities.28 Identities may be crystallized within a populist framework, whether it is peasant against the urban elite, Croat against Serb and so on. What has facilitated the emergence of populism in the Croatian case is the repeated failure of existing political and social institutions (Austria-Hungary, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and then the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia) and the discrediting of and

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disillusionment with ruling political elites (several “bourgeois” parties, the Croat Peasant Party and then the League of Communists of Croatia/Yugoslavia, respectively). This has all been accompanied by significant and often violent economic, cultural, and societal shifts. In the Croatian context the existence of internal and external “others,” namely, the Serb minority and Serbian political establishment in Belgrade, served increasingly as rallying points for populists. Since the end of the Croatian war in 1995, however, populists have increasingly turned to the alleged threat to national values posed by the EU and other supranational institutions. Populist rhetoric characterized these “others” as threats to the national community, “the people” and its incipient national state. From Radić to Tudjman, populism in Croatia has represented an assault on established configurations of power and the status quo. While it may be tempting to view populism in the Balkans as a legacy of Communism or problematic transition to democracy, the phenomenon clearly has much deeper historical roots.

Notes   1 See Margaret Canovan, The People (Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2005), 66.   2 On modernization in the Balkans, see John Lampe, Balkans into Southeastern Europe: A Century of War and Transition (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 1–10; Diana Mishkova, “Modernization and Political Elites in the Balkans, 1870–1914,” Center for Austrian Studies Working Papers (1997); Victor Roudometof, “The Social Origins of Balkan Politics: Nationalism, Underdevelopment, and the Nation-State in Greece, Serbia, and Bulgaria, 1880–1920,” Mediterranean Quarterly 11: 3 (2000), 144–63; Roumen Daskalov, “Ideas About, and Reactions to Modernization in the Balkans,” East European Quarterly 31: 2 (1997), 161–71; and Mark Biondich, The Balkans: Revolution, War, and Political Violence since 1878 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 50–63.   3 On peasant movements and populism in Eastern Europe, see Ghita Ionescu, “Eastern Europe,” in G. Ionescu and E. Gellner (eds.), Populism: Its Meanings and National Characteristics (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1969), 62–96.   4 The party’s nomenclature changed several times. It was known originally as the “Croat People’s Peasant Party” (with the Croatian acronym HPSS), and then from 1920 to 1925 as the “Croat Republican Peasant Party” (HRSS) and then simply as the “Croat Peasant Party” (HSS) after 1925. For simplicity’s sake, I will refer to it throughout as the “Croat Peasant Party.” On the HSS, see Mark Biondich, Stjepan Radić, the Croat Peasant Party and the Politics of Mass Mobilization, 1904–1928 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000).   5 Daskalov, “Ideas About, and Reactions to Modernization in the Balkans,” 161–71.   6 The standard work on Maček is still Ljubo Boban, Maček i politika HSS, 1928–1941: Iz povijesti hrvatskog pitanja, 2 vols. (Zagreb: Liber, 1974). For other relevant works, see his autobiography, Vladko Maček, In the Struggle for Freedom, eds. Elizabeth and Stjepan Gaži (University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 1957), and the translated version, Memoari (Zagreb: Hrvatska seljačka stranka, 1992).   7 On the Ustaša movement, see the relevant sections of Jozo Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941–1945: Occupation and Collaboration (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001); and, Bogdan Krizman’s multiple works, Ante Pavelić i

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Transformations of Populism in Europe and the Americas ustaše (Zagreb: Globus, 1978), Pavelić izmedu Hitlera i Mussolinija (Zagreb: Globus, 1980), and Ustaše i Treći Reich, 2 vols. (Zagreb: Globus, 1982). On interwar Yugoslavia and the national question, see Ivo Banac, The National Question in Yugoslavia: Origins History, Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984); and the relevant sections of John Lampe, Yugoslavia as History: Twice There was a Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). On the different political currents in Yugoslavia during the dictatorship, see Todor Stojkov, Opozicija u vreme šestojanuarske diktature, 1929–1935 (Belgrade: Institut za savremenu istoriju, 1969). Aleksa Djilas, The Contested Country: Yugoslav Unity and Communist Revolution, 1919–1953 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 131. On the Sporazum, see Ljubo Boban, Sporazum Cvetković-Maček (Belgrade: Institut društvenih nauka, 1965). Boban, Sporazum Cvetković-Maček, 266. “Mi nismo Srbohrvati!,” Hrvatski narod (Zagreb), July 14, 1939, 2. For further discussion of the right’s attack on Maček, see Mark Biondich, “Vladko Maček and the Croat Political Right, 1928–1941,” Contemporary European History 16: 2 (May 2007), 203–13. “Osjećaj političke realnosti,” Hrvatski narod, June 30, 1939, 1. Hrvoje Hrvatinić, “Mačekova ‘umjetna borba’” Nezavisna Hrvatska Država, December 10, 1938, 1. “Hrvatska borba i hrvatska politika,” Nezavisna Hrvatska Država, March 18, 1939, 8. “Još jedan ustaški proglas hrv. narodu!,” Nezavisna Hrvatska Država, April 22, 1939, 8; and Mile Budak, “Zdravlja, zdravlja, gospodine!,” Hrvatski narod, February 17, 1939, 1. Ivo Rojnica, Susreti i doivljaji, 1938–1945 (Munich, 1969), 28. Mato Jagatić, “Značajeva nam treba,” Hrvatski narod, March 31, 1939, 1. See Vjeran Pavlaković, “Vladko Maček, the Croat Peasant Party and the Spanish Civil War,” Contemporary European History 16: 2 (May 2007), 233–46; and his “Matija Gubec Goes to Spain: Symbols and Ideology in Croatia, 1936–1939,” The Journal of Slavic Military Studies 17: 4 (2004), 727–55. On the federal structure as a flexible balance of power among the constituent republics after 1962, see Sabrina P. Ramet, Nationalism and Federalism in Yugoslavia, 1962–1991, 2nd edn (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992). Dejan Jović, “Yugoslavism and Yugoslav Communism: From Tito to Kardelj,” in Dejan Djokić (ed.), Yugoslavism: Histories of a Failed Idea, 1918–1992 (London: Hurst and Company, 2003), 168. See Jill Irvine, “The Croatian Spring and the Dissolution of Yugoslavia,” in L. J. Cohen and J. Dragović-Soso (eds.), State Collapse in South-Eastern Europe: New Perspectives on Yugoslavia’s Disintegration (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2007), 149–78. On the post-Communist transition in Croatia, see Paula M. Pickering and Mark Baskin, “What is to be done? Succession from the League of Communists of Croatia,” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 41 (2008), 521–40; Garth Massey, Randy Hodson, and Duško Sekulić, “Nationalism, Liberalism and Liberal Nationalism in Post-­war Croatia,” Nations and Nationalism 9: 1 (2003), 55–82; and Dejan Jović and Christopher K. Lamont, “Introduction: Croatia after Tudjman: Encounters with the Consequences of Conflict and Authoritarianism,” Europe-Asia Studies 62: 10 (2010), 1609–20. Goran Čular, “Political Development in Croatia 1990–2000: Fast Transition—Postponed Consolidation,” Politička misao 37: 5 (2000), 30–46.

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26 Maple Razsa and Nicole Lindstrom, “Balkan Is Beautiful: Balkanism in the Political Discourse of Tudjman’s Croatia,” East European Politics and Societies 18: 4 (November 2004), 628–50. 27 Vjeran Pavlaković, “Croatia, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, and General Gotovina as a Political Symbol,” Europe-Asia Studies 62: 10 (2010), 1707–40. 28 Glenn Bowman, “Constitutive Violence and the Nationalist Imaginary: The Making of ‘The People’ in Palestine and ‘Former Yugoslavia’,” in Francisco Panizza (ed.), Populism and the Mirror of Democracy (London and New York: Verso, 2005), 118–43.

5

The People as a “Happening”: Constellations of Populism in Serbia in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries1 Nenad Stefanov

The perception of the wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990s has heavily influenced the understanding of populism in this region. A common image of the Balkans in the Western media since these wars is of enraged masses, and it follows a familiar scheme. The camera moves into the crowd, with a close-­up focusing on an angry protester who, in the next shot, explains to the reporter in broken English their demands, that is, the demands of the people. “The people” as the pivotal category for understanding social conflicts is seldom called into question. For many Western observers of “Balkan affairs” “the people” seems to be the basic phenotype of political actors. The only social actors are leaders and “their” people. It was something like a law of nature, that if the leader discovered the right tone, which resonated with the soul of the people, he could mobilize them. He was their ideal representative because he understood. By addressing the historical emergence of populism in Balkan societies, what ruptures it underwent, and what kind of continuities are visible across time, it is possible to develop a more nuanced picture of Balkan societies, which does not reduce them to ancient hatreds and “leaders and their peoples.” Because of the dramatic impact of the social crisis in Yugoslavia, which escalated into war in the 1990s, Serbian society will be the focus of analysis here. This does not mean that one should discuss the “Serbian example” from a Sonderweg-perspective.2 On the contrary, the extreme experiences of Serbian society contain crucial elements, which can be found in less dramatic form in other Balkan or former Yugoslavian societies. We will avoid such ethnic categories of description here and focus instead on the concrete meanings and the social and political constellations of populism in different historical contexts. In his critique of the myth of an ethnic war in the former Yugoslavia, V. P. Gagnon has interpreted “ethnic” violence as a way to protect power relations that are under pressure: Rather than pre-­rational sentiments or bonds of ethnicity causing violence, in the Yugoslav cases violence was part of a very modern story. The violence in the former Yugoslavia was a strategic policy chosen by elites who were confronted with

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political pluralism and popular mobilization. A segment of the Yugoslav elite responded to such challenges by inflicting violence on diverse, plural communities, with the goal of demobilizing key parts of their population by trying to impose political homogeneity on heterogenous social spaces.3

In the context of this essay the terms “mobilization” and “demobilization” have special significance. On this point I will follow Gagnon, who—in contrast to the everyday media usage of “nationalist mobilization”—undertakes an inversion of both terms. Mobilization is seen as a characteristic of democratic movements, while demobilization is associated with the efforts of delegitimized regimes to maintain power in their hands. He writes: For those elites who decide to protect the status quo demobilization is a crucial goal, since the most serious immediate threat comes exactly from that part of the population being mobilized by challenger elites for fundamental change. One way to demobilize the population is to reconceptualize political space, thereby fundamentally shifting the focus of political discourse away from issues around which challengers are mobilizing the populace, toward the question of who “owns” space; the right to make decisions about this space belongs to these “owners.”4

Here, ethnicity acquires the function of keeping political space homogenized—only with a changed iconography.5 The shift here of the focus of analysis is important: from how “masses mobilize for nationalism” to how public space and the possibility of political participation were destroyed in the period between 1987 and 1992 through a process of political demobilization. This approach develops a new perspective on nationalism, which is no longer seen as an unquestionable force, but instead as a product of societal conflicts. This approach also poses the questions of how and why a certain type of populist nationalism could become dominant at this particular moment and stresses ex negativo the importance of the opposed social movements. This type of analysis of the war for ethnically homogenous territories, which erupted in Yugoslavian society at the end of the 1980s, can also be applied to the study of populism in historical perspective; populism is conceptualized as moving between the two possibilities of mobilizing or demobilizing society. On the one hand, populism can be viewed historically as a way of encouraging and attaining greater participation in society. On the other hand, populism can also be understood as a kind of a “demobilizing” factor, which paralyzes participation, through collectivism, and devalues individuals’ political actions and demands. Here the question will be posed if one can observe an oscillation between these two poles of mobilization and demobilization. When and why did populism become dominant historically? Was it a phenomenon of the “age of extremes,”6 particularly in the unstable interwar period, or were traces of it to be found already in the second half of the nineteenth century? A host of other questions about populism in Serbia come to mind. Which conceptions of social order did its protagonists develop? Which political ideas did they rely on? What did they see as the relationship between collectivism and

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individuality? Did these conceptions change over time? If so, what sort of shifts can be observed? In order to illustrate specifics, as well as continuities and breaks, the text will center on three particular periods and constellations in which populism appears: 1. The development and establishment of ideas of a just and equal society in Serbia between the 1870s and the 1890s, which centered on the category of “the people.” 2. The appropriation of the concept of “the people” by nationalists in the interwar period. 3. The transformation of a domesticated state-socialist ideology of “the people” into a demobilizing factor in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Let us first briefly examine some important contributions from recent research on populism in Serbia and Yugoslavia. In the context of historical research, the first examinations of populism in Southeastern Europe examined the period between the world wars. These historians were interested in the rise of agrarian populism in East Central and Southeastern Europe, as well as the permanent political crisis and the threat of dictatorship in these countries.7 Subsequent research on the interwar period focused on agrarian movements, mainly in Yugoslavia and Bulgaria,8 with a particular emphasis on the political history and the socio-­economic preconditions of their development.9 The classical historiography focused—especially in the Croatian case— mainly on agrarian populism and it highlighted the national elements within these movements.10 The peasant parties were interpreted as evolving representatives of national emancipation.11 The political and social conflicts that contributed to the establishment of parties—such as the Croatian Peasant Party, or hrvatska seljačka stranka (HSS)—were often overlooked. Historical research on agrarian populism in Bulgaria, in contrast, focused on social conflicts and the peasants’ struggle for recognition as a political subject with equal rights, which the Bulgarian Agrarian National Union (BANU) pursued in the years between 1919 and 1923.12 It is quite surprising that research in the last twenty years has actually lost sight of the social dimensions of these movements. For example, recent scholars have tended to focus more on the Croatian Agrarians’ role in developing the national consciousness of Croatian peasants in their fight against Serbian tutelage. Political developments in the past five years in Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria have drawn scholars’ attention to the social dimension once again, but it is interesting that the term “populism” is still rarely used to describe historical developments in the former Yugoslavia. Historical research in Serbia did address these social factors from the very beginning of the rise of nationalist rhetoric and violence since the 1980s. It is not a coincidence that researchers in Serbia, who were highly critical of ethnic nationalism, developed a new interest in populism in the 1990s. Three dominant perspectives emerged: one historical, the other sociological, and the last from cultural anthropology. Such studies sought to uncover the sources of violence that eventually led to war and ethnic cleansing. In what follows, we will reexamine these critical approaches, which have often been unjustly forgotten.

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Latinka Perović has argued that populism emerged already in the late nineteenth century in Serbia in connection with a faction within the League of Communists that was represented later by Slobodan Milošević. Her reflections took as their point of departure the recent experience of Milošević’s rise to power. Already in the mid-1980s, Perović challenged the conviction that the Radical Party13—one of the dominant parties in Serbia from independence to the Second World War—modeled itself primarily on the nineteenth-­century French Radical Party.14 Instead, Perović pointed to the close ideological ties that had existed since the 1870s between the growing socialist and radical movement in Serbia and the Russian Narodniki.15 Perović traced back the populist rhetoric of the Milošević wing of the Serbian Communist party to the egalitarian ideology of the Narodniki, on the one hand, and the anti-Western orientation of the Russian Slavophile tradition, on the other.16 In this way Perović stressed continuities that had been rejected by mainstream historians in Serbia, and her thesis still remains a challenge to scholars and a part of the public in Serbia, as we shall see below. Although equally concerned by the destructive impact of the populism in the 1980s and 1990s, the sociologist Nebojša Popov chose a different approach. In his still relevant study of Serbian populism, he describes its growth from marginal status between the world wars to a dominant position by the end of the twentieth century.17 Popov also locates the roots of populism in a different ideological setting: that of right-­wing sympathizers of National Socialism in Serbia during the 1930s. Whereas Perović focuses on ideology and certain topoi that have been transported throughout the century, Popov concentrates on the organization and self-­understanding of the movement, as well as the relationship between its leaders and “the people.” He analyzes the different constellations and modifications, to better understand the dynamics of ethno-­nationalism in the 1980s. Finally, from a perspective of political anthropology, Ivan Čolović has analyzed the “politics of symbols” within the new dominant political culture.18 He searches for the new moments in this putatively traditional movement, deciphers the symbols from “ancient” times that were frequently used, and points out their changed symbolic meanings. This analysis—and particularly its placement within the larger context of 1989, the European “year of change”—contributes to a better understanding of the particularities and common features of Serbian populism from a comparative European approach.19 With these considerations in mind, my point of departure here is the rise of nationalism within a state-­socialist framework at the end of the twentieth century in Serbia and Yugoslavia, which leads to the question of where the social and historical origins of this phenomenon should be located. However, the formulation, “rise of nationalism,” can easily be misunderstood as something predetermined, as an inevitable process without alternatives. There are also a growing number of noteworthy publications that prefer a “from—to” perspective (e.g. “Serbian nationalism, from ideology to aggression”), or stress the continuities of Serbian nationalism from the nineteenth century.20 Such approaches have been seriously challenged by new research, which centers on the concrete and local dynamics of societal conflicts and violence.21 This latter approach will be followed in this chapter.

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Populism at the end of the nineteenth century Examining populism in the nineteenth century is of particular importance because protagonists of ethnic nationalism in the 1980s regularly placed themselves in this putative tradition of “former times.” The critical currents in Serbian historical research also focus on this epoch, as the origin of subsequent complex developments. The principality of Serbia was established by a decree (ferman) of Sultan Mahmud II as a semi-­autonomous province within the framework of the Ottoman Empire in 1833. Although it was not internationally acknowledged as an independent province, the sphere of sovereignty within its borders increased gradually, and a new stratum of Western-­style clerks developed. Between 1833 and 187822 state development was characterized by a slow but steady shift from the traditional style of rule by influential local potentates (best personified in the first ruler, Miloš Obrenović), towards a westernized elite, which sought to modernize the country. In order to develop a state and technical elite capable of meeting the challenges of the new epoch, the rulers of the principality soon started to fund students for studies abroad—particularly in the technical sciences, law, and medicine. They were sent predominantly to Germany, the Danube Monarchy, and to Russia. These students came from all parts of Serbia which, during the 1860s and 1870s, was composed primarily of small cities and villages. Even the capital, Belgrade, had only approximately 50,000 inhabitants.23 Such developments were part of a transfer of ideas that took place in the 1870s. It is worth noting that the direction of this transfer was not simply from West to East, as is usually assumed. The founder of Serbian socialism, Svetozar Marković, is emblematic in this regard. While studying abroad in St. Petersburg, he encountered the ideas of the Narodniki. Like St. Petersburg, Zurich became an important place of interaction between Russian Narodniki and students from the Balkans. The ideas of the Narodniki and their efforts to find a “way to the people” were not interpreted as referring exclusively to the peasantry. Marković was convinced that the establishment of a socialist society in the Balkans could avoid a detour through capitalism.24 The egalitarian Balkan zadruga (extended family household) and the village opština (commune) seemed to him a sufficient basis for the establishment of socialism. His approach did, however, have one important difference from later developments: these communal forms would serve as a starting point for a new society that would not preserve the old customs. He viewed the reduction of the growing state bureaucracy and the liquidation of national expansionist policies, together with the fostering of the opština, as the way to begin developing socialism.25 Perović points to an important relationship between the socialist ideas of the young Serbian students and the peasant delegates in the Serbian parliament (Skupština). These delegates were mostly prestigious elders of well-­known regional families, whose attitudes were characterized by patriarchal egalitarianism and opposition to the centralized power of the capital.26 According to Perović, soon after Marković’s premature death in 1875, the Serbian socialist movement transformed its vision of opština-based narodniki populism to the egalitarian approach of the peasant delegates, who founded the Radical Party in 1881. During the second half of the nineteenth century and into the first years of the twentieth, two other dominant political groupings

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formed: the Liberals and the Conservatives. The latter was centered around Milan Obrenović the Prince and future King of Serbia, and his court. In this increasingly centralized state, politics was seen as a top-­down system, which always benefited the “gospoda” (gentlemen) from Belgrade.27 The Radical Party succeeded in mobilizing those parts of society, which had not yet been represented in political life. Generally, they fought against new incursions into what they viewed as their private affairs, such as increasing taxes, imposing a state monopoly on the right to bear arms, and the introduction of a standing army. Concerning the possibility of political participation, there were elections for a national parliament. The precondition was an annual payment of a relatively modest tax, so that a majority of the male population was included. But women were completely excluded from voting, and voting took place in public by acclamation. The Radicals gained the support of small merchants and middle-­peasants against the officials from the capital, who normally held most of the administrative posts in such districts and were often perceived as arrogant and corrupt by the local population. In this way the Radical Party succeeded in mobilizing a social segment that was not yet present in political life in Serbia. From the perspective of this part of Serbian society, the Radicals also seemed credible because the King regularly prevented them from joining the cabinet.28 In 1883 the Radicals became the party with the most voters for the first time.29 Three years later King Milan Obrenović was forced to include them in the government. After participating in short-­lived government coalitions from 1887, the Radicals began to dominate the parliament by 1889—a tendency that continued into the first decade of the new Yugoslavian state that was founded in 1918.30 One of their key demands, which remained unchanged since the shift away from the early socialist conceptions of Marković, was decentralization and self-­management: samouprava, as their central newspaper was called. But their advent to power did not see the realization of this aim. Radical Party power during this era was personified by Nikola Pašić, who was the Serbian Prime Minister until 1918 and the responsible head of government of Yugoslavia from the beginning of the twentieth century until 1926. Historians have usually interpreted the Radicals as the authentic representatives of the majority of Serbian society. Their rise was supposedly marked by the biggest and last peasant rebellion against the state in Eastern Serbia (Timočka Buna), in 1883. However, later research has shown that ties between the rebelling peasants and the Radicals were incidental at best.31 The rebellion itself was an autonomous movement against growing state control, instigated—as mentioned earlier—by new state regulations requiring the branding of peasants’ stock and the confiscation of their weapons in state-­controlled depots. King Milan used the uprising to settle accounts with the Radicals by blaming them for provoking the uprising. After the King’s failure to eliminate the Radicals from government, they—and particularly their leader Nikola Pašić—referred repeatedly to this legend. This episode illustrates quite well the relationship of the Radical Party to the peasants, who saw themselves as the representatives of the vast majority of Serbian society. In practice, however, few of the peasants’ original demands were met. Scholars in Socialist Yugoslavia interpreted this development as a betrayal of the Radical Party’s peasant constituency.32 Nevertheless, the Radical Party had a significant impact on

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political rhetoric and the self-­understanding of political protagonists in the Serbian public sphere. The “empirical” peasant as a political actor moved gradually into the background, while the “representation” of the peasant became a key element of political rhetoric. The disappearance of the empirical peasant was compensated by redefining “the peasant” as the essential element of “the people” (narod). The Radicals’ political goal was to establish a people’s state (narodna država), which would defend the interests of the rural heartland at a higher level. In the eyes of Perović the narodna država was at odds with both the absolutist and liberal conceptions of the state: “This state is the articulation of collective interest, right and will; it is the personification of the people in an ethnic and social sense . . . This state is organized on the basis of people’s self-­management and the integrating factor is the People’s Party.”33 The peasant appears here as an abstract embodiment of “the people.” All concrete features of his empirical social being have been removed and all that remains is his egalitarian character. As Perović notes: “any attempt to stand above the peasantry was seen as a betrayal of the People’s spirit” and its egalitarian principles.34 In the 1870s this egalitarian community of the people represented by peasant delegates still referred to a specific social group. It was the community of the faithful and simple, directed against the seductions of the modern world. In the following decades, these social referents were increasingly abandoned. This loss resulted from the conflict between the traditional world of the villages and the nation state and its new administration. This initial egalitarianism was gradually “translated” by the ideologues of the Radical Party—particularly by Nikola Pašić—into a new pseudo-­egalitarian ethnic nationalist ideology, severed from its earlier ties to peasants’ interests. In Pašić’s view of societal development, Western improvements should be adopted, but that did not mean blindly adopting a Western way of life. In contrast to Marković and his followers, who wanted to circumvent capitalism, this distinctive term was altered in a culturalist direction; it was no longer capitalism, but “the West” that was a menace to Serbian culture. In the beginning, the Radicals viewed “the people” exclusively as the peasants. But this representation also underwent an inversion. It was no longer the peasant community that had to be protected against the vices of the West, but instead the Serbian people, who originated from the peasantry. The aim of national liberation adopted by Pašić, led to increasing conflict with the Habsburg Empire, whose elites were concerned that such a liberation movement could spread to parts of their possessions in the Balkans—namely, Croatia and Bosnia—and destabilize their rule. The Serbian government headed by the Radicals loosened its ties to Austria-Hungary, which had been strong since the beginning of the twentieth century, and searched instead for new support from Russia. Ideologically, this meant turning away from Piotr Lavrov—who was living in exile in Western Europe, and who had emphasized the revolutionary experiences of the Commune of 1871— to the ideas of the Slavophiles, which were much more palatable to the Czar. This appealed to the egalitarian, Orthodox Christian character of the Serbian People, who imagined they had a common bond with the Russian people in resisting the malevolent influences of the West. Such sentiments remained key components of Radical Party doctrine until 1918.

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Perović judged the idea of an egalitarian national Serb community as in “spirit and consequences totalitarian.”35 She cites the mocking and contempt of the aforementioned peasant delegates in this regard. Bogosavljević, one of the peasant leaders in the Skupština,36 ridiculed the “wimps” that learned to play the violin and had no idea of real life. He praised in turn the healthy and natural hardening of people in the rural world, who remained in touch with their roots. Nevertheless, the Radical Party did establish a pattern of political rhetoric, in which individuality as a systematic possibility of difference had no place. This cannot be explained purely in terms of their reference to the egalitarian peasant. The “peasant” had become a symbol across the entire political spectrum37—with the exception of Social Democrats. Instead, the reference to an imagined egalitarian community, to a national “collective singular,” served increasingly to justify authoritarian rule after the failure to establish a democracy in Yugoslavia in 1918.38 It was no peasant-­populism but instead a transformation of experiential elements into reified political symbols, with a different societal function—one that did not represent rural movements.

Trajectories of populism in the interwar era This tension between the demands of broadening participation and the dominant political elites’ reified rhetoric of “the people” also characterized the period between 1920 and 1941. It can be illustrated by the fact that Pašić remained in power in the newly founded Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes until his death in 1926. On this particular point, only marginal alterations occurred in the political and social constellations. They were in completely new surroundings, and the political elites were challenged by the integration of new societies from former Habsburg and Ottoman lands into the preexisting tradition of an independent Serbian state.39 The main challenge was to avoid obstacles hindering the process of integrating these newly acquired lands into the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes—later rechristened the Kingdom of Yugoslavia—in an era which was characterized throughout Europe by upheaval, economic crisis, and the rise of right-­wing and authoritarian policies. Agrarian countries such as Yugoslavia were hit particularly hard by these crises. One response to such challenges of integration in the period of crisis after the First World War was the transformation of peasant populism in a national direction. In Croatia, for example, this transformation reflected the demand for participation of societal groups that had until then been mostly excluded from politics in the Danube Monarchy. There were also reasons for peasant dissatisfaction in Serbia proper, but they were not articulated politically. As a result of violent death, starvation, and disease during the war, there was considerable loss of life in the countryside.40 Finally, many Serbians also saw themselves as a part of the victorious alliance, which seemed to promise as yet unclear benefits in the future. Croatia experienced massive peasant unrest during this time, but similar events did not occur in Serbia for a number of reasons. It is indicative that the Serbian Peasant Party, which was founded in the interwar period by the main protagonist of agrarianism, Dragoljub Jovanović, did not gain any influence in other parts of Yugoslavia and

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remained relevant only in Southeastern Serbia, where he acted as a lawyer representing the demands of the local rural population.41 The space for the articulation of social issues in Yugoslavia was quite narrow. In Bulgaria, in contrast, the Bulgarian Agrarian Union gained power and even dominated politics in the first half of the 1920s.42 As alluded to earlier, in the newly founded Yugoslavia political and social issues became increasingly “nationalized” in the process of “power negotiations” between locally centered elites, who were competing for dominance in the newly composed state. However, this did not mean, as it is often implied, that society as a whole was captured by national issues.43 A considerable part of the people in the weakly integrated state lived detached from political life in the cities. Politics was still restricted to a relatively narrow circle of members of the state apparatus, intellectuals, and wealthier merchants. It was instead the representatives of the political parties themselves, who failed to articulate political demands in anything but nationalist terms. During this time the aforementioned ideology of rural Serbia was refined and elaborated in this segment of the urban middle classes, and particularly among clerks and scholars. This shift from a political practice to a set of symbols was completed during the interwar era. The writings of the renowned ethnographer Tihomir Djordjević are a good example this type of “rural discourse” from the fin de siècle into the 1920s. Djordjević’s work represents paradigmatically the ways in which rural discourses were adapted to a new kind of national ideology. Čolović has thoroughly examined the appropriation of rural folklore by the new protagonists of the national state, such as Djordjević.44 In such an approach the history of the Balkans was dominated by the distinction between two models of culture throughout history: the city and the village represented this difference in all epochs. Particularly during Ottoman rule this difference became explicit. The cities were alienated from the rest of the country not only because they had become Islamized, but also because this market culture (čarsilije),45 became a place of interethnic exchange, where Greek, Ladino, Arabic, Armenian, and other languages were spoken.46 The Serbian element vanished in this putatively artificial bustle of different cultures. Following this interpretation, the situation of the village was completely different. Due to the Ottomans’ practices of governance and administration, the villages were allegedly rarely touched by “oriental culture.” The representatives of the foreign rulers—namely, tax collectors—were present in the villages at most once a year. This narrative postulated two separate societies through the ages. Thus the villages could preserve the authentic Serbian culture, living detached from the vices of the multi-ethnic towns.47 The villages retained a fresh and vital folk culture, in contrast to the rotten oriental towns, already in complete decay. The “liberation” of Serbia led to a fundamental process of urban renewal. As the previous non-Slavic and non-Christian population “left” the towns, they could now be resettled by peasants, who brought their intact original Serbian culture with them.48 But the peasant was not the sole protagonist in such a narrative; the scholar-­statesman also entered the scene. It was the latter’s task to distill the authentic national culture out of crude peasant habits via ethnography and other means. In this view peasant folklore is not identical with the national culture. The “primitive” peasant culture is characterized by odd habits and superstitions and has no awareness of the value of the nation state. Historiography, ethnography, and linguistics

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are enlisted to refine all the valuable and relevant elements, to protect them from oblivion, and to produce out of them a genuine national culture.49 Although creating such a national culture was intended to protect against the alienating and degenerating influences of modernity, it is important to keep in mind, that men like Djordjević did not aim to abandon modernity completely. Instead, they believed that a modern Serbia should be based on a foundation that was “healthy,” because it was “popular.” The artificial mixing of races and nations, which had occurred in the Ottoman Empire, would be prevented. In this way the dichotomy between town and village—which was the basic divide in Serbian society for Bogosavljević and other populist leaders—could be overcome. But a real connection to the rural population was no longer seen as necessary at all. On the contrary, such an attitude was adopted by social groups which viewed themselves as the urban and modern segment of society. These same groups were also in close touch with the European authoritarian Zeitgeist. Such perceptions of the “healthy” and powerful rural foundations of society dominated right-­wing discourse in Europe as a whole. As comparative research on Balkan societies has shown, such eugenic conceptions were not far removed from National Socialist ideology.50 According to Popov, it was precisely this emergence of right-­wing politics that was subsumed under populism. In his opinion this kind of populism remained a marginal movement in the interwar period, and assumed a new relevance only during the crisis of socialist Yugoslavia a half-­century later. During the interwar period, a broad spectrum of right-­wing populist movements emerged, not only in Yugoslavia, but also in other European societies. In Yugoslavia, however, they remained on the political margins.51 The entanglement of authoritarian politics, ruralist ideologies, and religious identity was also characteristic of public discourse in Yugoslavia. Djordjević’s and others’ peasant-­based notions of refined ethnic purity were circulated in public by right-­wing groups and individuals, such as Dimitrije Ljotić, the leader of the fascist movement in Serbia. The defeat of the protagonists of such right-­wing ideas—reaching from classical nationalists like Djordjević to fascists like Ljotić—after the Second World War, and the establishment of state socialism, removed these ideas from public discourse. In the following section I will elaborate how such ideas eventually reemerged in a modified form under the different social conditions of socialist Yugoslavia.

From the working class to the Serbian people: populism in a disintegrating society The establishment of socialist Yugoslavia led to profound changes, reaching much deeper into society than state formations had until then. Yugoslavia first moved in the direction of the Soviet model and then, after 1948, on an independent path of workers’ self-­management. Within these fundamental changes certain kinds of continuities or, to put it more precisely, adaptations under different societal conditions could be observed. We have just seen how the idea of the Serbian nation as the product of a natural, popular spirit—distilled from an imaginary, still intact life in the

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countryside—was adopted by a considerable section of the urban elite. Nonetheless, this concept was not connected with the practical aim of establishing collectives as the basic units of society, as in Bulgaria, where BANU attempted to establish a corporatist model. Although such rhetoric was abandoned in state-­socialist Yugoslavia, a thoroughly collectivist organization of society was introduced for the first time. The aim of establishing thorough control and supervision of all aspects of social life could not, of course, be achieved, due to the obstinacy of everyday life. But collectivist modes of communication became predominant and, within this context, appeals to the “people,” the “working people,” or the “Yugoslav people,” were common. In this last section I will briefly examine the ways in which the potential for populist practices were maintained under the changed societal conditions of state socialism. I will then focus on the so-­called anti-­bureaucratic revolution (antibirokratska revolucija) as a particular kind of populist political practice that emerged within the framework of a deeply delegitimized state socialism. This “revolution” transformed society into something new, and culminated in the violence and destruction of war throughout Yugoslavia. In contrast to the first Yugoslavian state, the new ruling establishment formed by the Yugoslavian League of Communists modified its earlier conviction that nationalism disappears under the conditions of socialism.52 They now believed that all nations in Yugoslavia should be guaranteed equal treatment to avoid such nationalist outbursts as seen during war and resistance.53 This conviction was embodied in the explicitly federalist structure of the state. This federalism was extended considerably in constitutional reforms in 1974, which were quite controversial and characterized by some currents within the party as leading to a confederation.54 The party ideologues viewed democratic participation exclusively as the affirmation of national emancipation. In the 1960s a complex system of “ethnic quotas” was developed in order to insure that members of all nations could advance within the political structures, and to minimize nationalist discontent. This policy of “ethnic keys” had three results. First, democracy and liberty were conceptualized as democracy and liberty only for ethnic groups, in this way institutionalizing ethnicity as a group identity.55 Second, ethnicity became important as the only way to acknowledge the individual. Third, in addition to ideological reliability, ethnicity also became critical to one’s chances of advancement. These policies resulted in a considerable narrowing of political space. Political and societal questions were reduced to national ones. They could be articulated in the statesocialist public sphere only as national issues which, within the framework of the current ideology, were referred to euphemistically as “national in form and socialist in content.” Radical nationalist currents were forbidden and excluded from public space. Nevertheless, the affirmation of ethnicity under state-socialist conditions made ethnicity seem more normal than political convictions, such as being a liberal, or an anarchist. It is not by chance that “anarcho-­liberal” became an insulting invective against dissidents, while ethnic nationalist categories were accepted as something natural and normal. At first glance, there was nothing surprising about the recrudescence of populist policies as at the end of the 1980s, because the political space had already been structured along collectivist lines. But, as mentioned in our earlier discussion of

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Gagnon, such a collectivist organization of society and public discourse, and dominant forms of collectivist self-­awareness, were regularly challenged. The Praxis Circle, a group of critical intellectuals, contested the monopoly on ideology until the mid1970s.56 While the party succeeded in curbing and suppressing this challenge, a deepening economic and social crisis only five years later reopened opportunities for the articulation of discontent. In the mid-1980s a critical public space reemerged that was accompanied by increased social protest and a growing number of strikes. At the same time, the situation in the Serbian autonomous province of Kosovo became increasingly tense.57 In this constellation of growing economic crisis (fueled particularly by international debts58), social unrest and the intensifying conflict over the legal status of the autonomous province of Kosovo, two processes became entangled between 1987 and 1989. On the one hand, nationalist critiques became more influential. Scholars and intellectuals affiliated with the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SANU) decried the miserable condition of the Serbian people, claiming, of course, to be guided by the results of scientific research.59 It is interesting to examine the publication policies of SANU and interviews of its members as an indication of the extent to which the official consensus of “brotherhood and unity” could be modified. In the beginning the leadership of the Serbian League of Communists (Savez Komunista Srbije—SKS) kept its distance from such academic statements. But with the growing populist campaign in 1988 the renowned “academics” became important protagonists in the “scientific” legitimation of this process. They were called upon to demonstrate that the politicians’ demands were entirely reasonable and justified. Furthermore, social protest was now reaching broader strata of society. The slogan that the working class would rule, and that workers’ self-­management was the core of the Yugoslav system, was seen as ridiculous. Thus the Serbian League of Communists was under serious pressure in regard to both the public criticism of a deteriorating state organization, and the promise of the good life in a socialist society. In both respects the legitimacy of the party had been seriously eroded. Then, suddenly, the SKS oddly went on the offensive, thereby further undermining the legitimacy of the party. This offensive coincided with the rise of Slobodan Milošević as the leading figure in the SKS. This process began in April 1987 with his famous words “no one should dare to beat you” at a local party meeting in Kosovo Polje, and culminated some two years later not very far away in Kosovo Polje at Gazimestan: the monument honoring the legendary Battle of Kosovo Polje. In the 1990s what could be called a “master narrative” of the wars in Yugoslavia emerged from a vast literature on the topic. This narrative is perhaps best represented in the canonical BBC series, The Death of Yugoslavia.60 Unfortunately, the well-­known personalities involved in the rise of ethnic nationalism in Serbia, which destroyed Yugoslavian society, have received much more attention in this narrative than the actual political and social processes involved. This focus has only changed in recent years.61 These processes, in which the more conservative elements within the SKS gained control of the party and tried to guide the development of protest on a broader public stage, became known in the Serbian public as the “anti-­bureaucratic revolution.”62

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This term describes the events between 1987 and 1989, beginning with the Eighth Session of the Central Committee of the SKS in which Slobodan Milošević and his faction dismantled the moderate leadership around Ivan Stambolić, terminated the constitutional autonomy of the provinces of Kosovo and Vojvodina, and then changed the republican and party leadership in Montenegro.63 The term “anti-­bureaucrat revolution” had also been used as a euphemism for the Stalinist purges in the USSR, in the 1930s.64 Outside the party, the term was not obviously associated with Stalinism, but exactly such a purge took place in the SKS between 1987 and 1989, when the majority of reform-­oriented functionaries on all levels was replaced by those loyal to the new leader. This process deeply affected the most influential institutions of the two most important electronic and print media: Radio Televizija Beograd and the Politika Publishing House.65 In public this “anti-­bureaucratic revolution” assumed a completely different appearance. It was portrayed and seen as a popular movement for a thorough reform of Serbia and Yugoslavia at all levels, and was directed with energetic anger against the “armchair-­politicians” (foteljaši), who enjoyed privileges and were uninterested in anything else. Milošević presented himself as a Serbian version of Gorbachev, at the head of a long overdue protest against the feckless foteljaši, who were supposedly responsible for all the political and social problems in Yugoslavia. In the autumn of 1988 images of enraged protesting masses became a fixture on the evening news, leading to the popular characterization in 1989 that “the people did happen.”66 In public it appeared that the purges were the logical outcome of popular pressure, which forced Milošević to energetically move towards reforms. At the same time outsiders viewed this process as a rise of Serbian nationalism. It was assumed that Milošević controlled all those meetings tightly and used his newly acquired position to stabilize the situation.67 What is missing in both of these antithetical perceptions—the ideologized self-­perception of the protagonists, on the one hand, and the reductive version of the “rise of Serbian nationalism,” on the other—is how the inner-­party purges and the protests on the streets were interrelated, and how they became entangled. It is possible to comprehend the dynamics and contradictions within this development without assuming a conspiracy carried out by an omnipotent leader. One week in October 1988 illustrates these interrelations and entanglements particularly vividly. After the new leadership had established itself in power, the “promise” that “no one should dare to beat you” was fulfilled; the rallies of Kosovo-Serbs in 1988 now enjoyed official support. 1988 witnessed a series of so-­called meetings of truth or meetings of solidarity in Serbian cities, which demonstrated the party’s involvement in organizing these protests.68 The tensions that remained between the party and nationalist intellectuals, who saw themselves as the original vanguard of the Kosovo protests, increasingly disappeared. The relationship of the new party leadership to the nationalist intellectuals—particularly those gathering around SANU—led to a belated embrace of the memorandum’s authors, including historians, philosophers, and writers, such as the former Praxis member, Mihailo Marković, and Dobrica Ćosić. As a result, their statements also received considerable media coverage.69 On October 5, 1988, some of the largest factories in Belgrade experienced a major strike. The next day workers from the Belgrade suburb of Rakovica marched to the

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Yugoslavian parliament. On their way, many other workers joined the protest.70 They demanded an increase in their wages to keep up with inflation. During the protest, which was not characterized by the usual iconography of the “meetings of truth” (flags of Serbia and Yugoslavia, etc.), a change became visible. The workers insisted that they were willing to talk only with Milošević. When the “leader” finally emerged, there was no talk of wages and similar issues. Addressing the workers, Milošević spoke only in general terms and promised broad promene (changes), by which he understood only those changes concerning the status of Serbia in the federation. At the end he shouted to the workers: “and now comrades, everyone back to his duties.” The meaning of demobilization is readily apparent here. The broader set of demands initially presented in the strike was reduced to a single issue by the politician pleading for the loyalty of the workers in a populist manner. On this day the loyalty of the workers remained ambivalent, but that would change the next day, not that far away in Novi Sad, the capital of the autonomous province of Vojvodina. Between August and October, 1988 a series of mass meetings were organized against the party leadership of the province of Vojvodina. These protests, which became known as the “Yoghurt Revolution,” intensified on October 7, right after the march on the parliament in Rakovica. In contrast to Rakovica, there was no ambivalence among the protesters here, who were exclusively party cadres loyal to the leader of the SKS. Everything from transportation to catering was organized by “his people,” that is, the cadres and their companies.71 The TV viewer could observe people finally protesting against the foteljaši, the armchair politicians, but all in an enjoyably familiar way. Workers were carrying flags, pictures of Tito, singing popular revolutionary songs, known from all the ceremonies on the “holy days” of the parties. While not disturbing, those pictures did symbolize the long-­awaited changes (promene) they had been promised. Throwing tetra-­packs of Yoghurt at the leaders of the province was the only sign of non-­conformity, but it suited the “authenticity” of the protest. On October 8, 1988, when the party leadership of the province resigned, the social and political demands of the Rakovica protesters seemed far more distant than just one day away. The Belgrade party leadership succeeded in setting the agenda: national unity, the status of Serbia, was the exclusive issue. Within the next two days the Yoghurt Revolution had spread to Montenegro, where the leadership was removed in the same manner. Demonstrations of workers and Kosovo Serbs actually needed a little bit more time. The meetings had achieved their aim by the end of December, when a new leadership loyal to Milošević was installed.72 In his recently published study about the “anti-­bureaucratic revolution” Nebojša Vladisavljević stresses the importance of both the nationalist (Kosovo) and the social (Rakovica) grass-roots movements.73 But focusing too intensely on these movements as “autonomous” developments could lead one to lose sight of the ways in which they were connected to the purges within the SKS and their role in stabilizing the power of the new leadership. One should not forget the narrow scope of autonomous political action in state socialism. Nevertheless, the importance of these movements should not be minimized completely, as the Rakovica protests made clear. Overall, one can see how the party tried to control such protests and enlist them for its own agenda of stabilizing power by re-­centralizing the state structure.

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As shown, the demonstrators emerged only momentarily as an autonomous force with their own demands. The term demobilization helps to conceptualize the “meetings of truth” in a way that explains the tension between an impulse for change and its integration into the power stabilizing practices of the party. Here the crucial elements of populism emerge; the initial impulse of the demonstrators to broaden participation was transformed into the acclamation of a “new leader.” This was visible in Slobodan Milošević’s diversion of the demands of the workers demonstrating in Rakovica in the direction of his political aims. This shift is illustrated by a contemporary observation: “they came to the meetings as workers and parted as Serbs.”74 This process is also illustrated in the rapid replacement in the media of the term “anti-­bureaucratic revolution” with the term “happening of the people.” Increasingly the media reported “gatherings of the Serbian people.” The term working class, which was a familiar expression in the state-­socialist jargon, was inconspicuously abandoned. According to Olivera Milosavljević, one began to speak much more frequently of the “Serbian people” from November 1988 onwards.75 This shift was also apparent in the important daily newspaper Politika,76 where a special column, “Echoes and reactions” (Odjeci and reagovanja) was introduced, in which the voice of the common people could be heard. No one was of course surprised that the vox populi on the pages of the newspaper echoed Milošević’s reactionary ideas. The column was also quite effective in denouncing unpopular cadres.77 Milošević was able to use this process of demobilization to redirect the initial energy for change towards the central issues of his own nationalist agenda: Kosovo and changing the constitution. Other issues highlighted by the still active civil opposition,78 such as the terrible economic situation, political liberties, and democratization in Serbia/Yugoslavia, were pushed aside. This process was facilitated by tight media control after the purges; all positions were now in the hands of Milošević’s confidants. It would be misleading to assume that Milošević developed a cult of personality at this time. As Popov and, more recently, Čolović have shown, it was far more a cult of “the people.” The acclamations of support were directed towards “the soul of the people,” and Milošević was the medium of this soul, articulating their collective needs.79 As Čolović points out, Milošević appears primarily as a “Prometheus,” who “does not speak alone in the name of the people, but gives the people the ability of speaking and the liberty to speak.”80 This relationship between the populist leader and his followers was also apparent in the slogans of the meetings: “The people write the constitution.”81 It is important to stress here that this was not a cult of the people per se, but an ethnicized cult of the Serbian people.82 As pointed out above, since 1985 a discourse had developed, in which political qualities became ethnicized. Liberalism and anti-­ fascism were portrayed as original virtues of the Serbian national character, which had been naturally inherited and not acquired in a complex historical process.83 Historians, philosophers, and writers asserted that other people were naturally “fascist” or totalitarian. From this perspective the crucial characteristic of the Serbs was their love of freedom. Populism in this sense is characterized by a fundamental ethnicization of the term people as well as all other encompassing political terminology. But one should avoid the impression that this process was authored by a Machiavellian genius “seducing” and “channeling” the will of the people, or the wills of

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individuals, and that it was all in the hands of a “gifted” politician. The unsuspecting might mistakenly perceive this ritual as a Prometheus-­like awakening of the Serbian people. Again, also here the aspect of interrelatedness and entanglements is of crucial importance. The turn from participation to acclamation was also based on the social psychological disposition of the individuals who attended the meetings. Pressed by terrible living conditions, the person’s wish for profound change and, at the same time, fear of it made him or her very malleable. The meetings of truth nearly perfectly accommodated these feelings. Although people marched and shouted slogans against the functionaries (mostly those from the other provinces), these actions were carried out in a familiar and orderly state-­socialist way, albeit under the new slogan of the empowerment of the Serbian people. Ethnicization here acquired a compensatory function; it provided a false satisfaction of the need for fundamental political change.84 The collectivist socialist framework was thereby simply replaced by a nationalist one. Faced with the collapse of state socialism, individuals found shelter in a new ethno-­national collective, and thereby avoided the hard and ambivalent experience of self-­responsible action.85 At this point the important differences between the historical manifestations of populism in Serbia should have become clear. Although the meetings in the late 1980s repeatedly invoked our “ancestral memory,” with a particular emphasis on the ancient tradition of “self-­rule” (samouprava),86 the spurious character of such invocations is easy to see. The “meetings of truth” did not create possibilities for greater political participation; they were instead a celebration of the national collective.87 Thus collectivism and egalitarianism as a remnant of the old populism re­emerged in a transformed state-­socialist idiom. One can observe this pheonomenon clearly in the writings of Dobrica Ćosić, an author who was dubbed the “father of the Serbian nation” in the 1980s, when he was at the peak of his popularity. For example, Ćosić wrote at this time that, Only in great/big nations human personality, the individual, can be a value in itself. In small nations this is not possible because of taboo and myth. In small nations only the nation can be big/great. In small nations the first duty is the subordination of the individual—to the community, the people, the state. The Serb is a man, who is not a man if he is no Serb.88

But it is crucial to stress, as pointed above, that collectivism here means egalitarian homogeneity in a very particular sense: ethnic homogeneity. The exclusive domination of this aspect is the historically new element. In contrast to Perović, who stresses the unbroken continuity of populism from the Radical Party to the “meetings of truth,” it is important to understand how, under changed societal conditions, individuals appropriate older modes of perception or ideology, which acquire a new and different meaning in the process. The drive for participation characterizing the peasant-­radical movement in the nineteenth century had disappeared. The solidarity of an ethnic collective was seemingly all that remained. But it is also important to stress that this ethnic solidarity acquired new characteristics and a different meaning within this process of the “happening of the

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people.” Although “ethnic solidarity” made it possible to demonstrate discontent, at least momentarily, at the same time it remained within an authoritarian framework. Milošević’s speech at the 500th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo established such populism as the dominant form of communication in the public sphere. With the still mounting crisis this officially “administered” populism was challenged by what Popov has called the “uncontrolled populism” of the nationalist opposition.89 The latter could only be suppressed by violent means, as tanks rolled through the streets of Belgrade in March 1991 to curb protests by rival nationalist opposition parties.90 Here a new type of violence was introduced, whose horrors the people throughout Yugoslavia would experience for the next decade.

Conclusion This essay has examined populism in three different socio-­historical constellations: political ideas and practices in the nineteenth century, discourses of populism in the interwar era and, finally, populism in practice as a kind of conformist reaction to the societal crisis of the 1980s. Nineteenth-­century Serbian society underwent thorough political transformation when it passed from the framework of the Ottoman Empire to a constitutional monarchy nominally based also on the sovereignty of the people, or demos. The contradiction between the latter principle and the practices of power by the new state elite resulted in the development of a political movement with its roots in rural society. The protagonists of this new movement struggled in the name of “the people” (narod) to broaden political participation and maintain local autonomy. By the beginning of the twentieth century, with the increasing differentiation of the political spectrum, the meaning of narod acquired a stronger connotation of representing the ethnic nationalist collective. Thus a shift from demos to ethnos could be observed. This transformation of populism was completed during the interwar era, when social background disappeared as the defining characteristic of the narod and was replaced by a reified ideology of the particularities of the Serbian people—an ideology that was developed and espoused by conservative urban elites. This concept of populism as the rule of the Serbian ethnos was revived and adapted in the changed societal conditions of the late 1980s and early 1990s, that is, during the profound social and political crises of state socialism. The protagonists of the anti-­bureaucratic revolution claimed that they would revive the people´s authentic liberal and democratic spirit, a lost relic of the nineteenth century. Their practices, however, betrayed this promise. By establishing the ethnos as the new highest principle (“they came as workers, and left as Serbians”), they continued the collectivist style of politics that was dominant under state socialism. By mobilizing the populace on an ethnic nationalist basis, the conservative party functionaries also aimed to demobilize all of the other societal actors who did not fit into this schema. While populism assumed different characteristics in each of the three different historical contexts, the predominance of a collectivist approach to life and social order remained constant. It must nevertheless be stressed that, in the first case, this collectivism was grounded in the social background of an emerging radical rural movement. One

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hundred years later—between 1986 and 1992—it was nothing more than a reified ideology. Thus, in its early stages populism in Serbia was able to provide a point of departure for emancipatory politics and broader sphere of political participation. But as long as collectivism remained one of the core elements of populism—as it was in all three of the constellations discussed here—it would necessarily come into contradiction with the emancipatory aims of populist movements. This was true as well in the first case. Freedom in the tradition of the Enlightenment implied the emancipation not only of social or ethnic collectives, but also the individual. In short, populism could be a starting point to articulate discontent and the need for societal change, but the further development of practices and political rhetoric in the next stages of such movements is what decides if they can accomplish more than a reification of the initial impulses, as can be observed in the cases studied here.

Notes   1 The expression, “when the people are happening” (dogadjanje naroda), is usually attributed to Milovan Vitezović, a Serbian writer who at his talk at the largest gathering in Belgrade on November 18, 1988 said: “Our history will remember this year as the year, when the people happened to us [kada nam se dogodio narod].” See Olivera Milosavljević, Antibirokratska revolucija 1987–1989, 64, 323, http:// www.cpi.hr/download/links/7292.pdf [accessed on August 6, 2013].   2 In parallel to German history concerning the responsibility for two world wars, sometimes a particular development of Serbian society is assumed, in contrast to the other Southeastern European countries. Such a view argues that Serbia took an entirely different path of development, stressing the difference between a more civilized tradition of conflict solution in the parts of Yugoslavia previously under the reign of the Habsburg monarchy, on the one hand, and Serbia, with its different tradition of the “Byzantine-Oriental symbiosis,” supplemented by aggressive ethno-­ nationalism, on the other. See Viktor Meier, Wie Jugoslawien verspielt wurde (München: C.H. Beck, 1995), 247.   3 Valere P. Gagnon, The Myth of Ethnic War: Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), 7.   4 Ibid.   5 “The ultimate goal, however, is not so much ethnic homogeneity as it is the construction of homogenous political space as a means to demobilize challengers.” Ibid., 9.   6 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, 5th printing (London: Joseph, 1995).   7 Joseph Rothschild, East Central Europe between the Two World Wars. A History of East Central Europe, vol. 9 (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1998).   8 Ivo Banac, The National Question in Yugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984). For Bulgaria see John D. Bell, Peasants in Power: Alexander Stamboliski and the Bulgarian Agrarian National Union, 1899–1923 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977). For Croatia, see Biondich in this volume.   9 Holm Sundhaussen, “Institutionen und institutioneller Wandel in Südosteuropa in historischer Perspektive,” in Johannes Papalekas (ed.), Institutionen und institutioneller Wandel in Südosteuropa (München: Südosteuropa Gesellschaft, 1994), 35–54. John

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10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

22 23 24 25 26

27 28 29 30 31

Transformations of Populism in Europe and the Americas Lampe, Balkan Economic History, 1550–1950 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982). Banac, The National Question in Yugoslavia, 226–60. For another approach see the biography of Stjepan Radić: Mark Biondich, Stjepan Radić, the Croat Peasant Party, and the Politics of Mass Mobilization, 1904–1928 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000). John D. Bell, “Populism and Pragmatism. The BANU in Bulgarian Politics,” in Joseph Held (ed.), Populism in Eastern Europe, Racism, Nationalism and Society (Boulder: East European monographs, 1996), 20–62. In 1838 Serbia became an autonomous province within the Ottoman Empire and in 1878 it gained full independence. See: Holm Sundhaussen, Geschichte Serbiens (Köln;Wien;Weimar: Böhlau, 2007), 65–81. See for the traditional approach Milan St. Protić, Radikali u Srbiji. Ideje i pokret 1881–1903 (Beograd: Balkanološki Institut SANU, 1990). Latinka Perović, Srpski socijalisti 19. veka, vol. 2 (Beograd: Rad, 1985). Latinka Perović: “Rusija i Evropa, N. J. Danilevskog i njeni odjeci u Srbiji,” Special Issue No. 8 of the journal Republika, January 1994. Nebojša Popov, Srpski populizam: Od marginale do dominantne pojave (Beograd: Vreme, 1993). Ivan Čolović, Politika simbola ogledi o političkoj antropologiji (Beograd: B92 Samizdat, 1997). Ivan Čolović (ed.), Zid je pao, živeli zidovi! Pad Berlinskog zida i raspad Jugoslavije (Beograd: Biblioteka 20. Veka, 2009). See: Croatian Information Centre, Greater Serbia: From Ideology to Aggression (Zagreb, 1993). See: Wolfgang Höpken, “Gewalt auf dem Balkan—Erklärungsversuche zwischen ‘Struktur’ und ‘Kultur’ ” in Wolfgang Höpken and Michael Riekenberg (eds.), Politische und Ethnische Gewalt in Südosteuropa und Lateinamerika (Köln: Böhlau, 2001), 53–95; Hannes Grandits and Carolin Leutloff, “Diskurse, Akteure, Gewalt—Betrachtungen zur Organisation von Kriegseskalation am Beispiel der Krajina in Kroatien 1990/91,” in Höpken and Rickenberg (eds.), Politische und Ethnische Gewalt, 227–57. In 1878, after the Russo-Turkish war, the Principality gained full independence. Sundhaussen, Geschichte Serbiens, 77–80. Latinka Perović, Srpski Socijalisti, 274–323. Svetozar Marković, Izabrana Dela, ed. Miodrag Mladenović (Beograd: Narodna Knjiga, 1968). One such renowned person was Adam Bogosavljević, who participated in political life coming from a peasant background and was close to some of the ideas of Svetozar Marković. See: Latinka Perović, Između Anarhije i Autokratije Srpsko društvo na prelazima vekova (19.-21.) (Beograd: Helsinški odbor za ljudska prava u Srbiji, 2006), 114–18. See: Slobodan Jovanović, Vlada Milana Obrenovića (Beograd: Geca Kon, 1926–7), 306–21. Jovanović, Vlada Milana Obrenovića, 317. Latinka Perović, Srpsko-Ruske revolucionarne veze. Prilozi za istoriju narodnjaštva u Srbiji, (Beograd: Službeni List, 1993), 143. Ibid., 146. Andrija Radenić, Radikalna stranka i Timocka buna. Istorija Radikalne stranke—Doba narodnjastva (Zaječar, 1988).

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32 Olga Popović-Obradović, “O ideološkom profilu radikala u Srbiji 1903–1914,” in Tokovi istorije (Beograd, 1994), 59–77. 33 Latinka Perović, Između Anarhije i Autokratije, 21. 34 Ibid., 92. 35 Ibid., 91. 36 See footnote 27. 37 Slobodan Naumović, “Ustaj seljo, ustaj rode: Simbolika seljaštva i politička komunikacija u novijoj istoriji Srbije,” in Godišnjak za društvenu istoriju, Sveska 1 (Beograd, 1995), 39–63. 38 See: Holm Sundhaussen, “Die Königsdiktaturen in Südosteuropa: Umrisse einer Synthese,” in Erwin Oberländer (ed.), Autoritäre Regime in Ostmittel- und Südosteuropa 1919–1944 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2001), 337–48. 39 Marie-Janine Calic, Geschichte Jugoslawiens im 20. Jahrhundert (München: C. H. Beck, 2010), 83–97; Dejan Djokić, Elusive Compromise: A History of Interwar Yugoslavia (New York: Columbia University Press and London: Hurst, 2007), 12–39. 40 Holm Sundhaussen, Geschichte Serbiens, 228. 41 About Dragoljub Jovanović see: Nadežda Jovanović, Život za slobodu bez straha. Politička biografija Dragoljuba Jovanovića (Beograd: Institut za noviju istoriju Srbije, 2000). 42 See John D. Bell, Peasants in Power. Alexander Stamboliski and the Bulgarian Agrarian National Union, 1899–1923 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977). 43 For a more traditional focus exclusively on the protagonists of the political parties, see Banac, National Question. 44 Ivan Čolović, “Town and Country in the Work of Tihomir Djordjević,” in Ivan Čolović, The Politics of Symbol in Serbia: Essays in Political Anthropology (London: Hurst & Co, 2002), 112–21. 45 Derives from the word Čaršija (from Turkish Çarşi) meaning mainly the trading center of the towns, also the city center itself. 46 Čolović, Politics of Symbol, 115. 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid., 117. 49 Ibid., 119. 50 See: Christian Promitzer, Marius Turda, and Sevasti Trubeta, Hygiene, Health and Eugenics in Southeastern Europe to 1945 (Budapest; New York: CEU Press, 2011). 51 Although such groups failed to gain political relevance, their possible impact on the rhetoric of the dominant protagonists in society is not yet well researched. 52 This was the convićtion of the Yugoslav Communists in their early stages: Dušan Lukač, Radnički pokret u Jugoslaviji i nacionalno pitanje, 1918–1941 (Belgrade: Institut zu savremenu istoriju, 1971). 53 Macedonians, Montenegrins, and Muslims, and eventually Bosnian Muslims (today Bosniaks) were acknowledged as new nations between 1945 and the end of the 1960s. See: Holm Sundhaussen, Jugoslawien und seiner Nachfolgestaaten 1943–2011 (Wien/ Köln/Weimar, 2012), 167–71. 54 Cf. Vojin Dimitrijević, “The 1974 Constitution as a Factor in the Collapse of Yugoslavia or a Sign of Decaying Totalitarism?,” in Drinka Gojković (ed.), The Road to War in Serbia. Trauma and Catharsis (Budapest: CEU Press, 2000), 212–46. 55 Rogers Brubaker, “Ethnicity Without Groups,” Archives Européennes de Sociologie (2002), 163–89.

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56 Gerson S. Sher, Praxis. Marxist Criticism and Dissent in Socialist Yugoslavia (Bloomington, London: Indiana University Press, 1977). 57 Concerning the complex problematic of Kosovo in the view of critical contemporaries, see Srđa Popović, Dejan Janča, and Tanja Petovar (eds.), Kosovski Čvor. Dresiti ili seci (Beograd: Hronos, 1990). 58 Sundhaussen, Jugoslawien, 205–19. 59 Particularly prominent was the so-­called Memorandum (1986) by the Serbian Academy of Arts & Sciences about the current situation of the Serbian people. It criticized the alleged discrimination of the Serbian people particularly in Kosovo and the general unjust position of Serbia from an economic and political perspective. The Memorandum was predominantly perceived as a kind of blueprint of Serbian ethno-­nationalism. For different approaches see: Nenad Stefanov, Wissenschaft als nationaler Beruf. Die Serbische Akademie der Wissenschaften und Künste 1944–1989. Tradierung und Modifizierung nationaler Ideologie (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2011); Jasna Dragović-Soso, “Saviours of the Nation”: Serbia’s Intellectual Opposition and the Revival of Nationalism (London: Hurst and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002). 60 See: Laura Silber and Allan Little, The Death of Yugoslavia (London: Penguin, 1996). One can also watch the BBC series of the same title. 61 Nebojša Vladisavljević, Serbia’s Antibureaucratic Revolution. Milošević, the Fall of Communism and Nationalist Mobilization (Hampshire, New York, 2008) and “The Break-­up of Yugoslavia: The Role of Popular Politics,” in James Kerr-Lindsay and Dejan Đokić (eds.), New Perspectives on Yugoslavia: Key Issues and Controversies (London, 2010); see also Bojàna Lekić Zoran Pavić and Slaviša Lekić (eds.), Antibirokratska revolucija (1987–1989) (Beograd: Službeni glasnik, 2009). 62 Olivera Milosavljević, Antibirokratska revolucija 1987–1989 godine. http://www.cpi.hr/ download/links/7292.pdf. [accessed on August 6, 2013]. 63 Sundhaussen, Geschichte Jugoslawiens. Viktor Meier, Wie Jugoslawien verspielt wurde (München: C.H. Beck, 1995), is an indispensable, detailed account of political events in the 1980s. 64 See Kevin McDermott, “The History of the Com-Intern in Light of New Documents,” in Tim Rees and Andrew Thorpe (eds.), International Communism and the Communist International 1919–1943 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 33. 65 Mark Thompson, Forging War: The Media in Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina (London: University of Luton Press, 1994). On the newspaper Politika, see Miodrag Marović, “Politika” i politika (Beograd: Helsinški odbor za ljudska prava u Srbiji, 2002) and Aleksandar Nenadović, Politika in the Storm of Nationalism, in Gojković & Popov, The Road to War, 537–64. 66 See footnote 1, and see Olivera Milosavljević, Antibirokratska revolucija 1987–1989. godine, footnote 63, 323. 67 As a contemporary see the aforementioned Viktor Meier, Wie Jugoslawien verspielt wurde. 68 Milosavljević, Antibirokratska Revolucija. 69 Stefanov, Wissenschaft als nationaler Beruf, 259–91; Dragović-Soso, Saviours of the Nation, 207, 227, 329. 70 Vladisavljević, Antibureaucratic Revolution, 150. 71 Fortunately YouTube can sometimes serve also as a depot of historical sources for the visual appearance of the Yoghurt Revolution: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHJGDepF50 [accessed on August 6, 2013].

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72 This process resulted in a fundamental restructuring of the balance within the Yugoslav Federation and introduced the process of the disintegration. 73 Vladisavljević, Antibureaucratic Revolution, 150. 74 http://pescanik.net/2009/10/srpski-­intelektualci-i-1989-godina/ [accessed on August 6, 2013]. 75 Olivera Milosavljević, Antibirokratska Revolucija, 322. 76 Politika was at the same time a publishing house, with other important dailies, such as the tabloid-­like Politika Ekspres which reached an even broader public, or the influential weekly NIN, renowned until then in Yugoslavia and elsewhere as a serious news magazine. 77 Aljoša Mimica and Radina Vučetić, Vreme kada je narod govorio: Odjeci i reagovanja u Politici, 1988–1991 (Beograd: Institut za sociološka istraživanja, Filozofski fakultet, 2008). 78 Appearing in more remote journals with lesser access to a broader public but of high relevance for the intellectual public: Gledišta [later Republika]. 79 Ivan Čolović, Zidovi, 51, 52. See also Popov: “In the speeches of Slobodan Milošević we find the imitation of legendary heroes. In contrast to them, he does not appeal to his own charisma or to the gods, but relies instead upon the deification of the people.” Nebojša Popov, Srpski populizam, 20–3. 80 Čolović, Zidovi, 51. 81 Ibid. 82 Ibid., 52. 83 Nenad Stefanov, “Strah od ‘nemačke Evrope’. Srpski intelektualci i 1989. godina,” in Ivan Čolović (ed.), Zid je mrtav (Vek, 2009), 56–78. 84 For a theoretical examination of the role compensation in collective behavior—albeit in a different historical context— see Theodor Adorno, “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda,” in Rolf Tiedemann (ed.), Soziologische Schriften, vol. 1 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972), 397–407. 85 What is touched upon here only briefly—the social-­pyschological dimension of ethno-­nationalism and “identity” discourse—is profoundly elaborated in: Siebo Siems, Die deutsche Karriere kollektiver Identität Vom wissenschaftlichen Begriff zum massenmedialen Jargon (Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 2007). 86 Čolović, Zidovi, 50. 87 Ibid. 88 Popov, Srpski Populizam, 26. “Srbin je čovek koji nije čovek ako nije Srbin; ako nema svest o narodu, bilo da ga slavi ili psuje.” 89 Ibid., 20–3. 90 Ibid.

6

Alija Izetbegović’s Islamic Declaration and Populism in Bosnia York Norman

Populism, broadly defined as a modern political movement aimed at mobilizing the masses against established elites, has a unique history among Bosnian Muslims in comparison to other South Slavic peoples. Whereas late nineteenth and early twentieth-­ century forms of Balkan populism typically formed around peasant communities, rising up first against the abuses of local landlords, Bosnian Muslims had a much smaller peasant population than their Serbian and Croatian neighbors. From the Austrian occupation of Bosnia in 1878 until Tito’s land reforms of 1948 and 1953, Bosnian Muslims were made up of diverse social groups. While roughly 50 percent were peasants, many were townsmen, or traditional landowners, a legacy of the Ottomans who ruled Bosnia from 1463 to 1878.1 As a result, populist movements, when they made their rare appearance, defined their protests in terms of the rights of the Muslim religious community. Such movements primarily aimed at restoring Islamic governance, or at least autonomy for their community, and looked to political Islamic movements in the Middle East and elsewhere for inspiration. Arguably, the first Bosnian Muslim populist movement occurred in the wake of the Austrian occupation, when the new authorities first implemented a series of modernization measures, such as universal conscription and multi-­confessional public schools. Local Muslims were often leery of these measures, since they feared they were a way of secularizing, and even converting new generations of Bosnian Muslim youth to Catholicism, the official faith of their new overlords as well as that of Bosnian Croats. Ali Fehmi Džabić (1853–1918), the mufti, or chief religious official of Mostar, led a series of protests throughout the country after Fata Omanić, a young Bosnian Muslim woman, ran away from her family and converted to Catholicism in order to sanctify a mixed marriage in 1899. Džabić then proceeded to denounce the Austrian reforms as following a pro-Croat agenda, and demanded that his community have autonomy in religious and educational matters. The Austrians tolerated the protests at first, but prohibited Džabić from returning to Bosnia after a brief trip to Istanbul in 1902. They were indeed suspicious of Džabić’s ties to the Ottoman revisionist circles, who sought to end Austria’s unofficial colonization of their former province. Populist denunciations of the Austrians died down after that event, as the movement was then dominated by the landed elites, who sought to use the situation to consolidate their

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traditional rights. The Austrians conceded these, as well as the formal recognition of partial Bosnian Muslim judicial and educational autonomy in 1909, a year after they had formally annexed Bosnia. The movement also had the status as an official political party, the Muslim National Organization (Muslimanska narodna organizicija).2 The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, later known as the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, also officially acknowleged these privileges, and thereby avoided renewed protests.3 Hitler’s invasion and destruction of Yugoslavia, and the consequent inclusion of Bosnia into the Ustaša, or Croatian fascist Independent State of Croatia, led a new generation of Bosnian Muslim political leaders to reevaluate their community’s position. Bosnian Muslims’ fears that they faced the prospect of extermination if they protested, instead prompted a number of key Islamic politicians to collaborate in various ways with the occupiers. This included figures such as Husein Đozo (1912–82), a prominent advocate in prewar years for liberalizing religious life, who volunteered in 1943 to become the leading imam for the SS Handžar Division, largely made up of Bosnian recruits.4 Mehmed Handžić (1906–44), the leading “traditionalist” figure in Bosnia and head of the Gazi Husrev Library, who published his opinions regularly in the journal El-Hidaje (“The True Path”) often sought to cement local Muslim privileges in return for submission.5 Finally, Alija Izetbegović (1925–2003) began his career at the age of 16 when he joined the Mladi Muslimani (Young Muslims)—a group that also frequently cooperated with the Ustaša and Nazi German authorities, but was critical of both the liberal and traditionalist camps of Islamic thought.6 Tito, unsurprisingly, was not particularly kind to either Izetbegović or Đozo after the Partisan victory in the war. Izetbegović and Đozo were both sentenced, receiving three and five years of hard labor respectively. But where Đozo reconciled with the Communist regime in the 1950s, and in fact became the leading Islamic intellectual voice in favor of the Socialist Federated Republic of Yugoslavia, Izetbegović remained a diehard opponent even after his release, when he became a law student at the University of Sarajevo. It was during this time that he became familiar with leading twentieth-­century Muslim thinkers such as Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938)—the intellectual father of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan—and Sayyid Qutb (1906–66)—a member of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood who elaborated a radical originalist (Salafi) version of Sunni political Islam. Inspired by such work, he would craft his own message of protest against Tito’s Yugoslavia when he wrote the Islamic Declaration (Islamska deklaracija) in 1970.7 Although he advocated a “democratic” version of political Islam, he argued that Bosnian Muslims must overcome both “internal” and “external” threats to achieve his ultimate aim of national independence. The Yugoslav authorities refused to publish Izetbegović’s work, and, he was eventually sent to jail for the second time as a political prisoner in 1983. He would be viewed by many Bosnian Muslim non-Communist political activists during the last years of Yugoslavia as a living political martyr for their cause. This roughly paralleled the nationalist populist Franjo Tuđman (1922–99), who likewise fell afoul of Tito for inciting Croatian nationalist resentments, especially after the publication of his book Velike ideje i mali naroda (“Great Ideas and Small Nations”) in 1969, and was similarly sentenced to jail.8

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It is no coincidence that Izetbegović published his Declaration in 1990. Yugoslavia was on the verge of civil war, and Izetbegović played an active part in pushing for an independent Bosnia, led by the Muslim community, demographically the largest of the three nationalities there. His message reverberated strongly at a time when the economy suffered, and Bosnian Serbs, led by the future war-­criminal Radovan Karadžić, threatened genocide. Izetbegović, after successfully campaigning to be President of Bosnia, was also able to win a referendum declaring the independence of his state. Izetbegović’s aim of Bosnian Muslim independence was largely achieved with the formation of the Muslim-Croat Federation, but at a cost of three years of war, during which nearly 65,000 Bosnian Muslims died, and hundreds of thousands were ethnically cleansed. Certainly, one could claim that the Bosnian Muslim populism, focused first on a program of cultural autonomy, was only transformed into a full-­fledged independence movement under Izetbegović’s guidance, truly beginning with the writing of his Declaration. This chapter will analyze the import of the Declaration, highlighting the nationalistic, yet religious motivation of his call to political action. Reference will frequently be made to Izetbegović’s predecessors and colleagues among Bosnian and globally renowned political Islamic activists alike. One possible target of Izetbegović’s Declaration was the Marxist regime that pervaded Yugoslavia at the time he wrote. He claimed that the Marxist economic system had become “fossilized” during the 50-odd years since the Russian Revolution, and as a result, had failed to serve the needs of its people. This echoed the criticisms of other former Yugoslav dissidents, like Franjo Tuđman, who used such arguments to justify the breakup of Yugoslavia in favor of a new series of non-­socialist independent states. Tuđman, like Izetbegović, would often seek solace in the pre-Yugoslavian past, where he imagined that his “country” managed to maintain its political independence during the medieval era, and later its autonomy.9 But Izetbegović was very careful not to dwell too much in the Declaration on the cultural impact of Marxism on Bosnian Muslims. At no point in this work did he openly characterize Tito and the Yugoslav Communists as the primary enemy of his community, which deprived it of its religious freedom. He obviously may have feared such a statement might have cost him his life. Qutb, who wrote Milestones, his most provocative work, in 1964, some six years before Izetbegović composed his own, did not hesitate to denounce Marxism as an ideological danger, a veiled reference to Nasser’s social reforms: Marxism “deprived people of their spiritual needs, which differentiates human beings from animals.”10 Qutb’s execution some two years later was a direct result of such boldness, a lesson of which Izetbegović was undoubtedly acutely aware. However, Izetbegović’s Declaration is strongly critical of Muslim elites, both in Bosnia and beyond. He blamed the “backwardness of Muslim peoples” on “conservatives who want the old forms, and modernists who want someone else’s forms.” He castigated the conservatives as “Hajjs and Sheikhs . . . [who want to] drag Islam into the past” by setting themselves up as “intermediaries between man and the Quran.” In his opinion, they were hopeless dogmatics who refused to “apply Quranic principles to new situations, which continue to emerge from world developments.” They might have had

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“a love of Islam, but it is the pathological love of a narrow-­minded and backward people, whose deathlike embrace has strangled the still-­living Islamic idea.”11 Although Izetbegović did not specify these conservatives by name, he likely was making a thinly-­veiled reference to Handžić, whose famous wartime essay “Patriotism, Nationality, and Nationalism from an Islamic point of view” (Patriotizam, narodnost i nacionalizam sa islamskog gledišta) argued that while Muslims sometimes endorsed benevolent forms of nationalism, they were also right to reject its extreme “extreme” forms: Islam is not against nationalism. It recognizes and tolerates its non-­aggressive form, and can even approve it in some cases, because this mild nationalism unifies groups that cannot live on their own, bringing these people together for their own welfare . . . [But] in many cases one group’s nationalism is nothing other than religious propaganda and proselytization.12

Handžić’s circle also asserted the primacy of Islamic law, to be adjudicated by the theologically trained authorities, like himself, and not mere demagogic Bosnian Muslim politicians, who lacked this education: Our divine faith is our scholarly faith, as it can be seen on nearly every page of the Koran. According to it the basis of our faith is scholarship. Our Prophet (Peace Be upon Him) was proud of those who taught. The mission of his followers was to instruct the world in the true faith. This divine mission, after the death of the Prophet, was incumbent on those people who recognized the faith, and that was the scholars. Our Prophet said that prophets who founded their religious communities did not leave any property to their successors except for their divine scholarship. Consequently, the true bearers of this inheritance, our science, I considered to be the true inheritors of the prophet. The scholar’s mission is to be a miniature version of the Prophet.13

Izetbegović responded belatedly to this criticism, a sore point given his lack of Islamic scholastic credentials, both as a member of the Young Muslims, and in the later stages of his political life. Izetbegović’s dismissal of Handžić’s conservatives largely echoed that of Iqbal, a well-­credentialed doctor but no theologian, who called for Muslims to rid themselves of the superstitions of their predecessors.14 Izetbegović’s criticism of “modernists” is equally sharp: As far as the so-­called progressives, Westerners, modernists, and whatever else they are called are concerned, they are the exemplification of real misfortune throughout the Muslim world, as they are quite numerous and influential, notably in government, education and public life. Seeing the Hajjs and conservatives as the personification of Islam, and convincing others to do likewise, the modernists raised a front against all that the idea represents. These self-­styled reformers in the present-­day Muslim countries may be recognized by their pride in what they should rather be ashamed of, and their shame in what they should be proud of.

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Transformations of Populism in Europe and the Americas These are usually “daddy’s sons,” schooled in Europe, from which they return with a deep sense of their own inferiority towards the wealthy West and a personal superiority over the poverty-­stricken and backward surroundings from which they sprung. Lacking an Islamic upbringing and any spiritual or moral links with the people, they will quickly lose their elementary criteria and imagine that by destroying local ideas, customs and convictions, while introducing alien ones, they will build America—for which they have an exaggerated admiration—overnight on their home soil.15

This critique, however vague, was likely aimed at Đozo, the premier Bosnian Muslim modernist for much of the mid- to late-­twentieth century. Regardless of his chameleon-­ like ability to flourish under the Ustašas, and later under Tito, Đozo did consistently condemn those Bosnian Muslims who used the program for educational and legal autonomy to build up a populist movement. Rather he emphasized that Muslims should try to strengthen their own personal faith, and give up on larger concerns to politically organize the Muslim community at large.16 Đozo also advocated that his people ultimately assimilate with local non-Muslims, which, in the Tito era, meant embracing a Yugoslav, and not a separate Bosnian Muslim identity. This was far too “cosmopolitan” for Izetbegović’s taste. Izetbegović further elaborated on the “perfidious” influence of education in leading astray new generations of Muslims, both at home and abroad: For centuries now our peoples have been deprived of educated people. Instead they have two other types, equally undesirable: the uneducated, and the wrongly educated. In no Muslim country do we have a system of education, sufficiently developed and capable of responding to the moral understanding of Islam and the needs of the people. Our rulers either neglected this most sensitive institution of any society, or left it up to strangers. The schools to which foreigners donated money and personnel, and thereby curricula and ideology, did not educate Muslims, not even nationalists. In them our budding intellectuals were injected with the “virtues” of obedience, submission and admiration for the might and wealth of the foreigner; in them, the intruders fostered a vassal mentality in the intelligentsia . . . Iron chains are no longer necessary to keep our peoples in submission. These silken cords of this alien “education” have the same power, paralyzing the minds and will of the educated. While education is so conceived, foreign wielders of power and their vassals in the Muslim countries need have no fear for their positions. Instead of being a source of rebellion and resistance, this system of education is their best ally.17

Here Izetbegović was repeating the complaint that traditional Bosnian Muslims had had since 1878, the first time that their community was subject to a non-Muslim political authority. Izetbegović subtly pushed for control over public schools and Sarajevo’s theological faculty. As any savvy Balkan politician, he was well aware that control of the school system was the best way to inculcate loyalty to the state. It is not

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a coincidence that Izetbegović’s complaints roughly paralleled those of Džabić’s protest movement approximately a century before. Beyond Bosnia, Izetbegović targeted the younger generations of Turkish and Arab modernizers, who were often trained in former missionary schools, like Robert College in Istanbul, and the American Universities at Beirut and Cairo. He blamed the creation of these institutions either on the European colonial powers, the United States, or even Middle Eastern nationalists.18 He reserved particular venom for Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938), the founder of modern Turkey, who initiated a comprehensive program of secular reform, aimed at reducing Muslim cultural and social influence in the public sphere. He commented that Atatürk was “obviously a greater military leader than a cultural reformer . . . [who] prohibited the wearing of the fez. It soon became evident that changing the shape of their caps cannot change what is in people’s heads or habits.”19 Atatürk’s banning of the fez, an Islamic-­styled red tasseled hat, in 1925 was indeed an important part of his greater secularization program. The irony, however, is that the fez itself had been an innovation. Before the Tanzimat, or Ottoman reform era, men had worn turbans, with different colors denoting their religious denomination. The fez, worn by Muslims and non-Muslims alike, was a sartorial symbol of equality and common citizenship. If Atatürk approached secular reform superficially, he certainly was not the first Muslim leader to do so.20 He then launched into a comparison between Turkey and Japan, blaming Atatürk for the decline of his country: In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries [both Turkey and Japan] were ancient empires, each with its own physiography and place in history. Both found themselves at approximately the same level of development; both had a glorious past, which indicated both great privilege and a heavy burden. Then followed the well-­known reforms in both countries. In order to continue to live its own way and not in another, Japan tried to unite tradition and progress. Turkey’s modernists chose the opposite path. Today, Turkey is a third-­rate country, while Japan has climbed to a pinnacle among the nations of the world . . . While Turkey abolished Arabic writing, which because of its simplicity, and just 28 characters, is one of the most perfect and widespread of alphabets, Japan rejected demands . . . to introduce the Roman script. No one is illiterate in modern-­day Japan, while in Turkey—40 years after the introduction of Roman letters—over half the population cannot read or write, a result which would cause the blind to regain their sight . . . By abolishing the Arabic alphabet, all the wealth of the past, preserved in the written word, was largely lost to Turkey, and by this single act, the country was reduced to the brink of barbarism. With a series of “parallel” reforms, the new Turkish generation found itself with those spiritual props, in a kind of spiritual vacuum. Turkey had lost its remembrance of its past. Whom did this profit?21

Here Izetbegović railed against Atatürk’s language reforms, particularly his switch from the Arabic to Latin script in 1928. Atatürk also regularized the Turkish grammar, reducing much of the Arabic and Persian vocabulary that had been used in Ottoman

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Turkish. Certainly, there were problems in realizing the reform. Atatürk’s modern Turkish was read in the printed press, and taught in the schools. Much of the population, still living in the countryside, remained illiterate. Even those who were taught the earlier Ottoman Turkish tended to adopt modern Turkish as a second language. Islamic theologians were especially reluctant to give up their mother tongue.22 Nevertheless, Izetbegović’s characterization of Japan’s successful rise to power as based on retaining its traditional language, and Turkey’s decline as explained by its abandonment of its old language, is a gross overstatement. Although he focused on cultural continuity as the key to national success, he did not touch on Japan’s geographical advantage as a compact island nation, relatively distant from Europe in comparison to the Ottoman Empire, which had a far harder time protecting its vast territories from encroachment from its European neighbors. More importantly, Izetbegović did not directly address his main grievance with Atatürk: his abolition of the Caliphate in 1924. Indeed, Izetbegović called his movement pan-Islamic in orientation. Pan-Islamism, an anti-­colonial movement with the aim of uniting all Muslim peoples under the auspices of Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II (1876–1909), was abandoned by Atatürk after the Ottoman loss of Mecca, Medina and the other Arab provinces in the First World War. Pan-Islamism survived the war in altered form, with Bosnian and Arab intellectuals vigorously engaged in a debate as to who would succeed the Ottoman Sultan as the leader of the Muslim world. Izetbegović’s Young Muslims, like Qutb’s Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, began as movements in response to this loss, hoping to find a practical alternative to reform this institution.23 Qutb labeled his opponents in a similar manner to Izetbegović. He regarded those who strove to modernize their society by borrowing from Western political and cultural traditions as Jahiliya—godless Westernizers who pursued pleasure and material wealth instead of embracing the Muslim faith. Izetbegović adopted Qutb’s vocabulary himself when he stated that: The struggle towards new goals did not begin today. On the contrary, it has already experienced shihada (martyrdom) and its history contains pages about the suffering of its victims. Still, this is mainly the personal sacrifice of exceptional individuals or courageous minor groups in collision with the mighty forces of the Jahiliya (the Godless). The magnitude of the problem and its difficulties, however, required the organized action of millions.24

Đozo reacted to such arguments about “struggle,” when he wrote in 1973 that: Today, unfortunately, there are many in the Islamic world who mistakenly speak about struggle in a confrontational sense rather than struggle as self-­reform, progress and a general spiritual and cultural renaissance. But it is necessary to reject aggression and its consequence which leads to weak government . . . That is the true path.25

The argument clearly is about the definition of “struggle,” expressed in classical Arabic as “jihad.” For Đozo, such struggle was internal and could not in any way, shape, or

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form be applied to the struggle for a Bosnian Islamic movement. Izetbegović obviously interpreted things differently. Yet, for Izetbegović, the main problem he encountered was that the Muslim masses rejected participating in the modernist intelligentsia’s reform projects: By their acts, modernists have created a state of internal conflict and confusion in which any program—Islamic or foreign—becomes impracticable. The masses want Islamic action, but cannot carry it through without the intelligentsia. An alienated intelligentsia imposes a program, but cannot find enough people prepared to contribute the blood, sweat and enthusiasm for this paper ideal. The opposing forces cancel each other out, and a stage of powerlessness and paralysis sets in.26

He strove to resolve this dilemma in the following way: “There is only one possible way out: the formation and grouping of a new intelligentsia, which thinks and feels Islam. This intelligentsia would then fly the flag of the Islamic order. And, together with the Muslim masses, take action to bring it about.”27 For Izetbegović, this movement was inherently democratic in nature: The establishment of an Islamic order is in fact, a supreme act of democracy, because it means the realization of the deepest inclination of the Muslim peoples and the ordinary man. One thing is certain: regardless of what some of the wealthy and the intelligentsia may want, the ordinary man wants Islam and life in his own Islamic community. Democracy here does not come from principles and proclamations, but from facts. The Islamic order does not use force simply because there is no need for it. On the other hand, the un-Islamic order, sensing the constant resistance and hostility of the people, finds a solution in having recourse to force. Its transformation into a dictatorship is more or less the rule, an unavoidable evil.28

The chance for establishing a populist Islamic movement was indeed hard to come by. Izetbegović in his youth certainly would not have seen such an opportunity. The Second World War, and the ensuing Titoist communist regime, would certainly not brook democratic elections or other fundamental political freedoms necessary to protest in favor of Bosnian Muslim independence. Those who would come close to attempting it, such as Handžić in 1944, or Džabić in 1902, would wind up exiled or worse.29 Izetbegović’s bold call to arms some 20 years before the breakup of Yugoslavia doubtlessly won him the status of a political prophet.30 Yet, Izetbegović, as elsewhere in his Declaration, would ground this argument with examples from the Islamic world and its rich heritage, without referencing his own country specifically. For example, he would posit that the inherent democratic tendency within Islam began with the first four Caliphs, the companions of Prophet Muhammad. These Caliphs, known as the “Rightfully-Guided,” were chosen by the consensus of the Islamic community. In Izetbegović’s eyes, their “election” was inherently republican, since the Caliph as head of state was responsible to his people for “public affairs and social matters.”31

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Izetbegović was no doubt influenced by Iqbal, who seemingly came to a similar conclusion: “the republican form of government is not only thoroughly consistent with the spirit of Islam, but has also become a necessity in view of the new forces that are set free in the world of Islam.”32 Iqbal then elaborated that the only way for Islamic law to be effectively implemented was through a “Muslim legislative assembly” in which such issues would be debated by “laymen who happen to possess a keen insight into affairs. In this way alone, can we stir into activity, the dormant spirit of life in our legal system, and give it an evolutionary outlook.”33 Iqbal’s arguments that Islamic republicanism was a new phenomenon differed from that of Izetbegović. Rather than pointing to the example of the Caliphs, Iqbal talked glowingly of Atatürk’s decision to abolish the institution. He believed that maintaining the Caliphate would have perpetuated a monarchical system, which would inhibit rather than promote Islamic growth. Izetbegović hoped instead to revive the institution as an elective head of state. Nevertheless, Izetbegović credited Iqbal for his idea of creating an Islamic republic: “Pakistan is the dress rehearsal for the introduction of an Islamic order, under modern conditions and at present rates of development.”34 While he pointed to problems of political unity among the Pakistanis, he blamed Muhammad Ali Jinnah for failing to maintain a unified movement after Iqbal’s death. One can see why Izetbegović would identify so much with the Pakistani movement. The Bosnian Muslims, like the Muslims of the subcontinent, were a minority religious community within a larger state. The question would be whether they could thrive as a religious minority or whether they should push for a separate Muslim state. Izetbegović alone spoke to this issue, admitting that “the Islamic order can only be established in countries where they represent the majority of the population.” He then postulated that: “Muslim minorities within a non-Islamic community, provided they are guaranteed freedom to practice their religion, to live and develop normally, are loyal and must fulfill their commitments to that community, except those which harm Islam and Muslims.”35 This statement implied that the Bosnian Muslims should remain within Yugoslavia, as long as they were given their religious and cultural autonomy. This position was well-­ grounded in Bosnian history, given that the Bosnian Muslim community sought an established religious, cultural, and educational autonomy after its annexation by AustroHungary in 1908, its incorporation into the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes in 1918, and acquired somewhat greater freedoms under Tito’s Yugoslavia in the 1970s.36 That situation likely changed for Izetbegović by 1990 on the eve of the war when Yugoslavia was wracked by ethnic nationalism, giving many the impression that Tito’s multicultural model of development was a thing of the past. If he abandoned Yugoslavia in favor of an independent Bosnian state, he might instead argue that Bosnian Muslims were the majority within that state—Muslims accounted for only 43 percent of the overall Bosnian population in 1990, although they made up a plurality of the three major groups, and arguably were a majority at times in the past, and even in the future.37 Thus, Izetbegović might have envisioned the possibility to establish an “Islamic order” in Bosnia. When he talked in general about the aims of an Islamic movement, he stressed that moral and social reform must come before seeking political power:

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Each nation, before being called upon to play its part in history, has had to live through a period of internal purging and the practical acceptance of certain fundamental moral principles. All power in the world starts out as moral firmness. Every defeat begins as moral failure. All that is desired to be accomplished must first be accomplished in the souls of men.38

To Izetbegović, this moral reform—what he termed as “Islamization”—involved following traditional Islamic teachings as working for the good and welfare of the greater Islamic community, having a good work ethic, taking no interest as profit, condemning crime, forbidding alcohol, loose morals and pornography, and encouraging women to act as moral guides for their children. Nonetheless, Izetbegović nuanced this message by also stressing progressive aims, such as racial and social equality, Muslim self-­reliance, and, most importantly, a refusal to impose his moral program on unwilling participants: “As it recognizes God, but no dogma or hierarchy, Islam cannot turn into a dictatorship and any kind of inquisition or spiritual terror is thereby done away with.”39 Besides promising to leave non-Muslims in peace, Izetbegović went so far as to defend women’s rights to vote and prohibit polygamous marriage. He also made no statement about veiling—a sensitive issue in Bosnia since many Bosnian Muslim women would be likely to refuse the practice. Yet, this “internal” religious revival was only one step in the process: “stressing the priority of the religious and moral renewal does not mean—nor can it be interpreted to mean—that the Islamic order can be brought about without Islamic governance.”40 In his opinion, the movement should take power once it had the moral and numerical strength to establish an Islamic government, and not simply overturn the old, nonIslamic order. Timing was all-­important, since seizing power without adequate moral and political preparation would cause a “coup d’état and not an Islamic revolution.” Any delay in taking action when the movement was ready could also prove deadly, since the un-Islamic order would have the opportunity to suppress the movement. This talk of an Islamic movement that transformed itself from an internal struggle of faith to an external struggle for power is very reminiscent of Qutb’s position on jihad. To Qutb, jihad signified not only a struggle for individual and communal identity, but also the establishment of a global Islamic government: “the ultimate objective of the Islamic movement . . . is a means of establishing the divine authority within it so that it becomes the headquarters for the movement . . . which is then carried throughout the earth to the whole of mankind.”41 His defense of Islamic revolution—regardless of definition—did not go over well with many of Izetbegović’s critics—whether they be Serbs, Croats, the Yugoslavian authorities, or even secular Bosnian Muslims. While he did not specify how such a revolution was appropriate for Bosnia, he did stoke fears that an Islamic movement could pose a threat to national and regional security even if it was originally culturally and religiously ­based. This fear was bound to grow after the Iranian revolution in 1979 and the growth of Hamas among Palestinians and of Hezbollah among the Shiites of Lebanon in the early 1980s. The subsequent jailing of Izetbegović only helped him launch his own political career in the lead-up to war in 1992. He was seen at the trial by many Bosnian Muslims as a brave political dissident, who wanted to reestablish

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autonomy, if not independence for his community; others saw him as a ruthless Islamic radical who pandered to his community’s long-­standing grievances with the Yugoslav state in order to impose his own form of dictatorship based on religious difference. What is lost in this analysis is the broad, if contradictory, nature of Izetbegović’s Islamic Declaration. On the one hand, he portrayed his own Islamic movement as innately democratic and progressive. Allowing for Muslims to form Islamic cultural associations—a civic group—could potentially empower a religiously ­alienated population to play an important part in revitalizing popularly ­elected government in Bosnia and elsewhere in the Islamic world; places where stable republican government often had a hard time developing. His partial embrace of Iqbal’s vision of an Islam reconciled with modernity led him to include progressive messages—such as his stress on racial and social equality, freedom of belief, and the right of women to vote. On the other hand, Izetbegović’s denunciations of Westernizers, foreigners, and Marxists as un-Islamic and reactionary did not bode well for those who wished to maintain the delicate multicultural balance of Yugoslavia and its successor states. Although he never mentioned his home country specifically, one could perceive the threat of an intolerant movement that would seek to impose its agenda on non-Muslims and the secular-­minded—the majority within Bosnia. This could be seen in Izetbegović’s parallels with Qutb’s call for an Islamic seizure of power, and even Iqbal’s model of an Islamic republic in Pakistan. His mockery of Atatürk’s alternative of a secular, but independent Turkish Republic as “Western-­controlled” and a third-­rate country cut off from its cultural heritage, showed a fundamental lack of respect for state traditions that did not easily fit his definition of an “Islamic order.” Even his citation of Pakistan as his dress rehearsal seemed to suggest that creating a Muslim-­dominated Bosnian state from Yugoslavia was logical and necessary. This was a step far removed from earlier Bosnian political activists, especially Džabić in 1899–1902 and Handžić in 1941–4, who had both sought autonomy, not independence for their community. Admittedly, Izetbegović likely matured in the decades after writing his Declaration. He never spoke about political radicalization in his two other major works—Islam between East and West42 and his Notes from Prison.43 He also became aware of the need to compromise with non-Muslims inside and outside Bosnia that were key to his community’s survival; indeed, by signing the Dayton Peace Accord he agreed to join an uneasy federation with Bosnian Croats, and even a loose affiliation with the Bosnian Serbs—the party most responsible for perpetuating ethnic cleansing and even genocide during the Bosnian civil war of 1992–5. Still, the Declaration’s publication in 1990 and its controversial political program contributed in its own unique way to the conflict that ensued. The Declaration that launched Izetbegović’s political career as a Muslim populist would continue to haunt him until the end of his days.

Notes   1 Fikret Karčić, The Bosniaks and the Challenges of Modernity: Late Ottoman and Hapsburg Times (Sarajevo: El-Kalem, 1999), 109–11; Mustafa Imamović, Historija Bošnijaka (Sarajevo: Preporod, 2006), 367–72.

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  2 Robert Donia, Islam Under the Double Eagle: The Muslims of Bosnia and Hercegovina, 1878–1914 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 100–18, 122–8, 160, 170–81.   3 Imamović, Historija Bošnijaka, 489–94.   4 Enes Karić, Husein Đozo (Sarajevo: Dobra Knjiga, 2010), 7–8; Enes Karić, “Husein Đozo i islamski modernizam,” in Husein Đozo, Izabrana djela: Knjiga prva: Islam u vremenu (Sarajevo: El-Kalem, 2006), 7; George Lepre, Hitler’s Bosnian Division: The Waffen-SS Handschar Division, 1943–1945 (Altgen: 1997), 72–3, 76–9, 124–5, 132–3, 136–7, 184–6; Enver Redžić, Muslimansko autonomaštvo i 13.SS divizije: Autonomije Bosna i Hercegovine i Hitlerov Treći Rajh (Sarajevo: Svjetlost, 1987), 120–1.   5 Emily Balić, “A City Apart: Sarajevo in the Second World War” (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 2007), 29–31; Esat Duraković, “Prosvjetiteljski zanos Handžićev,” in Mehmed Handžić, Izabrana Djela: Knjiga I: Teme iz književne historije (Sarajevo: Ogledalo, 1999), 6–7.   6 Sead Trulj, Mladi Muslimani (Zagreb: Globus, 1992), 9–36, 57–70.   7 Gilles Keppel, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 207, 447.   8 Ante Čuvalo, The Croatian National Movement (Boulder: Columbia University Monographs, 1990), 237.   9 P.H. Lilliota, The Wreckage Reconsidered: Five Oxymorons from Balkan Deconstruction (Lanham: Lexington Books, 1999), 65. 10 Sayyid Qutb, Milestones (Indianapolis: American Trust, 2005), 52–3. 11 Alija Izetbegović, Islamic Declaration: A Programme for the Islamization of Muslim Peoples (Sarajevo: 1990), 8–9. 12 Mehmed Handžić, Izabrana Djela: Knjiga III: Islamske teme (Sarajevo: Ogledalo, 1999), 335, 337. 13 Ibid., 46–7. One wonders if Handžić’s argument in favor of special political privileges for the Muslim learned was affected to any extent by the great political influence wielded by Alois Stepinac (1898–1960), the Cardinal of Croatia. 14 Muhammad Iqbal, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (Lahore: Javid Iqbal, 1968), 78. 15 Izetbegović, Declaration, 10–11. 16 Husein Đozo, “Odgoj i vjersko vaspitanje naše obladine,” in Izabrana djela: Knjiga prva: Islam u vremenu (Sarajevo: El-Kalem, 2006), 95–7. 17 Izetbegović, Declaration, 20–1. 18 Ibid., 62. 19 Ibid., 12. 20 Donald Quataert, “Clothing Laws, State and Society in the Ottoman Empire, 1720– 1829,” International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 29: 3 (1997), 403–25. 21 Izetbegović, Declaration, 13–14. 22 Andrew Mango, Atatürk: The Biography of the Founder of Modern Turkey (New York: Overlook Press, 1999), 494–8. 23 Amir Karić, Panislamizam u Bosni (Sarajevo: Connectum, 2006), 31–67. 24 Izetbegović, Declaration, 4. 25 Husein Đozo, “Islam—Džihad,” in Izabrana djela: Knjiga prva: Islam u vremenu (Sarajevo: El-Kalem, 2006), 499. 26 Izetbegović, Declaration, 24. 27 Ibid., 25. 28 Ibid., 44–5. 29 Balić, “A City Apart,” 345; Donia, Islam Under the Double Eagle, 164–71.

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30 Ray Takeyh and Nikolas Gvosdev, The Receding Shadow of the Prophet: The Rise and Fall of Radical Political Islam (Westport: Greenwood, 2004), 186–7. 31 Izetbegović, Declaration, 39. 32 Iqbal, Reconstruction of Religious Thought, 57–8. 33 Ibid., 64. 34 Izetbegović, Declaration, 58. 35 Ibid., 49–50. 36 Imamović, Historija Bošnijaka, 489–94, 547–59. 37 Ibid., 562–70. 38 Izetbegović, Declaration, 49–50. 39 Ibid., 43. 40 Ibid., 56. 41 Qutb, Milestones, 45. 42 Alija Izetbegović, Islam Between East and West (Indianapolis: American Trust Publications, 1990). 43 Alija Izetbegović, Izetbegović of Bosnia and Herzegovina: Notes From Prison (Westport: Praeger, 2002).

Section III

Transformations of Populism in the United States in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

7

Richard Hofstadter’s Populist Problem and his Identity as a Jewish Intellectual Gary Marotta

I know it’s risky, but I still write history out of my engagement with the present. Richard Hofstadter My thesis begins with my first personal encounter with Richard Hofstadter— the principal provocateur of what one historian calls the “bloody era of Populist historiography.”1 I was 21 years old, commencing my first term in the fall of 1964 as a graduate student in history at Columbia University. I had filled out my registration for class card, and it included a year-­long colloquium Hofstadter was offering. All was going smoothly until a registrar told me that it required Professor Hofstadter’s prior approval. Off I went to 704 Hamilton Hall to secure it. What I found was a large group of graduate students, all seeking the same approval. Hofstadter appeared from his office and told us he would accept just ten students and that he would interview each of us. It turns out that my interview was the longest. He started by asking me what books I had read over the summer. I mentioned Bernard DeVoto’s The Year of Decision, Oscar Handlin’s The Uprooted, Herbert Aptheker’s American Negro Slave Revolts, and Stanley Elkins’s Slavery. That’s when he stopped me and asked me to discuss the “contradiction” between Aptheker and Elkins. It went well, but entry into the class was far from clinched; after all, the other students also came prepared with bibliography. What clinched it, I think, was what came next, and has something to do with my thesis here. He inquired into my background. I told him I came from a “working class” family, from the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, and that my father had been an organizer for the Fur and Leather Workers Union. Now, I was uneasy about such disclosures because my parents, who had been deeply affected by the McCarthy era, had cautioned me that our “red” politics could compromise my future. But Hofstadter displayed interest; he wanted to know more. I told him that I was the product of a mixed marriage—half Jewish, half Italian. He now asked about my own identity. I told him I identified with both: that I loved Italian food and Jewish deli, but that I considered myself Jewish, though I was agnostic. Why, then, he persisted, did I identify as a Jew? Because of anti-Semitism, I told him, as I mumbled something about anti-Semites defining Jews, a notion I had absorbed from Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew.

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He told me I was accepted into the colloquium, and of course I was delighted and grateful. Hofstadter later went out of his way to set up a meeting with me and Eric Foner, who had returned to Columbia to pursue his Ph.D. under Hofstadter’s supervision. Hofstadter knew that my father had been involved with the Jefferson School, an academy for workers organized by the Joint Council, a group of leftist New York City unions. The school had provided employment during the McCarthy era for “blacklisted” scholars like Eric’s father and uncle, Jack and Phil Foner.2 In retrospect, I realize that I had gained entry into the colloquium because of Hofstadter’s own “affirmative action, cultural diversity” program. He accepted me, I suspect, and probably many others along the way, out of a nostalgic sense of loyalty to his own youth. He was, by this time, a member of the academic establishment, the recipient of two Pulitzer Prizes, and he lived a thoroughly bourgeois life as a New York intellectual, with a vacation home on Cape Cod. But his background had been that of a Jewish radical, and his sympathy remained alive. It stamped his scholarship and his revisionist interpretation of American Populism. That interpretation is in the first three chapters of his third book, The Age of Reform, written and published in 1955, during the red-­baiting McCarthy period. Its place in American historiography is well-­known for its revisionist view of the populist and progressive eras. It immediately set off a vehement and continuing debate over the nature and legacy of Populism. Before Hofstadter, academic historians viewed the Populist movement of the 1890s approvingly, as evidence of a salutary and democratic agrarian resistance to capitalist exploitation and oppression that led to an age of reform, culminating in FDR’s New Deal—the triumph of a kind of social democracy on a capitalist base. “Thanks to the triumph of Populist principles,” declared John D. Hicks in his depression-­era classic The Populist Revolt, “one may almost say that . . . the people now rule.”3 Well, then, what’s wrong with that? What’s Hofstadter’s problem? It was “the people” themselves, the nether side of Populist principles. Hofstadter acknowledged and expressed sympathy for their situation, their objective exploitation and their rebellion, including many of their proposals for reform. But he also saw something else, something ugly, reactionary, and intolerant in their mass movement. And it is this exposé that made its mark and constitutes the core of contention. For Hofstadter, there was no a priori guarantee that “the people” or “masses” as historical agency necessarily constituted a liberating emancipation. As David Brown comments in his intellectual biography of Hofstadter, “he found it impossible to suspend his critical judgment in the name of ideology.”4 Free of this fetish, Hofstadter criticized his fellow intellectuals for their “tendency to sentimentalize the folk.” “Liberal intellectuals,” he wrote, “who have rather well-­rationalized systems of political beliefs, tend to expect the masses of people whose actions at certain moments in history coincide with some of these beliefs, will share their other convictions as a matter of logic and principle.”5 Hofstadter would here break with the traditional historiography on Populist progressivism. Hofstadter argued that the Populists looked back to a self-­serving Edenic republic. It was, he said, an “agrarian myth.” Here, rugged Wasp yeomen farmers imagined

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themselves to be the depository of virtue, the producing class, victimized by a heartless, plutocratic elite, ensconced in the parasitic cities of the Northeast, and internationally centered in London. It gave rise to a simplistic rhetoric of “the people” versus “the interests.” But “the people,” as Hofstadter argued, were xenophobic, fearing Asians and despising the new ethnic immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. They were racist Negrophobes with a penchant for lynching. They were anti-Semites who saw Jews as alien Shylocks, agents of the exploiting class. Hofstadter was aware of antiSemitism in American culture generally, notably among the establishment, but he argued that it was particularly virulent among the Populists. “It was chiefly Populist writers who expressed the identification of the Jew with the usurer and the ‘international gold ring’ which was the central theme of the American anti-Semitism of the age.” Paranoid in their worldview, they saw themselves as victims of a vast conspiracy. They were also militant in their revolt against the status quo.6 Hofstadter did not have to spell it out much further. The movement that appeared reformist and democratic before the Second World War, looked different after the rise of mass movement Nazism. The Populists looked and sounded like an American version of Hitler’s Volk. Latent within Populism was “an ambiguous character”: Populists were at once advanced prairie radicals and reactionary proto-­fascists. American reformist innocence could not be sustained; he stressed, instead, the “coexistence of reformism and reaction.” “The impulses behind yesterday’s reform may be put in the service of reform today, but they may also be enlisted in the service of reaction . . . Populism, for all its zany fringes, was not an unambiguous fore-­runner of modern authoritarian movements.”7 As it turned out, according to Hofstadter, the Populists moved “from pathos to parity.” That is, Populism was absorbed into the great American “consensus” as just another special interest group, a lobby and beneficiary of government-­funded subsidies. They got their share of the pie and were not averse to denying it to others, especially labor unions, despite their earlier attempt at forging an alliance with them.8 As Hofstadter wrote in the introduction to his earlier breakthrough book The American Political Tradition: “American traditions show a strong bias in favor of egalitarian democracy, but it has been a democracy of cupidity.”9 Hofstadter was not yet done with the Populist legacy. With the rise of the Radical right in the 1950s and 1960s—McCarthy, Goldwater, and the John Birch Society—he developed an analysis which critiqued it as “pseudo-conservative.”10 This critique derived principally from the insights of the Frankfurt School, notably those of Theodor Adorno.11 Hofstadter argued that these self-­proclaimed “conservatives” were nothing of the sort, at least not in the Burkean sense. He saw them as reactionaries, seeking to reverse the reforms of the New Deal. The Radical right, like the Populists, were illiberal and intolerant, banning books, bashing intellectuals, teachers, and entertainers stained, like Hofstadter, with leftist pasts. Hofstadter argued that they displayed symptoms of “authoritarian personality,” revealed “status anxiety,” and were consumed by a “paranoid style.” He suggested, like Adorno, that these self-­proclaimed conservatives, both programmatically and psychologically, were more fascistic than conservative, hence the term Radical right. In this regard, rhetorically and historically, the Radical right represented the latter-­day, petit-­bourgeois descendants of the Populists.

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Hofstadter’s critics argued that he had over-­reached again, declaring that he had ventured into polemics, avoiding the arguments of the Radical right by putting them on the couch, dismissing them as irrational. He was wrong on the connection between Populism and the Radical right, they say; he was wrong from the start. Jeffrey Ostler, writing in 1995, calls Hofstadter’s analysis of the Populists “deeply flawed.” “The world of populism constructed by Hofstadter now languishes in ruin.”12 That’s hyperbole. The debate about the Hofstadter thesis continues, but not principally on the grounds of their illiberal flaws—where he blew the whistle and drew the line. Two works in particular, Lawrence Goodwyn’s Democratic Promise and Charles Postel’s The Populist Vision, have challenged entrenched misconceptions of Populism.13 Goodwyn describes the Populists as members of a “cooperative crusade,” battling against the “coercive potential of the emerging corporate state.” The Populists offered authentic radical change. Postel goes further, arguing that the Populists embraced technology and progress, and offered a modernist, social-­democratic alternative to laissez-­faire capitalism and its inequities. Such reevaluations modify Hofstadter’s thesis, but not his fundamental criticism of illiberalism and intolerance. As Postel writes in his preface: “No attempt has been made here to resuscitate dead Populism for a living present. The movement’s flaws should be a warning against any such attempt at revival.”14 The flaws, precisely, that Hofstadter exposed. As we look again, now from the vantage point of the Tea Party insurgency, it is Hofstadter’s prescience, the illuminating reach and relevance of his critical analysis that astounds us. From the rise of movement conservatism after McCarthy and Goldwater, through the advent of the visceral George Wallace and the triumph of the avuncular Reagan, to the adventurist George W. Bush and the promoting of Sarah Palin and the lesser furies—it is all about a continuing crisis with its roots in the 1890s. It is also about status politics and anti-­intellectualism. Conservative power is based on a mass movement of “value voters” in the Midwest and South—the former Populist strongholds—in rebellion against the “liberal elite” of the Northeast. Michael Kazin’s Populist Persuasion has demonstrated the continuity of thought and mind through an analysis of the social basis of Populist rhetoric as it moved from the left to the right in the course of more than a century. And Kim Phillips-Fein’s Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Ronald Reagan has demonstrated how this right-­wing populist mass movement has provided cover and enabled an empowered plutocracy to advance its interests.15 Hofstadter himself was nuanced and made careful distinctions, but he could have been bolder. The Tea Party, despite its initial reception as astroturf by liberal pundits, is not an aberration. It appears to be a pathologic normality in American democracy, intrinsic to the mainstream, with felt, angry complaints, rooted in the Populist legacy. I concur with Michael Kazin’s 1999 essay on “Hofstadter’s Lives:” “No historian,” he wrote, “provides a better model of how to approach and write about the past.” He revealed “what had been ignored and repressed.”16 It’s Hofstadter’s predictions, grounded in prudent judgments, a sense of the tragic, ironic, and ambiguous, that are prophetic, says Kazin. I concur, too, with Robert Johnson’s assessment, in a forum on The Age of Reform after fifty years, when he argues that, in a word, Hofstadter was “right.”17

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That Hofstadter was “right” has much to do with his powers of analysis and intuition, his special feel for history and criticism. But where does it come from? Kazin and Johnson found a clue in Peter Novick’s brief but incisive analysis of Hofstadter in his thematically much larger work, That Noble Dream. Novick offered a demographic break-­ down of who was for and against the Hofstadter thesis on Populism’s connection to the Radical right. Here’s the breakdown: Hofstadter partisans included Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Oscar Handlin, Seymour Martin Lipset, Talcott Parsons, David Reissman, and Edward Shils; Hofstadter critics were David Hicks, C. Vann Woodward, Howard K. Beale, William B. Hasseltine, John Higham, Walter T.K. Nugent, Norman Pollack, David Shannon, and William Appleman Williams. Novick observes that Hofstadter partisans were Jews from the Northeast, whereas his critics were gentiles from the South and Midwest. Exceptions were Parsons and Pollack in either group. Novick, however, failed to observe that the Hofstadter camp was principally from the social sciences; the opposition, principally historians. Hofstadter, like others in his camp, was one generation removed from the East European shtetl, where gentile peasants led pogroms and Nazis later exterminated Jews. Novick concludes that identity as a Jewish intellectual plays a sociological role in the historiographical debate on Populism.18 Hofstadter was raised in multi-ethnic, industrial Buffalo, which was dominated by a conservative Protestant establishment. He was the product of a German Lutheran mother and a Polish Jewish father. Born into his mother’s faith, he was christened a Lutheran and served in church services as a choir boy. Yet, he later identified as a Jew and died as a Jew. Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, was said at his funeral. David Brown’s outstanding intellectual biography does not explain this identity shift, but Susan Strout Baker’s Radical Beginnings offers a partial understanding based on Eric Erickson’s “identity crisis theory.”19 Hofstadter’s paternal side left Cracow in the 1890s, along with thousands of other Jews escaping pogroms, discrimination, and impressments. They traveled steerage, came through Ellis Island, and settled on the Lower East Side of New York City. Meyer, the grandfather, was orthodox and a furrier by trade. His son, Emil, was eleven years old when they arrived, but by age sixteen he rebelled from his father’s orthodoxy and left New York City for Buffalo, where he too worked as a furrier. Hofstadter’s maternal side had been in America since 1848, part of a wave of liberal Germans escaping the counter-­ revolution after the great rebellion of that same year. Catherine Hill, Hofstadter’s mother, was born into a large, successful, middle-­class family in Buffalo. She is described as maternal and warm. Catherine and Emil married outside of their faiths, though by a Rabbi. Richard was born on August 6, 1916, at once christened and circumcised. The family is described as secular, secure, and assimilated. Their politics were Republican, of the Progressive sort. Though financially successful, the family lived near the William Street ghetto on Buffalo’s East Side, surrounded by Poles, Italians, and Russians. It is likely that he picked up on the anti-Semitism of his Christian working-­class neighbors. The family was a kind of anomaly in the ghetto, which resembled Irving Howe’s Lower East Side and Alfred Kazin’s Brownsville, with a Jewish culture marked by tension between assimilated German Jews and the more newly arrived Yiddish-­ speaking Jews of Eastern Europe. The latter group was dominated by the local Talmud

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Torah, a Hebrew school led by Israel Swados, described as an orthodox “fiery autocrat.” In this world of Jewish intellectual ferment and left-­wing politics, the secular and liberal Emil took Richard for lox and herring on Elmwood Avenue. Richard attended Fosdick-Maston Park High School, now City Honors, where he was popular, acted in plays, participated in sports as a cheerleader, excelled on the debate team, and joined a fraternity that did not admit Jews. In 1933, he was president of his class, and upon graduation won virtually all the honors. His favorite authors were H.L. Mencken and F. Scott Fitzgerald. From the former, he may have absorbed a prejudice against “hayseeds” and a distaste for the “boobeoisie”; from the latter, he learned of Wasp privilege and gentlemanly anti-Semitism. The school yearbook indicates that his fellow students thought him most likely to become President of the United States; Richard declared that he would select a woman as his Vice President. Richard’s life changed drastically when he met Felice Swados at the University of Buffalo, where he majored in history and minored in philosophy. Felice was the granddaughter of that “fiery autocrat,” Israel Swados. Israel’s son, Aaron, a physician to the poor, was married to Rebecca, fun-­loving, artistic, and socially involved. They had two precocious children, Felice and Harvey. The death of Richard’s mother at an early age was traumatic, but he found renewed life in the Swados household. They opened their world to him. They were profoundly Jewish, intellectual, and politically active. Dick, as he was now known, was returning to the roots his father had rejected. Following Felice’s lead, Richard joined a minority of activist-­intellectual students at the University of Buffalo that met in the Iron Room of the Student Union, much like “Alcove #1” in the lunchroom at the City College of New York, where students engaged in the radical politics of the National Student League. At Buffalo, Hofstadter was influenced by Marvin Farber and Julius Pratt, the former a pioneer in introducing phenomenology to American philosophy and the latter a critic of progressive economic interpretations of American history. Nevertheless, the young Hofstadter remained inspired by the iconoclasm of Charles Beard. Richard and Felice married, and over family objections he rejected a career in law, and in 1936 registered for courses in history at Columbia University. He joined the campus Communist Party, but quit after four months. “We are not the beneficiaries of capitalism,” he wrote his brother-­in-law, Harvey Swados, now commencing his career as a playwright, “but we will not be the beneficiaries of the socialism of the 20th century—if any—any more than Kamenev & Zinoviev & Rykor & Bukharan were . . . We are the people with no place to go . . . Comes the Revolution . . . and then what? So where are we and what do we stand for?”20 He had rejected the Party and its authoritarianism, but acquired a Marxist methodology and critique, while eschewing its eschatology. Still in his early twenties, Hofstadter and Felice went to depression-­ ridden Mississippi, where he visited black sharecroppers while conducting research into the New Deal’s Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA). His MA thesis, supervised by the agricultural and economic historian Harry Carman, was a scathing indictment of the AAA for supporting Southern planters rather than poor farmers. In 1941, he landed his first full-­time job at New York’s City College, replacing Jack Foner who was purged for his Communist sympathies. The next year, Hofstadter completed his doctoral dissertation under the supervision of Merle Curti, a Marxist

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scholar of American intellectual history. Later published as Social Darwinism in American Thought, it was an erudite assault on capitalist apologia. Upon completion of his Ph.D., he took a position at the University of Maryland, offered in part because of anti-Semitism; Hofstadter’s name sounded less Jewish than that of his rival, Eric Goldman. He was deeply alienated but not at all isolated at Maryland. He became close friends with Kenneth Stampp, Frank Friedel, and C. Wright Mills. Encouraged by Mills, he read in the social sciences, notably Weber, Mannheim, and Freud. Four years later, Hofstadter was passed over for a job at Johns Hopkins because he was half Jewish; the job went to C. Vann Woodward, who became a close friend and critic. Woodward’s “The Populist Heritage and the Intellectual,” a defense of Populism and its connection to the New Deal and liberal reform, was aimed at Hofstadter.21 Woodward acknowledged Hofstadter’s insights—“the deconversion of populism and progressivism from reform to reaction”—and the reasons behind them—disenchantment with Stalinism and with the masses in Germany and elsewhere. Yet, despite the irrational and retrograde in Populism, even its potential for fascism, Woodward called on Hofstadter to return to the progressive fold. “For the tradition to remain open,” wrote Woodward, “the intellectual must not be alienated from the source of the revolt.”22 Woodward’s argument missed the nature and source of Hofstadter’s dissent. Hofstadter believed he never left the “progressive” tradition. “I find that I have been critical of the Populist-Progressive tradition,” he wrote in the introduction to The Age of Reform. “I say critical, but not hostile, for I am criticizing largely from within. The tradition of Progressive reform is the one upon which I was reared and upon which my political sentiments were formed.”23 He criticized from within, in terms of political sympathy. But as a radical Jewish intellectual, that is to say alienated, he was the outsider as insider. Woodward had asked the impossible. Long before Woodward wrote this essay in response to The Age of Reform, Hofstadter had returned to Columbia, where he found a sustaining community. That community was largely made up of Jewish intellectuals from Columbia and Partisan Review— Alfred Kazin, Daniel Bell, Fritz Stern, Lionel Trilling, Meyer Shapiro, Seymour Martin Lipset, Robert Merton, Peter Gay, and Richard Morris. They had broken the walls of restrictive anti-Semitism at Columbia put in place by the likes of Dean John W. Burgess and President Nicholas Murray Butler, along with the Waspish gentlemen scholars in the departments.24 In the early 1950s, again encouraged by Mills, who had also come from Maryland to Columbia, Hofstadter immersed himself in the work of the Frankfurt School, composed of Jewish radical émigré scholars in critical theory, who were now affiliated with the University.25 In the 1960s he met regularly with his colleagues at the Claremont Avenue apartment of Fritz Stern, where they discussed the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the counter-­culture, and the gathering forces of reaction. They called themselves the “Stern Group” and referred to their larger intellectual community as the “Upper West Side Kibbutz.” The Kibbutz, however, could not protect Hofstadter from the barbed criticism of the gentile world of academic historians. In December, 1962, Carl Bridenbaugh, a Brown University historian, delivered the presidential address to the American Historical Association. He assailed the vogue in social scientific history. He described his own childhood close to farm, field, and frontier that produced the qualities necessary for

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understanding American history. He agreed that Americans had moved from the country to the city, a famous Hofstadter formulation from The Age of Reform, but he decried the loss of homogeneity that produced historians lacking identity with America. “Many of the younger practioners of the craft,” he said, “are products of lower middle-­class or foreign origins, and their emotions not infrequently get in the way of historical reconstructions. They feel themselves in very real sense outsiders on our past and feel themselves shut out.” The criticism was aimed at Hofstadter and found its mark. Two years later, in our colloquium of 1964, upon completing a discussion of a Bridenbaugh monograph, Hofstadter asked whether we were familiar with his AHA address, and whether newcomers to America could write its history. This was the only time that he brought such stuff to the colloquium, and his remarks were mocking. He sniffed not only Yankee superciliousness, but the stink, however subtle, of anti-Semitism as well.26 Was Hofstadter overreacting to Bridenbaugh? Similarly, was he overreacting in his critique of Populism? Was he reading his own insecurities into Bridenbaugh and American history? Perhaps. Perhaps, too, his alienation as a radical Jewish intellectual invested him with insight, his sensitivity to the intolerant and illiberal in American history. Perhaps Hofstadter’s journey into the culture of the Jewish ghetto, whether in Buffalo or New York, whether squalid or gilded, is at the heart of the matter. Alfred Kazin, Daniel Bell, and James Shenton believed that Hofstadter struggled with his mixed identity. Hofstadter himself was direct and explicit. “I spent a lot of years acquiring a Jewish identity,” he told Richard Kostelanitz, “which is more cultural than religious . . . anyone who is part Jewish can only be a Jew.”27 When students in the late 1960s rebelled against the Vietnam War and the hypocrisies of the universities, Hofstadter nearly alone among prominent intellectuals refused to condemn them publically, even though he despised their tactics. He was shaken by the 1968 student takeover of the Columbia campus, and wrote to J.H. Plumb that the enemies of the university slept in its dormitories and attended its classes. The student radicals were disappointed in Hofstadter, yet he commanded their respect. After they trashed Hamilton Hall, he returned to his office and found a note. It read: “The forces of Liberation have, at great length, decided to spare your office (because you are not one of them).”28 Hofstadter had taken stands against the illiberal, intolerant, and irrational; he had supported fights for social justice, civil rights and racial equality, and for the integrity of the University. And he was never a court historian. He died at the age of 54, in 1970, of leukemia. He was the vanguard scholar in propounding the “consensus” interpretation of American history and in revising traditional views on populism, progressivism, and liberalism. He introduced concepts from social psychology to history—status anxiety, status revolt, psychic crisis, pseudo-­ conservative, paranoid style. He modified the unilinear, dualistic narrative of American history, stressing complexity, ambiguity, and irony. He insisted on rejecting sentimentality and hero worship, on questioning the received pieties and conventions.29 When John Lewis, leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and later a US Congressman, had his head bashed open by a state trooper in Selma in 1965, he was carrying a knapsack which contained Hofstadter’s iconoclastic The American Political

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Tradition, published 12 years earlier.30 With Hofstadter, David Brown reminds us, the Wasp and agrarian bias were out; the city, ethnic pluralism, criticism and modernity were in. Today, the genre of historical literature in which he worked, the national narrative and its elite, is seen as traditional and incomplete. It is being challenged and augmented by professional concerns for a larger picture, a transnational Atlantic or global history, and a deeper understanding of the roles of identity, race, class, gender, and locality in American culture. And with all that, the debate he initiated over Populism, its nature and legacy, has not abated. But we are all alerted now to be on guard, to keep our eyes open for the illiberal, intolerant, and bigoted in democratic mass movements. By the time of that colloquium in the 1964–5 academic year, Hofstadter was shifting toward a Burkean conservatism—which allowed him to defend the age of reform as an authentic historic tradition. It is unlikely that he would have joined the ranks of the neoconservatives. Nor had he forgotten when the old left was young. “So where are we and what do we stand for?” he had asked Harvey Swados. The answer, I propose, is suggested by Peter Gay, who dedicated one of his early books on the philosophes of the Enlightenment to Richard Hofstadter. It was entitled The Party of Humanity.31

Notes   1 Jeffrey Ostler, “The Rhetoric of Conspiracy and the Formation of Kansas Populism,” Agricultural History Society 69: 1 (Winter 1995), 2.   2 For background, see Eric Foner, “The Politics of History and Historians,” in Who Owns History? (New York: Hill and Wang, 2002), 3–46.   3 John D. Hicks, The Populist Revolt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1931), 422. For the historiography of Populism to the time of Hicks, see James Malin, “Notes on the Literature of Populism,” Kansas Historical Quarterly (February 1932), 160–4.   4 David Brown, Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 12.   5 Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (New York: Knopf, 1955), 18.   6 Ibid., 23–93; for quote, 78.   7 Ibid., 7.   8 Ibid., 94–130.   9 Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition (New York: Knopf, 1948), xxxvii. 10 See Hofstadter’s “The Pseudo Conservative Revolt” (1955), together with others making the linkage, in Daniel Bell (ed.), The Radical Right (New York: Anchor Books, 1964); also, Hofstadter, “Pseudo-Conservatism Revisited” (1965) in his The Paranoid Style in American Politics (New York: Vintage Books, 1967). 11 Theodor Adorno, The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950); in his section on the United States, Adorno coins the term and explains “pseudo-­ conservatism,” 675–6. 12 Ostler, “The Rhetoric of Conspiracy.” 13 Lawrence Goodwyn, Democratic Promise: The Populist Movement in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976); Charles Postel, The Populist Vision (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). 14 Postel, The Populist Vision, viii.

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15 Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998); Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (New York: Norton, 2009); Phillips-Fein, “Right On,” The Nation, September 28, 2009, 27–32. 16 Michael Kazin, “Hofstadter’s Lives: Political Culture and Temperament in the Work of an American Historian,” Reviews in American History 27:2 (1999), 334–48. 17 Robert Johnson, “Forum: Richard Hofstadter’s The Age of Reform After Fifty Years,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (April 2007), 128. 18 Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 339–41. 19 The information in the following sketch on Hofstadter is derived from Brown, Richard Hofstadter; Susan Strout Baker, Radical Beginnings—Richard Hofstadter in the 1930s (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985); the Hofstadter archives, City Honors High School, Buffalo, New York; and Mark Goldman, City on the Edge (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2007). 20 Baker, Radical Beginnings, 151. 21 C. Vann Woodward, “The Populist Heritage and the Intellectual,” in his The Burden of Southern History (New York: Vintage, 1960), 141–66. 22 Ibid., 166. 23 Hofstadter, The Age of Reform, 12. 24 John W. Burgess, Reminiscences of an American Scholar (New York: Columbia University Press, 1934). 25 For the Frankfurt School in the United States and its association with Columbia, see Thomas Wheatland, The Frankfurt School in Exile (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). 26 Carl Bridenbaugh, “The Great Mutation,” American Historical Review (January 1963), 317, 320, 322–3. By turning Hofstadter’s own insight on him, Michael Kazin shrewdly suggests that Hofstadter and his circle manifested a status anxiety of their own. “Such individuals were no less captives of ‘status strain’ than were the people who ridiculed them as ‘eggheads.’ ” See Kazin, “Hofstadter’s Lives,” 190–1. Christopher Lasch applies Hofstadter’s social anxiety thesis to the dissenting “liberals” of this period in his The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (New York: Norton, 1999), 412–75. 27 Richard Kostelanitz, Master Minds (New York: Macmillan, 1969), 168. Such was Hofstadter’s determination for himself, but it certainly was not at all a universal conclusion. The seminal Harvard historian Arthur Meier Schlesinger’s father was a Prussian Jew who immigrated to the United States in 1860 and married a Roman Catholic. Schlesinger himself married Elizabeth Bancroft, a Unitarian and descendant of historian George Bancroft, and their son, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., seemed free of such identity angst, comfortable as a gentile in a gentile world. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. was a friend of Hofstadter, but he sensed a difference between them that had nothing to do with religion but something to do with public perception as professional historians. “I am vaguely juxtaposed against Dick Hofstadter—the power-­loving stable mate of statesman against the pure, dispassionate, incorruptible scholar. There is something in this.” Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Journals 1952–2000 (New York: The Penguin Press, 2007), 447. For Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., see his In Retrospect (New York:Harcourt Brace, 1963). 28 Brown, Richard Hofstadter, 181. 29 See the 1989 Introduction by Christopher Lasch to Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition; also, Gary Marotta, review of Brown’s Richard Hofstadter in Afro-Americans in New York Life and History (July 2008), 85–9.

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30 John Lewis, Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999); for Hofstadter at the second Selma march, see John Hope Franklin, Mirror to America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 238. 31 For Peter Gay during this period, see Gary Marotta, “Peter Gay at Columbia: A Remembrance,” The Flora Levy Lecture in the Humanities, Vol. X (University of Southwestern Louisiana [now the University of Louisiana], 1994), 22–7.

8

The American Populist and Anti-Populist Legacy Charles Postel

A coalition of American farmer, labor, and middle-­class reform organizations forged a new political party in 1891. They called it the People’s Party, otherwise known as the Populist Party. Their effort proved to be the most successful third party movement in the United States since prior to the Civil War. Although the Populists had lost their organized strength by the end of the 1890s, their ideological and political legacy cast a long shadow across the twentieth century. The brief Populist moment brought major innovations in American politics and political thinking, and across the ensuing decades reformers inside and outside of the Democratic and Republican Parties absorbed much of the Populist program and outlook. Accordingly, Populism has been a significant current in the history of American political thought. The 1890s Populists drew from multiple reform impulses, from women’s suffragists to urban supporters of Henry George’s Single Tax. But at its core it represented interest-­ based and class-­based farmer-­labor politics. In comparative transatlantic terms, the Populist vision of a “cooperative commonwealth,” to be realized by way of majoritarian electoral democracy, shared ideological terrain with other labor and evolutionary socialist movements. By the turn of the century, as the People’s Party collapsed, ex-Populists forged a key constituency of the Socialist Party. Other ex-Populists helped to consolidate factions that pursued labor, farmer, and other reform agendas within both the Democratic and Republican Parties. These farmer-­labor and social-­democratic traditions played a critical role in early twentieth-century state building and in the development of the New Deal, and they continued to be felt in Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and beyond. Populist ideology, however, was always just one among the multiple currents of American political thought. It contested the ideological terrain along with various types of radicalism, liberalism, and nationalism. Most importantly, it confronted a militant strain of conservatism. Historians often place the birth of modern conservatism in the context of the resistance to the New Deal or the strains of the Cold War and civil rights,1 but it has an earlier ancestry and a striking resemblance to the reactionary response of wealth and power to the late nineteenth-century Populist challenge. Examining this anti-Populist aspect of the conservative legacy provides insights into later conservative mobilizations, including episodes when conservatives have used the techniques of mass agitation and mobilization developed by Populists and similar movements for right-­wing causes. As Geoff Eley explains, prior to 1914 German radical

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nationalism confronted social democracy on “its own ground.”2 Similarly, American conservatives seized Populist weapons to defeat Populism. But here it must be stressed that the fact that Populism and conservatism interacted does not suggest a blurring of distinctions. The American conservative movement has always been on a trajectory that is quite distinct from the Populist movement of the 1890s, or the various political currents that flowed from that movement. Conservative movements, of course, take multiple forms covering a wide swath of ideological ground. It just so happens that conservative movements often identify themselves as such, and proudly so, which makes for a good starting point for answering the question of what is and what is not a conservative movement. Yet there are significant distinctions within self-­identified conservative political thought. Edmund Burke, for example, had a more reserved sensibility, or at least language, than the root-­and-branch militancy of Joseph McCarthy; the present-­day conservatives of German Christian Democracy, obviously, speak in a different style than American Tea Party conservatives. Yet, as Corey Robin warns, it would be a mistake to overstate such distinctions and fail to recognize a common conservative bottom line in the defense of economic, gender, and racial hierarchies.3 In the American historical context, conservative movements arose against the menace of slave abolition, labor radicalism, women’s rights, and African-American civil rights. Conservative movements also emerged in response to populism. Conservative anti-­populism has been called into existence by populist movements or developments that appear to offer the potential for such movements. What then is a populist movement? This is a more perplexing question. Political movements often avoid self-­identification as populist, partly because of the term’s pejorative connotations. Yet, it is applied promiscuously by journalists and a section of scholarly analysts who have the tag at the ready for political phenomena that either escape easy labels or whose easy labels somehow have less cachet than populism seems to have. As a result, populism serves as a catchall. The term is used to suggest characteristics such as nationalistic, corporatist, and perhaps irrational and authoritarian power as in various movements and regimes in Latin America. In European contexts it often implies demagogic, intolerant, and self-­destructive politics. And in the United States, populism serves as short hand for hostility to elite and centralized power, whether that power rests in the state, the economy, or the culture. The meaning of the term populism often implies some mix of all of these. It is a highly contingent, unstable, malleable, and multifaceted notion, with different elements gaining more or less salience from one region and one time frame to the next. The first usage of the term populist was as a quirky nickname for the American People’s Party, whose supporters were commonly known as either Populists, or simply Pops.4 Soon thereafter the name was applied to the narodnik movement in Tsarist Russia. What connected these two contemporaneous yet profoundly different phenomena? As Margaret Canovan notes in her classification of populist types, the most important connection between the two was the quite accidental translation of the Russian word narodnik to the newly invented English word populist.5 Indeed, because the concept of populism is so flexible and contingent, it has little value outside of specifically defined meanings in specific places and moments. The Populist movement of the 1890s in the United States represents one such place and moment.

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The People’s Party represented a new type of political formation. Traditionally, American political parties drew their strength as mechanisms for capturing political office and distributing the spoils. The People’s Party, by contrast, formed as a “Confederation of Industrial Organizations,” and rested on the strength of farmer and labor associations. The most important of these were Farmers’ Alliances and related farm organizations that had spread their networks from coast to coast.6 Industrial unions among coal miners and railroad employees also played a major role, and in several Midwestern and Rocky Mountain states the People’s Party was principally a labor movement.7 The Populist confederation also enrolled tax and currency reformers, women’s rights advocates, and a number of other mainly urban and middle class constituencies. The politics of interest lay at the core of this coalition. Charles Macune, the ideological architect of the National Farmers’ Alliance and Industrial Union, the most powerful of the Populist groups, explicitly rejected the physiocratic notion that farmers’ claims derived from some primordial relationship to the land. Rather, he argued, agriculture was a modern business interest, and like every other such interest must organize on business principles.8 Although Macune himself did not join the People’s Party, the majority of his followers did, and they went into politics with other “industrial interests” in the pursuit of interest-­based goals. In the process, they facilitated major innovations in American politics. The Populists placed on the national political agenda redistributive politics by way of an aggressive expansion of federal power and bureaucracy. The Omaha Platform of 1892 was the Populists’ most celebrated statement of principles, and reflected the aspirations of its constituencies for reordering and rationalizing the national political economy.9 The Populists sought to improve the market leverage of agriculture, to strengthen the negotiating position of labor, and to address a growing crisis of economic inequality. Towards these objectives they articulated four major Populist demands: 1) federal farm subsidies by way of the so-­called Subtreasury System, a nationalized system of credit and marketing; 2) a flexible national currency to meet the needs of agricultural markets, provide relief for indebted farmers, and economic stimulus; 3) public ownership of railroads, telecommunications, banking, and other “natural monopolies”; and 4) a progressive income tax to redistribute wealth and to finance public education, universities, research, infrastructure, and the expanded capacities of state regulation. Never before had an American political movement so forcefully pushed such state-­centered reforms into national politics. In the ensuing decades, these Populist demands served as building blocks of the modern regulatory state. The other major innovation had to do with how the Populists sought to realize their goals. They sought a means to ensure a democratic or majoritarian control over the energized and expanded national state power that they sought to build. In place of the personalistic politics of patronage and influence peddling, the Populists imagined an impersonal and equitable politics. The Populist demands for the direct election of US senators, an expansion of the civil service, the Australian (secret) ballot, and a more rationalized electoral process provided much of the impetus for the political reforms of the Progressive Era. Moreover, in place of the old partisan tactics based on emotional and sectional appeals, fireworks, torchlight parades, and free liquor, the Populists

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envisioned a new politics based on mass adult education. This was a corollary to their belief in politics as an extension of business-­like interests. If through mass education farmers, miners, and other “industrial interests” better understood the workings of political economy, they could make that political economy work better for themselves. Hence the Populist watchword: “Knowledge is Power.”10 The Populist movement built a national network for the publication and circulation of inexpensive educational materials, and had a lecture circuit that resembled the educational Chautauqua system more than a traditional political campaign.11 Both in terms of goals and means, the Populists of the 1890s represented what in the European context might have resembled a type of reformist and evolutionary social democracy. They envisaged a rationalized mixed economy, with a larger role played by both state-­owned and cooperative industries than was the case in the American corporate model. They sought to undermine the position of grain dealers, merchants, and other middlemen, not through revolutionary expropriation, but through the construction of large-­scale, centralized, and bureaucratic cooperative enterprises. They sought a more activist state in the spheres of education, infrastructure, regulation, and economic development, which was to be accomplished by combining mass education with the majoritarian democracy of the ballot box. All of this might sound tame enough. However, it would be difficult to overstate the trauma that Populism spread among the upper class and a section of the middle classes. In 1896, Theodore Roosevelt, serving at the time as the commissioner of the New York Police Department, reportedly suggested that the best solution to the Populist threat was to line the Populists “against a wall to be shot.” He would later deny the report about firing squads, but his language remained no less violent. That same year, William Jennings Bryan, a reform Democrat ran for President with Populist support. Roosevelt viewed the Populist-Democrats as “a gathering of social unrest,” “anarchy,” “socialism,” and those “who want to strike down the well-­to-do.” As such, they represented an existential threat, “fundamentally an attack on civilization; an appeal to the torch.”12 Roosevelt was hardly alone in his apocalyptic assessment of the Populist threat. Part of the problem was class. The Populist mobilization threatened the profits and power of the railroad and bank corporations, as well as a large number of merchants and brokers. More broadly, it threatened the rigid social ordering of manual and intellectual labor. The independent political and educational mobilization of so many people with callused hands and sunburned necks proved a frightening development to many academics, journalists, and other mainly urban dwellers that enjoyed the status and privileges of their desk-­bound pursuits. A wave of labor action culminating in the spring and summer of 1894 compounded upper and middle class fears: the unemployed marched to Washington; the bituminous coal miners went on strike; and the railroad workers’ boycott of Pullman cars paralyzed much of the country’s railroads. Significantly, prominent supporters of the People’s Party—Jacob Coxey, John McBride, and Eugene Debs—led all three of these frightening class developments.13 Race also played a part. Post-Civil Rights era historians, following the lead of C. Vann Woodward, have overstated the extent to which Populism represented a bi-­racial challenge to the white power structure in the South.14 White Populists tended to be no less committed to white supremacy than were white Democrats (and many

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white Republicans).15 Yet, the political competition between white Democrats and white Populists pried open possibilities for African-American political action in Texas, Alabama, Georgia, and elsewhere. Most strikingly, in North Carolina white Populists and mainly black Republicans formed a fusion government that built schools and took other measures sought by the African-American community and that were perceived as a threat to white power.16 Then there was the “woman question,” as it was called. The Farmers’ Alliances and other Populist organizations enrolled hundreds of thousands of women members in what was then the largest mobilization of women in American history. Populist women sought educational and employment opportunities, and many demanded property rights, the right to divorce, and the right to vote.17 A highly effective cadre of women lecturers and editors drove much of the Populist educational machinery. This included Mary Elizabeth Lease, the orator who reportedly told Kansas farmers to “raise less corn and more hell.” Conservative critics ridiculed Lease as unfeminine, awkward, and out of place, reflecting broader conservative fears of Populist women. Harpers’ Weekly reported that women were “a disturbing and uncertain element” in the Populist West.18 To the extent that Populism challenged the existing hierarchies, it loomed as a grisly specter in the conservative imagination. Looking at the Populists in the light of the transatlantic phantoms of anarchism and communism, political, corporate, and academic elites saw at work the American version of blood-­soaked Communards and fanatical agrarians wielding sharpened pitchforks. Such judgments had little or nothing to do with living and breathing Populists. They nonetheless provided a good measure of the prejudices and narrow-­mindedness that guided the thinking of sections of the wealthy and intellectual classes. Such prejudices had deep roots, and these and related critiques of Populism have been recurrent themes in American intellectual life. In fact, one of Populism’s most significant intellectual legacies has little to do with the political experience of the 1890s. Rather, it has to do with the efforts of mid-­ twentieth-century American intellectuals to reevaluate the Populists in light of the experience of Nazism in Europe and right-­wing intolerance in Cold War America. Their working hypothesis was that the Populism of the 1890s, as an unreasoned mass movement, represented an American version of intolerant mass politics or proto-­ fascism. This search for the roots of American fascism was an interdisciplinary project among social scientists, with the Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter being its most effective practitioner. Hofstadter’s The Age of Reform won the 1955 Pulitzer Prize and enjoyed (and continues to enjoy) wide influence.19 Hofstadter conducted little research on the Populist movement itself, and as such his analysis of Populism was largely intuitive. Some of his insights were quite discerning, especially regarding the commercial character of farming in the United States, and the business nature, or what Hofstadter called the “hard-­headed” side, of farmer motivations. But he could be wide of the mark. The worst of it was when Hofstadter ranged into psychological analysis. Here he diagnosed Populist delusion, paranoia, and fanaticism. For Hofstadter, this “soft-­headed” Populism correlated to a feminized irrationality, in contrast to a manly realism. In short, just as they had set out to demonstrate, Hofstadter and his colleagues discovered that the farmer-­labor Populism of the 1890s was the American fountainhead of the politics of unreason, intolerance, and anti-Semitism.

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Two or three generations after the old Populism had left the political stage, Hofstadter explained, its tradition “turned sour,” resulting in the “illiberal and ill-­tempered” and “cranky-­pseudo-conservatism” of 1950s McCarthyism.20 Hofstadter’s claims about the “souring process” and Populist irrationality, intolerance, and anti-Semitism drew a forceful rebuttal. C. Vann Woodward, Walter Nugent, Norman Pollack, and other historians who had actually spent time in the archives studying the Populist record, demonstrated that such claims were overwrought, hyperbolic, and ahistorical.21 The political scientist Michael Rogin’s examination of voting patterns revealed the absence of demographic or political connections between the Populists of the 1890s and the conservative supporters of Joseph McCarthy more than half a century later.22 By the end of the 1960s, the so-­called Hofstadter thesis was in tatters. Later generations of scholars have diligently covered the same terrain from a wide variety of perspectives and have come up with similar conclusions about the weaknesses in Hofstadter’s claims. Yet, mainly outside of the historical profession, the Hofstadter thesis has maintained its influence on political analysis. The Age of Reform has been described as “the most influential book ever published on the history of twentieth-­century America.”23 To this day, it informs the views of a number of intellectuals who admire its elegant style and embrace an argument that reinforces their own notions about the supposed deficiencies in the mentality of rural and working people. It must be stressed here that the weaknesses in the Hofstadter thesis have to do with exaggerations. Populism was a complex and sprawling social movement that mobilized millions of people. As in any such movement of that scope, it contained strands of unreasoned, conspiratorial, authoritarian, and intolerant political thought.24 That being said, what made Populism significant as an historical moment of innovation and creativity was precisely its clear-­eyed interest-­based politics, the high level of its educational campaign, and its inclusive and tolerant appeal. This reality explains why so many scholars have invested so much intellectual energy in demonstrating the error in Hofstadter’s claims, because such claims not only create a false portrait of the farmer-­ labor Populists, they also make a hash of understanding the historical origins of American politics of unreason and intolerance. The nineteenth century was marked by the relentless brutality of white supremacy. Scholars have debated the extent to which white Populists were invested in white power. But the one point where they agree is that the Democratic Party was the preeminent party of white supremacy, and it was the Democratic Party that quite appropriately made that claim more than a half-century before the People’s Party came into existence. As for anti-Asian bigotry, during the depression of the 1870s, the Workingmen’s Party in California made Chinese immigrants the scapegoats for high unemployment, and mobilized to demand Chinese exclusion laws.25 Like many other Americans, Populists tended to be in favor of such laws. But in a striking contrast with the 1870s, during the depression of the 1890s most Populists refrained from scapegoating any racial or ethnic group and instead placed demands on the federal government for jobs and economic stimulus.26 Similarly, the nineteenth century was littered with political movements driven by fears of Papist, Masonic, and other conspiratorial plots, and the Republican Party made exploiting such fears high political

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art and mobilized generations of voters on the basis of anti-Catholic appeals. Again, what stands out about the People’s Party in this history was the relative absence of this type of political exploitation of religious prejudice. But what of the validity of Hofstadter’s claim regarding Populist anti-Semitism? In widely circulated Populist writings, “Shylock” stood in for “banker” in what were antiSemitic literary metaphors about the role of Jews in the economy. Such literary expressions, however, as Hofstadter himself pointed out, were “a mode of expression,” and were not aimed at actual Jews. This distinction is significant because, contrary to Hofstadter’s claim, Jewish merchants and storekeepers were often very much a presence in the farm towns of Populist country.27 Although Populist farmers tended to view the merchant and storekeeper as a competing business interest, and although a similar competition in Germany, for example, led some German farm reformers to stigmatize “brokers and Jews” as the “enemy,”28 it is striking that such stigmatization, with the rarest exceptions, was not a feature of the Populist agitation. Indeed, the People’s Party claimed to recognize no distinctions based on religion or creed. Part of this can be explained by the influence of Populist activists—from Clarence Darrow to Charlotte Perkins Gilman—who were attracted to the cosmopolitan and bohemian subcultures of Chicago, Denver, San Francisco, and other mainly western cities. In San Francisco, a coalition involving such activists successfully made the Jewish mining engineer Adolph Sutro the Populist mayor of the city.29 In Omaha, Nebraska, Edward Rosewater, leading Republican, founder of the Omaha Bee, and the most prominent Jewish person in the state, supported the Populist candidate for governor because the Republican candidate had the backing of the anti-Catholic bigots of the American Protective Association.30 In remote rural places, too, Populists tended to both preach and practice religious tolerance. In the dusty cotton districts of central Texas, Samuel Ealy Johnson, the grandfather of Lyndon Baines Johnson, was a reluctant farmer and a bona fide People’s Party politician who taught his family about human brotherhood and the importance of including Jews within that brotherhood. The lessons were not lost on his grandson. As a freshman congressman in 1938 and 1939, Johnson was one of the few people in Washington to use his political leverage to help Jewish refugees from Germany and Poland circumvent America’s restrictive immigration laws.31 In terms of religious open-­mindedness, the Johnsons of Texas represented a significant strand of the Populist legacy. But, there were exceptions to this pattern, such as Thomas Watson of Georgia. During his years as a Populist politician, Watson sounded the same tolerant themes as most Populists. But with the demise of the People’s Party, Watson emerged as a strident Negrophobe and anti-Semite.32 To weigh the significance of Watson’s evolution, it needs to be kept in mind that during the Populist years a virulent and committed anti-Semitism was brewing among the urban elites groomed in the most exclusive universities, belonging to the most fashionable clubs, and residing in the finest urban districts. It was this environment that produced the career of Madison Grant, America’s pioneer of virulent anti-Semitic advocacy, and the architect of the anti-Semitic and anti-­immigrant Immigration Acts (the same ones that Lyndon Johnson defied). An American counterpart to prewar German radical nationalism, Grant authored The Passing of the Great Race, a 1916 treatise on the struggle for survival of the “Nordic race” against the Jewish and other “lower

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races”—a work that was praised by Adolf Hitler and embraced by a section of American academic, political, and business elites. True, the former Populist Watson would later emerge as a bigot. But the career of Madison Grant—graduate of Yale and Columbia Law, friend of Theodore Roosevelt, and life-­long resident of New York City—poses serious questions of proportionality regarding Hofstadter’s claim about the rural Populist roots of American anti-Semitism and intolerance.33 It also must be asked: how typical was Tom Watson’s post-Populist evolution? After the demise of the People’s Party a significant number of former Populists followed Eugene Debs into the Socialist Party. This Populist migration made Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas, and other rural states strongholds of the socialist movement.34 As a result, American socialism represented an extraordinary political marriage of rural former Populists, mainly with Anglo and Protestant cultural backgrounds, and the socialist language federations of mainly Eastern and Southern European immigrants, including Jewish immigrants. This marriage represents a Populist legacy that cannot be easily explained within Hofstadter’s framework. Meanwhile, the majority of former Populists migrated to the reform wings of the Democratic and Republican Parties. In doing so they made up key constituencies of the progressive coalitions—often prodded or supported by socialists—that facilitated Progressive Era developments in state building, from the graduated income tax, to the regulation of banking and commerce, to the direct election of senators. As the political scientist Elizabeth Sanders has demonstrated, the successes of Progressive Era reforms were attributable to their deep roots in the Populist farmer-­labor movements of the previous decades.35 This legacy, in terms of both political demographics and ideological bent, also played a significant role in the forging of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Again in the case of Lyndon Johnson, he was viewed by members of FDR’s administration as “the best New Dealer from Texas.”36 Like his Populist ancestors, he believed in extending the scope of the federal bureaucracy as a means of economic and social justice. In this regard, Johnson’s “Great Society” programs of the 1960s might be understood as having ideological roots in the original Populism of Johnson’s grandfather. Although most white Populists of the 1890s believed in white nationalism, they expressed a wide array of views when it came to whether or not African Americans should be granted civil and political rights. This left a mixed and often contradictory legacy. Of course, it was Lyndon Johnson who signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of the following year. Most other southern Democrats with Populist roots were less sympathetic to black rights. Yet, with some exceptions, it tended to be the Populists’ old political enemies, the Democrats, who formed the front ranks of the racial demagogues. Here the example of Alabama’s Democratic governor George Wallace carries some telling ironies. Wallace is often mentioned as an example of “southern Populism,” although unlike his political foe Lyndon Johnson and other southern politicians he had no discernable connections to historical Populism. Nonetheless, in his early career, Wallace aligned with the reform wing of the Democratic Party in Alabama, that is the wing that embraced the Populist lessons that the federal government had a role to play in building roads, schools, and colleges, and building dams for rural electrification. A more conservative college friend derided Wallace as “a

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genuine Franklin Roosevelt socialist.”37 In his 1968 presidential campaign, Wallace touted his role in expanding government outlays for the disabled and the elderly, and for raising salaries and pensions in the public sector.38 Perhaps, in an indirect way Wallace, too, might be regarded as part of a Populist legacy that had been diluted and dispersed across the twentieth century. At the same time, it would be difficult to detect what was distinctly “southern Populist” rather than “southern Democratic” about Wallace’s racial politics. He started his political career as a self-­styled “moderate” on race relations until, like so many southern Democrats that preceded him, he later discovered the political efficacy of venomous race baiting. In the 1960s, this led Wallace to forge a political alliance with the hard-­right conservative wing of the Republican Party in a joint struggle against black civil rights. But the alliance proved unstable. To the extent that he accepted much of the New Deal and the social contract that it implied, Wallace was never able to make a confortable ideological home within the conservative movement of Robert Welch, Barry Goldwater, and William Buckley, Jr.39 The roots of modern conservatism can be traced back to the Populist epoch, but not in the way that Hofstadter and his colleagues suggested. Hofstadter employed the methods of mass psychology to analyze what he perceived as the Populist fevers surrounding currency reform and anti-­monopoly. But such an analysis misses just how fevered the conservative opponents of Populism were in their ideological commitments. In the late nineteenth century, conservative thought hardened and fastened on three interrelated propositions about the political economy: so-­called laissez-­faire, the freedom of contract, and hard money. For academic and corporate elites, this holy trinity of anti-populist ideas stirred deep passions. In the face of farmer-­labor demands for regulation of railroad rates, graduated income taxes, and other adjustments in the political economy, conservative thinkers such as William Graham Sumner at Yale erected a doctrine that defined such adjustments as violations of natural and immutable economic laws.40 They referred to their doctrine as laissez-­faire, arguing that the private corporate economy must be free of governmental interference if it were to run along its natural and therefore God-­given course. Reality, including massive interventions by the federal government on behalf of corporations—protective tariffs, railroad subsidies, bank charters, court action, and so forth—rarely intruded on this ideological fantasy.41 The associated doctrine of the so-­called freedom of contract was the conservative response to farmer-­labor demands for legislation to establish arbitration boards, shorter workdays, and restrictions on child labor. Again, conservatives erected freedom of contract as a brittle dogma, without regard to either America’s long history of regulatory legislation or the realities of employer–employee relations. The farmer-­labor demands for currency reform brought forth the most fevered conservative response of all. During the post-Civil War decades, a deflationary cycle gripped the American economy, squeezing farmers and other debtors, stalling investment, and pushing industry into recurrent slumps. The Populists and other reformers argued that the channels of commerce required a more flexible currency, based on paper, silver, or a combination of the two, as a means to aid distressed farmers and stimulate the economy. Despite a tendency to employ conspiratorial language when discussing the role of Wall Street and the banking corporations, the Populists had a relatively sophisticated understanding of the currency and a relatively clear-­headed

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interest-­based approach to the problem. Relatively is the operative word here, as Populist soft-­money arguments are best understood when compared to the conservative response. Business, political, and academic conservatives were known as Gold Bugs because they were gold fetishists. They convinced themselves that this particular metal represented a moral, naturally ordered, and superior civilization. Professor of economics Edwin Seligman at Columbia wrote that silver coinage was a “suicidal mania,” that would “plunge the country into disaster, the momentous evils of which can be only faintly imagined.”42 Harvard economist Francis Amasa Walker warned that paper money would weaken the power of fathers and husbands and result in “effeminacy.” Hard money was a product of natural evolution, according to Walker, as “the better,” that is gold, has “gradually crowded the worse out of existence.”43 Populist silver was nothing short of a diabolic conspiracy to reduce the “highest civilization” to the level of “pagan Asiatics.”44 This is how the better people talked, and how learned professors wrote. These were also highly charged ideological commitments that fed the polarized politics of the Gilded Age. The polarization came to a head in the presidential elections of 1896. On the Democratic side stood William Jennings Bryan, a young congressman from Nebraska. Although Bryan himself was never a Populist, he had made alliances with Populists, and the People’s Party endorsed his candidacy because he championed soft money and other reforms. On the Republican side stood William McKinley. As the governor of Ohio, a swing state, McKinley knew how to split the difference on the political issues. He was a strong supporter of business and the tariff, and also said favorable things about labor arbitration and union rights. He was for hard money, and also sympathized with soft money, too. But when it came to running for president, he adopted conservative Gold Bug positions, with the conservative political and corporate elites investing their cash and their hopes in the McKinley campaign. The Republican ticket represented Wall Street’s gold standard against Populist soft money, and corporate regressive tariffs against Populist graduated income taxes. But much more was at stake than monetary and fiscal policy. For Mark Hanna, a coal and steel industrialist and McKinley’s close friend and campaign manager, the danger resided in the “communistic spirit” that sustained Bryan’s campaign. For the journalist William Allen White, Bryan himself was “an incarnation of demagogy, the apotheosis of riot, destruction, and carnage.”45 By such measures, the anti-Bryan election campaign might be understood as the first conservative anti-­populist political mobilization at the national level. The McKinley campaign made special efforts to appeal to the American worker. Gold Bugs argued that defending the gold standard was not about the profits of bankers and financiers, but defending honest wages for honest work. The conservative political economy not only conformed to supposedly natural law, but would also provide a “full dinner pail” for those who labored in workshop and mine. Such marked appeals to producers and laborers might be explained by the competition, given that Bryan and the Democrats had their own such appeals. But there is a simpler and more direct explanation: virtually all American political campaigns have required such things. The necessity of capturing a majority of votes in a winner-­take-all election has driven political campaigning since the advent of universal male suffrage. Such a

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majority has provided the essential legitimacy of political power. Accordingly, as Ronald Formisano argues, notions of people’s sovereignty and claims to express the will of the people have been intimately related to insurgent popular movements across the political spectrum from right to left.46 Indeed, such claims have not been restricted to outside challengers, but have been a universal of American politics. At least since the days of Andrew Jackson, political conflicts—at least those that have made it into the electoral arena—have been marked by appeals to the common voter: variously known as the plain people, the producers, the laboring man, the forgotten man, the silent majority, the middle class, or some variation of the same. In fact, an organic link with this imagined people has been a requirement of American politics. In the nineteenth century, to prove their popular bona fides, political contenders would acquire a taste for hard cider and make claims about their humble log cabin origins. In more recent years, candidates have posed for the cameras as they chop brush on a ranch, drive a pickup truck, play basketball, or shoot various animals. Moreover, in a corollary to this appeal to the people, political campaigns—of whatever stripe—have usually involved mobilizing voters to unseat real or imagined oppressive, illegitimate, or otherwise baneful centers of power: the monster bank, the slave power, the monopolists, the economic royalists, the federal bureaucrats, or, as in the 1896 elections, the gold bondholders and the silver mining interest. These deeply rooted features of American political practice are at the heart of Michael Kazin’s argument about the historic continuity of a populist language of persuasion.47 However, it is important to keep in mind that this language was by no means an innovation of the People’s Party of the 1890s. To the contrary, this language preceded the Populists by several generations. Moreover, unlike many campaigns that preceded it, Populism tended to emphasize an interest-­based “business politics,” and downplay emotional appeals and simplistic slogans. What was perhaps most innovative about Populist political practice was the insistence that politics should be rooted in mass education. In a typical People’s Party rally, farmers would stand out in the hot sun listening to a two-­hour discourse on the minutiae of markets, credit, infrastructure, or some other problem of political economy. The Populists’ political weapons of choice were cheaply published books and pamphlets on a wide range of economic, political, scientific, and historical topics. Much of the Populist educational campaign involved serious research and well-­reasoned argument although, as already mentioned, some of this literature bent in the direction of conspiracy (a fact that needs to be weighed next to the more extravagant demagogy of the conservatives).48 This Populist emphasis on mass education led to one of the great ironies of the 1896 election campaign, as the conservatives seized on what was a Populist innovation for their own ends. With corporate funding and the support of the urban press, Mark Hanna and the conservatives launched their own campaign of mass education in support of their anti-Populist platform of hard money and high tariffs. They produced a flood of inexpensive pamphlets and educational literature that swamped the network of reform publications supporting Bryan.49 Despite the inequity in resources, the political contest became an educational contest, as 1896 became “a campaign of study and analysis,” and “a search for economic and political truth.”50 The conservatives won the contest, at least in the vote-­rich Northeast and Midwest. But it proved an unstable victory.

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With McKinley’s assassination in September of 1901, the presidency fell into the hands of Teddy Roosevelt, who by this time was moving towards what was becoming the reform wing of the Republican Party. Conservative anti-­populism frayed under the pressures of the new twentieth-century political realities and the financial panic of 1907. The election of 1912 repudiated conservative doctrine, as three-­quarters of the voters cast their ballots for the progressive candidates, either Woodrow Wilson or Roosevelt, or for the socialist, Debs. From time to time the old dogmas would reassert themselves in their old, militant form. During the Great Depression, the corporate opposition to the New Deal, spearheaded by family members of the DuPont chemical empire and the Liberty League, tried and mainly failed to build a political force promising a return to conservative principles. During the early years of the Cold War, the modern conservative movement had more political success in this endeavor, as the likes of Robert Taft, Joseph McCarthy, and Barry Goldwater held sway over a right-­ wing faction of the Republican Party, and as Robert Welch and the John Birch Society mobilized a grass-roots social movement that sustained this faction.51 In recent years we have seen a new hardening of conservative thinking, and a resurrection of the holy trinity of laissez-­faire, freedom of contract, and hard money. The Supreme Court’s Citizens United (2010) decision overturned limits on corporate political spending, and endorsed notions of corporate laissez-­faire unrealized since the Gilded Age. The conservative argument for the 2011 Wisconsin law limiting public sector union rights was rooted in the old freedom of contract dogma. The parallels between early twenty-­first century conservative commitments and those that preceded the reforms of the Progressive Era are hardly accidental. Rather they reflect a distinct historical consciousness. As suggested by its name, the conservative Tea Party movement is all about history lessons, and one of its central lessons is that America fell from grace with the end of the Gilded Age. In 2010, Time magazine listed Glenn Beck, the conservative television and radio personality who helped launch the Tea Party movement, as one of the hundred most influential people in the world. Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin explained why: [Beck] has become America’s professor of common sense. . . . Consider his desire to teach Americans about the history of the progressive movement: he’s doing to progressive what Ronald Reagan did to liberal—explaining that it’s a damaged brand.52

In Beck’s telling, the Progressive movement introduced into American life pernicious and unconstitutional notions of social justice. The Federal Reserve Act regulating banking and providing for a more flexible currency, the progressive income tax, the direct election of senators, and the industrial regulations of the early twentieth century—all represent what Beck calls the “cancer” that has been gnawing at American freedom since the advent of the Progressive Era. Tea Party politicians, from Rick Perry, the governor of Texas, to the former leader of the Tea Party Caucus in Congress, Michele Bachman, have attested to this history.53 Whether in their critique of the campaign finance laws or the Federal Reserve, the conservative movement demands the repeal of the Progressive Era, and in so doing it has revived the most dogmatic of the Gilded Age laissez-faire arguments.

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Perhaps one of the most dogmatic of the conservative arguments pertains to the gold standard. A return to a fixed gold-­backed currency has emerged in recent years as the alpha and omega of conservative economic thought. Tea Party conservatives in Congress have been pushing to repeal the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 and restore a precious metal currency. Milton Friedman, the leading light of the monetarist school of conservative economics, dismissed gold advocates as “monetary monomaniacs.”54 Modern economies, according to Friedman and his fellow monetarists, had moved away from the inflexible strictures of gold for a reason. Significantly, the Tea Party conservatives of recent years have repudiated Friedman’s monetarism that sustained free-­market conservatives during the last decades of the twentieth century. Instead, they have favored a return to the specie theories of the late nineteenth century. Glenn Beck has sold gold coins on his broadcasts, while explaining that gold is the currency of natural law and the only salvation for the American economy. In the 2012 Republican primaries, all nine presidential candidates pledged to rein in the Federal Reserve in favor of hard money, and six candidates pledged to return to the gold standard. As a contributor to Forbes magazine breathlessly reported, the Tea Party has moved the gold standard “from the realm of mavericks and social dystopians to mainstream conservative, and even Republican presidential candidate, policy. The gold standard’s momentum is building fast.”55 This poses the question, why in the second decade of the twenty-­first century has the United States witnessed the rise of a movement dedicated to a specifically late nineteenth-century conservative ideology? In framing the question it needs to be kept in mind that this variation of conservatism is partly the enduring legacy of the Cold War era hard right. Robert Welch’s John Birch Society and similar conservative groups fell below the political radar after the prominent part they played in the Republican conservative resurgence of the early 1960s. But they continued to build up their ideological networks. Within this effort, the author Cleon Skousen played a key role. More than anyone else the notion that America lost its freedom with the advent of the Progressive Era is associated with Skousen’s name. It might be noted here that both Welch and Skousen portrayed themselves as men of high learning and social status. Welch was a corporate executive who earned a fortune in the candy business, while Skousen was a self-­styled FBI man and law enforcement expert, Mormon theologian, and constitutional scholar. Their vision of restoring America to its constitutional bedrock included the notion that men of knowledge and virtue, such as themselves, should hold the political reins. As the John Birch Society slogan puts it, “America is a republic, not a democracy.”56 But if the Cold War hard right has served as the transmission belt of Gilded Age conservative orthodoxy, its Tea Party-fueled resurgence must be understood in the context of a fevered response to what has been perceived as an existential political threat. As Barack Obama entered the White House, millions of Americans projected their hopes and fears onto his presidency. Since his early days in the Illinois legislature, Omaha has hewed the course as a moderate Democrat. Yet, progressives have fantasized that he would usher in a progressive revival in the spirit of Teddy or Franklin Roosevelt. And in the fevered conservative imagination, Obama represents the socialism of the radical wing of the Progressive tradition, and his administration represents the triple

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nightmare of regulation (banking, health care), redistributive taxes, and inflationary stimulus. It may be difficult to understand this perception, given the half-­hearted, parsimonious, and corporate-­friendly nature of Obama’s political agenda. But the power of the conservatives’ nightmare is real enough. Holding aloft the old anti-­ populist trinity of laissez-­faire, freedom of contract, and hard money, a section of corporate conservatives have launched an implacable political crusade. Playing the role of modern-­day Mark Hannas, the billionaires David and Charles Koch of Koch Industries, through Americans for Prosperity and other corporate lobbies, have poured their vast resources into political education and mobilization. Recognizing that the Obama campaign made use of the web to mobilize grass-roots support, the AFP and similar Tea Party groups conduct educational campaigns in the use of Twitter, Facebook, and other technologies to mobilize a mass response to the perceived Obama threat.57 Part of the success of the Tea Party conservatives is their promise of a return to prosperity—that by restoring conservative orthodoxy, Americans will have the twenty-­first century version of the “full dinner pail.” The uncanny historical parallels between the conservative resurgence of the 2010s and the conservative anti-­populism of the 1890s can partly be explained by the historical mindedness of the Tea Party movement. It has set out by design to resuscitate a pre-Progressive Era conservative orthodoxy. But by a number of measures the analogy breaks down. There are no good parallels, for example, with the unprecedented fact that Obama is the African-American son of an African immigrant with a Muslim name. Accordingly, the conservative nightmare is also a racial nightmare, as the Obama administration represents new demographic realities and dangers. Here there are important comparisons to be drawn with right-wing movements in other parts of the globe. The American Tea Party, for example, shares much of the xenophobic, antiMuslim, and racial commitments of European right-­wing movements. But more directly than the Tea Party Republicans, parties such as Marine Le Pen’s National Front in France and Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom in the Netherlands have been defined by such commitments. At the same time, Le Pen advocates what she describes as a “populiste” vision of strong state-­centered social policies, and Geert Wilders favors an eclectic mix of neoliberal and social-­democratic measures. As Cas Mudde points out, much of the European radical right embraces the notion of the “social market economy” that has evolved out of the post-Second World War social contract.58 Of course, shades of such politics can be found in the Tea Party movement as well. For example, during the debates over health care reform demonstrators showed up at Tea Party rallies with signs saying: “Keep Your Government Hands Off of My Medicare!” This slogan reflects the ambiguities produced by an ideological hostility to state provision and a political commitment to protect such provision for preferred constituencies.59 Nonetheless, the hostility of Tea Party conservatives to the notion of a social contract reflects an ideological divide separating them from much of European right-­wing populism. Moreover, the American right faces a specific enemy that has not confronted their European counterparts in quite the same way. Whereas Le Pen and Wilders have struggled to keep the infidel at the gates, Perry and Bachman have sought liberation from the infidel in power. From the Tea Party perspective, the presidency of Barack Obama represents an illegitimate usurpation and tyranny. This explains why the

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American right wing, perhaps even more than it usually has over the last half century, has been speaking in the name of an aggrieved, dispossessed, and persecuted people. Hence the Tea Party movement has promised a liberation struggle to “Take Back Our Country!” In many ways, this is the historical language of political combat in the United States. But it also reflects a new context with the election of the nation’s first African-American president. In 1860, the white conservatives rose in rebellion against the election of the so-­ called “black Republican” Abraham Lincoln because they believed that the new president posed a danger to the institution of slavery and white power. In 2008, white conservatives mobilized in fear of the threat that the election of a black president posed to the racial order. In the conservative narrative, Obama’s victory was only made possible by his demagogic manipulation of voters and with the aid of massive voter fraud. In the story told by the Fox News television network and the conservative websites, Obama took the White House because his community-­organizing minions herded felons, undocumented immigrants, and other illegal voters to the polls. Here it should be noted that, much like the conservative-­driven disfranchisement laws at the end of the nineteenth century, a wave of legislation aimed at restricting voting rights among minority, poor, and young voters has been one of the signature measures realized by the Tea Party conservatives at the state level since the 2010 elections.60 Then as now, conservatives fear the excesses of democracy and the perceived manipulation of the “ignorant” vote. Indeed, this was the conservative verdict on Obama’s successful reelection: Obama consolidated power by means of redistributive economic policies to reward African American, Mexican American, and other non-­white, immigrant, and marginalized groups. All of this has the final aim, many Tea Party activists have convinced themselves, of “reparations” for slavery and colonialism, as Obama has sought to uproot the property and place of white Americans within the shifting terrain of the US and global political economy.61 This framing of the Obama presidency has been, of course, a conservative nightmare that has little connection to reality. But nightmares have been a distinct part of Tea Party anti-­populism. The scary visage that they have found so frightening perhaps is best understood in an international context. Much as the Haitian slave revolt pressed on the brains of nineteenth-century American conservatives, the modern conservative movement has raised its own mainly dark-­skinned bogeyman among international movements of the dispossessed. In this regard, the conservative hatred for the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez suggests another comparative vantage point for analyzing the recent conservative resurgence. The Tea Party News Network have warned that, “reminiscent of the Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez,” Obama threatens to muzzle the media.62 Like-­minded conservatives have predicted the Obama presidency will result in having “Hugo Chavez in America.”63 Meanwhile, conservative pundit Charles Krauthammer observed that Obama represents a “populism so crude that it channels not Teddy Roosevelt so much as Hugo Chavez”—intimating that Obama more resembles the demagogic Latin American caudillo then an American reformer.64 Chavez came to power in 1998 on a left-­wing platform sustained by the ballots of Venezuela’s Afro, Indian, and impoverished majority. In response, conservative Venezuelans launched a furious opposition, demonstrating in the streets, unleashing

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strike waves, and organizing coups d’état. The mass opposition was based among whiter and more prosperous Venezuelans, who feared the loss of their historic power and place within the political economy. Millionaires provided the funding and private television stations served as key tools of mobilization. The opposition was especially inflamed by Chavez’s successful efforts to extend the franchise among mainly non-­ white marginalized voters. In a similar fashion as their Tea Party counterparts, the anti-Chavez opposition viewed the extension of the democratic franchise as an expression of popular tyranny.65 Anti-­populist movements with similar profiles have been unleashed in several other Latin American countries against left-­wing administrations, including against Evo Morales in Bolivia, and to a lesser extent Rafael Correa in Ecuador. Thailand also provides a useful comparison. At least since the 1970s, Thailand has had a history of progressive or left-­wing political movements being confronted and even eclipsed by right-­wing movements employing their opponents’ methods of social mobilization.66 In 2001, Thaksin Shinawatra was elected prime minister, appealing to the country’s politicized peasantry and other rural and poor voters with promises of populist reforms such as low-­cost health care, better schools, and debt relief.67 In response, a conservative, explicitly anti-­populist movement took to the streets. A television personality and media mogul spurred the creation of the People’s Alliance for Democracy, or Yellow Shirts, that drew into its ranks much of the monarchist, militarist, and bureaucratic elite, as well as the urban upper and middle classes. Despite its name, the People’s Alliance for Democracy marched under the yellow color of the monarchy in support of Thailand’s most hierarchical institutions. Restricting the role of the democratic ballot was one of its key demands. At their height, Yellow Shirt street demonstrations overwhelmed the pro-Thaksin Red Shirt protesters, paralyzed the country, and sustained a right-­wing coup d’état. In the midst of the Yellow Shirt protests, Prajak Konkeerati, a Thai political scientist, observed: “This is a very weird situation where a reactionary movement is mobilizing people by using conservative ideology mixed with leftist language.”68 Much the same could be said about the noisy Tea Party movement protests in 2009 and 2010, voicing rage against the prospects that the Obama administration might dare to provide economic stimulus to aid the unemployed, debt relief for struggling homeowners, and health insurance protections to mainly low-­income workers. There may have been something weird about right-­wing activists marching in the streets and shouting down their enemies in militant defense of conservative and anti-­populist economic principles. But, weird does not mean outside of history. At least since the political polarization of the late 1890s, Populism and its conservative opposition have represented distinct trends in American political thought. And since that time, anti-­ populist mobilization has been a recurrent theme in the American political drama.

Notes   1 Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2009); Lisa McGirr,

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  9 10 11 12 13

14 15 16

17 18 19 20

Transformations of Populism in Europe and the Americas Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). See this volume, Chapter 2. Corey Robin, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Robert C. McMath, American Populism: A Social History, 1877–1898 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), 146. Margaret Canovan, Populism (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Press, 1981). Robert C. McMath, Populist Vanguard: A History of the Southern Farmers’ Alliance (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975). Michael Pierce, Striking with the Ballot: Ohio Labor and the Populist Party (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010); Robert W. Larson, Populism in the Mountain West (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986). National Economist (Washington, DC), March 30, 1889; Message of Acting President, C. W. Macune, Proceedings of Farmers’ State Alliance of Texas, Waco, January 1887, in Nelson A. Dunning, Farmers Alliance History and Agricultural Digest (Washington, DC), 49. “Omaha Platform, July 1892,” in John D. Hicks, The Populist Revolt: A History of the Farmers’ Alliance and the People’s Party (St. Paul: University of Minnesota, 1931), 439–44. Southern Mercury (Dallas), April 19, 1888; Marion K. Barthelme (ed.), Women in the Texas Populist Movement: Letters to the Southern Mercury (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1997), 190. Theodore R. Mitchell, Political Education in the Southern Farmers’ Alliance, 1887–1900 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987). TR to Henry Cabot Lodge, April 8, 1897, TR to Cecil Arthur Spring-Rice, October 18, 1896, TR to Albert Shaw, November 4, 1896, The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, ed. Elting E. Morison (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951). Carlos A. Schwantes, Coxey’s Army: An American Odyssey (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985); Michael Pierce, “The Populist President of the American Federation of Labor: The Career of John McBride, 1880–1895,” Labor History 41 (2000), 5–24; Nick Salvatore, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 156–64. C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951). Barton C. Shaw, The Wool-Hat Boys: Georgia’s Populist Party (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984). James M. Beeby, Revolt of the Tar Heels: The North Carolina Populist Movement, 1890–1901 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008); Deborah Beckel, Radical Reform: Interracial Politics in Post-Emancipation North Carolina (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011). Marion K. Barthelme, Women in the Texas Populist Movement: Letters to the Southern Mercury (College Station, TX: Texas A & M University Press, 1997). Rebecca Edwards, Angels in the Machinery: Gender in American Party Politics from the Civil War to the Progressive Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 115. Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (New York: Vintage, 1955), 20. Victor Ferkiss, “Populist Influences on American Fascism,” Western Political Quarterly 10 (1957), 350–7; Seymour Lipset and Earl Raab, The Politics of Unreason: Right-Wing

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22 23 24 25 26 27 28

29 30 31 32 33 34

35 36 37 38 39

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Extremism in America, 1790–1977 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 90–4. For an evaluation of the broader intellectual impact of the revisionist assessment made by Hofstadter et al., see Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 337–41. C. Vann Woodward, “The Populist Heritage and the Intellectual,” American Scholar 29: 1 (Winter 1959–60), 55–72; Walter T. K. Nugent, The Tolerant Populists: Kansas, Populism and Nativism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963); Norman Pollack, The Populist Response to Industrial America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962). Michael Paul Rogin, The Intellectuals and McCarthy: The Radical Specter (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1967). Alan Brinkley, “Richard Hofstadter’s the Age of Reform: A Reconsideration,” Reviews in American History 13: 3 (September 1985), 462–80. Jeffrey Oslter, “The Rhetoric of Conspiracy and the Formation of Kansas Populism,” Agricultural History 69 (1995), 1–27. Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971). Carlos Arnaldo Schwantes, Coxey’s Army: An American Odyssey (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985). Hofstadter, Age of Reform, 80. “Extracts from Translations of Letters of Herr Gustav Prenzel, the German Farmer Alluded to in Report of Commissioner to Europe,” Journal of Proceedings of the Tenth Session of the National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry (Louisville: John P. Morton & Co., 1876), 176. Charles Postel, The Populist Vision (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 207, 229. Robert W. Cherny, Populism, Progressivism, and the Transformation of Nebraska Politics, 1885–1915 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981), 44–46. Robert Dallek, Lone Star Rising: Lyndon Johnson and His Time (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 169–71. C. Vann Woodward, Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel (New York: Macmillan, 1938, reprint 1975), 431–50. Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1916); Jonathan Peter Spiro, Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant (Burlington: University of Vermont Press, 2009). Jim Bissett, Agrarian Socialism in America: Marx, Jefferson, and Jesus in the Oklahoma Countryside, 1904–1902 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999); James R. Green, Grass-­roots Socialism: Radical Movements in the Southwest, 1895–1943 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978). Elizabeth Sanders, Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). Dallek, Lone Star Rising, 170. Dan T. Carter, The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 48. “Stand Up for America,” George Wallace for President Campaign 1968 Campaign Brochure, http://www.4president.org/brochures/1968/wallace1968brochure.htm Rick Perlstein, Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), 276–7, 431, 469.

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40 William Graham Sumner, What Social Classes Owe to Each Other (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1883). 41 Brian Baloch, A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); R. Jeffrey Lustig, Corporate Liberalism: The Origins of Modern American Political Theory, 1890–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). 42 “The Silver Craze,” The Independent (New York), January 15, 1891. 43 Francis A. Walker, Money in its Relations to Trade and Industry (New York, 1889), and Money and Banking (Boston, 1902 [reprint of 1895 ed.]), cited in Michael O’Malley, “Free Silver and the Constitution of Man,” Common-Place 6:3 (April 2006), www. common-­place.org. 44 A Currency Primer (1896), cited in O’Malley, “Free Silver.” 45 R. Hal Williams, Realigning America: McKinley, Bryan, and the Remarkable Election of 1896 (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2010), 91, 128. 46 See this volume, Chapter 9. 47 Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion, An American History (New York: Basic, 1995). 48 Mitchell, Political Education; “Knowledge and Power: Machinery of Modern Education,” in Postel, The Populist Vision, 45–68. 49 Williams, Realigning America, 137–8. 50 Stanley L. Jones, The Presidential Election of 1896 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964), 332. 51 Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands, 3–25; Geoffrey Kabaservice, Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, from Eisenhower to the Tea Party (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002); Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001). 52 Sarah Palin, “Glenn Beck,” in “The 2010 TIME 100,” Time, April 29, 2010. 53 Rick Perry, “The Progressive Era: Remaking the Constitution with the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Amendments,” in Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America from Washington (New York: Little Brown and Company, 2010), 39. 54 Milton Friedman, “Bimetallism Revisited,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 4: 4 (Fall 1990), 85–104. 55 Ralph Benko, “The Gold Standard: A Litmus Test for GOP Candidates,” Forbes, July 5, 2011. 56 Charles Postel, “The Tea Party in Historical Perspective: A Conservative Response to a Crisis of Political Economy,” in Lawrence Rosenthal and Christine Trost (eds.), Steep: The Precipitous Rise of the Tea Party (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 23–46; Sean Wilentz, “Confounding Fathers, the Tea Party’s Cold War Roots,” The New Yorker, October 18, 2010. 57 Postel, “Tea Party in Historical Perspective.” 58 Cas Mudde, Populist Right Movements in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 124–5. The Tea Party in the United States mainly shuns the “populist” label because of, among other reasons, its historical connections to progressive Populism of the past, whereas the French National Front cautiously embraces the term “populiste” as an alternative to being a party of the “right” and the historical connections that has to National Socialism, “Marine Le Pen Qualifie le FN de ‘National-Populiste’,” RTL, October 16, 2013, http://www.rtl.fr/actu/politique/marine-­le-pen-­qualifie-le-­fn-de-­ national-populiste-7765689621 [accessed on July 26, 2015].

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59 Matthew Continetti, “Hands Off My Medicare,” The Weekly Standard, August 17, 2009, http://www.weeklystandard.com/weblogs/TWSFP/2009/08/hands_off_my_medicare_ 1.asp [accessed on July 26, 2015]. 60 Wender R. Weiser and Lawrence Norden, “Voting Law Changes in 2012,” Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, 2012. 61 Jonathan Cohn, “Stuff White People Like,” The New Republic, November 12, 2012; Dinesh D’Souza, Obama’s America: Unmaking the American Dream (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2012). 62 Jennifer Burke, “Tyranny Update: Barack Obama Muzzles the Media,” Tea Party News Network, July 8, 2014, http://www.tpnn.com/2014/07/08/tyranny-­update-barack-­ obama-muzzles-­the-media [accessed on July 26, 2015]. 63 Peter Ferrara, “Hugo Chavez In America: A 2nd Obama Term Means No Independent Judiciary,” Forbes, May 24, 2012, http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterferrara/2012/05/24/ hugo-­chavez-in-­amerca-a-2nd-­obama-term-­means-no-­indepdendent-judiciary/ [accessed on July 26, 2015]. 64 Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post, December 8, 2011. 65 Richard Gott, Hugo Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution (London: Verso, 2005), 217–68. Voting patterns after 1998 suggest that Chavez gained middle-class voters and retained the bitter opposition of the wealthy; see Noam Lupu, “Who Votes for ‘Chavismo’? Class Voting in Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela,” Latin American Research Review 45 (2010), 7–32. 66 Prajak Kongkirati, “Counter-­movements in Democratic Transition: Thai Right-Wing Movements After the 1973 Popular Uprising,” Asian Review 19 (2006), 101–34. 67 Andrew Walker, Thailand’s Political Peasants: Power in the Modern Rural Economy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012); Claudio Sopranzetti, Red Journeys: Inside the Thai Red-Shirt Movement (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012). Charles Keyes, “ ‘Cosmopolitan’ Villagers and Populist Democracy in Thailand,” South East Asia Research 20 (September 2012), 343–60. 68 Seth Mydans, “Power of the People Fights Democracy in Thai Protests,” NYT, September 11, 2008.

9

Populist Movements in US History: Progressive and Reactionary Ronald Formisano

In the history of the United States, populism has taken many forms, but in whatever guise it has constituted a central element of American political culture. When presidential candidates for an out-­of-power political party declare that they intend to “give the government back to the American people,” they are invoking a foundational fiction of the nation’s political system. But the people, in any realistic manner, never had the government, nor have actually ruled. The fiction of the people’s sovereignty is intimately related to the competition for power as well as struggles for the redress of grievances. During the early decades of the republic the tension between the fiction and the reality of governance gave rise to insurgencies and protest movements claiming to speak “for the people” against the misrule or oppression of wayward governing elites. Later on, that disconnect energized countless third parties and independent challenges to authority at all levels of government, national, state, and local. Populist expectations became endemic in electoral politics in large part because the leaders of the American Revolution appealed to natural rights and the people’s sovereignty as their source of authority. A constitution and government purportedly created by “We the People” explicitly invited its citizens to regard themselves as the rulers—though in fact they were not, nor would they be. Nor did the framers of a conservative constitution, distancing ordinary people from representation, as did the framework of several states, really want them to rule. Thus the belief that “the people rule” is a fiction, because while the people may theoretically constitute the source of legitimacy, they themselves do not rule, but elites rule through the mechanism of representative government in the name of the people. As Edmund Morgan pointed out, the concept of popular sovereignty originated during the preceding century and a half in England and the colonies as a “fiction” created by elites to justify government by the few and to limit the power of the king and enhance that of Parliament.1 Before Morgan, R.R. Palmer had observed that the flaw in the theory of popular sovereignty “was that the conditions under which it would work were seldom present. No people really starts de novo; some political institutions always already exist; there is never a tabula rasa or state of nature.” Echoing Palmer’s skepticism, Morgan asserted

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that the theory “rested on supposed acts of the people, both past and present, that were almost as difficult to examine as acts of God.”2 Thus the prevailing conviction, or “invention,” that “here the people rule” was inherently unstable, and made inevitable frequent challenges to authority during the early years of the republic and well into the nineteenth century. Repeated efforts to bring the reality into harmony with the fiction, or, to put it positively, the ideal, led to changes in the conduct of politics, notably by increasing participation in the public sphere. The expansion of the electorate (as well as activist cadres) owed much to populist rhetoric and the increasing respectability of “democracy,” a form of government that some of the constitution’s framers looked upon as degenerate. Latin American scholars particularly appreciate how populist rhetoric serves different purposes: to legitimize regimes in power, to mobilize popular support, to energize social movements or political parties.3 This chapter focuses, however, on the main types of populist movements in the United States. Populist insurgencies of the post-Revolutionary, early republican, and antebellum periods often defied law and judges and frightened elites, but were neither revolutionary nor even radical, including those that resorted to mobilizing under arms large numbers of aggrieved protesters. Nevertheless, many of their elite opponents exaggerated and misunderstood the threat posed by insurgents, who saw themselves as continuing popular actions that had been routine during the resistance to British authority. Conservatives accused the Massachusetts Regulators of 1786–7, for example, of aiming to set up a dictatorship that would disregard law and divide up property. But the backcountry insurgencies of that era, extending from Maine to the Carolinas, usually sought more modest goals: stopping foreclosures, or reversing tax and economic policies that favored urban merchants and money men while bearing heavily on landed property.4 Long after the Revolution the belief remained current among many ordinary citizens that the people’s sovereignty meant that the people possessed an inherent right to revise their fundamental laws. Thus constitutional arrangements could be challenged, and not necessarily through established procedures. Revolutionary-­era constitutional ideals, according to Christian G. Fritz, persisted long after adoption of the federal constitution and state constitutions. “Americans transformed the language of the revolutionaries’ right to ‘alter or abolish’ government into an ongoing, inherent right of the people, as sovereign, to revise their constitutions.” “Alter or abolish” provisions indeed found their way into several state constitutions well into the nineteenth century.5 Thus the American Revolution, made in the name of “the people,” left a powerful populist legacy. But many of the makers of the new American governments held constricted ideas of who constituted “the people.” Most gentlemen assumed that the few debated to decide policy, while the many would participate by granting consent. They took for granted the exclusion of women, most non-­whites, and even lower-­class white men. Most Revolutionary gentry and framers of constitutions thus espoused a populism without egalitarianism.6 Yet some state constitutions dared to broaden “the people” and moved to inclusiveness and limits on elected officials’ power. Gradually, participation in public

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affairs widened, particularly after the nascent Federalist and Jeffersonian Republican parties emerged and clashed over domestic and foreign policy. Historians have disagreed about the “radicalism” of the American Revolution in part because it released both populist and anti-­populist impulses.7 The populist strain in political culture often has been misunderstood, by commentators in the media as well as scholars. Social scientists have had difficulty agreeing on a definition of populism that works across nations and cultures. Some historians doubt the existence of an authentic populist tradition in the United States. Any individual leader from across the political spectrum, after all, can use populist rhetoric claiming to champion the people and not particular interests; and many have. Contemporary politics, indeed, is saturated with inauthentic populist posturing by Washington insiders, lobbyists, and candidates posing as ordinary folks while accepting large amounts of campaign money from corporations and special interests whose expectations of “access” to the candidate once elected are usually met. One persistent source of confusion regarding populist movements has been their diverse and mixed character. They have emerged in two major forms: progressive or reactionary, and have verged to the left or right, and sometimes have fused together both illiberal and progressive tendencies in an amalgam that defies traditional left-­ right categories. Thus populist movements need to be positioned on a spectrum running from progressive to reactionary, recognizing that ideal types are unlikely to be found in reality. Yet both progressive and reactionary movements share the conviction, in Margaret Canovan’s words, “that politics has escaped popular control. The message is, ‘this is our polity, in which we, the democratic sovereign, have a right to practice government by the people; but we have been shut out of power by corrupt politicians and an unrepresentative elite who betray our interests, ignore our opinions, and treat us with contempt.’ ”8 Progressive populist movements in the United States have shown a concern for fairness, justice, and equity, in the sense of equality of process in the competitive marketplace (rather than equality of outcome). Throughout the nineteenth century they tended to be egalitarian and suffused with an ethic of producerism that drew less energy from class conflict and more from opposition to powerful economic and political interests who tilted the playing field. Women generally fare better in progressive populism, which lifts women out of traditional gender roles and promotes at least an implicit feminism and a decidedly expanded role for women in the public sphere. In progressive movements, such as the Farmers’ Alliances of the 1880s, women have held leadership positions, and have influenced the movement’s agenda. Sometimes even reactionary populist movements generate women’s activism and changes in women’s traditional roles, though usually within an anti-­feminist climate.9 Progressive populist movements seek goals that are, in the manner of reformers, simultaneously restorationist and innovative. The People’s Party of the 1890s, for example, wanted to save farmers’ holdings and livelihoods and to restore farmers’ independence through the novel means of the subtreasury plan. In a similar vein Craig

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Calhoun has described the “radicalism of tradition” that animated many nineteenthcentury reform and labor movements.10 Reactionary populist movements, too, may be energized by the “radicalism of tradition”: this could describe in part, for example, the twenty-­first-century Tea Party’s rank and file. Reactionary movements may exhibit other features found also in their progressive counterparts: arising initially from the grass roots and possessing a popular base among ordinary people; they may build from the bottom up on communal or group subcultures. But reactionary movements differ in caring less about fairness and more about morality and authority, and often express culturally illiberal tendencies, opposing government efforts to insure equal opportunity or equal rights to groups they dislike or regard as “outsiders,” and not of the homeland people. Progressives are usually nationalists, but reactionary populisms tend to advocate a more exclusive form of civic nationalism. So they also tend to scapegoat and attack rhetorically as well as with policy prescriptions vulnerable groups whose ability to do harm the reactionaries magnify. Sometimes these aggressive postures are a displacement of anger against more powerful groups and extraneous conditions affecting everyone; and sometimes target groups do in fact bear some responsibility for the ills of which the protesters complain. Reactionary populist movements sometimes violate norms of civility essential to democratic discourse by denying opponents the ability to assemble or speak. They more easily (than progressive movements) slide into exaggerated fear regarding their perceived and real enemies, and focus on conspiracies (as do progressive movements at times) while some of them slide into the extreme belief, as Richard Hofstadter put it some time ago, that history itself is a conspiracy. It is not useful, however, as a first resort of analysis, to label populisms of whatever stripe “paranoid” or irrational, though this has often been the default response. Populist leaders tend to bluntness of speech and readily employ exaggeration and hyperbole. But mainstream politicians and parties routinely engage in rhetorical excess, yet seem to escape the glib psychological analysis visited upon populist movements. Presumably mainstream hyperbole is calculated and hypocritical while populist exaggerations are sincere and to be condemned? Both kinds of movements harbor distrust of conventional politicians and political parties, and, finally, the grass-roots supporters of both progressive and reactionary populisms believe that they have lost control over their destinies, and seek to regain a sense of efficacy and autonomy that they once experienced, or that the professions of politicians and media—the political culture itself—tells them they ought to possess. To repeat a key point: progressive and reactionary populist movements seldom exist as ideal types, but each may contain some element common to the other. Although media commentators routinely and scholars sometimes tend to homogenize populisms, historically they have reflected a mix of impulses extant in the social and political milieu. They often confound, again, simple left-­right categorization.11 Populist movements flourished throughout the nineteenth century in all areas of public life. In the decades after 1800, however, economic and technological developments created what historians have called a market revolution and a transportation revolution; these together created a new context for social movements,

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and a new kind of populist movement. Some populist movements would continue to use vigilante and other methods outside the law well into the twentieth century, but increasingly populist movements turned to the ballot box and politics. By the late 1830s, too, the political arena began to take on a recognizably modern form, with two major political parties emerging as institutions with a life of their own. Although two parties thereafter dominated most national and state elections, still, up to the Civil War independent movements and parties mounted frequent challenges to the Whigs and Democrats, and then after the war to the Republicans and Democrats. Third parties, sometimes spawned by populist movements that preceded them, usually described themselves as anti-­party movements of independent citizens who had broken free of the shackles of party conformity. Even after taking up the methods of political parties, they professed opposition to parties themselves, regarding politicians with scorn and their followers as deluded by partisan loyalty and heedless of the majority’s interests. Anti-­party rhetoric drew heavily on the populist impulse that set up a conflict between the powerful and oppressive few and the sovereign people.12 By the 1820s, populist rhetoric thoroughly suffused competition for electoral office. Aspirants not only couched their appeals to and for “the people,” but also styled themselves as truer representatives of ordinary folk than their opponents. Andrew Jackson, a Scots-Irish and western plantation owner, the first “outsider” president, won the election in 1828 in large part because of his popularity as a military hero, but also because he seized the populist mantle of the “common [white] man.” Jackson thus preceded a long line of political leaders successfully acting the part of a people’s champion while serving special interests (state bankers via the Bank War) and crony capitalists (him, his relatives, and friends via Indian Removal).13 Populist rhetoric, in any case, now suffused the political universe. Even as conservative a political leader as Senator Daniel Webster had declared, in his famous 1830 debate with South Carolina’s Robert Y. Hayne over the nature of the Union, that it was “the People’s Constitution, the People’s government, made for the People by the People; and answerable to the People.” In 1840 General William Henry Harrison, a sometime Indian fighter, parlayed his military reputation and alleged log cabin roots into a winning presidential campaign for the Whig Party. Harrison indeed had won battles against Indian and British foes, but he had been born on a Virginia plantation, a son of a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Nevertheless the Whig’s “Hard Cider and Log Cabin” campaign of 1840 became a historic marker of the triumph of populist posturing in elections. The ascension of populist rhetoric in electoral combat brought with it an anti-­ intellectual component that persists to the present. The victory of the “unlettered” Andrew Jackson over the intellectual science-­oriented incumbent John Quincy Adams serves as a good marker for this development. Jackson postured as the fierce enemy of elites, and his supporters trumpeted his prowess as a military leader which, as Daniel Walker Howe pointed out, constituted an ancient but not necessarily democratic political appeal. The contest, said the Jacksonians, was “Between J.Q. Adams who can write and Andy Jackson who can fight.” Jackson’s well-­organized campaign waged by emerging politicos relentlessly mocked Adams’s erudition and his experience

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abroad as a diplomat, establishing “a pattern in American politics, warning aspiring politicians to conceal their intellect rather than proclaim it.”14 Another element of the darker side of populist movements consisted of their being energized by nativist and racial reaction. The Know Nothing movement of the 1850s in some locales combined hostility to Catholics, especially Irish Catholic immigrants, with progressive reforms. The Know Nothing record in Massachusetts, for example, was a stunningly incongruous mixture of intolerance toward Irish Catholics (especially the recent flood of poverty-­stricken refugees from famine), as well as democratization of the polity, and economic and social welfare reform.15 In its political form the American Republican Party’s reformist nativism simply took it for granted that it represented white working people. So too did many populist movements that followed. In the great upsurge of discontent and progressive reform led by the Farmers’ Alliances of the 1880s and the People’s Party of the 1890s, however, insurgents in several Southern states tried to attract the votes of African American farmers and workers by appealing to common economic interest. The Democrats defended white supremacy and their political stranglehold on the South with vehement rhetoric as well as fraud and violence. Ultimately, too, white Populists’ coalition-­building foundered on their own commitment to the racial caste system. Across the South, Populist efforts to appeal to African American voters varied enormously by locality, but in most cases white Populist leaders paid fealty to Southern mores by stressing the need for political equality, accompanied by fervent denials of any approval of social equality. In most other respects, as Charles Postel has shown, Populism represented a progressive movement in tune with modernity and the rationalist and scientific mentality of the age. Populists realized that agricultural enterprise must adapt to changes in business and political economy. The Populists “mobilized to put their own stamp on commercial development and. . . . were as committed to the notion of progress as any social group in post-Civil War America.”16 The agrarian protest movements of the late nineteenth century that culminated in the People’s Party expressed the producer ideology that historians have said animated many reformist and challenging movements since the antebellum period and before. Producerism was the ideology of artisans, mechanics, farmers, small businessmen, and professional allies that valued work and asked for a “competency,” that is, the ability to support one’s family, maintain respectability, and rise to middling status through hard work and education. It crossed class and occupational lines and excluded only middlemen, saloon-­keepers, profiteers, and the idle rich who lived off the fruit of others’ labor. Factory owners who managed their own enterprises could be regarded as part of the “great army of the producing classes.”17 Populist orators and fellow travelers to some degree shared some of the nativist Protestant prejudices pervading much of American society, as the historians critical of the Populists in the 1950s observed to excess. Of course some reformers or fellow travelers expressed illiberal strains in society at large, but overall the populism of the 1880s and 1890s expressed largely progressive tendencies. A reverse weighting of features may be seen in the reactionary populism of the Ku Klu Klan of the 1920s. (The revisionist view of the Second Klan also may be instructive

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for scholars of Europe’s new right or neo-­populist parties.) Once seen as an abnormal, temporary outburst of largely anti-­black racism, historians have overturned the traditional view and replaced it with a still reactionary but different image of the Klan as a “mainstream social movement that drew support from a wide cross-­section of the nation’s white Protestant society.” While race thinking permeated Klan ideology, revisionist studies have rejected “status anxiety and social pathology as explanations for the Klan’s extraordinary popularity and political influence,” and instead have emphasized “continuity between the Klan’s bigotry and that of broader white, and white Protestant society.” The new studies of localities as disparate as Ohio, Indiana, Utah, Los Angeles, and El Paso, Texas, have shown that the movement drew strength not only from concerns about race and the growing influence of Jews, Catholics, and ethnic groups, but from a startlingly long list of additional, sometimes highly localized grievances concerning law enforcement, vice and public morality—particularly in regard to Prohibition enforcement, political corruption, the power of business elites to dictate community affairs, disruptions to traditional community institutions and values, challenges to traditional gender roles, and even popular demands for public services such as modern schools, paved roads, and new sewer lines.18

The revisionists have not ignored the Klan’s intolerance and bigotry, but the emphasis on its populist character in effect has positioned the Second Klan much nearer to the mainstream of US political culture (ironically, in view of the tendency of many intellectuals to use the populist label to marginalize similar movements). Thus the 1920s Klan qualifies as a case of a reactionary populist movement. It contained, in certain localities, not just populist features but even those that can be labeled reformist or progressive.19 But on balance, the Second Klan nationally expressed illiberal, reactionary impulses. The characteristic populist movement of the 1930s, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), presented a stark contrast to the KKK, enlisting many kinds of persons—urban, ethnic, Catholic, Orthodox—that the Klan men and women believed endangered what they viewed as traditional American values. The CIO campaigned to unionize basic industries (automobiles, steel, coal, garment, textiles) from the bottom. The focus on industrial organization was thus populist and progressive. Earlier, the American Federation of Labor had welcomed only skilled workers, but the CIO no longer distanced itself from the unskilled and common laborers, many of whom were first- or second-­generation immigrants. Tens of thousands of workers went on strike in the Great Depression and organized themselves with or without the AFL’s blessing— the CIO took them in. In addition, the CIO was not only multi-ethnic, but also seriously tried to overcome entrenched racial barriers by bringing in African American workers. “Such heterogenity,” observed Michael Kazin, helped promote the idea that the CIO was not a narrow interest group focused on the workplace but the core of a grander “people’s movement”—of small farmers, local politicians, working- and middle-­class consumers, and even some small

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employers—that sought to level the heights of concentrated wealth and push the New Deal [of Franklin Roosevelt] further leftward.20

The Civil Rights movement, although based largely among African Americans in the South, can be regarded as a populist movement seeking to further some of the loftier goals of the CIO. Even the older and now revised view of the Civil Rights movement that posits a “Birmingham (1955) to Selma (1965)” paradigm is open to this understanding. But several works of recent scholarship focused on African American “local people” during the years before the Second World War have added weight to the argument that the black struggle against racial discrimination and second class citizenship constituted a progressive populist movement.21 In the North, the white counterpart to the Southern Civil Rights movement became in the 1960s and 1970s the phenomenon known as the “white backlash.” Northern backlash had been anticipated, of course, in the 1950s by “massive resistance” and White Citizens Councils in the South. In cities across the country from the Northeast, Midwest, and West Coast, whites reacted to black demands for desegregated (or just better) schools, fair housing, and equal employment opportunities with often fierce resistance. City officials and school boards delayed, denied, and obstructed, while white neighborhood groups often mobilized grass-roots movements to keep African Americans out, away, or separate. Often appealing to class resentments and claiming reverse discrimination these outbursts typified reactionary populist movements.22 The white backlash, as Kazin and others have shown, played a critical role in the migration of populist rhetoric from its previous use in predominantly progressive movements to its appropriation by conservative politicians for right-­wing causes and policies. In the late 1940s, as Kazin observed, populism [i.e., populist rhetoric] began a migration from left to right. The rhetoric once spoken primarily by reformers and radicals (debt-­ridden farmers, craft and industrial unionists, socialists attempting to make their purposes sound American, even prohibitionists eager to wipe out the saloon interests) was creatively altered by conservative groups and politicians (zealous anti-Communists, George Wallace, the Christian right, and the campaigns and presidential administrations of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan).

When the rhetorical shift was complete “[t]he vocabulary of grassroots rebellion,” said Kazin, “now served to thwart and reverse social and cultural change rather than to promote it.”23 There are exceptions to this generalization, of course, notably the progressive 1980s campaigns of Jesse Jackson in the Democratic primaries. Jackson’s sustained protest against the economic and racial policies of the Reagan administration powerfully echoed traditional American populism.24 In the late 1980s and early 1990s, too, a term limits movement took off across the country, directed against professional politicians in state legislatures and Congress, and supported by both liberals and conservatives (though conservatives provided most of the organization and money). By 1994 thirty-­ four states enacted some kind of term limits legislation, and though the Supreme Court

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soon decided that only Congress could limit Congressional terms, the limits in place on state office-­holders persisted.25 In 1992 the same kind of populist anger that fueled the term limits movement simultaneously brought wealthy businessman Ross Perot into the presidential race as an independent candidate. Although Perot was a conservative former Republican whose career had benefited from political connections, he attracted largely independents or weak party identifiers motivated by frustration and anger with professional politicians and fed up with “politics as usual.” Perot appealed strongly to working- and middle-­class Americans who felt left behind by the Reagan bonanza for millionaries of the 1980s, and threatened by corporate downsizing and elite (and bipartisan) policies such as NAFTA. Before writing off Perot as a conservative or reactionary populist, historians should look first at the range of his support, as well as some of the progressive reforms favored by many of his supporters. After withdrawing from the presidential election for what the media presented as eccentric reasons bordering on mental instability, after re-­entry he still managed to attract 19 percent of the national vote.26 The important point here is that Perot offered a message that was both progressive and reactionary and attracted a similar mix of impulses running through the electorate. Perot ignored cultural and moral issues such as abortion (on which he was liberal or neutral) and hence his candidacy held no strong appeal for the Religious right, which by the 1990s had moved firmly into the Republican camp. But culture war impulses did figure prominently in the various grass-roots Tea Parties that emerged in 2009 after the election of Barack Obama. This reactionary populist insurgency of mostly very conservative Republicans, some of them alienated from the Republican Party by the policies of the Bush administration, focused their anger primarily on a federal government they believed had grown too big, spent too much, and regulated and taxed excessively. But along with the ostensible preoccupation of the Tea Party with political economy, a substantial overlap existed between the movement and the Religious right, particularly white evangelicals. Although some commentators portrayed the Tea Party and the Religious right as one, this was hardly the case. Indeed, the Tea Party consists of several networks of Tea Parties, both at the grass roots and at the “Astroturf ” levels, with the latter consisting of corporate funded lobbying groups, some of which provide funds, training, and infrastructure to grass-roots organizations, and some focused on pouring money into campaigns to elect Tea Party Republicans. Besides corporate money, right-­ wing media, notably Rupert Murdoch’s and Roger Ailes’s Fox News along with talk radio, played an essential role in the rise of the movement. The corporate sponsors, including notably the billionaire reactionaries Charles and David Koch of Koch Industries, prefer that the grass-roots networks stay focused on cutting down the government and reducing taxes and regulation, and urge the rank and file to steer clear of cultural issues. This pressure from the “astro” level may grow stronger in the wake of the defeat of Tea Party Republican candidates for the US Senate in 2012, in part due to comments offending women and Hispanics. But while billionaires and ordinary Tea Partiers agree on their antipathy to the federal government’s spending, regulation, and taxes, the record of Republicans in state legislatures suggests that the Tea Party has reinforced the influence of cultural populism in the GOP.

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During 2011 Tea Party state representatives pushed forward agendas laden with objectives more cultural than economic, particularly addressing reproductive health and rights-­related provisions. Of the over 1,100 such bills introduced in all states, 135 became law in 36 states, almost all in states with Republican-­controlled legislatures. A staggering 1,538 bills and resolutions relating to immigrants and refugees surfaced in the first quarter of 2011, and many of the states that enacted anti-­immigrant laws or related resolutions also had Republican-­controlled legislatures.27 Thus, while the Tea Party burst onto the scene in 2009 protesting government spending, high taxes, and bailouts, its passions have been animated as much by the cultural preoccupations of the Religious right and allied groups focused on the rights and place in society of women and undocumented immigrants. The Republican Party’s use of cultural populism to mobilize voters predated the rise in its ranks of the Tea Party, and the latter served to intensify this strategy. Yet the efficacy of campaigns focused on women’s reproductive rights, same-­sex marriage, and other cultural issues appears to be waning. In the 2008 presidential election, contrary to the conventional wisdom, and because of a massive downturn in the economy, economic populism trumped cultural populism.28 In 2012 with the economy still struggling, President Barack Obama nevertheless won reelection with a campaign that once again emphasized economic populism. Many other causes in addition to Obama’s successful positioning of himself on the side of ordinary people determined the outcome of both elections, while signs of a weakened cultural populism abounded in the wake of 2012. Indeed, Thomas B. Edsall, analyzing voting patterns up to and through November 2012, concluded that the right “has lost the culture war.” Same-­sex marriage gained approval in referenda in three states (Maine, Maryland, and Washington), Colorado and Washington voted to allow the recreational use of marijuana, “Wisconsin elected the first openly gay Senator, Tammy Baldwin; and Florida voters rejected a ballot initiative prohibiting the use of public funds for abortion by ten points.” Women and minorities made startling advances in Congressional elections, and, “[t]o the dismay of the conservative movement, on virtually every burning issue that preoccupies the right,” election day exit polls showed that the country was moving leftward, toward acceptance, for example, of women’s right to choose an abortion and of same-­sex marriage. The latter trend held especially for younger voters. A Washington Post poll in May of 2012 found that while a majority of Republicans still believed same-­sex marriage should be illegal (61 percent), among Republicans aged 18 to 44 opinion was evenly divided at 46 percent.29 Divisive cultural issues will hardly disappear from the political landscape, and will remain flash points for the rank and file Religious right and the Tea Party, at least as much or more than economic policy. While many observers attributed the 2009–10 rise of the movement in large part to the economic crisis of 2008, and the federal government’s bailouts of big banks and financial institutions begun under the Bush administration and continued by Obama, Tea Party protesters directed little of their anger at the money men responsible for the economic tailspin of 2008 and far more at the federal government. Opinion surveys indicated that Tea Party supporters showed far less concern than other Americans about corporate malfeasance, overpaid

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executives, or corporate welfare in the form of tax evasion or federal subsidies. Meanwhile, economists and others began to call attention to the fact that even during a severe economic slump, the richest 1 percent of Americans had gotten even wealthier, while millions lost jobs, health insurance, and homes.30 Tea Party spokespersons at all levels seemed oblivious to rampant socio-­economic inequality, but beginning in September 2011 a progressive populist movement burst into national visibility and focused attention on those who Teddy Roosevelt once called “malefactors of great wealth.” Occupy Wall Street began by camping-­out in New York City’s financial district, attracting hundreds of supporters, and soon spread across the country and globe. By October tens of thousands joined Occupy protests and encampments in over 600 cities and towns in the United States and in 82 countries. OWS’s slogan of “we are the 99 percent” harkened back to the progressive populists of the nineteenth century, who spoke in non-Marxist terms of the broad producing class. Although Occupy protests attracted mostly the young, people of all ages, occupations, and income levels were drawn to camps or demonstrations, many of whom were independent in their politics. Early on opinion polls showed high levels of approval for OWS among all Americans. By the end of 2011 police had broken up most of the encampments in the United States, but OWS has lived on in local movements focused on economic fairness and social justice, including relief efforts after Hurricane Sandy. Most importantly, OWS succeeded in putting the nation’s gross inequalities of wealth and income, worse than most developed nations, onto the political agenda and into the 2012 presidential campaign.31 Any brief survey of populist movements in the nation’s history is bound to be superficial. Moreover, it misses countless populist movements at the grass roots, some progressive, others reactionary, and many a mix of progressive and reactionary, that have arisen for brief periods in states, cities, towns, suburbs, and neighborhoods. They have included strikes seeking economic justice against multinational corporations, sometimes engulfing entire local communities (and capable of dividing them bitterly); “NIMBYS,” or local, “not-­in-my-­backyard,” short-­lived protests against the building of a Walmart or McDonald’s or the locating of a power plant or a half-­way house; countless white backlash movements against school desegregation or fair housing ordinances or the opening of public housing to minorities; the reactionary taxpayers’ revolt in California in the 1970s; and the use of the initiative and referendum in other states by both progressive and reactionary grass-roots movements. This list could go on and on.32 While populist movements and leaders may have shared a common language of populism, there has been in the United States no one populist tradition in the case of social movements. While populist rhetoric has permeated American politics from the nineteenth century through to the present, it has been employed by a wide diversity of groups and political leaders. Against the pattern of continuity in the language of populism stands an enormous variety of movements, progressive, reactionary, and mixed, that have emerged at all levels of polity and society. While the democratic ideal that “the people rule here” remains a fiction, it also continues to constitute a powerful force in American political culture.

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Notes   1 Edmund Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), 49, 50, 53. For an attempt to reconcile constitutional democracy with populist democracy see Richard D. Parker, “Here the People Rule”: A Constitutional Populist Manifesto (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994).   2 Robert R. Palmer, The Age of Democratic Revolution, Vol. 1, The Challenge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), 215–16; Morgan, Inventing the People, 58.   3 Alan Knight, “Populism and Neo-Populism in Latin America,” Journal of Latin American Studies 30 (May 1998), 223–4, 229.   4 Ronald P. Formisano, For the People: American Populist Movements from the Revolution to the 1850s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).   5 Christian G. Fritz, “Recovering the Lost Worlds of America’s Written Constitutions,” Albany Law Review 68: 2 (2005), 262–93, quotation, 273; also, Fritz, American Sovereigns: The Constitutional Legacy of the People’s Sovereignty Before the Civil War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).   6 Seymour Martin Lipset, The First New Nation: The United States in Historical and Comparative Perspective (New York: Basic Books, 1963), 77; Andrew W. Robertson, The Language of Democracy: Political Rhetoric in the United States and Britain, 1790–1900 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 3.   7 Barbara Clark Smith, “The Adequate Revolution,” William & Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., 51 (October 1994), 691.   8 Margaret Canovan, “Taking Politics to the People: Populism as the Ideology of Democracy,” in Yves Meny and Yves Surel (eds.), Democracies and the Populist Challenge (Houndmills, Palgrave, 2002), 3; also Canovan, “Trust the People: Populism and the Two Faces of Democracy,” Political Studies 47 (March 1999), 2–16.   9 Michael Lewis Goldberg, An Army of Women: Gender and Politics in Gilded Age Kansas (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); Julie Roy Jeffrey, “Women in the Southern Farmers’ Alliance: A Reconsideration of the Role and Status of Women in the Nineteenth-Century South,” Feminist Studies 3 (Fall 1975), 72–91. For women in a reactionary populist movement, Ronald P. Formisano, Boston Against Busing: Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s, rev. edn. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 146–50, 179–83. 10 Craig Calhoun, The Roots of Radicalism: Tradition, the Public Sphere, and Early Nineteenth-Century Reform Movements (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2012), 82. 11 This material is reworked from For the People, 10–16. 12 Formisano, “The ‘Party Period’ Revisited,” Journal of American History 86 (June 1999), 93–120; Mark Voss-Hubbard, “The ‘Third Party Tradition’ Reconsidered: Third Parties and American Public Life, 1830–1900,” Journal of American History 86 (June 1999), 121–50. 13 For Jackson and Indian Removal see Anthony F.C. Wallace, The Long Bitter Trail: Andrew Jackson and the Indians (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993); Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1948 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 342–57. 14 Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 279, 282; Lynn Hudson Parsons, The Birth of Modern Politics: Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, and The Election of 1828 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), xvii. “John Quincy

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Transformations of Populism in Europe and the Americas Adams’s resume may indeed have been impressive, but his defeat . . . was a signal that in the future such resumes may not be sufficient and indeed might be handicaps. In the same way, his powers of intellect, conceded by friend and foe alike, and which had serve him so well as a diplomat, were dismissed as irrelevant to the presidency” (ibid.). John R. Mulkern, The Know-Nothing Party in Massachusetts: The Rise and Fall of a People’s Movement (Boston: New England Studies, 1990); Ronald P. Formisano, The Transformation of Political Culture: Massachusetts Parties, 1780s–1840s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983). Charles Postel, The Populist Vision (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 4. In the 1880s the Knights of Labor, for example, welcomed “merchants and manufacturers . . . if just, morally upright, and sympathetic to Knighthood.” Bruce Laurie, Artisans Into Workers: Labor in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989), 149. Lawrence Moore, “Historical Interpretations of the 1920s Klan: The Traditional View and the Populist Revision,” Journal of Social History 24 (Winter 1990), 341–57. Robert D. Johnston, The Radical Middle Class: Populist Democracy and the Question of Capitalism in Progressive Era Portland, Oregon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003) depicts the Portland Klan as a case of “reactionary nonpopulism,” 246. Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History, rev. edn. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 137; also, Robert H. Zieger, The CIO, 1935–1955 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995). Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History 91 (March 2005), 1233–63; see e.g., John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana, IL; University of Illinois Press, 1994); Adam Fairclough, Better Day Coming: Blacks and Equality, 1890–2000 (New York: Viking Press, 2001). Jonathan Rieder, “The Rise of the Silent Majority,” in Steve Fraser and Gary Gertle (eds.), The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 243–68; Thomas J. Sugrue, “Crabgrass-Roots Politics: Race, Rights, and the Reaction Against Liberalism in the Urban North, 1940–1964,” Journal of American History 82 (September 1995), 551–78; Formisano, Boston Against Busing. Kazin, Populist Persuasion, 4; also Thomas Byre Edsall and Mary D. Edsall, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991). Alan D. Hertzke, Echoes of Discontent: Jesse Jackson, Pat Robertson, and The Resurgence of Populism (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly Inc., 1993). Gerald Benjamin and Michael J. Malbin (eds.), Limiting Legislative Terms (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly Press, 1992); Rick Farmer, John David Rausch, and John C. Green (eds.), The Test of Time: Coping With Legislative Term Limits (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003). Perot campaigned on reducing the national debt and deficits and advocated running the government like a business. John Zeller, “The Rise and Fall of Candidate Perot,” (Working Paper 93–31, Institute of Governmental Studies, University of California, Berkeley). Jamie Slattery, “Was the Perot Vote a Vote for None of the Above? An Analysis of Perot’s Constitutency in the Election of 1992” (Department of History Honor’s Thesis, University of Florida, 1998). For the climate of the 1990s, but little about Perot, Susan J. Tolchin, The Angry American: How Voter Rage is Changing the Nation (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996). Political Scientists’ studies of the Perot movement say little about populism but do emphasize his supporters’ weak

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partisanship and hostility to the major party candidates and “politics and usual.” Ronald B. Rapoport and Walter J. Stone, Three’s A Crowd: The Dynamics of Third Parties, Ross Perot, & Republican Resurgence (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 113–14, 120–3. Charles W. Blow, “Lincoln, Liberty and Two Americas,” New York Times, Nov. 23, 2012. Ronald P. Formisano, “Populist Currents in the 2008 Presidential Election,” in Liette Gidlow (ed.), Obama, Clinton, Palin: Making History in Election 2008 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011), 116–17 (originally published in slightly revised form in Journal of Policy History 22 [Spring 2010], 237–55). Thomas B. Edsall, “The Culture War and the Jobs Crisis,” Campaign Stops, New York Times, Nov. 11, 2012; Rachel Weiner, “Republicans Slowly Warming to Gay Marriage,” Washington Post, June 25, 2012: www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-­fix/post/ republicans-­slowly-warming-­to-gay-marriage/2012/06/25/gJQAOZCK2V_blog.html [accessed on July 25, 2015]. Indeed, the richest 0.01 percent of multi-­billionaires had become the biggest winners in the preceding decades and during the crash of 2008–9. Chrystia Freeland, Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else (New York: Penguin Press, 2012); Ronald Formisano, The Tea Party: A Brief History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 63–80. Matthew Cooper, “Poll: Most Americans Support Occupy Wall Street,” The Atlantic, October 2011, www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/10/poll-­most-americans-­ support-occupy-­wall-street/246963/ [accessed on July 25, 2015]. “Occupy Wall Street Statistics and Demographics,” www.statisticbrain.com/occupy-­wall-street-­statisticsand-­demographics [accessed on July 25, 2015]. For a sample of books covering these kinds of episodes in the twentieth century: Harry Boyte and Frank Riessman (eds.), The New Populism: The Politics of Empowerment (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986); Sylvie Murray, The Progressive Housewife: Community Activism in Suburban Queens, 1945–1965 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); Douglas Rose (ed.), The Emergence of David Duke and the Politics of Race (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992); Thomas Goebel, A Government By the People: Direct Democracy in America, 1890–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).

Section IV

Populism in Latin America and the Caribbean, 1920–60

10

Populism in the Circum-Caribbean, 1920s–50s1 Gillian McGillivray and Thomas D. Rogers

Crossing political and linguistic lines, this chapter discusses populism in mid-­twentiethcentury Mexico as well as parts of Central America and the Spanish and British Caribbean. We do this following the multipolar patterns of labor migration in the region that stemmed from overlapping North American and European economic expansion.2 The chapter advances three arguments and organizational principles. Temporally, we suggest that structural events that impacted the region as a whole, in particular the Great Depression, encouraged the emergence and deepening of populist reforms, before the Cold War prompted a shift to the right. Expanding on Latin American treatments of populism that focus on urban and industrial actors, we propose that in the agricultural commodity-­dominated economies of the circum-Caribbean, peasant farmers and rural middle classes became important bases for populist leaders (as with nineteenth-­century US populism). Finally, we emphasize transnational connections between states in the circum-Caribbean, noting the coincidence of populism’s rise with the blossoming of the rhetoric of racial democracy in both independent nations and European and American colonies (and neo-­colonies) of the circum-Caribbean. This connection proved important for populist leaders who drew on these discourses to fuel potent forms of broadly incorporative political practice. Like other populist movements, Latin American and Caribbean regimes praised workers and farmers over capitalists as the true source of progress.3 Since US capitalists played such an important role in the region, Latin American and Caribbean residents blamed these investors and their domestic elite allies, when commodity-­based economies wavered in the 1920s and then crashed in the 1930s. Workers, farmers, and professionals accustomed hitherto to dealing with their bosses on a one-­on-one basis organized into groups, calling themselves working or middle “classes,” and then lobbied their newly pro-­labor states for assistance and protection. Populists campaigned toward these self-­defined classes and, at times, passed reformist laws that emphasized protection for farmers, workers, and in some cases national industries. Latin American sociologists and leftist political scientists writing in the 1960s depicted populists as demagogic charismatic leaders who, together with ruthless union bureaucracies, ruled over naïve, manipulated masses not yet class-­conscious enough to carry out authentic social revolutions.4 These analyses argued that populists incorporated more people into the political system, but disempowered them at the

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same time by stripping their class-­based organizations of autonomy. More recent scholarship emphasized how and why many diverse communities within the “masses” chose to engage with populists as a way to be included in the polity, noting that the populist leader’s radical rhetoric made them answerable to astute popular groups.5 Many of the circum-Caribbean’s mid-­twentieth-century populists encouraged corruption, inefficiency, and military infiltration in their societies. Without idealizing their regimes, we should nevertheless recognize that populists created opportunities for more people to gain a stake in their nations. Working- and middle-­class people could claim more as “citizens,” and many at least fleetingly gained more respect and dignity, if not formal rights or economic support. Many workers, farmers, professionals, and other groups in the circum-Caribbean used the economic crisis of the 1930s to push the system of rule from dictatorships to more inclusive polities. This extended to people of indigenous and African descent, who actively participated in populist leaders’ reshaping of racial politics that moved away from Social Darwinism’s praise of “whiteness” to instead foreground their nations’ indigenous and African roots.

The Cárdenas regime in Mexico Populism in Mexico under President Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–40) was a give-­and-take process. Cárdenas is well known for nationalizing Mexico’s oil industry, but this came only after years of labor protests. Cárdenas is also known for having granted land to peasants—roughly 800,000 people received 18 million hectares of land under his regime, almost twice the amount of land that had been distributed by his predecessors.6 The central state deliberately depicted these land grants as “gifts” rather than “rights,” but many of these peasants had fought actively for lands since the outbreak of Mexico’s 1910 Revolution and the progressive 1917 Constitution’s promise of agrarian reform.7 The populist Cárdenas regime thus aimed to incorporate the popular groups that helped him achieve power by recasting as presents from the benevolent state, the demands that workers and peasants had fought to achieve. At the same time, because Cárdenas had to formally declare reforms in order to incorporate popular groups, these groups quickly pushed the state further than it may have wanted to go, by demanding that it fulfill its rhetoric.8 Mass mobilizations across the country (1934 saw 202 strikes and 1935, 642) compelled Cárdenas to step up to defend the rights of workers and support most of the major strike movements during his first years as president.9 This led to real improvements in wages, benefits, and conditions for workers, while at the same time giving Cárdenas popular power against former President Plutarco Elías Calles and reactionary elites (including American elites, in the case of the 1938 oil industry expropriation). Cárdenas’ dealings with peasants reveal a similar dynamic. All over rural Mexico, peasants and agrarian workers mobilized, organized, and then “were granted” land by the state. Cárdenas and other members of his government stood up to landowners by claiming that “the administration could not stop the process of land distribution even if it wanted to without precipitating either a revolution or spontaneous uprisings throughout the country.”10 As some one million people of Mexican ancestry flooded

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the Mexican countryside upon being deported from the Depression-­era United States, the threat of uprisings became even more potent.11 Peasants and workers forged beneficial alliances with the state during the initial stages of populist state consolidation. Cárdenas “granted” rights to the workers, “gave” land to the peasants, and even distributed arms to the latter so that they could defend these lands. The Cárdenas regime realized more of the promises of the Mexican Revolution and guarded them against reversal, at least in the short term, by taking advantage of the weakness of Mexican and American elites due to revolutionary upheaval (from 1910 onward) and international depression. By passing widespread reforms and incorporating trade unions, peasants, and professional sectors into the ruling party, the populist regime enlisted the support of large portions of the popular classes. By distributing arms to the peasants, while at the same time empowering progressive junior officers in the state military, Cárdenas protected the social reforms coming out of the revolution from a military coup. Workers and peasants, on the other side, in many cases managed to forge unity across challenging differences to demand the fulfillment of Mexico’s 1917 constitutional reforms, including labor and agrarian rights. While Cárdenas is frequently cited next to Juan Perón of Argentina and Getúlio Vargas of Brazil as a “classic” Latin American populist, the Mexican Revolution that preceded his regime made for a very important difference. He was able to redistribute land and arms to the peasantry, thus gaining an important agrarian base to his populist regime, in addition to the urban workers and industrial sectors that formed the core of the populist alliances in Argentina and Brazil.12 By acknowledging this agrarian facet of Cárdenas’s populism, we can recognize as populists other leaders in agrarian, export commodity-­based countries such as Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba.13 The 1930s leaders in these countries— Anastasio Somoza, Rafael Trujillo, and Fulgencio Batista—were for many years portrayed as dictators who ruled with an iron fist thanks to the national armies that the United States financed and organized as an alternative to more expensive and domestically unpopular US military occupations. More recent studies emphasize how these hyper-­masculine leaders (two of them from humble, mixed-­race origins, and all three from the countryside) tapped into the class, race, and regional concerns of their constituents.

The Somoza regime in Nicaragua The Somoza family that ruled Nicaragua from the 1930s to the 1970s opted for a combination of cooption and coercion, using populist strategies that “combined an anti-­oligarchic discourse with appeals to the working masses.”14 For example, Anastasio Somoza, Sr. allowed the creation of worker organizations and favored worker demands in 1936 and 1944 in response to massive labor mobilization and in order to counter elite opposition.15 Nicaragua’s 1944 Labor Code guaranteed the right to unionize and strike, accident compensation, one month’s paid vacation, and a minimum wage. In a May 1945 speech Somoza, the son of a relatively wealthy coffee farmer, proclaimed: “I

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am now just another worker . . . A world is being born without exploiters or exploited, without oppressed or oppressors, with no more conquests than those of science and work, a world with trees whose branches can be reached by the children.”16 The following year, he permitted a group of workers dominated by communists and socialists to found the Confederation of Nicaraguan Workers. The Nicaraguan workers and peasants who mobilized and won concessions from the Somozas provide another excellent example alongside Mexico of the give-­and-take of populist rule. The process revealed an internal dynamism whereby the homogenized masses gained certain rights, privileges, and gifts in exchange for supporting the leaders. These benefits and allegiances could either deepen or dissolve as larger conjunctures related to Depression, wars, or US policies pushed national politics left or right. For example, Somoza tacked left in the early 1940s, with the increase in Soviet prestige related to the triumph against the Axis powers at Stalingrad (Nicaragua was allied to the US and USSR). Closer to home, Somoza invited Vicente Lombardo Toledano, the leftist leader who built up the labor branch of Cárdenas’s revolutionary party, to speak at a popular rally in Nicaragua at the end of 1942.17 As mentioned, communists and socialists in Nicaragua took advantage of the moment to organize Nicaragua’s Labor Confederation. Later in the 1940s, Somoza tacked right, closing off opportunities for Nicaragua’s left and organized labor when, as Jeffrey Gould puts it: “The beginning of the Cold War tilted a precariously balanced set of class relations decisively in favor of business and landed interests,” and Somoza reinvented himself as an anti-­communist crusader to court US favor.18 A fascinating aspect of the Nicaraguan case is that peasants and workers won concessions through a tactic of populism-­from-below. In the 1940s and 1950s, small farmers and rural workers successfully played one set of elites (the large landowners) against another (the cotton producers). Farmers, workers, and semi-­proletarians forged a common identity as campesinos (peasants) against los ricos (the rich)—a common enemy that could flexibly encompass managers, landowners, state representatives and whomever else stood in the way of rural demands. The popular classes learned to make their own demands from what began as a top-­down, cooptive project. They used Somoza’s worker organizations to mobilize; they forged unity across different constituencies—including those who wanted to farm for themselves and those who wanted higher wages and better working conditions on commercial estates, and then to make demands on employers and on the state.19 Rural Nicaraguans gave their support because they benefited from new land titles for squatters, new roads and railways, and the peace that the Somoza regime brought to the countryside after some forty years of civil wars.20

The Trujillo regime in the Dominican Republic Moving from the Central American and Mexican mainland to the island region of the circum-Caribbean, we find the Dominican Republic’s Rafael Trujillo rising to power at roughly the same time as Nicaragua’s Somoza. Both leaders have been depicted as “US puppets” due to the diplomatic support that they received and the power that they

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drew from US-trained and funded militaries, but both in fact introduced measures to achieve broader popular support. Precisely the same Depression conditions that pushed US policymakers to subsidize Trujillo’s military rather than sending in marines, led Trujillo to introduce state policies that supported farmers who grew subsistence and export crops. Richard Turits has demonstrated that Trujillo “secured the foundations for widespread acceptance and rural stability, at least until he shifted course in the 1950s and began undermining the policies, alliances, and economic success that had previously served to legitimate his rule.”21 Trujillo’s rural populism involved distributing land and property rights to peasants in order to integrate them into his modernization project. Some 141,000 peasants claimed almost 500,000 hectares (22 percent of the nation’s farm lands) between the 1930s and the 1950s, and many others gained property on the basis of squatters’ rights. The regime gave these new landowners the basic tools and agricultural inputs to farm the land. In turn, they had to pay taxes and work as corvée labor to build and maintain the infrastructure (irrigation and roads) required to cultivate and move products to domestic and export markets. Inclusion in Trujillo’s modernization project brought a certain loss of freedom: instead of moving from place to place to clear new plots and raise animals on open ranges, peasants had to settle, farm, and produce surplus for the market—or risk eviction. Vagrancy laws were strictly enforced by means of the same personal identity cards whose annual renewal fees generated taxes and increased the state’s capacity to control. Nevertheless, the expansion of sugar and other export crops since the end of the nineteenth century had already begun to concentrate landholdings, so it made sense for peasants to accept the Trujillo regime’s more inclusive economic development project.22 The Trujillo regime pressured newly incorporated peasant-­citizens to learn about vagrancy and other laws from state officials at the local level, and they were compelled to attend mass political demonstrations to exhibit loyalty to Trujillo in what Lauren Derby describes as a “theater state” of grandiose processions.23 For example, Trujillo’s military forces paraded through the country on horseback upon his inauguration; the regime encouraged celebration of Catholic holidays as well as some hundred new civic holidays honoring among other things Trujillo’s birthday and inauguration, and shortly before Trujillo’s assassination in 1961 citizens were compelled to participate in a “million man march” to demonstrate their allegiance to the new Dominican nation.24 Trujillo sought to “embody” the nation, lending his name to scores of places and things and taking credit for economic development and national progress. According to this logic, when he and his family became wealthy, so did the nation. When he and his family took over land and sugar companies, the sugar industry was “nationalized.” Public works, policy formation, and patronage were framed as personal gifts from Trujillo to his people. He invited legions of humble, barefoot Dominicans to visit the National Palace to request and receive gifts, including bags of food, bicycles, and even artificial limbs for the disabled. To some, he gave the opportunity of upward mobility in the form of the aristocratic Italian uniforms, houses, and other benefits that identified them as part of his 30,000-man military (in a country of three million).25 Trujillo’s expanded military force—funded by US policymakers whom he skillfully courted during the 1930s Good Neighbor policy era—added surveillance and fear to the

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reform, welfare, and patronage strategies that contributed to his regime’s endurance. The state “gave” Dominicans healthcare, land, and jobs, but it also manipulated information in Trujillo’s favor through its control of radio, television, and the press. Trujillo and his entourage intervened in personal relationships, stealing daughters, sisters, and wives from families and curtailing friendships with so-­called enemies of the state. Drawing on “popular idioms of masculinity, personhood, and fantasies of race and class mobility,” Derby explains, “Trujillo adopted popular forms such as gossip, gift exchange, fictive kinship, and witchcraft into the repertoire of domination of the regime, leaving almost no place for Dominicans to hide or resist.”26 Trujillo rose from being a security guard at a sugar mill to head of the army and president of the nation. Like Somoza, he presented himself as a fellow worker, inviting humble Dominicans to join him as a “disciplinary father” who was neither a traditional politician nor an elitist professional. Trujillo offered the status of “decent workers” to the “undisciplined” rural and urban masses through access to land and credit, the military and schools, but the social order was based on a subordinate proximity rather than symbolic equality. You could only be a friend of Trujillo’s if you worked. Yet Trujillo’s subordinate incorporation was better than the elite (mostly white) liberal presumption that (mostly mixed-­race) peasants were incapable of work, condemning the nation to violent civil wars and backwardness. Trujillo’s land reforms, military expansion, and development of infrastructure did give opportunities to more Dominicans and, as in Nicaragua, put an end to decades of rural conflict. Violence was redirected outward, as in 1937 when Dominican soldiers massacred tens of thousands of “black” Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian ancestry in the rural borderlands.27 For Trujillo, Dominicans by nature were Creoles, in contrast to the supposedly “black” Haitians. All Dominicans had the potential to pass as white because they were all mestizo or indio, “a transitional category between white and black which conveys racial mixture through that master symbol of autochthony, the figure of the Indian.”28

The Mendieta-Batista regime in Cuba Three years after Trujillo seized power in 1930, dictator Gerardo Machado fell to a revolution in neighboring Cuba, opening President Ramón Grau San Martín’s “100 Days of Reform” with an alliance of sergeants who had rebelled under then-Sergeant Fulgencio Batista’s guidance. Grau San Martín, in turn, lost power in 1934 to thenArmy Chief Batista and President Carlos Mendieta. Batista and Mendieta did not reverse the reforms prompted by the revolution; instead they used violence combined with new legislation to forcibly incorporate more people into an expanded state. To broaden their support base, Mendieta blessed with a conservative mantle many of revolutionary President Grau’s reforms.29 Mendieta lasted barely a year, and Batista had little chance to win working-­class support until he, like Somoza, tacked left in the late 1930s and early 1940s to weather the political climate ushered in by the Second World War, and, closer to home, Mexican populism. As in Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic, Cuba’s regime relied heavily on the army as a power base. In 1934 Mendieta used military force to contain the mass

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mobilizations unleashed by the 1933 Revolution and to channel its participants into a new populist state. Yet later in the 1930s, Batista made concerted efforts to win the support of popular groups such as farmers and workers, extending benefits to the individuals who joined state-­sanctioned unions and associations. In addition to these mechanisms for incorporating more people into the state, he established new institutions to mediate between workers, farmers, and industrialists, including a Labor Ministry and Sugar and Coffee Stabilization Boards. Batista’s meteoric socio-­political rise mirrors Trujillo’s: he was born into a humble mixed-­race family in the United Fruit Company’s eastern sugar mill enclave, working as a cane cutter, carpenter, tailor, and railroad worker before becoming an army stenographer in 1921 and a sergeant in 1928.30 On September 3, 1933 he had been just one of a group of sergeants, corporals, and enlisted men who demanded basic needs such as housing facilities, food, uniforms, pay, and access to promotion. The sergeants’ and corporals’ protest became a mutiny when the officers on duty refused to submit their petition to the commanding officers.31 The mutiny became a political act on September 4, when the sergeants pledged to support the political, economic, and social objectives of a group of civilians opposed to Machado. By the end of 1933, Batista (now Army Chief) had removed Machado’s loyal officers and commissioned about four hundred new ones, most of them former sergeants. When Batistianos replaced Machadistas, a largely mixed-­race, noncommissioned officer corps replaced a white officer corps that had been tied to the island’s political elite.32 In contrast to Batista, President Mendieta belonged to the Cuban elite: he was an independence war veteran like his predecessors, presidents José Miguel Gómez (1909– 12) and Gerardo Machado (1925–33).33 A prominent member of the Liberal Party, Mendieta had hoped for a presidential nomination in 1924 but lost to Machado. Immediately upon assuming the presidency in 1934, Mendieta sought popular legitimacy by proclaiming new constitutional statutes, granting political amnesty to many, and restraining brutality against all prisoners.34 He got US politicians to recognize abolition of the neo-­colonial Platt Amendment, confirmed women’s suffrage, and expanded social security. Mendieta reinforced the eight-­hour day, introduced vacation pay, and legislated collective labor contracts that applied to all employees and workers of a given company. Legislation made it illegal to dismiss workers without cause and detailed a procedure for dismissal so complicated that it served to protect workers’ jobs. Mendieta set up a Technical Commission on Minimum Wages that included labor and management representatives, and then he set the minimum wage for field workers at an impressive 80 cents (up from an average 20 cents in 1933). Women were guaranteed “equal pay for equal work,” and a Maternity Law established the first general system of worker insurance. Mendieta wanted to steer Cuba on a moderate reformist path out of revolution, but a strike wave that began in 1933 continued to grow, and sugar’s agricultural cycle dictated that his regime would have to take whatever means necessary to begin the 1934 harvest in January (sugar ruled Cuba’s economy, constituting 80 percent of exports). To establish order, Mendieta turned to Batista and his military.35 The Cuban state’s political, economic, and juridical reach expanded with Mendieta’s series of decree laws, Sugar and Coffee Stabilization Boards, and National Defense Tribunals,

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but the average Cuban was quicker to note the military’s infiltration into every realm of society. Just before the 1935 sugar harvest, landowners prepared lists of agitators and Batista’s army officials arrested them. The government sent soldiers and members of the newly created “military reserve” to step in as strikebreakers at sugar mills, in utility and telephone companies, and on railroads across the island.36 When a general strike in March 1935 attracted some 200,000 participants, Mendieta declared a state of siege and completely suspended constitutional guarantees for the rest of the harvest period. Batista’s army and private security forces killed more than one hundred workers and wounded or arrested hundreds more.37 It was during this state of siege that Batista’s army usurped a vast number of positions formerly held by civilians. The process of military infiltration into civil society had already begun during the final years of Machado’s dictatorship, when he sent military officers across the country to replace elected municipal and provincial politicians who had joined the opposition. After Machado’s departure, the “mobs” killed some of these officeholders, and the new authorities arrested others. Batista sent army officials to fill the resulting vacuum in local government, supposedly to await political reorganization and elections, but in fact making the army the new powerbroker on the island (as in Somoza’s Nicaragua and Trujillo’s Dominican Republic).38 Army officials mimicked the system of patronage and spoils that had been in place since Cuba’s start as a nation in 1902. But the civilian leaders were (at least fraudulently) elected and usually gave a little before they started to take. Their armed replacements behaved more like a Mafia. Rural Guardsmen forced even the most humble members of Cuban society to surrender their produce, livestock, and merchandise, or suffer beatings with a machete blade and other forms of torture. As long as the Army Chief guaranteed financial and political gains combined with immunity from punishment, he could count on his lieutenant colonels’ loyalty and obedience as a group.39 By allowing corruption, Batista maintained loyalty within the army, but Mendieta’s hold over civilian power began to fall apart as members resigned in protest against the army’s excesses. Mendieta himself resigned in late 1935. Cuba looked more and more like a dictatorship, but the dictator saw himself as a revolutionary bringing democracy to the island. In July 1936, Batista advocated “a renovated democracy, under which there should be discipline of the masses and of institutions so that we can establish a progressive State.” He added: “We want to teach the masses that capital and labor both are necessary and should cooperate.”40 A year later, he announced: “Many want to forget that I am the chief of a constructive social revolution, and see me as a mere watch-­dog of public order. My idea of order is that of an architect rather than that of a policeman.”41 For Batista’s populist edifice to stand, “the masses” needed to join his institutions.42 Before his resignation, President Mendieta had set up the means to incorporate workers through domineering social legislation, and Batista’s army stood ready to “discipline” anyone who questioned its terms. A series of presidential decrees disguised as compromises between capital and labor included Decree 3, passed on February 7, 1934, allowing workers to strike but requiring them to give eight days’ notice.43 The law took away the element of spontaneity that made strikes effective, giving the companies time to hire strikebreakers and to evict or exile the leaders of the strike before it began.

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Moreover, since the National Defense Decree prohibited any “unauthorized political meetings,” it became increasingly difficult for workers to meet legally. Labor leaders were quick to recognize the controlling nature of these so-­called reforms. Communists, Trotskyists, and supporters of the deposed Grau all rejected this form of populism at first. A January 1934 manifesto from the Communist CNOC stated: “We need to resolve conflicts through direct action with the bosses without intermediaries of any sort. We should not notify the Labor Ministry in any way. Our attitude now must be the same as it was toward Grau and the Labor Ministry: Do not recognize it, ignore it completely, boycott it.”44 Workers opted to negotiate directly with their bosses because populist state intervention remained only a fleeting promise. Sugar mill and cane farm residents wanted to formalize and enhance many benefits that Depression-­era companies considered expendable, including year-­round housing, schools, transportation, pensions, health care, and accident compensation. Workers also sought to win more control over hiring and promotions, demanding job ladders, recognition of their unions, and provision of union halls. Communist-­led workers sought to combat the favoritism and racism that fomented division among the workers, attacking racism directly with three “specific demands for Cubans of color”: equal salary for equal work, the end of racial segregation in housing and employment, and the right to work in all positions in the mills and their offices. Cuban workers achieved more control over who was hired and fired during the 1934–59 period.45 Racist barriers proved more tenacious. Most Haitian, British West Indian, and Asian workers were excluded from populism’s benefits entirely, as they were forced to leave the island when the army helped to impose a “50 percent [Cuban labour] law” in the mid-­to-late 1930s.46 (The 50 percent law that drove Haitians out of Cuba may have contributed to the 1937 massacre of Haitians in the Dominican Republic.) Cuban workers were hoping to rebuild their relationship with the bosses on more solid ground—and with more equal footing. Managers thought that Mendieta and Batista would be like former president Gerardo Machado, spouting populist rhetoric to gain initial support, but shifting to repression to guarantee the harvest. Batista met their expectations by declaring: “there will be a harvest or there will be bloodshed,” as soldiers stormed union headquarters across the island. Unions found their halls’ doors and windows nailed shut, and managers opted not to negotiate with strike leaders because they denied Mendieta’s new laws.47 Police cruisers replaced the horses that public and private security guards used to ride on mill-­town streets. In the cane fields, where cruisers could not pass, Rural Guardsmen carried Springfield rifles and sabers, and rode “seven-­foot Texan horses” so they could frighten the mostly thin and undernourished workers. Batista’s soldiers added the Italian fascists’ palmacristi torture to Cubans’ time-­ honored machete-­blade beatings: anyone who did not say or do what he or she was told to would be forced to drink a liter of oil. The years that immediately preceded the Cuban Revolution from 1955 through 1959 shared many of the characteristics of this era of extreme repression.48 Sugar mill workers asserted that the company could no longer protect them from the Rural Guard’s abuses “when Batista arrived.”49 When Mendieta and Batista shifted from cooption to coercion in 1934, they largely restored the bosses’ control over their mills. Despite populist promises to the contrary,

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the state threw its support behind sugar mill owners, not workers. Company correspondence reveals that sugar mill owners used their lawyers and generous bribes to their “friends” to make sure social measures were diluted and delayed. The most common tactic was to not show up at meetings with Labor Ministry representatives— or to bribe the ministry representatives not to show up—and then to declare the workers’ petitions invalid because there was no company or ministry representation. Or administrators sent a representative to meetings and then claimed that he was not authorized to make any decisions. Cane-­farmers found themselves in a much stronger position than workers. Because many were middle- and upper-­class white Cubans, they found more support in Havana’s halls of power. Some literally sat in the Cuban House of Representatives. The governments of the mid-1930s passed a series of decrees to save cane-­farmers, reinforcing some measures that Grau had already introduced (such as tenant cane-­ farmers’ right to stay on the land that they worked) and adding others (such as a moratorium on August 17, 1934 to help cane-­farmers pay off their debts). A new law sanctioned production quotas for cane-­farmers and reinforced state control through the Sugar Stabilization Board that included six cane-­farmer representatives alongside twelve mill-­owner representatives and a presidential delegate. State legislation protected cane-­farmers from being evicted for debt, and quotas guaranteed them a place to sell their cane, but many cane-­farmers felt that the quotas were too small to guarantee their livelihood. Several prominent members of the National Cane-­farmer Association who had managed to win positions in Cuba’s House of Representatives submitted a bill against company (versus cane farmer)-grown cane. They argued that unless measures were taken to avoid the consolidation of the agricultural and industrial sectors in the hands of “a few” (read, US corporations), the “native classes” (read, Cuban cane-­farmers) would be displaced from the land. To this nationalist argument the cane-­farmers added a class-­based one: “The proletariat will have to increase, this being a most serious danger for the stability of the economic system on which the Cuban state and Cuban nationality are based.”50 The cane-­farmers who were making this argument were not smallholding yeoman farmers; most hired large numbers of field workers to administer and work the land that they controlled. There was probably some truth to their argument, though. The field-­worker segment of the sugar “proletariat” often supported strikes by mill workers, but on the whole they were slower to organize and make demands themselves, for a variety of reasons. One of these is the fact that they were divided up among cane-­farms and often lived in isolated thatch huts within them. (In contrast, mill workers lived in concentrated urban spaces, and many of the homes—even the most humble—had front-­porch swings or chairs where workers could share experiences and build a protest movement.) The fact that the cane-­farmer congressmen were not “small Cuban farmers” growing cane to sell to “big foreign mills” is revealed in the careful wording of the anti-­companygrown-­cane bill of 1936, as well as in subsequent bills that advocated land reform. They proposed that the land be given not to those who worked it, but to those who “enjoyed” or “personally directed” its cultivation. Even Fidel Castro’s early revolutionary platforms of the 1950s reflect this inclusiveness. The cane-­farmers that headed the National

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Cane-­farmer Association had to have the money and education to spend large amounts of time for meetings and lobbying in Havana. When convenient, they included the small cane-­farmers to play up the image of the downtrodden Cuban peasant. More often they sought to project themselves as Cuba’s hard-­working entrepreneurial middle class. For their summer meetings, they donned a very Cuban business “suit”: the white linen guayabera shirt without jacket or tie.51 Cuban populism renewed its promise for sectors beyond the agrarian middle classes in the late 1930s, when labor leaders shifted more to the center and Batista shifted farther to the left due to three main factors. Communists, Trotskyists, and Grau supporters forged a popular front that staged massive demonstrations and an international campaign to win amnesty for all political prisoners and to raise funds for the struggle against the fascist regime of Francisco Franco in Spain. A group of Cuban workers visited Mexico City in September 1938 for the Congress of Latin American Workers and, back in Cuba, in January 1938, they founded a national labor confederation modeled after Cárdenas and Toledano’s Confederation of Mexican Workers—Toledano visited Cuba to promote such a confederation, as he did in Nicaragua. After having legalized the Communist Party and supported the founding of the labor confederation, Batista visited Cardenista Mexico and experienced the pride of speaking in front of a mass rally of some 6,000 people in Veracruz, and 20,000 workers in front of the national palace (organized by the Confederation of Mexican Workers).52 Finally, again as with Nicaragua, the US alliance with Russia against fascism in Europe during the Second World War prompted the President to tack leftward to distance his regime from fascist tendencies and allow labor and leftists more space to organize.53 The economic climate in the late 1930s and early to mid-1940s was also good for the Cuban economy because first the United States expanded Cuba’s sugar quota, and then the Second World War curbed European beet-­sugar production and increased demand on the world market for sugar. This literally gave Batista more to distribute, and he did so with the passing of the 1937 Sugar Coordination Act that permanently established a new system of profit-­sharing between workers, cane-farmers, and mill owners, according to a sliding scale that moved with the price of sugar. Jorge Domínguez described this as “the crowning piece of legislation—and—consequently, the cornerstone of the Cuban political system until 1959”: it was fundamentally populist in that it guaranteed redistribution among society’s classes, at least until the Cold War turn in the late 1940s and 1950s that emptied many of Cuba’s populist institutions, to the point that critics remarked disparagingly that instead of workers and cane-farmers sharing profits, the profits were funneled only to crooked union leaders, lawyers of the Association of Cane-farmers, and Batista cronies.54

Pedro Albizu Campos and Luis Muñoz Marín in Puerto Rico Puerto Rico’s experience in the 1930s resembled Cuba’s in many ways, but at least one glaring difference separated the islands: Puerto Rico’s colonial status. Direct legal subjugation to the United States differed from Cuba’s neo-­colonial relationship, even if

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sugar companies wielded great power in both places. Crucially, colonial subjects could not govern their societies, even if they exercised important political power. By the 1920s, a coherent nationalist movement had emerged in Puerto Rico, consolidated in the form of the Partido Nacional (PN) in 1922. A young Harvard-­educated lawyer named Pedro Albizu Campos joined the party in 1924. Born illegitimately to a mother who had been a slave, and a prominent Basque farmer, Albizu Campos settled in Ponce to serve workers and the poor. In 1926, Mexican education minister José Vasconcelos visited the island and expressed an interest in meeting members of the PN, including Albizu Campos. Well-­known as the author of the 1925 book La Raza Cósmica, Vasconcelos was fascinated to see how Puerto Ricans were negotiating their legacies of race mixture.55 A series of connections tied Puerto Rico’s experience with the emergent politics of race in the region. The year after Vasconcelos’s visit, Albizu Campos visited Haiti, making contact with Jean Price-Mars’s L’Union Patriotique. Another Puerto Rican nationalist, Tomás Blanco, premiered his famous essay on racial prejudice at a forum organized by Fernando Ortíz in Cuba. Ortíz was a Cuban scholar whose Contrapunteo cubano (1940) critiqued both Spanish imperialism and US neo-­colonialism, emphasizing the promise and value of creole culture.56 George Reid Andrews has pointed out that a range of Latin American intellectuals from this period advanced new ideas and valuations of racial difference that contributed to cultural upheaval in their countries. Andrews argues that these figures facilitated a process of “cultural browning,” premised on the idea that race mixture served as “the foundation on which to construct new national identities.”57 Kelvin Santiago-Valles also argues that in the 1930s, “extensive exchanges occurred among various elements within the Latin American, Caribbean, and/or Afro-­diasporic advocates of racial democracy and ethnic roots.” The genre of “Negro-­themed poetry” in Puerto Rico, Santiago-Valles writes, “was the literary equivalent of the racial democracy writings and social science scholarship, as well as of the populist rhetoric conveyed by the rising stars of public oratory (Albizu Campos) and of the political campaign circuit (Muñoz Marín).”58 These two figures embodied Puerto Rico’s populist moment. Albizu Campos developed a politics of race that centered around freedom from the exploitation of the dominant sugar interests and rallied the laboring poor around a notion of non-­white solidarity. He championed the interests of what he called “the Race,” which comprised all of Latin America; in contrast to Trujillo, he decisively included Haiti, then under US occupation. And he had an interested and bitter audience, since Puerto Rico suffered acutely from the effects of the Depression, like its counterparts elsewhere in the region. The sugar sector in particular declined in the 1920s, a trajectory sharply accelerated by the United States’ imposition of punitive quotas in 1934. Sugar prices had fallen sharply from the early 1920s, dropping from more than five cents per pound in 1923 to less than a cent per pound in 1932. Between 1929 and 1934, the average field worker’s wages dropped by 35 percent and even mill workers lost 12 percent of their earnings. By late in 1934, unemployment had reached 50 percent. To make things worse, food prices rose at the same time, with some staples costing 75 percent more than they had five years earlier.59

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Workers responded angrily to the conditions, mounting a series of strikes starting in 1928; in the single year between the summers of 1933 and 1934, they struck 91 times. Albizu Campos’s star rose during this period. He declared angrily in 1932: “Yankee imperialism . . . has transformed us from property owners into peons; from peons into beggars sentenced to death.”60 Workers requested his leadership during the major strike of June 1934. “It is in the interest of all of Puerto Rico to support this strike,” Albizu Campos said, “because it is the beginning of the end of sugar slavery.”61 However, even as the nationalists developed a broad following under Albizu Campos’s leadership, they also invited repression as their rhetoric exceeded the colonial state’s tolerance level. The 1934 strike proved to be the PN’s apogee; police forces perpetrated massacres of nationalist crowds in 1935 (Río Piedras) and 1937 (Ponce). Albizu Campos and other important leaders were jailed for sedition in 1936 and effectively marginalized politically.62 Two years later, the Partido Popular Democrático (PPD) was founded by Luis Muñoz Marín and Jesús T. Piñero. Muñoz Marín had strong alliances with US political figures, especially committed New Dealers like Rexford Tugwell, the governor from 1941 to 1946. Piñero was a cane-farmer, representing an important constituency of the Party that paralleled Cuban politics of the same period. The PPD prepared assiduously for the 1940 legislative elections, shaping its message to capture a broad constituency. The party promised to “confront the public problems which derived from the state of exploitation that we [the PPD] denounce.”63 Muñoz Marín exhorted voters to “Believe in yourselves! . . . Have faith in your force and power to make justice and secure your childrens’ future! . . . Believe in your own dignity!”64 The PPD successfully built ties across classes and Muñoz Marín shaped Puerto Rican politics for an entire generation. The PPD brought the non-­sugar elite together with small- to mid-­sized cane-farmers and the working-­class to create a powerful movement that helped deliver the governorship into Puerto Rican hands (Muñoz Marín’s, specifically) and, eventually, set the stage for Operation Bootstrap. The party used federal relief programs as vehicles for social reform, even in the face of opposition from sugar interests and the PN. The latter feared increased dependence, and the deepening of ties with the United States. The PPD emerged in the context of a failing sugar economy, collapsing traditional parties, and a colonial government unable to meet the island’s challenges.65 Anne Macpherson points out that the populist reforms of Puerto Rico included a robust gender component, as politicians like Muñoz Marín directly appealed to women as workers and voters (they received the vote in 1935). She suggests that the PN’s failure to mobilize truly national power may have had something to do with the party’s conservative gender politics (surely the massacres also loomed large).66 The two-­pronged approach of the PPD revolved around agrarian reform and industrialization. The former had its roots in US legislation (the Foraker Act of 1900 and the Jones Act of 1917) that allowed for expropriation of properties larger than 500 hectares. The Depression’s disruption of the traditional power bloc, along with the creation of an urbanizing working class, provided an opening that the PPD filled. Its reformist policies and “ambiguous non-­class discourse” helped seal a “populist alliance” that proved durable through the 1950s.67

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Alexander Bustamante in Jamaica and British West Indian populism Shifting from the Spanish Caribbean to the British, we find colonies in crisis. Labor unrest had been simmering since 1935 across the British islands and it burst forth in Trinidad, Jamaica, and smaller islands in a series of strikes and riots in 1937 and 1938. The leaders who emerged to guide these movements could not govern their own polities, but we argue that their leadership styles and the policy approaches they fought for were populist. Just as the Depression had placed strains on, and provoked political transformations in, the Hispanophone circum-Caribbean, it brought change to the British possessions. Between 1883 and 1935, an average of 10,000 Jamaicans a year had sought work abroad.68 The Depression and xenophobic (and populist) nationalism drove home multitudes of West Indian labor migrants. Alexander Bustamante, who seized the leadership of Jamaica’s 1938 “labor rebellion,” was one of these returnees, having spent thirty years in Cuba, Panama, the United States, and elsewhere. Many from Bustamante’s generation had braved the dangerous conditions of the Panama Canal Zone in order to find work. When the canal opened in 1914, West Indians moved to cut bananas in the booming plantations of Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Honduras. Thousands of others joined Haitian cane cutters in Cuba when the First World War drove up sugar prices, and still others traveled to the United States seeking work. In many of these cases, restrictive legislation sent the West Indians homeward— Cuba’s 50 percent law demanded national workers and the United States’ National Quotas Act narrowed migration in 1924.69 The resonant discourse of the 1930s generation of West Indian leaders had roots in the trials of the Great Depression, increasing dissatisfaction with imperial rule throughout the colonial world, and a growing self-­consciousness among the working class.70 Returning migrants faced acute unemployment and a recalcitrant colonial regime and clashed frequently with the police. A first wave of strikes and demonstrations took place in 1935 in British Honduras (Belize), Trinidad, British Guiana, and Jamaica. The larger-­scale “rebellions” in Jamaica, Antigua, Barbados, Trinidad, and Guiana between 1937 and 1939 provoked the British Parliament to convene a Commission of Inquiry and heralded the maturation of an anti-­colonial movement in the British West Indies.71 West Indian labor leaders such as Uriah Butler in Trinidad began building durable unions that worked synergistically with movements of racial solidarity such as Marcus Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) that were rapidly attracting followers.72 The uprisings forged a generation of leaders who would preside over many nations’ processes of decolonization. Along with his cousin Norman Manley, Alexander Bustamante played this role for Jamaica, as he leveraged the mobilization of 1938 to lead for the next thirty years.73 There were severe limitations to the politics of these men. Eric Gairy was brutally repressive in Grenada, for instance, and most of these leaders accommodated readily to neo-­colonial regimes. In Antigua, the fierce labor leader Vere Bird turned away from calls for wholesale transformations of his society when his union and party gained power.74 Shortly after Jamaica’s Labor Rebellion, Bustamante founded an organization to harness the power of the “masses,” as he called his followers: the Bustamante Industrial

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Trades Unions (BITU).75 By the fall of 1938, the BITU boasted an officially recognized membership of over 8,000, though Bustamante claimed 25,000 members.76 Even when the colonial authorities detained him on sedition charges between the fall of 1940 and the spring of 1942, his union grew (under Manley’s stewardship).77 On his release from prison, Bustamante founded the Jamaican Labour Party (JLP) to compete with Manley’s recently formed People’s National Party (PNP). Bustamante’s clearly expressed vision of leadership did not include sharing power with his cousin.78 When the colony regained home rule in 1944, Bustamante’s JLP won convincingly, taking twenty-­two seats to the PNP’s five. Like Bustamante, many of this generation of leaders had had experience abroad.79 The Trinidadian Jim Headley, who in 1934 helped found the National Unemployed Movement, had spent time in the United States, where he shared leftist political ideas with other migrants, including prominent communist and anti-­colonial activist George Padmore. The Portuguese-­descended Trinidadian Albert Gomes had also worked in the United States and after returning in the early 1930s published the labor-­oriented paper The Beacon.80 Peregrinating leaders learned about more than political ideologies on their travels; West Indians with experiences in Latin American republics frequently observed fragile governments and returned home with a sense of the British colonial administration’s vulnerability.81 The list of British West Indian leaders who used populist rhetoric and leadership styles is expansive. In Barbados, Clement Payne hammered the themes of racial and economic exploitation and developed a militant anti-­colonial critique as he took the lead of the 1937 strikers. When he was jailed and subsequently deported (because he was not Barbadian-­born and had supposedly lied to enter the country), his lawyer Grantley Adams took up the cause.82 Antonio Soberanis Gomez, founder of Belize’s Labourers and Unemployed Association, was called the “Moses of British Honduras.” Others included Bird of Antigua, Gairy of Grenada, Cheddi Jagan of Guyana, Robert Bradshaw of St. Kitts and Nevis, Ebenezer Joshua of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and Butler of Trinidad. Bustamante rose to power through dramatic performances in print and in person, carving out a niche for himself as an assiduous writer of letters to newspaper editors and a stirring public speaker on stages large and small. During the four years between his return home and the Labor Rebellion, Bustamante wrote 134 letters to newspapers. Again, many of his peers around the West Indies also used blunt newspaper letters and fiery speeches to create a bond with large numbers of disaffected, exploited, and unemployed colonial subjects. The written expression of their politics marks a difference between the cohort of British West Indian leaders and their counterparts in the Hispanophone circum-Caribbean. In general, literacy rates in the Anglophone territories were fairly high.83 In his letters and speeches, Bustamante played on the colonial relationship with Britain to advance a subtle critique of imperialism and he put forward an idiosyncratic view on the nature of leadership. He also demonstrated a critical awareness of color dynamics, and refused to elide their political content. Bustamante homogenized workers and the poor as “the masses,” and spoke often about their plight and his ability to lead them.84 Bustamante identified with a strong and overtly paternalistic form of leadership, the normative style in a colonial administration.

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“Government poses as a paternal Government,” he argued, “and as one looks to one’s natural parents, so the people naturally look to Government when they are unable to help themselves.”85 Like Trujillo, he posed as a father figure himself, writing, “there is no greater good than the good one can do for the weak. Why not do something for them so that they can love and respect you for your action?”86 Bustamante’s skill in engaging a crowd became well known; newspapers reported that Bustamante “electrified and swayed” his listeners and “held the audience spell-­ bound.”87 “The audience seemed to have gone wild, neither the loudspeaker nor the plea from Mr. Bustamante was sufficient for the crowd to cease cheering,” one article recounted. “Mr. Bustamante finally ended his speech by walking through the major portion of the audience still exhorting them to join hand in hand for one common cause for their betterment.”88 Trinidad’s Uriah Butler had a similar gift for creating a sense of dramatic tension and political urgency and he turned his skill toward political mobilization during Trinidad’s 1937 strikes. Butler combined “rhetoric culled from socialist vocabulary, with biblical phrases and images, and appeals to African race consciousness,” and he appealed strongly to other workers in Trinidad who, like himself, had migrated from smaller islands (in his case Grenada).89 Bustamante expressed support for the British monarch but also declared ominously in 1937, “whilst we demonstrate loyalty we should be patriots first, for charity should first begin at home.”90 A few months later, he warned “if no more interest is taken in the workers of this country, the only conclusion we can come to will be to confirm the belief that Jamaica is only kept as a dumping ground for British products, and that we are but squatters on the land of our birth.”91 He clearly recognized Jamaica’s place in the Empire, but could also envision Jamaicans as a discrete people. Butler also avoided directly challenging the British Empire but said he was conducting “a heroic struggle for British justice for British Blacks in a British country.”92 Grantley Adams went a bit farther toward a proto-­nationalist critique in Barbados, railing against the key components of colonial hegemony: “Power in this colony rests in the hands of a narrow, bigoted, selfish, grasping plutocracy,” he wrote. “To financial pressure is added political overlordship and the powerful alliance of a state Church and various brands of religion whose ministrations help to delude the multitude.”93 The three leaders alluded to the unspoken threat of nationalism by pointing to the contingency of colonial life. How, Bustamante asked, can a colonial negotiate the contradictions of being a “squatter in the land of [one’s] birth”?94 Racial politics played a key role in the rise of Bustamante and other West Indian leaders.95 Anton Allahar writes, “at the levels of popular culture and populist politics the irrational, primordial pull of race outweighs any rational appeal to class identity or consciousness.”96 A JLP organizer commented in 1941, “if there wasn’t a UNIA there could be no PNP or JLP.”97 In the previous decade, a sense of Afro-Jamaican unity had emerged in opposition to Chinese- and Indian-­descended Jamaicans. Then, the return of Jamaicans from places like Panama fueled a new form of proto-­nationalism. And just as Garvey proclaimed “Jamaica for Jamaicans,” a similar slogan cropped up in Barbados.98 Marcus Garvey noted Jamaica’s sharp racial divisions in an autobiographical essay describing his years as a radical young printer when his worst enemies were the

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“coloured men of the island who did not want to be classified as Negroes, but as white.”99 This comment makes clear where the salient racial division lay: between brown and black. Bustamante experienced this in 1937 when a “brown skin man” asked him to leave a bar because he was “organizing the niggers.” He thundered in a newspaper letter that “The time is ripening for labour to organise, labour of every shade and complexion . . . neither brown skin, nor pink men are in a position to condemn negroes, and the quicker Jamaicans realise this fact, the quicker that unity which does not exist today, will come.”100 In Trinidad and Guyana, leaders like Butler and Cheddi Jagan navigated a more complicated racial landscape, marked by the presence of a substantial population of South Asian descent. Butler’s failure to forge a durable movement may have been linked to his lesser appeal among Indo-Trinidadians, while scholars of Jagan’s leadership have emphasized how his ancestry set him apart from “the Afro-­ creole leadership in the rest of the English-­speaking Caribbean.”101 Even in the somewhat clearer black, white, and brown context of Jamaica, Bustamante had an ambiguous racial identity; various sources describe him as “near-­ white” and “tan,” but also as “coloured” and “brown.”102 He said his father was white and his mother a descendent of Arawaks, drawing on the ubiquitous Caribbean trope of indigenous ancestry, but his biographer describes her as “dark-­skinned (sambo).”103 If his skin complexion alone would seem to have placed him in the “brown” class, or even the near-­white elite, he followed a clearly “black” pattern in his personal trajectory, working in Cuba and on the Panama Canal. On his return, he spoke at meetings of the Kingston chapter of the UNIA.104 By contrast, Norman Manley followed the pattern of the brown elite—education at Oxford or Cambridge and the assurance of a comfortable position upon return to the island. Bustamante’s personal trajectory placed him in a much more popular category than most of his peers in public life. The Colombian populist Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, in publicly assuming his mixed-­race, part African ancestry violated an elite code against the politicization of race. He was one of the few, like Bustamante, to speak openly about a deeply divisive issue that generally went unchallenged.105 Bustamante clearly used Jamaica’s racial hierarchies to position himself politically, the most famous example of this strategy being his campaign for office during the first elections under the newly granted Home Rule. During this race, in 1944, he argued that a vote for Manley’s PNP—the independence party—would mean “ ‘brown man’ [middle-­class] government and continuing enslavement of the masses.”106 Bustamante could carry off this strategy because of his ambiguous whiteness and dubious class position, which left him in an uncertain relationship to the central division between black and brown. But there were clear limits to the “blackening” of Bustamante’s identity. Jamaican intellectual Rex Nettleford bitterly observed that “the black man in Jamaica” was robbed of “his true identity since he was transformed into ‘the small man’ by Bustamante.”107 And he did not displace a potentially radical racial identity in favor of a potent class identity, but instead reduced workers to a homogenized category of “the masses,” composed of many “small men.” The JLP decisively won the 1944 elections and Bustamante occupied the post of Minister of Communications, openly operating his ministry as a patronage machine.108 A US consular official in Kingston described his political style as a “crude type of mass

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dictatorship” and reported that conservative and business interests were quite pleased with Bustamante’s victory in the elections.109 Once his party gained power, Bustamante secured control of the legislature with a puppet speaker and remained president of both the JLP and the BITU. Criticized by the Daily Gleaner for retaining these positions while in government, he responded “if it needs dictatorship to blast the obstacles in our path, I will have no hesitation in resorting to it.”110 Though he may have expressed himself more baldly than Somoza, Trujillo, and Batista, we can see clear parallels between the leadership inclinations among these men. Lara Putnam points to the links between West Indian populism and its counterparts in the hemisphere: In the wake of the [labor] uprisings, the kinds of substantive state commitments that organized workers had gained in populist pacts in the Spanish American republics and the United States over preceding decades finally made it onto the negotiating table in the British Caribbean: housing and education, the rights to organize and strike [and] a mediating role for the state between labor and capital.111

Ernesto Laclau points out that populism is not an ideology itself but arises “at the point where popular-­democratic elements are presented as an antagonistic option against the ideology of the dominant bloc.”112 While the individual leaders discussed above do not cleave to a common ideology, they were fully aware of the potency of a rhetorical opposition between the dominant and the oppressed. Also, though they shared the pressures of the Depression, they worked within, and were products of, the parameters of their society. In this way, their politics resembled the notion of populism elaborated by John D. French, who describes its “mirror-­like quality” and argues that it “is a movement that maneuvers within but does not direct [the] contradictions” of society at large.113 Conceiving of a populist leader’s approach as a mirroring of society and its contradictions allows for the give and take that occurs in the development of a movement. It also strikes a balance between simplistic explanations of leadership that rely completely on the notion of charisma or that deny a leader’s agency through reference to the spirit of the time that “produces” leaders. This latter perspective characterized Norman Manley’s assessment of Bustamante. “Great occasions of trouble in the history of a people demand and create leaders,” Manley said, and Bustamante was “thrown up” by the people in the crisis of the 1930s.114 In many ways, “great occasions of trouble” also produce new groups, or reconstitute their identities. This helps explain why so many leaders in the circum-Caribbean emerged at the same time and with such similar styles. Ideas, policies, and approaches moved around the region with migrants, public intellectuals, and labor organizers. The nations and colonies of the circum-Caribbean shared similar reactions to the acute economic downturn of the 1930s, and new leaders reached out to formerly excluded segments of the population. These groups included the important participation of sectors related to agrarian production, both farmers and workers. Populist leaders also creatively reimagined national racial identities. For Mexico, this meant an inclusive mestizaje. For the Dominican Republic and Cuba, it meant excluding neighboring peoples. And for the British West Indies, partially

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reacting against rejection by the Hispanophone Caribbean and the United States, it meant a newly valorized form of blackness.

Notes   1 We thank John Tutino and Jeffrey Gould for their comments on an earlier draft of this chapter.   2 Frank Guridy, Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans and African Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 8. See also Lara Putnam, Radical Moves: Caribbean Migrants and the Politics of Race in the Jazz Age (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); Aviva Chomsky, West Indian Workers and the United Fruit Company, 1870–1940 (Baton Rouge: Lousiana State University Press, 1996); Harvey R. Neptune, Caliban and the Yankees: Trinidad and the United States Occupation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).   3 Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), introduction.   4 This interpretation reigned until the early 1970s. See, e.g., Torcuato Di Tella, “Populism and Reform in Latin America,” in a book whose title tells it all—Obstacles to Change in Latin America, ed. Claudio Véliz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 47–74; Gino Germani, “El rol de los obreros y de los migrantes internos en los orígenes del peronismo,” Desarrollo Económico 13: 51 (1973), 435–88. The negative portrayal of populist leaders reappears in Latin American media coverage of early twenty-­firstcentury leaders like Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and Evo Morales in Bolivia. On contemporary Latin American populism, see Carlos de la Torre, Populist Seduction in Latin America: The Ecuadorian Experience (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000) and Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005).   5 In addition to works cited below, some of the most innovative studies on Latin American populism are James Brennan (ed.), Peronism and Argentina (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 1998); Michael Conniff (ed.), Latin American Populism in Comparative Perspective (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982); John French, The Brazilian Workers’ ABC: Class Conflict and Alliances in Modern São Paulo (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992); Daniel James, Resistance and Integration: Peronism and the Argentine Working Class, 1946–1976 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Alan Knight, “Populism and Neo-­populism in Latin America, especially Mexico,” Journal of Latin American Studies 30 (1998), 223–48. For works that underscore the positive aspects of mid-­twentieth-century populist rule, see Jeremy Adelman, “Andean Impasses,” New Left Review 18 (November–December 2002), 41–72; Greg Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); and Gillian McGillivray, Blazing Cane: Sugar Communities, Class, and State-Formation in Cuba, 1868–1959 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009).   6 Alan Knight, “The Rise and Fall of Cardenismo, c. 1930-c. 1946,” in Leslie Bethell (ed.), Mexico Since Independence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 257.   7 Guillermo de la Peña, Legacy of Promises: Agriculture, Politics, and Ritual in the Morelos Highlands of Mexico (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982), 77; Arturo Warman, We Come to Object: The Peasants of Morelos and the National State

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10 11 12

13

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Transformations of Populism in Europe and the Americas (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1980), 136; John Womack, Zapata and the Mexican Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1970). An impressive array of cultural studies of Mexican history, many of which can be sampled in Gilbert Joseph and Daniel Nugent’s Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), demonstrate the cultural impact of popular forces on the nation. For example, Florencia Mallón, Jan Rus, and Elsie Rockwell show how “the state’s subjects” refashioned liberal and “revolutionary” discourses to fit their generational, ethnic, and gendered needs; Marjorie Becker shows how religious women convinced Cárdenas to temper the anti-Catholic aspects of the revolution; Mary Kay Vaughan shows how “cultural broker” teachers communicated the messages of the revolution to the people, then took the messages of the people back to the state. Knight, “The Rise and Fall of Cardenismo,” 251; Nora Hamilton, The Limits of State Autonomy Post-Revolutionary Mexico (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). See also Kevin J. Middlebrook, The Paradox of Revolution: Labor, the State, and Authoritarianism in Mexico (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995) and Norman Caulfield, Mexican Workers and the State (Fort Worth, TX: Texas Christian University Press, 1998). Hamilton, The Limits of State Autonomy, 166. See also Adolfo Gilly, El cardenismo: Una utopía Mexicana (Mexico: Cal y Arena, 1994). Francisco E. Balderrama and Raymond Rodríguez, Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), 21–2. Landowners in the Southern Cone reluctantly accepted state intervention to control and bolster agricultural commodity prices, but most complained bitterly of the increased taxation used to pay for the building of new state infrastructure and industrial development. Lowell Gudmundson pointed out the appeal of populist state projects to peasant farmers in a number of cases including Costa Rica, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Colombia, and Venezuela in Costa Rica before Coffee: Society and Economy on the Eve of the Export Boom (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Press, 1986). See also Catherine LeGrand, Frontier Expansion and Peasant Protest in Colombia, 1830–1935 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986) and Putnam, Radical Moves. Jeffrey Gould, To Lead as Equals: Rural Protest and Political Consciousness in Chinandega, Nicaragua, 1912–1979 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 293. See also Knut Walter, The Regime of Anastasio Somoza, 1936–1956 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993). Anastasio’s son Luis renewed the effort to coopt radical, mobilized campesinos in 1956, and Luis’s brother Tacho Somoza passed labor reform in 1962 in response to a large strike wave. Tacho’s regime also carried out some timid land reform whose international and local origins Jeffrey Gould explains clearly: “if the political and economic pressure of the Alliance for Progress stimulated the reform, the wave of campesino land invasions in León and Chinandega forced the regime to redistribute land in the heart of the agro-­export economy.” Gould, To Lead as Equals, 247. La Flecha, Novedades, May 2, 1945, cited in Jeffrey Gould, “Nicaragua,” in Latin America Between the Second World War and the Cold War, 1944–1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 259. Gould, “Nicaragua,” 247. Gould, “Nicaragua,” 277.

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19 In the Nicaraguan case, the supposedly “coopted ones” took the organizational skills, transformed the populist Somoza rhetoric of “rights” and pushed it to its limits in the 1960s. Gould argues that by undermining Somocista legitimacy and removing the worker/peasant pillar from the Somoza polity, the popular classes paved the way for Sandinista mobilization and the 1979 Revolution. 20 Gould, “Nicaragua,” 262. 21 Richard Lee Turits, Foundations of Despotism: Peasants, the Trujillo Regime, and Modernity in Dominican History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 12. 22 Turits, Foundations of Despotism, 9–12. 23 Lauren Derby, The Dictator’s Seduction: Politics and the Popular Imagination in the Era of Trujillo (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 5. 24 Ibid., 5–6. 25 Ibid., 3–4, 6, 21. 26 Ibid., 6–7. 27 Putnam, Radical Moves, 121. Richard Lee Turits, “A World Destroyed, A Nation Imposed: The 1937 Haitian Massacre in the Dominican Republic,” Hispanic American Historical Review 82: 3 (August 2002), 592–3. 28 Derby, The Dictator’s Seduction, 8–22. 29 Jorge Domínguez, Cuba: Order and Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1978), 78–9; Robert Whitney, State and Revolution in Cuba: Mass Mobilization and Political Change, 1920–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), chaps. 6 and 7 and Louis A Pérez, Jr., Army Politics in Cuba, 1898–1958 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1976). 30 By “mixed-­race,” observers usually suggest that he had Chinese, indigenous, or Afro-Cuban heritage. See Frank Argote-Freyre, Fulgencio Batista: From Revolutionary to Strongman (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006); Whitney, State and Revolution in Cuba, 122. 31 These are the events as told in Pérez, Army Politics in Cuba, 79–93. There is disagreement as to whether the sergeants then approached university students to forge a military-­civilian alliance, or if the process was vice-­versa. 32 The newly commissioned officers included 363 sergeants, 26 corporals, 32 privates, 28 warrant officers, and 63 civilians. Pérez, Army Politics in Cuba, 79–93. 33 Like so many Cuban elites, he joined late in the 1895–8 war for independence, after the United States intervened and it was safe to assume that Cubans would triumph over Spaniards. 34 Domínguez, Cuba, 78. 35 Mendieta solidified the legal procedures for state interventions into private companies when public needs clashed with company intransigence. Oscar Zanetti, “The Workers’ Movement and Labor Regulation in the Cuban Sugar Industry,” Cuban Studies 25 (1995), 189–91; Harold D. Sims, “Cuba’s Organized Labor, from Depression to Cold War,” MACLAS Latin American Essays 11 (1997), 46. 36 Pérez, Army Politics in Cuba, 102–3. 37 Ibid., 103–7; Domínguez, Cuba, 78; Sims, “Cuba’s Organized Labor,” 46. 38 Pérez, Army Politics in Cuba, 104. 39 Major E. W. Timberlake, military attaché, G-2 reports dated December 1, 1937, February 16, 1938, and May 5, 1938, file 2012–133 (84, 86, 88), United States National Archives, Record Group 165, cited in Pérez, Army Politics in Cuba, 106. 40 Russell B. Porter, “Dual Regime Denied by Batista,” New York Times, July 5, 1936, 1–2, cited in Whitney, State and Revolution in Cuba, 133–4.

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41 Havana Post, June 23, 1937, cited in ibid., 149. 42 For an expansion of this argument, see McGillivray, Blazing Cane, chapter 8 and passim. 43 Whitney, State and Revolution in Cuba, 125. 44 “Circular sobre la lucha contra Decreto Ley de prohibición de huelgas,” n.d., Instituto de Historia, Sindicato Nacional de Obreros en la Industria Azucarera, 1/8:87/6.1/13–18. 45 These conclusions are based on a reading of the series entitled “Sindicatos” from the 1930s through the 1950s in the Archivo Provincial de Las Tunas, Cuban American Sugar Company files. Workers managed to force Cubanaco to rehire all of the labor activists dismissed between 1925 and 1934, and they established a job ladder and dismissal procedures that the company had to follow. The company ended up having to bribe people to leave their jobs to get rid of specific positions, because government legislation made it nearly impossible to cut jobs from the mills. 46 Barry Carr, “Identity, Class, and Nation: Black Immigrant Workers, Cuban Communism, and the Sugar Insurgency, 1925–1934,” Hispanic American Historical Review 78: 1 (1998), 83–116; Marc McLeod, “Undesirable Aliens: Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism in the Comparison of Haitian and British West Indian Immigrant Workers in Cuba, 1912–1939,” Journal of Social History 31: 3 (1998), 599–623. 47 Memorandum on February 15 phone conversation between R. B. Wood and Joseph B. Harris, Havana representative, Cubanaco, submitted by H. Freeman Matthews, chargé d’affaires ad interim to secretary of state, USNA, RG 59, stack 250, row 26, decimal file 1900–1939, box 1339, 337.115 SM/665–337.1153-CU. 48 Testimony by Manuel Suarez Gómez in Colectivo de autores, Memorias de un viejo mundo azucarero (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1990), 216, 40. The detail about the Texan horse is from Fidel Castro’s memories of growing up in Oriente province. “Key address by Dr. Fidel Castro Ruz, President of the Republic of Cuba, Major General Calixto Garcia Square, Holguin,” June 1, 2002, http://www.cuba.cu/ gobierno/discursos/2002/ing/f010602i.html [accessed on July 26, 2015]. 49 When pressed to clarify whether they meant in the 1930s or the 1950s, the workers responded that it was during both periods. Older Cubans frequently conflate the 1930s with the 1950s, since Batista assumed prominence as an authoritarian military ruler during these periods (versus the era when democratic elections mattered more, between 1940 and 1952). Eladio Santiago Serrano and Arquímedes Valdivia Hernández, interview by Gillian McGillivray, Tuinucú, May 12, 2000; Rita Díaz, interview by Gillian McGillivray, Havana, September 10, 2006. 50 Juan Martínez-Alier and Verena Martínez-Alier, Cuba: economía y sociedad (Paris: Ruedo Ibérico, 1972), 78; Juan Martínez-Alier, Haciendas, Plantations, and Collective Farms (London: Frank Cass, 1977), 97. 51 The Spanish words that we translate as “enjoy” and “personally direct” are disfrutar and dirigir personalmente. Martínez-Alier, Haciendas, Plantations, and Collective Farms, 97, 112; Martínez-Alier and Martínez-Alier, Cuba, 78. 52 Tomas Bingham, “ ‘In the past we had Juárez and Martí; today we are united by Cárdenas and Batista’ Changes and Exchanges: Mexico-Cuba Relations in the 1930s” (MA Thesis, York University, Toronto, 2010). 53 The international and national factors are drawn from several sources, including Robert Whitney, State and Revolution in Cuba.

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54 Jorge Domínguez, Cuba: Order and Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1978), 85 and Raúl Cepero Bonilla, Obras históricas (Havana: Instituto de Historia, 1963). 55 Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo, “The Catholic Worldview in the Political Philosophy of Pedro Albizu Campos: The Death Knoll of Puerto Rican Insularity,” U.S. Catholic Historian 20: 4 (Fall 2002), 53; Kelvin Santiago-Valles, “ ‘Our race today [is] the only hope for the world’: An African Spaniard as Chieftain of the Struggle Against ‘Sugar Slavery’ in Puerto Rico, 1926–1934,” Caribbean Studies 35: 1 (January–June 2007), 117. 56 Fernando Ortíz, Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar: advertencia de sus contrastes agrarios, económicos, históricos y sociales, su etnografía y su transculturación (La Habana: Jesús Montero, 1940). 57 George Reid Andrews, Afro-Latin America, 1800–2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 165–6. 58 Santiago-Valles, “The Imagined Republic,” 76–80. See also Putnam, Radical Moves. 59 Emilio Pantojas-Garcia, “Puerto Rican Populism Revisited: The PPD during the 1940s,” Journal of Latin American Studies 21: 3 (October 1989), 524–5. Hurricanes hurt Puerto Rico’s agricultural sector in 1928 and 1932, and the costs of importation may also have raised staple prices. James L. Dietz, Economic History of Puerto Rico: Institutional Change and Capitalist Development (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 137–9. 60 Santiago-Valles, “Our race today,” 118, 127. 61 Ibid., 128. 62 Emilio Pantojas-Garcia, “Puerto Rican Populism Revisited: The PPD During the 1940s,” Journal of Latin American Studies 21: 3 (October 1989), 523–5. Santiago-Valles, “Our race today,” 112. 63 Pantojas-Garcia, “Puerto Rican Populism,” 534. 64 Anne S. Macpherson, “Citizens v. Clients: Working Women and Colonial Reform in Puerto Rico and Belize, 1932–45,” Journal of Latin American Studies 35 (2003), 307. 65 Pantojas-Garcia, “Puerto Rican Populism,” 532–3. 66 Macpherson, “Citizens v. Clients,” 281, 303. 67 Pantojas-Garcia, “Puerto Rican Populism,” 535–8; 554. 68 See tables X and XI in Gisela Eisner, Jamaica, 1830–1930: A Study in Economic Growth (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1961), 147–8. Bonham C. Richardson, “Caribbean Migrations, 1838–1985,” in Franklin Knight and Colin Palmer (eds.), The Modern Caribbean (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1989), 215. Elizabeth McLean Petras pays particular attention to Jamaicans in the Canal Zone and in Cuba: Petras, Jamaican Labor Migration: White Capital and Black Labor, 1850–1930 (Boulder: Westview Press, 1988). 69 Petras, Jamaican Labor Migration. 70 Bustamante and others also made appeals that were concrete and realizable, recalling Daniel James’s argument that “Peronism’s political credibility for workers was due not only to the concreteness of its rhetoric, but also to its immediacy.” Daniel James, Resistance and Integration, 22. 71 Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 57–69. 72 Richard Hart, “Introduction,” in O. Nigel Bolland, On the March: Labour Rebellions in the British Caribbean, 1934–39 (Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 1995), viii. 73 For a thorough analysis of Bustamante’s rise to power between 1934 and 1938 and his populist discourse, see Thomas D. Rogers, “Bustamante the Lonely Fighter: Loyalty,

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74 75 76 77

78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95

96 97 98 99

Transformations of Populism in Europe and the Americas Justice, and Race in the Discourse of a Jamaican Populist,” Contours: A Journal of the African Diaspora 3: 1 (2005), 48–78. Douglas Midgett, “Icon and Myth in a Caribbean Polity: V. C. Bird and Antiguan Political Culture,” in Holger Henke and Fred Reno (eds.), Modern Political Culture in the Caribbean (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2003), 188. Daily Gleaner, May 27, 1938, 1. George Eaton, Alexander Bustamante and Modern Jamaica (Kingston: Kingston Publishers, Ltd., 1975), 69. The union membership increased to 20,612 by the time of Bustamante’s February 1942 release; Eaton, Bustamante, 77, 79. The cited reason for Bustamante’s internment was a statement he made in a September 1940 address to Kingston waterfront workers: “I have stood for peace from the first day I have been in public life, but my patience is exhausted. This time if need be there will be blood from the rampage to the grave.” Rogers, “Bustamante,” 66–7. Putnam, Radical Moves, 222. O. Nigel Bolland, The Politics of Labour in the British Caribbean: The Social Origins of Authoritarianism and Democracy in the Labour Movement (Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 2001), 252; Bolland, On the March, 83. Eaton, Bustamante, 51. Bolland, On the March, 46, 113–20. Over 60 percent of Jamaicans were literate in 1921. Eisner, Jamaica, 333. Daily Gleaner, April 17, 1935; April 30, 1935; May 18, 1935. Daily Gleaner, April 17, 1935. Daily Gleaner, June 26, 1935. Daily Gleaner, July 25, 1938, 1; Plain Talk, October 23, 1937, 1. Plain Talk, August 21, 1937, 2. Kelvin Singh, “Adrian Cola Rienzi and the Labour Movement in Trinidad (1925–44),” Journal of Caribbean History 16 (1982), 61–2. Plain Talk, July 3, 1937, 10. Plain Talk, October 2, 1937, 11. Bolland, On the March, 90. Ibid., 46, 113–20. Adams toned down his rhetoric in later years, winning the trust of the Colonial Office. Letter to MP Charles Taylor; referred to Plain Talk, September 25, 1937, printed October 2, 1937. As Kelvin Santiago-Valles points out, racial politics were actually crucial to anti-­ colonial mobilizations all over the world at the same time. Santiago-Valles, “The Imagined Republic of Puerto-Rican Populism in World-Historical Context: The Poetics of Plantation Fantasies and the Petit-Coloniality of Criollo Blanchitude, 1914–48,” in Jerome Branche (ed.), Race, Colonialism, and Social Transformation in Latin America and the Caribbean (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008), 72. Anton L. Allahar, “ ‘Racing’ Caribbean Political Culture: Afrocentrism, Black Nationalism and Fanonism,” in Henke and Reno (eds.), Modern Political Culture, 29. Tony Martin, The Pan-African Connection: From Slavery to Garvey and Beyond (Dover, MA: The Majority Press, 1983), 128. Putnam, Radical Moves, 113–16. Marcus Garvey, I, Marcus Garvey: An Autobiographical Work Based upon a Document Written by Marcus Garvey while in Tombs Prison in New York City (n.p.: CMC Printing, 1995), 7.

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100 Plain Talk, July 31, 1937, pp. 1–2. 101 Percy C. Hintzen, “Cheddi Jagan (1918–97), Charisma and Guyana’s Challenge to Western Capitalism,” in Anton L. Allahar (ed.), Caribbean Charisma: Reflections on Leadership, Legitimacy and Populist Politics (Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 2001), 125. 102 Abigail Bakan, Ideology and Class Conflict in Jamaica: The Politics of Rebellion (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990), 101; Vivian Durham, Saga of a Liberator, or The Bustamante Story (Kingston: Crown Press, 1989), 1: Rex Nettleford, Mirror, Mirror: Identity, Race and Protest in Jamaica (Kingston: William Collins and Sangster, 1970), 32; S. P. M. Sherlock, The Story of the Jamaican People (Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 1998), 362. 103 Eaton, Bustamante, 9–10. 104 Plain Talk, June 22, 1935, 6. The UNIA was founded by Marcus Garvey. 105 Herbert Braun, The Assassination of Gaitán: Public Life and Urban Violence in Colombia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 85, 124. 106 Eaton, Bustamante, 95. 107 Nettleford, Mirror, Mirror, 124. 108 Bolland, Politics, 518–24. 109 Paul Blanshard, Democracy and Empire in the Caribbean (New York: Macmillian, 1947), 96. 110 Blanshard, Democracy, 98. 111 Putnam, Radical Moves, 226. 112 Ernesto Laclau, “Towards a Theory of Populism,” in Laclau, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory: Capitalism, Fascism, Populism (London: Verso, 1977), 173. 113 John D. French, The Brazilian Workers’ ABC, 277. 114 Ken Jones and Jackie Ranston (eds.), The Best of Bustamante: Selected Quotations, 1935–74 (Red Hill, Jamaica: Twin Guinep, 1977), 12.

11

Populist Discourses, Developmentalist Policies: Rethinking Mid-Twentieth-Century Brazilian Politics Joel Wolfe

Populism defined much of mid-­twentieth-century Latin American politics. Argentina’s Juan Perón (1946–55 and 1973–4), Mexico’s Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–40), and Brazil’s Getúlio Vargas (1930–45 and 1951–4) are the region’s best-­known populist presidents. Populism in Brazil, however, diverges from its Latin American counterparts. Whereas Perón, Cárdenas, and others focused on promoting directly the interests of new political actors (peasants, urban workers, etc.), and so stoked aggregate demand in their economies with benefits granted to those groups, Vargas and other Brazilian populist leaders—especially Juscelino Kubitschek (1956–61)—sought first to transform the economy with supply-side policies to stoke investment, break economic bottlenecks, and open new productive capacity. While Perón and Cárdenas used the state to transfer a portion of the extant GDP to the working class and other segments of the poor, Vargas and later Kubitschek believed that only an expanding and highly diversified economy could produce the means for the transformation of the Brazilian population.1 Brazilian populists sought to transform first the national economy and later the broad population. This focus made the ties between Brazilian political leaders and popular class groups much weaker than they were in Argentina and Mexico, but it also created the economic basis for the later development of powerful popular class movements that played a central role in the creation of the nation’s democratic political system.2 In different eras and regions of the world, populism had divergent meanings. In mid-­twentieth-century Latin America, populist politics shared some basic traits. Economic and political crises often ushered in eras of populism, during which the state attempted to mediate among social actors. Populist politicians usually sought to bring new groups into formal politics with new forms of representation, which were state-­ centered and dependent. In the Latin American context, that often involved the creation of a national corporatist structure.3 Although populist politics were hardly revolutionary, their Manichaean rhetoric made them appear to be more systemically threatening than they were in practice. Indeed, populist coalitions usually identified their political enemies as either foreigners or domestic allies of those foreign interests. Mexico’s Cárdenas took on both foreign oil companies, when he nationalized their

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holdings and created Pemex, and large domestic latifundistas, with his extensive land reform. Perón demonized cattle and wheat interests as exporters more interested in pleasing their foreign customers than the Argentine people. And so, both Cárdenas and Perón proclaimed that they acted against the interests of foreigners and their allies to bolster the nation and support its poorest citizens. Nationalism, particularly on behalf of those previously excluded from the political system, was a key component of this sort of populism. Some Brazilian populists advocated similar policies. Pedro Ernesto, the mayor of Rio de Janeiro in the early 1930s and perhaps Brazil’s first true populist, and Miguel Arraes, the governor of the northeast state of Pernambuco in the early 1960s and again in the late 1990s, sought to provide extensive social services and, in the case of Pernambuco, proposed an extensive agrarian reform. Lionel Brizola, who was governor of Rio Grande do Sul (1959–63) and of Rio de Janeiro (1983–7 and 1991–4), was an outspoken critic of foreign capital and firms. Adhemar de Barros, who was twice São Paulo’s governor (1947–51 and 1963–6) initially came to power as an ally of organized labor.4 But, none of these men managed to be elected president. Getúlio Vargas and Juscelino Kubitschek did hold Brazil’s highest office, and it is their populism that is most instructive. Another populist became president without having won direct election, João Goulart (1961–4). He had been vice president under Kubitschek and then again under the very brief administration of Jânio Quadros (1961). When Quadros suddenly resigned after only eight months in office, Goulart became president. Despite his unique path to the presidency, Jango, as he was known, was an extremely popular politician and very much a populist in the model of Cárdenas and Perón. He did not, however, have the political power or even opportunities to craft policies that would make his populism concrete before he was removed through a violent military coup in early 1964.5 While Vargas and Kubitschek employed nationalist rhetoric at times, both men welcomed foreign capital, often eagerly. The sort of xenophobic policies and support for the national elites over foreign capital that characterized Argentine and Mexican populist discourses were more often articulated by leaders of Brazil’s Communist Party than by Vargas or Kubitschek. Moreover, neither man even considered taking on rural interests; they both promoted agriculture, and expanded the governmental infrastructure to support it. A close examination of Vargas’s and Kubitschek’s populism in action reveals policies that more accurately could be described as “developmentalist,” with imbedded narratives of popular class inclusion and elevation.6 These policies rarely provided real material benefits to the working class and the poor, but they did lay the groundwork for the transformation of the Brazilian economy in the decades after they left the political stage.7 And these transformations provided the means for the rise of a post-­populist embrace of radical democracy by urban workers, landless peasants, and other popular class groups beginning in the late 1970s.8 Brazil’s unique form of populism is rooted in the complex mix of economic depression and challenges to the existing political order in the early 1930s.9 In November 1930, Getúlio Vargas seized power in a military-­backed coup with almost no actual fighting. Vargas was a traditional politician who had prospered in Brazil’s Old Republic (1889–1930). He had been Brazil’s Minister of Finance (1926–8) under President

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Washington Luís and then returned to his home state of Rio Grande do Sul to serve as governor. From the onset of the Republic—in the aftermath of a monarchy that had smoothed Brazilian independence under the tutelage of heirs of Portugal’s royal house of Braganza and maintained the slave regime until 1888—an extreme form of federalism created a very weak central state and powerful regional elites based in agriculture. The governors of the two most powerful states—São Paulo, known for its prodigious coffee production, and Minas Gerais, with its highly regarded dairy industry—dominated national politics through a system which came to be known as a política de café com leite or the politics of coffee with milk.10 The two states would rotate the presidency between their governors, and an “outsider” would only take office in the event of a conflict between them. Just such a conflict arose when President Washington Luís (a Paulista) chose his political heir, Júlio Prestes (the sitting governor of São Paulo), over a Mineiro candidate.11 Angered by Paulista arrogance, politicians throughout Brazil, but led by Minas Gerais, threw their support behind Vargas’s presidential candidacy. When he lost the popular vote, segments of this electoral coalition and key military leaders seized power in what became known as the Revolution of 1930.12 Vargas became Brazil’s provisional president in November 1930. He held on until 1945 by becoming an outright dictator in the mid-1930s, having initially promised to hold open elections. When the military and some of the very elites who had initially backed him removed him from office, he was in the midst of recasting himself as a populist and a democrat. In fact, he won the presidential election of 1950 with a populist platform of economic nationalism and improved wages and conditions for workers. He struggled to implement that populism and was so politically and personally frustrated by the situation that he committed suicide in August 1954. This long career afforded Vargas multiple opportunities to remake himself politically, and the various iterations of his politics have provided fodder to historians and others to read onto him a broad range of politics. But, when he first took power, Vargas did not have a well articulated politics, beyond putting an end to Paulista presidential domination. The only way to limit Paulista power and at the same time address the deteriorating terms of trade of the deepening economic depression would be to increase the power of the national government based in Rio de Janeiro. That became Vargas’s first and most important goal. Vargas therefore worked in the early 1930s to expand state capacity. He moved to weaken Brazil’s intense regionalism, which had been codified in the extreme federalism of the Old Republic’s Constitution of 1891.13 Vargas removed most of the states’ governors and replaced them with appointees called “interventors.” Allied states such as Minas Gerais and Rio Grande do Sul kept their governments, but São Paulo and most of the others, beginning in 1931, were run by outsiders appointed by the central state in Rio. The capital had never before exercised control over the states. Indeed, the reign of Brazil’s first monarch, Dom Pedro I (1822–31), ended in large part because the Portuguese-­born sovereign attempted to exercise some modest centralized control over the national territory and faced regional uprisings in response.14 In 1931 and 1932, industrial strikes in São Paulo, combined with Vargas’s first, awkward attempt to control Brazil from the capital, created a crisis that would shape his politics for close to twenty years.

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Soon after taking power, Vargas created two new national ministries to expand the federal government’s power and promote national economic and social development: the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Labor, Industry, and Commerce.15 The Ministry of Labor, as it quickly became known, sought to promote economic development in general. Specifically, it would insert itself into industrial relations to ameliorate or even prevent social conflicts; indeed, strikes were eventually formally outlawed. Over the course of the 1930s, the national government created a corporatist system for workers and employers, and a tripartite labor court that vested the ultimate authority in work disputes with Ministry officials.16 This new, federal power and the presence of a northeasterner, João Alberto Lins de Barros, as the interventor in São Paulo, helped to bring about the first major crisis in Vargas’s rule. His government’s attempts to mediate a series of wildcat strikes deepened Paulista discontent and paved the way for Brazil’s most powerful state to launch a civil war against the national government beginning in July 1932. The strikes began in familiar ways for São Paulo’s industrialists. At first women textile workers, and then other industrial laborers throughout the city, organized through informal factory commissions to demand better wages and conditions. The sudden and dramatic decline in coffee exports with the advent of the Great Depression affected the entire Brazilian economy, but was particularly hard-­felt in São Paulo, the nation’s largest coffee producer. Industry cut back production with the overall contraction of the economy. Workers’ pay suffered and they organized to protest the change. Vargas’s new Ministry of Labor and João Alberto, the foreign interventor, created a unique opportunity for male unionists and political activists who had long sought a bigger role in the city’s working-­class movement, which had since the 1917 General Strike been dominated by women in textile factories. Male unionists petitioned for help from the Ministry in Rio, women workers struck, and the city’s factory workers dug in for a prolonged struggle. João Alberto then inserted himself in the labor upheaval. He forced a settlement that satisfied no one. Workers were far from grateful for the intervention, and industrialists and other elites were horrified not only that they had lost control over the situation to the government, but that they had lost it to a segment of the state that reported to Rio, which was literally and figuratively foreign to them. Moreover, no matter what João Alberto did, the world price for coffee continued to tumble, and São Paulo’s economy with it.17 This federal intervention in Paulista affairs represented a proto-­populist move by the new regime, but it also hastened the backlash that would limit Vargas throughout his years of rule.18 João Alberto’s intervention was just one of many slights felt by Paulistas, who went into open, armed rebellion on July 9, 1932. Although the civil war ended in defeat for the rebel forces just three months later on October 9, the uprising shocked Vargas and forced him to change course. Indeed, some of his former allies in Minas Gerais and his home state of Rio Grande do Sul sympathized with the Paulistas and even hinted that they might support the rebellion. They did not, and federal forces won, but the reality of the war and the fact that other states were also put off by Vargas’s centralizing forced the provisional president to change course.19 To São Paulo itself, he granted that state’s industrialists complete control over the implementation of federal regulations, especially regarding industrial relations. To mollify his other critics, Vargas

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moved to promulgate a new, liberal constitution that provided real checks on federal authority. And, he accepted calls for a presidential election, but this was never held. The 1934 Constitution was the clearest expression of a populist politics articulated in Brazil to that point in time. The Constitution explicitly guaranteed the freedom of speech, religion, movement, and assembly. It granted universal suffrage, although there were still significant impediments to voting, and it created a system of proportional representation for specific groups, such as labor. This and the formal creation of labor courts housed in the Ministry of Labor were part of a corporatist system Vargas sought to establish. The constitution also included broad guarantees of social rights, including a minimum wage, eight-­hour day, paid vacations, and indemnity for being laid off. The 1934 Constitution was populist in its framework of expanding the franchise to women. It also granted suffrage to men who had not previously been eligible to vote. It was further populist in character in that it created a state role for the promotion of social justice, and it strengthened the federal government’s role in the economy. Vargas had only accepted the formation of the assembléia constituent in part to mollify the Paulista elite and his other critics.20 Moreover, he conspicuously exempted São Paulo from federal oversight of social regulations and legislation.21 Despite these limitations, for a few years in the mid-1930s Brazil experienced a political effervescence unlike anything it had ever seen. In factories and working-­class neighborhoods, people organized on their own or joined the newly established formal unions, which were tied to the state. At the same time, the Communist Party completed its purge of labor activists and focused on coup planning, with the former military man Luiz Carlos Prestes now in charge. An avowedly fascist movement, the Integralists, organized right-­wing intellectuals and segments of the German-­speaking community in Brazil’s south.22 For the first time since abolition of slavery in 1888, Afro-Brazilians openly sought equal rights. Industrialists and commercial interests pushed the state for aid, as much of the West continued to suffer through the worst years of the Great Depression.23 As all these forces geared up for planned national elections in January 1938, leaders of the Communist Party attempted to launch a military uprising in Brazil’s Northeast in 1935. Planned and organized in Moscow, the Intentona had been uncovered by the British security forces, which in turn informed the Brazilian government. Vargas arrested party leaders and crushed the uprising before it began.24 He then used the plot’s existence as an excuse to close the political openings created by the 1934 Constitution. From 1935 to 1937, Vargas had political opponents arrested and parties closed. On November 11, 1937 he formally declared the Estado Novo (or New State) dictatorship that sought to promote national development through a series of major industrial and infrastructure projects, the ending of open politics, and the centralization of power in the hands of the leader in the national capital. The Estado Novo dictatorship (1937–45) gave Vargas the power to force his will on Brazilian politics. Dictatorships are not devoid of politics, and Vargas had to contend with the demands of military leaders, who were his most significant allies, industrialists, planters, and exporters. He was not immune to public opinion, and so promoted nationalist and even some populist themes during the dictatorship. But the regime’s primary focus was on creating the physical, legal, and political infrastructure for national integration and development. In addition to tightening federal control over

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industrial relations, Vargas also created a national steel industry, opened a state-­run mining monopoly, dramatically expanded rural electrification, founded a government-­ run airplane engine factory, and established a government agency to develop the domestic oil industry. At the same time, the Vargas administration enlarged, centralized, and attempted to professionalize the bureaucracy by establishing the DASP (Departamento Administrativo do Serviço Público) and the DIP (Departamento de Imprensa e Propaganda).25 All these efforts bore fruit. The initial economic expansion of the late 1930s took off when the advent of the Second World War increased commodity prices and so export earnings, and spurred domestic industry as imports of manufactured goods dried up.26 Despite this boom, real incomes for the vast majority of Brazilians fell. In the face of Vargas’s nationalism and vague populist pronouncements, Brazilian workers faced stagnating wages, difficult work conditions, and high rates of price inflation, especially for food.27 The most obvious evidence of Vargas’s unpopularity among the working class was their near silence when he was removed by the military in October 1945. Segments of the bureaucracy and some in the now state-­run unions had organized a campaign to keep Vargas in office, but there were no real popular expressions of support on his behalf. Indeed, massive wildcat strikes broke out after his ouster, when workers felt free to express their anger at both their employers and the state and its corporatist industrial relations system that had kept their wages so low for so long. Direct action of this sort garnered Brazilian workers the wage increases they had long been denied by the state during the Estado Novo years.28 Vargas’s promises that he would support the needs of the average Brazilian, as a self-­proclaimed “Father of the Poor,” were therefore frequently derided by workers and others who instead described him, with justification, as the “Mother of the Rich.” And yet, Vargas did articulate a populist discourse during the later years of the dictatorship. Whether out of a sincere desire to help the poor, or a cynical attempt to create a base of support for the inevitable period of open politics that would follow the conclusion of the war, Vargas began to reach out to urban workers and other segments of the broad population in the early 1940s.29 He did so in response to popular demands that he pay attention to the plight of the average Brazilian. As part of his governing apparatus during the dictatorship, Vargas used radio and newsreels, managed by the new DIP, to promote himself as the single man responsible for promoting social justice for all Brazilians. The national propaganda campaign referred to the dictator as the “Father of the Poor.” And, thousands of Brazilians wrote directly to Vargas, seeking help with everything from children’s school tuition to conditions on the shop floor and in working-­class neighborhoods. Vargas personally reviewed some requests, marking those he read with a giant red “V”, and then might order investigations of claims against abusive foremen and problematic local officials. The interplay between the dictator and the Brazilian people led to the crafting of a series of populist pronouncements by Vargas.30 His radio addresses on the Hora do Brasil show, as well as his formal May Day speeches, increasingly spoke of the nation’s responsibility to its working people, as opposed to those people’s responsibilities to the state, as earlier Estado Novo statements had claimed.31 From 1942 until his ouster in late 1945, Vargas’s rhetoric became increasingly pro-­worker.32

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Beyond the relative handful of cases in which Vargas personally intervened, the average Brazilian was supposed to benefit from the establishment of a national minimum wage and the codification of a series of work and labor regulations into the Consolidated Labor Laws (Consolação das Leis do Trabalho, or CLT). Both the minimum wage and the CLT were put into effect in 1943, a full thirteen years after coming to power and nine years after the promulgation of the Constitution of 1934. The politics of the early to mid-1940s forced Vargas to deliver finally on his populist promises of the early 1930s. Brazil was fully engaged as an Allied nation in the Second World War, and the contradictions of fighting fascism in Europe while living in a dictatorship with some fascist trappings were becoming too much for many. The war brought record profits for agricultural commodity producers and industrialists, but working people and the middle class faced rapidly increasing prices for food, housing, and transportation.33 Moreover, workers and others spoke directly to Vargas, through their letters and petitions, offering their support in exchange for a shift in the regime’s priorities. Vargas was above all else, a shrewd politician, and so he embraced populism in 1943 to begin to build a political base for the elections he could see on the horizon. Brazil’s limited state capacity at this time shaped how Vargas came to embrace populist politics. The national government was weak by design.34 From the monarchy (1822–89) through the Old Republic (1889–1930), planters throughout the nation worked assiduously to keep as much authority as possible in their provinces (under the monarchy) and states (during republican rule). São Paulo’s rejection of Vargas’s centralizing tendencies in the early 1930s was about more than the nation’s most powerful state losing its grip on the presidency. By the time of the 1932 civil war, the majority of the states shared the Paulista critique of Vargas. His limited moves to strengthen Rio at the expense of the states brought loud objections from all corners of the nation. And, without effective instruments of state power to implement a centralizing project, Vargas was left with few options. The absence of state capacity in Brazil becomes even more obvious when compared to other Latin American countries. Mexico’s Lázaro Cárdenas fundamentally reshaped land tenure, nationalized foreign holdings, and reshaped the national political system during just one six-­year term. He did so by using existing institutions when possible, and creating completely new ones when necessary.35 Juan Perón created a state monopoly for agricultural commodity markets and controlled exports. He was also able both to promote industrial expansion and increase workers’ real wages.36 Those sorts of policies were politically impractical and bureaucratically impossible in Brazil. The central state simply had little power to effect change beyond the capital, Rio de Janeiro.37 Vargas understood this well and so embraced stoking cultural nationalism to combat the nation’s heritage of extreme regionalism. This took the form of everything from funding the first World Cup soccer team and sponsoring Formula One grand prix races, to promoting national historical patrimony and internal tourism.38 Vargas promoted colonial era and nineteenth-­century symbols of unification, such as the towns of Ouro Preto, where a proto-­republican uprising had broken out in 1789, and Petrópolis, the summer home of the monarchy.39 And, he relentlessly used radio to craft an image of himself as Brazil’s leader.40 Previous presidents not only lacked the tools to do that, they had no real interest in it either. Presidents under the Republic advanced

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state and regional rights over federal authority in most matters. Only Pedro II (1840– 89), as the emperor, had represented the nation as a chief executive, but he did so in a system that granted regional agricultural elites tremendous autonomy. Vargas, on the other hand, began the process of making the president more relevant to the average Brazilian throughout the nation. In other words, he was the first national political figure to practice a form of mass or popular politics. Unfortunately for Vargas, this was an extremely tenuous position for a Brazilian leader in the early 1940s. Without elections, there was no value in mobilizing large segments of the working class and poor. But, by responding to the petitions he had personally received and then crafting a series of populist responses, Vargas began to stoke popular interest in formal politics. Despite the incongruity of his position—he was a dictator who had come to power in a coup and then canceled promised elections in yet another coup—Vargas also moved to create two parties he could use in an open political environment. The two parties highlighted the complexity of his political position in the mid-1940s. The Partido Trabahlista Brasileiro (PTB) was supposed to tap into popular support, particularly among people in unions. Although on the face of it similar to Great Britain’s Labour Party, Vargas privately admitted that he was more impressed with FDR’s Democratic Party in the United States. Vargas’s allies also formed the Partido Social Democrático (PSD), which represented middle-­class and elite Brazilians who were tied to the regime.41 A group of Vargas supporters allied with these parties formed an allegedly spontaneous campaign to keep the dictator in power in 1945. The Queremistas (from “queremos Getúlio,” “we want Getúlio”) organized rallies that seemed formal and anything but spontaneous.42 The military, with the support of Vargas’s opponents, who had organized into their own party, the União Democrática Nacional (UDN) and with cheerleading from the United States ambassador, Adolph Berle, removed Vargas from office on October 29, 1945. Vargas’s military and civilian opponents promised immediate elections. In December 1945, Brazilians voted to put General Eúrico Gaspar Dutra in the presidential palace. Dutra ran on the combined PTB-PSD ticket against another military man, retired Air Marshal Eduardo Gomes, who ran as the UDN candidate. The pro-Vargas parties also won more seats in the Senate and Chamber of Deputies than any other party. Vargas himself ended up being elected senator from both his home state, Rio Grande do Sul, and from Rio, where he had dramatically expanded the bureaucracy for a decade and a half. He chose to serve from Rio Grande do Sul. More than six million people voted in 1945, which was triple the number who had participated in the 1930 election. This increase was significantly greater than simple population growth and so reveals the beginnings of a broader franchise. Women and more urban workers were now participating. Moreover, political parties represented real choices. Through the 1930 election, the choice was often between different representatives of different state Republican parties, which represented each state’s agricultural interests. In 1945, most of the old Republican parties were in the UDN, with middle-­class and working-­class voters in the PSD, PTB, and even the Communist Party, which was legal and won close to ten percent of the presidential vote in 1945.43 In this post-1945 political milieu, Vargas could finally attempt to take advantage of his status as the author of most of Brazil’s labor and social legislation. But Vargas

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only remained popular among working people in comparison with the UDN leaders. In his fifteen years as Brazil’s leader, Vargas succeeded in raising popular expectations for the central state to provide true social justice to Brazil’s working people. His accomplishments, though, were much more heavily tilted toward deepening industrial and agricultural production than in providing social justice for the majority of Brazilians. Industrial and agricultural production increased from 1930 to 1945.44 The national government also facilitated infrastructure development in everything from steel manufacturing to energy production. But, real wages for the majority of Brazilians declined. Caloric intake for workers and the poor declined. The cost of living for working-­class Brazilians increased and access to land and other productive resources declined. By most measures, Vargas was truly the “Mother of the Rich.”45 Moreover, Vargas’s connections to significant segments of the working class were tenuous. The corporatist labor structure he put in place did not bring people into the state the way its planners had imagined it would. In Rio, the national capital, the Ministry of Labor had a strong presence, but it was completely absent from the industrial capital of Brazil, São Paulo state.46 As part of the settlement of the 1932 civil war, Vargas ceded complete control over ministerial activities to the Paulistas. Moreover, workers in the city of São Paulo had long been suspicious of centralized authority and much preferred their own factory commissions over the state-­sponsored unions. Even though they paid a mandatory union tax, the vast majority of Paulistano industrial workers refused to take the next step of becoming formal union members (i.e., to become sindicalizado) in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Consistently more than 95 percent of the city’s textile and metallurgical workers paid the union tax but refused to join the state-­sponsored unions. Instead, they maintained their own factory and neighborhood forms of organization that they later called upon after Vargas’s ouster.47 Popular support for Vargas in the 1950 presidential election should be understood within this context. He won close to 50 percent of the national vote, again running against a candidate of the traditional elite in the UDN. In other words, he was preferable to the leader of the party that represented an alliance of factory owners and large land interests, and Vargas understood that. In his first period of elected leadership, he attempted to merge his past preference for focusing on infrastructure and other supplyside policies with his electoral populist rhetoric that promoted increased demand among all social classes in Brazil. But, he continued to emphasize supply-side policies over the demand side. Vargas focused his government on the work of the Joint Brazil–United States Economic Development Commission, which issued its final report in 1954. The US interest in the commission was twofold: developmentalism was an increasingly important component of US Cold War thinking. A growing capitalist economy would inoculate a country like Brazil from Communist influence.48 The Joint Commission also sought to improve Brazil’s infrastructure in order to facilitate more bilateral trade with the United States. For Vargas and his ministers, as well as key actors in the military, the Joint Commission’s work was yet another component of the developmentalism that stretched back to the late nineteenth century. None of the report’s recommendations spoke to increasing directly demand in the Brazilian economy. Instead they focused on

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improving national integration through improved transportation networks and breaking various economic bottlenecks in energy production and distribution.49 Vargas embraced the findings of the Joint Commission report without necessarily agreeing with its specific recommendations. He significantly expanded federal spending on road building and he embraced a growing role for Rio in the exploration, refining, and distribution of energy sources, especially petroleum. The creation of Petrobras in 1953 was yet another example of Vargas focusing on the broad infrastructure of development. Creating a national oil company stoked nationalist pride and took shape in response to a broad campaign that proclaimed “o petroleo é nosso,” “the oil is ours.” A state oil company defied the expectations of the US–Brazilian Joint Commission, which had a preference for private over public investments in commodity production, and so seemed populist to many foreign observers. And, the creation of Petrobras was popular among Brazilians.50 But, it was yet another instance of Vargas emphasizing developmentalism or supply-­side policies over consumption and the demand side. The founding of Petrobras did nothing to help workers squeezed by stagnant wages and an increasing cost of living that had been exacerbated by the broad rise in commodity prices brought on by the Korean War. Looking back to the early 1950s, it can seem as though Vargas finally began to tilt toward urban labor after more than two decades of ultimately siding with employers. He made his political protégé, pro-­worker João “Jango” Goulart, the Minister of Labor. Real wages finally grew and the Ministry relaxed control over the unions. Insurgent labor activists gained control over local unions in São Paulo and elsewhere and so workers seemed to occupy a key political space in national Brazilian politics for the first time since the advent of industry there.51 Just as much of Vargas’s populist narrative in the early to mid-1940s had come from workers themselves, this turn was more a product of popular politics than a top-­down populist initiative. Vargas made some minor concessions to organized labor at the beginning of his term. He loosened federal control over union elections and insurgent slates gained power in a number of unions throughout Brazil. In mid-1952, he also finally put the federal Ministry of Labor in charge of industrial relations in the state of São Paulo, twenty years after he granted that state’s industrialists control in the wake of the civil war. Unfortunately, the federal Ministry of Labor was so weak and disorganized that it had to send officials from its offices in Paraná, a neighboring state with much less industry, to oversee ministry affairs in São Paulo. At the same time, Vargas articulated a clear pro-­worker message in a series of speeches. On May Day 1952, he urged workers to join the unions to fight for real wage increases, telling a national radio audience, “The union is your weapon, your defense, and your tool for political action.”52 But, when workers sought significant wage increases through those unions, the federal government opposed them. The turning point was the March 1953 “Strike of the 300,000” in São Paulo. Using both the formal unions and their insurgent factory commissions, workers in São Paulo waged an extraordinarily effective six-­week general strike that all but halted all economic activity in and around Brazil’s largest metropolitan area. Workers in a broad range of industries gained across-­the-board 32 percent wage increases through direct negotiations with employers. Workers had sought 60 percent increases, and were

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worried that they did not have accurate data on the cost of living.53 Because they also came to understand the structural weakness of their position within the corporatist industrial relations system, workers formed their own statistical agency that they used to gather wage and cost of living data in order to bargain with the state and employers more effectively.54 Vargas took note of workers’ assertiveness and finally moved to make the Ministry of Labor more worker-­oriented, by appointing João Goulart as the minister. Goulart quickly moved to orient the Ministry of Labor toward workers’ issues. He began to tackle the issue of social security insurance for workers soon after taking office in June 1953, and in 1954 he directed the ministry to study the status of Brazil’s minimum wage. Jango quickly concluded that the wage should be doubled, but pressure from the business community and his political opponents led to his resignation from office in February 1954. Goulart’s quick rise and fall as a pro-­worker Minister of Labor foreshadowed the end of Vargas’s rule. Physically exhausted and increasingly tied to a variety of scandals, including the assassination of a political rival, Vargas killed himself on August 24, 1954. He left a suicide note that was read to a national radio audience. His intention was to cement his place in Brazilian history as someone who had made the ultimate sacrifice for the nation.55 Despite rallies and protests the day after his death, Vargas left no obvious legacy going forward. Indeed, when the Mineiro governor Juscelino Kubitschek won the 1955 presidential election, he seemed to usher in a totally new era of popular politics, by explicitly focusing his administration on national economic and social development. JK, as he was known, campaigned on the slogan “Fifty Years of Progress in Five,” highlighting his plan to use his one term in office to transform the nation and its people. On his first day in office, Kubitschek convened his cabinet for an early morning meeting to begin work on his Targets Program, which laid out plans for expanding basic industries and transportation networks. The only two targets that did not explicitly address inputs or infrastructure were the establishment of the national automobile industry (making autos the only consumer good in the plan) and the final, “synthesis” target of building a new, interior capital city, which became Brasília.56 While Vargas often spoke publicly about popular needs when he was in private focusing on developmentalism, Kubitschek was much more explicit in his emphasis on supply-­side policies. JK’s program of “Fifty Years of Progress in Five” sought to transform the Brazilian economy and population. By deepening industrialization, especially in steel, cement, and other inputs along with the development of the national automobile industry, and increasing the physical integration of the nation through a massive road building campaign and the opening of the new interior capital, Kubitschek attempted to remake Brazil and its people so that it could become a peaceful and prosperous democracy.57 JK left office with great public approval ratings because he succeeded in stoking nationalist pride by in fact building and opening a new national capital and essentially forcing the major US and European automobile companies to open production facilities in Brazil.58 The massive government spending and the increasing presence of multinational automobile companies brought high levels of economic growth—GDP more than quadrupled during his five years in office—and increasing wages for many.59 In other words, although Kubitschek focused, quite successfully, on supply-­side policies, there was enough growth in demand to satisfy

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most Brazilians. And, the symbolism of Brasília and the establishment of the auto industry stoked a deep national pride among Brazilians of all social classes.60 JK was indeed popular, but he probably should not be analyzed solely through the lens of populist politics. A public health doctor, Kubitschek relied on diagnosing and solving problems. He served as the mayor of Belo Horizonte, the largest city and capital of the prosperous state of Minas Gerais, governor of his state, and then president, and in each office he acted as a technocratic problem-­solver, rather than as an inspirational political hero. Instead of adopting a Manichaean narrative, which usually rests on notions of scarcity, he openly sought to expand the economy and opportunities for all Brazilians in every region. He also embraced productive foreign capital in manufacturing in that endeavor. Although he was elected as a member of the PSD, one of Vargas’s parties, and his vice president was João Goulart, who ran as a candidate of the PTB, Vargas’s other party, Kubitschek was not associated with Vargas in the popular consciousness. Only in the minds of his political opponents on the right and in the military, which often acted in concert, was Kubitschek really tied to Vargas.61 Under the terms of the 1946 Constitution, candidates for president and vice president ran for their offices separately. JK and Goulart were political allies, so their elections led to a smooth administration despite the fact that they led different parties. Although quite popular, Goulart did not seek the presidency in 1960 and instead ran again for the vice presidency. He may have worried that his support was too narrow and that he was seen as too tied to labor and other PTB constituencies. Jango was easily elected vice president as the PTB candidate and the governor of São Paulo, Jânio Quadros, won the presidency in a landslide, running as a reformer but under the banner of the conservative UDN.62 Although he had been an effective mayor and governor, Quadros was so overmatched as president that he used the threat of his own resignation, which would put the leftist Goulart in line for the presidency, to push the legislature to adopt his policies. This gambit failed and Quadros ended up leaving office on August 25, 1961 after having been inaugurated on January 31 of that same year. His resignation brought on a political crisis as the nation faced the ascension of Goulart to the presidency.63 To many on the political right and even in the center, and certainly to the military leadership, Goulart represented a Perón-­like populist. Conservatives feared that Brazil would finally have a classic populist leader, but in 1961 worries on the right about populism elided into fear of the rise of Castro-­style radicalism. Indeed, from Quadros’s August 1961 resignation to the April 1, 1964 military coup that removed him from office, Goulart’s populism was often misinterpreted as communism by many in Brazil and abroad. Goulart sought to manage an unmanageable set of political circumstances. He juggled the demands of workers and the rural poor for increased wages and access to land with a near constant opposition from the military and political right. Popular demands grew steadily as Brazilians faced a steadily increasing rate of inflation, which was an unwanted by-product of Kubitschek developmentalism. Goulart was able to effect a series of populist reforms, such as granting the franchise to illiterates, and accepting the unionization of enlisted men in the military.64 Goulart attempted to navigate the complex politics of the early 1960s by emphasizing economic nationalism. He openly disparaged the role of foreign capital in Brazil,

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even though multinational corporations had recently played a constructive role in establishing a highly visible and successful automotive sector. Goulart skillfully maneuvered around this complex issue by focusing on the need for foreign corporations to reinvest more of their Brazilian profits in Brazil. In September 1962, he signed a profit remittance law that had the benefit of both promoting domestic investment and garnering him more popular support.65 He also stoked nationalist pride and focused on development by creating Electrobras to generate and distribute power throughout Brazil. Following in JK’s footsteps, Electrobras would build massive new hydroelectric generating capacity and extensive power distribution grids, tying together the nation and increasing the power supply for commercial and household use.66 Although Goulart acted as a developmentalist and so focused on supply-­side policies, he also made a series of tentative moves to stoke demand with wage increases and by granting more authority to unions and other popular class groups. Finally, in February 1964, he introduced a broad reform program that would institutionalize a type of classic demand-­side populism. The so-­called Package Plan called for increased unionization, the extension of the franchise, periodic wage adjustments for workers, the seizure of lands adjacent to federal highways, railroads, and water projects for redistribution through an agrarian reform, and the creation of a series of state monopolies for coffee, iron ore, and other commodities. Between Goulart’s actions and the hemispheric context of the Cuban Revolution, people throughout Brazil increasingly saw the president as a radical populist. He was not, however, as much of a leftist as the right feared or the left hoped. But, for most Brazilians, Goulart did succeed in raising either expectations or fear. To the military, its conservative allies, and the US government, Goulart was either an out-­of-control radical populist, or a puppet of the organized left. They acted in concert by bringing down the elected government in a coup on April 1, 1964, which ushered in 21 years of military dictatorship.67 Whatever the nature of Goulart’s actual politics, Brazil was chaotic throughout most of his tenure. Whereas Vargas and Kubitschek had, in very different ways and with very different means, managed to maintain some level of political and economic stability, Goulart never had any real control over the political process. He deviated from his predecessors’ focus on supply-­side populism, which had succeeded in keeping the right at bay and set the stage for deeper economic development. Goulart instead emphasized demand-­side policies, because neither Vargas’s nor Kubitschek’s programs had significantly promoted the interests of the working class and the poor. The first iteration of Brazilian populism with its focus on supply-­side policies had succeeded in two ways: it maintained basic political peace and it began the processes of national unification and economic modernization. Vargas’s and Kubitschek’s populism, however, failed in significant ways because it did not provide real material benefits to broad segments of the population. So, when Goulart attempted to implement a more classic, demand-­side populism, his opponents brought down the democratic regime. Getúlio Vargas, Juscelino Kubitschek, and João Goulart demonstrated how the two sides to Brazilian populism had a highly limited political utility in the short term, but were valuable over time. As a political style, Brazilian supply-­side populism failed to meet popular needs, although Kubitschek’s massive government spending and the entry of foreign capital (for the establishment of the automotive sector) did provide

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some demand-side relief for workers and others. But, Goulart’s brief administration revealed the severe limits to demand-side populism in the Brazilian context. The developmentalism of supply-­side policies, however, provided for the fundamental transformation of the nation. It led to widespread road building and other infrastructure projects and created completely new industries, such as the automobile sector. In 1985, after 21 long years of military dictatorship, Brazil was more physically unified and more industrialized than it had been before the 1964 coup. And yet, populist politics did not return with democracy. By the end of the twentieth century Brazil seemed to be beyond a Manichaean politics of class. Foreign capital was welcomed as long as it was productive. Indeed, Brazil’s first truly leftist president—the former trade union leader from the automobile sector, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva—not only worked productively with foreign manufacturers, he was a product of their investments in the 1950s and 60s.68 So, although classic Latin American populist politics with its demand-­ side focus never had much success in Brazil, the nation’s legacy of supply-­side populism fostered major transformations that continue to shape Brazilian society and politics well into the twenty-­first century.

Notes   1 For an overview of the economic impact of populism in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico, see Daniel Díaz Fuentes, Crisis y cambios estructurales en América Latina: Argentina, Brasil y México durante el periodo de entreguerras (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1994). The standard and now classic analysis of the period can be found in Carlos F. Diaz Alejandro, Essays on the Economic History of the Argentine Republic. A neoliberal critique of Peronist economics can be found in Rudiger Dornbusch and Sebastian Edwards, The Macroeconomics of Populism in Latin America (Washington: Country Economic Dept., World Bank, 1989). See also Carlos Waisman, Reversal of Development in Argentina: Postwar Counterrevolutionary Policies and Their Structural Consequences (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987). For the Cárdenas years, see Marcos Tonatiuh Aguila Medina and Alberto Enríquez Perea (eds.), Perspectivas sobre el cardenismo: ensayos sobre economía, trabajo, política y cultura en los años treinta (Azcapotzalco: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, 1996). For a contrarian view of the period, see Alan Knight, “Cardenismo: Juggernaut or Jalopy,” Journal of Latin American Studies 26:1 (February 1994), 73–107.   2 For an original and insightful analysis of the long-­term political impact of the popular class incorporation, see Ruth Berins Collier, “Popular Sector Incorporation and Political Supremacy: Regime Evolution in Brazil and Mexico,” in Silvia Ann Hewlett and Richard S. Weinert (eds.), Brazil and Mexico: Patterns in Late Development (Philadelphia: ISHI, 1982), 57–109.   3 The classic text on the spread of corporatism in the region is Philippe Schmitter, “Still the Century of Corporatism?,” Review of Politics 36:1 (January 1974), 85–131.   4 The definitive study on Pedro Ernesto, Brazil’s first populist, is Michael L. Conniff ’s Urban Politics in Brazil: The Rise of Populism, 1925–1945 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981). On Arraes’s first tenure as governor, see Adirson de Barros, Ascensão e queda de Miguel Arraes (Rio: Editora Equador, 1965). An interesting study of Brizola in the post-­dictatorship environment can be found in João Trajano Sento Sé,

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Transformations of Populism in Europe and the Americas Brizolismo: estetização da política e carisma (Rio: FGV, 1999). For Adhemar and his alternative proto-­populist party the Partido Social Progressista, see Regina Sampaio, Adhemar de Barros e o PSP (São Paulo: Global, 1982). Conservative opposition to Goulart’s elevation to the presidency was initially so strong that opposition members of congress limited the new chief executive’s powers by instituting a quasi-parliamentary system. I return to Goulart in this essay’s conclusion. Kathryn Sikkink, Ideas and Institutions: Developmentalism in Brazil and Argentina (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). Under Kubitschek real incomes for the lower quintiles of the population did increase in part due to the dramatic Keynesian infusion of government spending. Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística, Estatísticas do Século XX (Rio: IBGE, 2006), 485, Tabela sal. 2.2. There is no shortage of studies on the rise of the New Unionism and other so-­called new social movements during and after the Abertura or “opening” and transition from dictatorship to democracy in the mid- to late-1970s through the 1980s. An excellent starting point is Sonia E. Alvarez et al. (eds.), Cultures of Politics/Politics of Culture: Re-Visioning Latin American Social Movements (Boulder: Westview, 1998). I examine the 1930s closely in “Change with Continuity: Brazil from 1930 to 1945,” in Paulo Drinot and Alan Knight (eds.), The Great Depression in the Americas and Its Legacies (Duke University Press, forthcoming). In some ways, this term is a misnomer. São Paulo’s agricultural economy was and remains highly diversified and the state became and remains Brazil’s largest industrial producer during this period. Moreover, Minas Gerais was also a significant producer of coffee at this time and it also developed a strong industrial base. Joseph Love’s Regionalism and Federalism in Brazil, 1889–1937 (Boulder: Westview, 1997) is a good starting place for understanding the politics and society of the Old Republic. The Paulistas could not simply choose the president, but the state was so much richer and more powerful than even Minas Gerais that a decision by São Paulo to act unilaterally could be seen as tantamount to choosing Brazil’s next president. The classic account of these events can be found in two works: Boris Fausto, A Revolução de 1930: historiografia e história (São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1970) and Thomas E. Skidmore, Politics in Brazil, 1930–1964: An Experiment in Democracy, rev. ed. (1967, New York: Oxford, 2007). Rui Barbosa e a Constituição de 1891 (Rio: Fundação Casa de Rui Barbosa, 1985). On the creation and operation of the constitutional order see, Rosa Maria Godoy Silveira, Republicanismo e federalism: um estudo de implantação da República Brasileira, 1889–1902 (Brasília: Senado Federal, 1978); and Percy A. Martin, “Federalism in Brazil,” Hispanic American Historical Review 18:2 (May 1938), 143–63. Roderick Barman, Brazil: The Forging of a Nation, 1798–1852 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988); and Isabel Lustosa, Dom Pedro I: um herói sem nenhum caráter (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2006). On Vargas and education, see Jerry Dávila, Diploma of Whiteness: Race and Social Policy in Brazil, 1917–1945 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). The best work on the founding of the Ministry of Labor is Angela Maria de Castro Gomes, A invenção do trabalhismo (Rio: Vértice, 1988). There is no shortage of studies of labor in the 1930s. For a close analysis of the changes the implementation of this system brought to working people in São Paulo, Brazil’s largest industrial city, see Joel Wolfe, Working Women, Working Men: São Paulo and the Rise of Brazil’s Industrial Working Class, 1900–1955 (Durham: Duke University Press,

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18 19

20 21

22 23

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1993). Kenneth Mericle’s “Conflict Resolution in the Brazilian Industrial Relations System” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1974) remains the single best study of how the labor code worked in practice. São Paulo and Brazil began to recover in the mid-1930s when the impact of Vargas’s price support program for coffee provided a Keynesian boost to domestic demand. See Simão Silber, “Análise da politica econômica,” in Flávio R. Versiani and José Roberto Mendonça de Barros (eds.), Formação econômica do Brasil: a experiência da industrilização (São Paulo: Ed. Saraiva, 1977), 173–207. Vargas’s proto-­populist policies of the early 1930s were more an attempt to promote central state control over the economy than to build an electoral coalition based in the working class. The 1932 Civil War remains understudied. Two good starting places for understanding the conflict are Holien Gonçalves Bezerra, O jogo do poder: revolução Paulista de 32 (São Paulo: Moderna, 1989); and Barbara Weinstein, “Racializing Regional Difference: São Paulo versus Brazil, 1932,” in Nancy P. Appelbaum et al. (eds.), Race and Nation in Modern Latin America (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2003), 237–62. The assembléia was elected and was probably the most direct expression of Brazilian popular will to date in the country, but even it was chosen by an extremely narrow franchise. This contrasts sharply with the experiences of two of Latin America’s well-­known populist leaders. Both Mexico’s Cárdenas and Argentina’s Perón extended the national government’s reach far into the countryside and played a central role in regulating social conflicts in industry. Robert M. Levine’s The Vargas Regime: The Critical Years, 1934–1938 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970) remains an excellent starting point for understanding this period. Kim D. Butler, Freedoms Given, Freedoms Won: Afro-Brazilians in Post-Abolition, São Paulo and Salvador (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 112–27; and George Reid Andrews, Blacks and Whites in São Paulo, Brazil, 1888–1988 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 125–55. Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro, Estratégias da illusão: a revolução mundial e o Brasil, 1922–1935 (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1991), 299–326. On state-­making and its impact on the economy in these years, see Tamás Szmrecsányi and Rui Guilherme Granziera (eds.), Getulio Vargas e a economia contemporânea, 2nd edn. (São Paulo: Hucitec, 2004). Werner Baer, The Brazilian Economy: Growth and Development, 5th edn. (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2001), 36–42. Marcelo Abreu and Dorte Verner, Long-Term Brazilian Economic Growth: 1930–1994 (Paris: Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation, 1997), 109–10. On São Paulo, see Wolfe, Working Women, Working Men, 104–7. Wolfe, Working Women, Working Men, 133–9. The issue of dictatorship became more complex when Brazil sent troops to Europe to fight under US command against the Axis powers. The best work on the complexity of that issue remains Frank D. McCann’s The Brazilian-American Alliance, 1937–1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973). See also, Antonio Pedro Tota, O imperialism sedutor: a americanização do Brasil na época da segunda guerra (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2000). Joel Wolfe, “ ‘Father of the Poor’ or ‘Mother of the Rich’?: Getúlio Vargas, Industrial Workers, and Constructions of Class, Gender, and Populism in São Paulo, 1930–1954,”

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34 35 36

37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

Transformations of Populism in Europe and the Americas Radical History Review (January 1994), 80–111. For Rio, see Brodwyn M. Fischer, A Poverty of Rights: Citizenship and Inequality in Twentieth-Century Rio de Janeiro (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 91–115. On the role of radio during the Estado Novo dictatorship, see Bryan McCann, Hello, Hello Brazil: Popular Music in the Making of Modern Brazil (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 19–40. See, for example, Getúlio Vargas, A nova política do Brasil, 11 vols. (Rio: José Olympio, 1938–43), 9: 141–4; 9: 163, 146; 9: 215–20, 247–8, 295–7; 9: 311–17. During the war, the overall cost of living rose dramatically, while wages stagnated. The most detailed overall analysis of this trend can be found in Seiti Kaneko Endo and Heron Carlos Esvael do Carmo, Breve histórico do indice de preços ao consumidor no município de São Paulo (São Paulo: FIPE, 1985), 17–20. See also Wolfe, Working Women, Working Men, 106. Barbara Geddes, “Building ‘State’ Autonomy in Brazil, 1930–1964,” Comparative Politics 22: 2 (January 1990), 217–35. See also Geddes, Politician’s Dilemma: Building State Capacity in Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). Nora Hamilton, The Limits of State Autonomy: Post-Revolutionary Mexico (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982). Paul G. Buchanan, “State Corporatism in Argentina: Labor Administration under Perón and Onganía,” Latin American Research Review 20: 1 (1985), 61–95. See also Ruth Berins Collier and David Collier, Shaping the Political Arena: Critical Junctures, the Labor Movement, and Regime Dynamics in Latin America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 331–50. Joel Wolfe, “The Faustian Bargain not Made: Getúlio Vargas and Brazil’s Industrial Workers, 1930–1945,” Luso-Brazilian Review 31: 2 (Winter 1994), 77–95. Joel Wolfe, Autos and Progress: The Brazilian Search for Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 97–102. Daryle Williams, Culture Wars in Brazil: The First Vargas Regime, 1930–1945 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 52–89 and Wolfe, Autos and Progress, 97–98. McCann, Hello, Hello Brazil, 26–9. See also, Alcir Lenharo, A sacralização da política (Campinas: Papirus, 1986). On the creation of new political parties, see Skidmore, Politics in Brazil, 48–53. Skidmore, Politics in Brazil, 50–1; Wolfe, Working Women, Working Men, 130–9. Skidmore, Politics in Brazil, 54–64. Baer, The Brazilian Economy, 43–57. John J. Crocitti, “Vargas Era Social Policies: An Inquiry into Brazilian Malnutrition during the Estado Novo, 1937–1945,” in Jens R. Hentschke (ed.), Vargas and Brazil: New Perspectives (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 143–71. Fischer, A Poverty of Rights, 116–36; Wolfe, Working Women, Working Men, 89–93. On the overall weakness of the federal labor bureaucracy at this time, see Wolfe, “The Faustian Bargain not Made.” Wolfe, Working Women, Working Men, 127–30, 133–9. Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 55–101. Joint Brazil–United States Economic Development Commission, The Development of Brazil: Report (Washington: Institute of Inter-American Affairs, 1954). The classic account of the politics surrounding Vargas and Petrobras is Maria Augusta Tibiriçá Miranda, O petróleo é nosso: a luta contra o “entreguismo,” pelo monopólio estatal, 1947–1953 (Petrópolis: Vozes, 1983).

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51 Wolfe, Working Women, Working Men, 172–6. 52 Getúlio Vargas, O governo trabalhista do Brasil, 4 vols. (Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1952–69), 1: 324. 53 Joel Wolfe, “There Should Be Dignity: São Paulo’s Women Textile Workers and the Strike of the 300,000,” in Jonathan Brown (ed.), Workers’ Control in Latin America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 189–216. 54 In the aftermath of 1953’s massive and highly successful “Strike of the 300,000” in São Paulo, the region’s workers banded together to form their own statistical agency that could challenge government and industry wage and cost of living data. On the formation of the Inter-Union Department of Statistics and Socio-Economic Studies (DIEESE), see Wolfe, Working Women, Working Men, 187–8. On DIEESE’s role in supporting workers’ wage claims during the 1970s and 1980s, see Wolfe, Autos and Progress, 170–1. 55 Thomas Rogers, “ ‘I Choose This Means to be with You Always’: Getúlio Vargas’s Carta Testamento,” in Jens R. Hentschke (ed.), Vargas and Brazil: New Perspectives (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 227–56. 56 Presidência da República, Conselho do Desenvolvimento, Programa de Metas; Tomo 1: Introdução (Rio: Gráfica Editora Jornal do Comércio, 1958), 11–13. See also Sikkink, Ideas and Institutions, 136–7. 57 Wolfe, Autos and Progress, 113–17; Claudio Bojunga, JK: o artista do impossível (Rio: Objetiva, 2001), 401–17; and Sikkink, Ideas and Institutions, 122–70. 58 Helen Shapiro, Engines of Growth: The State and the Transnational Auto Industry in Brazil (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 70–133; and Caren Addis, Taking the Wheel: Autos Parts Firms and the Political Economy of Industrialization in Brazil (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1999), 37–89. 59 Brian R. Mitchell, International Historical Statistics: The Americas, 1750–1988, 2nd edn. (New York: Stockton, 1993). Even with those gains, however, inflation eroded buying power and so workers in São Paulo and elsewhere continued to organize and strike for higher wages. See, for example, Paulo Fortes, “ ‘Centenas de estopins acesos ao mesmo tempo’: a greve dos 400 mil, piquetes e a organização dos trabalhadores em São Paulo, 1957,” in Paulo Fortes et al. (eds.), Na luta por direitos: estudos recentes em história social do trabalho (Campinas: UNICAMP, 1999), 145–72. 60 Public opinion surveys done at this time reveal the depth and breadth of support for JK’s developmentalism. See for example, Instituto Brasileiro de Opinião Pública e Estatística (IBOPE), “Pesquisa sobre a indústria automobilística realizado nas cidades do Rio e São Paulo, augusto-­setembro 1958,” IBOPE Archive, UNICAMP. 61 On the military’s attempt to prevent Kubitscheck from taking office after winning the 1955 presidential election, see Skidmore, Politics in Brazil, 154–8; and Bojunga, JK: o artista do impossível, 301–22. 62 Ricardo Arnt, Jânio Quadros: o prometeu de Vila Maria (Rio: Ediouro, 2004); and Skidmore, Politics in Brazil, 187–94. 63 Skidmore, Politics in Brazil, 205–11. 64 On the tumultuous Goulart presidency, see Marco Antonio Villa, Jango: um perfil, 1945–1964 (São Paulo: Editora Globo, 2003); and Luiz Alberto Moniz Bandeira, O Governo João Goulart: as lutas sociais no Brasil, 1961–1964, 8th edn. (São Paulo: Editora Unesp, 2010). 65 On the impact of the profit remittances on bilateral US-Brazilian relations, see Ruth Leacock, “JFK, Business, and Brazil,” Hispanic American Historical Review 59:4 (November 1979), 636–73.

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66 On Goulart’s developmentalism, see Oswaldo Munteal, Jacqueline Ventapane, and Adriano de Freixo (eds.), O Brasil de João Goulart: um projeto de nação (Rio de Janeiro: Editora PUC Rio; Contraponto, 2006). For a classic study of his brief administration, see Moniz Bandeira, O governo João Goulart: as lutas sociais no Brasil, 1961–1964, 6th edn. (Rio: Civilização Brasileira, 1983). 67 Thomas E. Skidmore, The Politics of Military Rule in Brazil, 1964–1985 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 3–17. 68 Wolfe, Autos and Progress, 171–7. Industrial relations executives at multinational corporations in Brazil frequently commented on the ways in which auto sector workers had no ties to populist or communist labor groups and were instead more like North America’s United Auto Workers and Germany’s IG Metall. See, for example, Tendências do Trabalho, July 1986, 4–6; August 1986, 16–17; and September 1987, 25–7. See also, Margaret E. Keck, The Workers Party and the Democratization of Brazil (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 73–5.

12

Populism as an Identity: Four Propositions on Peronism Matthew B. Karush

Scholars of populism face two daunting interpretive challenges. First is the term’s ideological slipperiness. Leaders from across the political spectrum, including figures as diverse as William Jennings Bryan, Lázaro Cárdenas, Adolph Hitler, Silvio Berlusconi, Hugo Chávez, and Sarah Palin, have all been labeled populists. Related to this terminological imprecision is the vagueness that characterizes the ideologies of many of the movements that have been called populist. Populists are notoriously inconsistent and have at times betrayed a tendency to careen wildly between contradictory political platforms. In the face of this ideological emptiness, some scholars have argued that the term populism ought to be jettisoned completely, while others have responded by defining it as a political style, arguing that the study of populism should focus on form rather than content.1 The second challenge is that populism appears to its critics, as well as to many scholars, as essentially irrational. Unlike such terms as liberalism or socialism, which are defined by their ideological content, populism is often seen as a sort of trick or manipulation by which unsuspecting rubes are convinced to follow a self-­interested, power-­hungry leader. Both of these characteristics—ideological incoherence and irrationality—seem particularly well exemplified by the durable political movement forged in Argentina by Juan Perón. Perhaps for this reason, Peronism has often been seen as a sort of paradigm of populism. Peronism is a particularly notorious instance of populism’s lack of a specific and consistent ideology. In its first iteration, following the military coup of 1943, Juan Perón’s movement represented an effort to forge a cross-­class alliance in support of nationalism and industrialization. By 1945, Peronism had become an anti-­oligarchic movement with a predominantly working-­class constituency. Although the movement retained this basic shape during its decade in power, it continued to evolve in other dimensions. For example, economic policy lurched from aggressive redistributionism and promotion of domestic industry, to an effort to rein in popular consumption and increase agricultural output. Likewise, Perón campaigned in 1946 as the Catholic candidate, but by the mid-1950s, he was at war with the Church, seeking to suppress religious education and to legalize prostitution and divorce. Following his overthrow in 1955, the movement reverted to its protean ways. During his eighteen-­year exile, Perón

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came to represent very different ideological principles to different constituencies. A nationalist and deeply anti-­communist Peronist right confronted a Peronist left committed to armed revolution, a rift that erupted in violence when Perón returned to Argentina in 1973. More recently, the government of Carlos Menem (1989–99) pushed Peronism dramatically to the right by implementing one of Latin America’s most radical experiments in neoliberalism. Today, Argentina is, yet again, being governed by Peronists, but this time with a platform that repudiates neoliberalism and revives Peronism’s earlier commitment to progressive social justice. In light of this sinuous trajectory, observers of Peronism can be forgiven for concluding that the movement defies rational explanation. In fact, the idea of Peronism as fundamentally irrational has deep roots. Almost as soon as Perón emerged as a political figure, his opponents began to question the bond he was forging with his followers. Later scholars inherited this skepticism, building their explanations of Peronism around an analysis of the powerful charisma of Juan Perón and his wife, Eva. For many, Peronism was defined by this feature: instead of rationally construing its self-­interest, the Peronist mob blindly followed, even worshiped its leaders. The image of Perón as a charismatic wizard able to hoodwink masses of unsophisticated and impoverished plebes provides a way of accounting for the movement’s ideological incoherence: unmoored from any particular sectoral interest, leaders were able to steer the movement in whatever direction best suited their own political interests at any given moment. But the focus on charismatic leadership achieves this explanatory power by sleight of hand. To label Peronist workers irrational dupes is simply to avoid explaining their point of view; it is to substitute value judgment for analysis. In the voluminous scholarly literature on Peronism, the work of Ernesto Laclau has been among the most incisive and influential. Beginning with the pioneering essay on populism in Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory (1977), Laclau has elaborated a robust interpretive framework that illuminates several key aspects of the history of Peronism.2 However, Laclau is a theorist, not a researcher. He uses historical examples to illustrate his arguments, but he does not uncover or directly confront archival source material. As a result, it has fallen to others—often historians, but also sociologists and political scientists—to apply his insights to the specific details of the Peronist experience. To date, this project has yielded mixed results. We now know a great deal about Peronism, both as a political project and as a grass-roots movement, but we still lack an account capable of meeting the challenges posed by what I have identified as Peronism’s two problematic features: its ambivalence and its apparent irrationality. This essay will begin to elaborate such an account by putting several of Laclau’s key analytical insights into dialogue with recent historical scholarship. The argument will be organized around four basic propositions that follow from Laclau’s work, but have often been either ignored or misapplied.

I.  Peronism is an identity Perhaps Laclau’s most important contribution to the study of Peronism is his insistence on attending to the specific ways in which Perón interpellated his constituency. Laclau

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turned to the topic of populism, and Peronism more specifically, because it provided a valuable case study through which to pursue a specific theoretical goal—namely, to elaborate a theory of politics that was free of the economic determinism of classical Marxism. It was precisely the movement’s ideological incoherence and the apparent irrationality of its followers that made it analytically useful, since they laid bare the failure of what he called “class reductionism.” In the case of Peronism, in other words, it was manifestly impossible to describe politics and ideology as the straightforward reflection of relations of production. Instead, any theory of Peronism or populism more generally needed to focus on “articulation,” the contingent process through which political identities are produced. Drawing on Saussurean linguistics as well as Gramsci’s account of the formation of hegemonic blocs, Laclau’s interpretation of Peronism is fundamentally discursive, attending to the ways existing ideological elements are re-­ articulated during specific conjunctures. In his 1977 essay on populism, Laclau insists that classes “have no necessary form of existence at the ideological and political levels,” but he nevertheless retains the Marxist notion of “determination in the last instance . . . by the relations of production.”3 The classic Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, which Laclau co-­wrote with Chantal Mouffe in 1985, jettisons this final bit of economic determinism, arguing that class has no necessary priority over other forms of social division. In his most recent book on populism, Laclau continues to de-­emphasize class, exploring instead how unmet “social demands” provide the basis for the formation of popular identities and concluding that all politics is essentially populist: “The construction of the ‘people’ is the political act par excellence.”4 Thus, as Jon BeasleyMurray has recently noted, Laclau’s hugely influential system of political analysis emerged via an attempt to understand Peronism, even if most of his followers in Cultural Studies and related fields have ignored Argentine history entirely.5 Nevertheless, Laclau’s interpretation of Peronism did have a significant impact on Argentine historiography. His 1977 essay took direct aim at what had been the dominant interpretation of the movement, that of the pioneering sociologist Gino Germani. Influenced by North American modernization theory, Germani had explained Peronism as the result of “asynchronies” produced by Argentina’s transition from a traditional to a modern society. According to this view, Perón drew the bulk of his support from recent migrants from the Argentine countryside, who came to Buenos Aires in pursuit of jobs in the nascent industrial sector. Germani argued that the migrants’ roots in a deeply traditional society prevented them from rationally perceiving their class interests. Instead of making common cause with the older, more established working class, they embraced Perón, whose authoritarianism resonated with their pre-­modern values.6 This interpretation had come under attack even before Laclau wrote his critique. Scholars demonstrated that many established workers joined the migrants in supporting Perón. Moreover, most of the recent arrivals to Buenos Aires in the 1930s and 1940s came from the highly developed region surrounding the capital city and not from the impoverished interior. In light of this evidence, revisionist scholars argued that Peronist workers could not be considered traditional or irrational. Instead, Perón’s pro-­labor policies and promises had earned him the support of a class conscious proletariat.7 The revisionists disputed Germani’s empirical findings and value judgments but not his structural determinism. Before Laclau, scholars debated whether Peronism was rational

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or irrational, but in one way or another they tended to see the movement as a reflection of a particular pattern of economic and social development. In this context, Laclau’s discursive approach represented a major advance. Neither Germani nor his critics had dealt effectively with the heterogeneity of Perón’s constituency: why had both migrants and older workers, as well as some middle sectors and, eventually, much of the rural poor, come to support the movement? Moreover, neither framework could account for Perón’s ability to retain mass support even as his policies shifted dramatically. Worst of all, both forms of structural determinism seemed to explain an ideologically ambivalent, even contradictory movement by reducing it to a few of its constituent elements. Germani focused on Peronism’s authoritarianism and cult of personality while ignoring the movement’s class politics and the concrete benefits Perón provided for workers. For their part, the revisionists emphasized Peronist workers’ class consciousness, but ignored their conformism and their rejection of orthodox, left-­wing ideologies. By contrast, Laclau argued that populism occurs when cultural raw materials that have no necessary relationship to any particular class position—what he called “popular-­democratic interpellations”—are linked together, or articulated, in opposition to the dominant ideology. The result of this process is a new identity, one that constitutes its subject in a new way. Rather than search for some underlying economic reality that can account for Argentine workers’ affiliation with Peronism, scholars should attend to the production and reproduction of this identity within the political process. By focusing on language and identity, Laclau restored both contingency and complexity to the history of Peronism. Just a few years after the publication of Laclau’s Politics and Ideology, the so-­called linguistic and cultural turns began to transform historical scholarship, particularly in the United States. Although the new approaches reflected the influence of multiple disciplines and theoretical traditions, one important strain was the British school of Cultural Studies, which had rediscovered Gramsci’s concept of hegemony. Alongside such figures as Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall, Laclau was a major force within this tradition, and it is therefore not surprising that his work resonated with historians. In any case, Daniel James’s Resistance and Integration, published in 1988, demonstrated the enormous potential of a discursive approach to the study of Peronism. James noted that the revisionist historians of Peronism were right to emphasize workers’ rationally construed class interest: Peronism from the workers’ point of view was in a fundamental sense a response to economic grievances and class exploitation. Yet, it was also something more. It was also a political movement which represented a crucial shift in working-­class political allegiance and behaviour, and which presented its adherents with a distinct political vision. In order to understand the significance of this new allegiance we need to examine carefully the specific features of this political vision and the discourse in which it was expressed.8

By taking Peronist discourse seriously, James uncovered the specific version of social citizenship and working-­class nationalism that Perón offered his followers, as well as the movement’s profoundly “heretical” impact. Grounding his analysis in the meanings

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that Peronism had for workers, James produced an account sensitive to the internal contradictions of the movement and capable of explaining change over time. Perhaps unintentionally, he had demonstrated the historiographical utility of Laclau’s basic approach. Peronism needs to be understood as a political identity produced and reproduced discursively in specific historical moments.

II.  Peronism must be historicized The dismantling of Germani’s grand structural thesis encouraged historians to look for more immediate, short-­term factors that might account for the emergence of Peronism. Scholars now carefully reconstructed the complex conjuncture opened up by the military coup of 1943. Perhaps the most influential such study, Juan Carlos Torre’s La vieja guardia sindical y Perón emphasized the role played by the established union leadership in mediating the evolving relationship between Perón and the workers. From his position as Secretary of Labor in the military government, Perón put the power of the state on the side of the unions. Union leaders recognized the danger of supporting an authoritarian project, but given the hostility to labor that characterized the opposition to Perón, they had little alternative.9 Although Laclau ignored the tactical maneuvers of the union leadership, his discursive method shared a similar conjunctural logic. In his original analysis of Peronism, he argued that the political and economic crises of the 1930s in Argentina severed the historic articulation between democracy and liberalism. That context made it possible for Perón to present liberalism as an ideology linked to elite class interests and to forge an oppositional discourse that articulated democracy with labor reform, industrialism, and nationalism. Thus, both Torre and Laclau replaced structural determinism with accounts that emphasized the specificities of the historical moment. While the turn to conjunctural factors has been productive, it can easily go too far. Crises can account for the emergence of new tactics and alliances, and they can also create the context in which discursive elements are reshuffled or in which, to borrow Laclau’s terminology, a new principle of articulation is introduced. Yet if we take Peronism seriously as an identity, we need to situate it within a longer history. Crises, no matter how severe, do not open up an infinite number of possible historical outcomes; they do not make any identity possible. Perón created something new but he did so by drawing on existing cultural material. Moreover, since no merely conjunctural phenomenon could have retained such power for so long, the durability of Peronism demands an explanation that is sensitive to both structure and contingency. By emphasizing the way “popular-­democratic interpellations” were rearticulated by Peronism, Laclau demonstrates the need for precisely this sort of analysis. Historians, in fact, have been eager to uncover the origins of Peronism in longer-­ term processes playing out over the previous decades. The field of labor history has been particularly vital in this regard, demonstrating that certain transformations of the 1930s—the emergence of industrial unions with large numbers of unskilled members, the rising influence of new labor ideologies, the growing willingness of union leaders to negotiate with the state—laid the essential groundwork for Perón’s alliance with the

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working class.10 Other scholars focused on the government side of the alliance, identifying the emergence of an interventionist state more than a decade before Perón’s rise to power.11 But of course, there is no reason to limit the search for origins to labor and the state. Most workers who embraced Perón were not members of unions before 1943, and even those who were had their subjectivities shaped by forces outside the factory gates and the union hall. By identifying themselves with Peronism, Argentine workers rejected labor ideologies like communism and syndicalism, so it seems reasonable to assume the importance of outside influences. Laclau’s own historical account of the rise of Peronism emphasized party politics; in particular, he stressed the nineteenth-­century battles between liberalism and federalism and the later rise and fall of the Radical Party under Hipólito Yrigoyen. But again, there is no reason to limit the analysis to the political arena either. In fact, as one useful study reminds us, one of the key consequences of Perónism was “the politicization of non-­political identities.”12 In recent years, a new generation of historians has begun to chart the long-­term cultural trends and transformations within which Peronism emerged. Looking beyond labor conflict and political competition, scholars have examined such topics as commercial mass culture, consumerism, architecture, beauty pageants, and folk music.13 Although any search for origins risks teleology, the best of this work eschews a simple hunt for precursors. Instead, historians track the ways Peronism reconfigured existing discourses and idioms such as popular melodrama, the pursuit of upward mobility, modernist architecture, standards of feminine beauty, and folkloric versions of Argentine national identity. As much as the rise of industrial labor unions or the crisis in Argentine liberalism, these discourses made Peronism possible. Conjunctural factors enabled Perón to mobilize thousands of Argentines around a new political identity, but he built that identity out of these existing elements. This sort of cultural history, in other words, can deliver on the promise of Laclau’s model of historical explanation: it can clarify how Perón engineered a populist movement by re-­articulating existing discursive elements. It can also illuminate the formation of anti-Peronism, since that reaction was also composed of existing discourses, including the idea of middle-­class respectability and a version of Argentine nationhood predicated on whiteness.14 Historicizing Peronism in this way enables us to avoid reductive interpretations that stress ideological incoherence or the simple cynicism of the movement’s leaders. Seen in the light of recent scholarship, Peronism betrays a fundamental ambivalence that reflects the ambivalence that characterized the cultural elements from which it was built. Peronism in its classical variant wavered between heresy and conformism and between liberation and discipline. Peronist workers invaded the prestigious public space of the Plaza de Mayo, famously dipping their feet in the plaza’s fountains on October 17, 1945, when thousands rallied to demand Perón’s release from prison. But if Perón encouraged this sort of challenge to the traditional class hierarchies of Argentine society, he also preached an end to class struggle and encouraged his followers to go directly “from home to work and from work to home.” Likewise, Peronism acknowledged the consumerist fantasies of poor Argentines, but it also attacked selfishness and greed. These ambivalences make sense once we detect their origins in existing cultural formations. For example, melodramatic films and radio

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plays from the 1920s and 1930s also combined moralistic conformism with anti-­elitism and lower-­class pride. Perón adapted and transformed existing discourses, but his dependence on those discourses meant that he was not free to devise his appeal in any way he saw fit. Peronist incoherence, in other words, is less a sign of the leader’s power to manipulate than it is the result of the cultural limits within which he acted. And one other consequence follows from a fully historicized view: the multiple versions of Peronism that have appeared in the decades since 1955 do not reveal the movement’s ideological emptiness. On the contrary, Peronism always bears the traces of its long history, even as it is reformulated by specific actors in specific historical conjunctures. Historians need to attend to this process of discursive rearticulation not only in analyzing the movement’s origins but also in tracing its subsequent remakings.

III.  Peronism is not just language Just as labor historians have traced the origins of Peronism to the union struggles of earlier decades, intellectual historians have produced a wealth of studies that locate the ideological roots of the movement in the various strains of right- and left-­wing nationalism that flowered in the 1930s. European fascism, corporatism, Catholic nationalism, and even the North American New Deal have all been examined for their contributions to Peronist ideology.15 At the same time, one consequence of the linguistic turn in history and, perhaps, of the influence of Laclau himself, was a new level of scholarly attention to Peronist rhetoric, and particularly to the speeches of Juan and Eva, which have been meticulously deconstructed.16 Eventually, scholars moved beyond these speeches, applying the techniques of discourse analysis to new types of sources. Recognizing the Perón regime’s virtuosic use of propaganda and mass communication, historians have examined school textbooks, the products of the government-­controlled media, and the choreography of official celebrations and commemorations.17 Both intellectual history and discourse analysis have undoubtedly illuminated Peronism. Nationalist ideologues of various stripes played important roles in Perón’s government, and Perón’s articulation of Italo-Argentine “clerico-­fascism” with melodramatic moralism was perhaps his most important discursive innovation.18 Likewise, careful analysis of the regime’s message to its followers is a necessary starting point for any analysis of the movement. Nevertheless, an exclusive focus on ideology and rhetoric can yield interpretive errors. As the historian Nicolás Quiroga has pointed out, several recent studies of Peronism inspired by Laclau have restricted their analysis to the speeches and writings of the movement’s most important leaders. Following Laclau, they have treated these texts not as “mere rhetoric,” but as “performance,” the basis of important political rituals.19 There are at least two potential problems with this approach. First, there is little justification for taking words more seriously than actions; as Foucault stressed, discursive formations involve not just language, but also institutions and practices. And quite obviously, Perón did much more than talk. The Peronist government created a wealth of new institutions while destroying others, and, crucially, it expropriated and redistributed resources on a massive scale. It would be difficult to understand Peronism’s

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appeal without acknowledging the concrete improvements in workers’ lives—the “democratization of welfare” as one study put it20—effected by the regime. Second, a top-­down approach that restricts its analysis to the words (or even the words and actions) of the movement’s leaders obscures the crucial roles played by a wide variety of intermediaries: local officials, provincial institutions, even party hacks and government-­appointed union leaders.21 Perón was not omnipotent; his impact on society, like that of any other political leader, was heavily mediated. Studies of Peronism’s impact outside of Buenos Aires highlight the role of local institutions, bureaucrats, and power-­brokers. For example, Quiroga’s careful studies of the Peronist party in the coastal city of Mar del Plata reveal that national leaders were often unable to impose their own grand schemes at the local level. These elites constructed a hierarchical party apparatus and sought to incorporate existing civil society institutions in order to indoctrinate the masses and enforce party discipline. However, Peronism also inspired an unprecedented level of popular mobilization leading to the emergence of many new unions and neighborhood organizations that were viewed with suspicion by national leaders. Even local party institutions—the so-­ called unidades básicas—often resisted national authority.22 Mark Healey draws similar conclusions in his recent study of the rebuilding of the Andean city of San Juan following the devastating earthquake of 1944. There, Perón’s initial vision of a broad, multi-­class alliance to construct the “New Argentina” collapsed in the face of resistance from engineers and the local elite. Instead of creating a new political movement out of whole cloth, Perón was forced to work within existing structures, forging an alliance with the region’s long-­time political boss, Federico Cantoni.23 Even within the capital city, Peronism was the result of negotiation and contestation. The historian Omar Acha has shown that despite its authoritarian tendencies, the Peronist state did not dismantle the active and organized civil society that had emerged in Buenos Aires during the 1920s and 1930s. On the contrary, the Peronist decade saw a flowering of such organizational activity. The city was home not just to unions, Peronist party organizations and branches of the Eva Perón Foundation, but also to countless football clubs, neighborhood improvement organizations, school cooperatives, popular libraries, and social clubs. In light of the Peronist government’s efforts to “colonize” these institutions, Acha gives them the label “political society” to distinguish them from the “civil society” of classical liberalism. These organizations gave the Peronist movement a presence in the neighborhoods as well as the ability to mobilize the masses. Nevertheless, as Acha demonstrates, they also posed a problem for Peronist leaders, since they preserved a substantial amount of autonomy and resisted the state’s efforts to impose unanimity.24 This vast network of Peronist-­affiliated organizations helps account for the movement’s capacity to survive decades of proscription as well as the death of its leader in 1974. As the political scientist Steven Levitsky has put it, “the Peronist organization consists of a dense collection of personal networks—operating out of unions, clubs, non-­governmental organisations, and often activists’ homes.”25 And just as Acha argued that political society organizations constrained Perón’s freedom of action, Levitsky makes a similar case for the Peronist government of Carlos Menem in the 1990s: Menem attempted to impose his neoliberal vision on the party apparatus, but the vitality of local and provincial party organizations

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limited his ability to do so. As a result, Menem quickly lost influence within Peronism after leaving office in 1999, and Peronism swung back to its roots in the discourse of social justice. The research on Peronist institutions and intermediaries has debunked interpretations that stress the unmediated, personalist authority of a charismatic leader. Perón and subsequent Peronist leaders exerted power through an informal, decentralized, yet elaborate organizational network, which in turn constrained their capacity to act. Peronist meanings, therefore, are embedded in myriad institutions and actualized by a range of intermediaries, not simply imposed from above. Peronism in any given historical moment and in any given locality is the result of negotiation and contestation. Of course, if this conclusion challenges some recent scholarship inspired by Laclau, it is perfectly compatible with Laclau’s own analytical method. As some of the best Latin Americanist historical scholarship of recent decades has demonstrated, political hegemony is built on contestations that are simultaneously struggles over resources and over meanings.26 The discursive rearticulation that Perón effected in the 1943–6 conjuncture entailed the reworking of meanings and the redistribution of resources; it included the reorientation of plebeian popular organizations toward the Peronist goal of social justice. That hegemony was itself embedded in the transformed and expanded web of popular organizations, institutions that would need to be accommodated in any future revision of Peronism.

IV.  Peronism is reproduced and transformed by ordinary people While some scholars worry that applying Laclau’s method leads to an exclusive focus on texts produced by the highest rank of Peronist leaders, others object that his mode of discourse analysis ignores the agency of subordinate groups. In an early response to Laclau’s first essay on populism, Emilio de Ipola argued that Laclau had focused too much on the “conditions of production” of Peronist discourse and not enough on the “conditions of reception.” Anticipating the work of Torre and others, De Ipola insisted that the positive response of Argentine workers to Perón’s appeal needed to be situated in the specific context of the 1943–6 period.27 To be fair, Laclau does acknowledge popular agency. In his initial essay on populism, he describes the situation of a new migrant experiencing novel forms of class exploitation in Buenos Aires: Under these circumstances, a natural reaction would be to assert the symbols and ideological values of the society from which he has come, in order to express his antagonism towards the new society which exploits him. Superficially, this would seem to be the survival of old elements, but in reality, behind this survival is concealed a transformation: these “rural elements” are simply the raw materials which the ideological practice of the new migrants transforms in order to express new antagonisms.28

In this passage, Laclau rejects Germani’s notion that Perón appealed to the new migrants’ pre-­modern orientation by arguing that migrants were in fact responding

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creatively to a new situation. Re-­articulating existing discourses—“ideological practice”— is not just something Perón does; workers do it too. In the more recent On Populist Reason, Laclau returns to the example of agrarian migrants to a big city. These newcomers face a series of problems including inadequate access to housing, water, health, education. If these problems remain unresolved, then the migrants may come to see their individual demands as equivalent, producing “a widening chasm separating the institutional system from the people . . . in embryo, a populist configuration.”29 Here, the causality is even clearer: populism begins not with an innovative enunciation from above but with the formulation of demands from below. Still, there is no doubt that Laclau spends more time analyzing populist interpellations from above than uncovering contestation and creativity from below. In his attempt to theorize broadly on the basis of the specific case of Peronism, he pays relatively little attention to the actions of specific subordinate groups. Laclau’s tendency to elide popular agency is related to a methodological problem that confronts all historians of Peronism. While analysis of Peronist ideology and rhetoric has proceeded apace, historians have struggled to decode the ways ordinary Argentines understood these messages.30 Reception is an active process, but historians have only rarely found sources that speak directly to the meanings that Argentines made of Peronist discourse. Many historians have reduced the role of subordinate groups to acceptance or resistance: Perón appeals to the workers, and they respond enthusiastically, a response that the historian makes intelligible by referring to objective class interests or, in the most sophisticated analyses, to workers’ cultural orientation or background. But Laclau’s great advance has been to insist that Peronist identity was constructed in the political process, that Peronism did not appeal to an already constituted group, so much as it produced a new one. This discursive construction happened simultaneously from above and below. Workers did not merely accept or reject Perón’s message; they engaged with it, pushing and pulling it in novel directions. And they did so in unpredictable ways, not simply on the basis of some a priori class interest that the historian can infer. More than any other historian, Daniel James has demonstrated how analysis of popular agency might proceed and what the interpretive payoff might be. In his early work, James analyzed cultural sources like tango lyrics in order to provide a sense of workers’ cultural orientation in the period before Perón. He also carefully analyzed workers’ behavior for clues regarding reception. His analysis of the demonstrations of October 17, 1945 helped reveal the heretical appeal of Peronism, and his examination of strikes, demonstrations, and clandestine resistance during the decades after the fall of Perón allowed him to chart workers’ evolving “structure of feeling.” Still, in this early work, James found few sources that directly illuminated grass-roots subjectivities. In his masterful Doña María’s Story, James turns to oral history and, more specifically to a life history of a single, low-­level Peronist militant from the meatpacking town of Berisso. By identifying moments of contradiction or unexplained silence in María Roldán’s narrative, he reveals points of tension in the way Peronism was adopted at the grass roots. Analyzing Roldán’s description of Eva Perón, James argues that the figure of the first lady legitimized working-­class women’s feelings of envy and desire for increased consumption. Most memorably, James analyzes a poem written by Roldán to

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memorialize the death of a co-­worker. By revealing her creative appropriation of the discourse of popular melodrama, James demonstrates not only the resonance between Peronism and melodrama, but also the ways in which this particular woman was able to extend established discourses in new directions.31 Recently, several other historians have followed James’s lead, using either oral history or new documentary sources to illuminate popular Peronist consciousness. Natalia Milanesio has conducted interviews with working-­class Argentines who lived through the Perón years in order to explore how workers responded to the increased consumption opportunities that Peronist policies enabled. The testimonies reveal that Peronist workers understood this consumption not as a sign of individual upward mobility but as a means of reinscribing their working-­class identity. In this context, being able to purchase more and higher-­quality goods reinforced their pride in belonging to a dignified working class.32 Historians Omar Acha and Eduardo Elena have made extensive use of a recently discovered archive of letters written by ordinary Argentines to the Perón government’s Ministry of Technical Affairs. Elena examines the letters to chart popular responses to specific Peronist policies, such as the crackdown on speculation, and to demonstrate the extent to which poor women embraced Eva Perón’s critique of profligate male workers. Most interestingly, the letters reveal popular notions of citizenship. Elena notes that the letter writers generally avoided depicting themselves as the passive recipients of government largesse. On the contrary, they emphasized their own work in local organizations aimed at community improvement, and they did not shy away from criticizing Peronist officials or proposing new policies.33 Taken together, these studies demonstrate that Peronism was not simply imposed from above; it was constructed through the negotiation of popular demands and official discourse.

A structural account of Peronism But how precisely did this negotiation take place? We certainly cannot conceive of it as the interface of two autonomous, uncontaminated forces: state and masses. On the contrary, recent studies establish the interpenetration of both. Workers conceived of their consumption and their citizenship in Peronist categories, while the official discourses of Peronism were themselves built out of existing cultural traditions. And while it is imperative to recognize popular agency, we cannot forget that power is distributed unevenly. Rank-­and-file workers reproduced and transformed Peronism in their everyday actions, but they did not do so in the same way or to the same extent that Juan and Eva Perón did. Finally, can an appreciation for the agency of subordinate groups help us meet the two interpretive challenges with which I began this chapter: Peronism’s ideological incoherence and its apparent irrationality? What is needed, I believe, is a structural account of Peronism that builds on Laclau’s model of discursive articulation (rather than Germani’s economic determinism), while adhering to the four propositions I have advanced in this chapter: Peronism is an identity; it must be historicized; it includes resources, practices, and institutions, not merely language; and it reflects the agency of ordinary Argentines.

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I would like to suggest a provisional version of such an account by drawing on the theory of structure outlined by historian William Sewell.34 For Sewell, structures are composed of schemas (including rules, norms, cultural understandings, etc.) and resources that “mutually imply and sustain each other over time.” Peronism is easily conceivable as a structure in this sense. Discourses such as the notion of social citizenship, the idea of the working class as the authentic Argentine pueblo and of the oligarchy as anti-­patriotic, and the responsibility of the state to guarantee social justice constitute Peronist schemas, while the factories and pipelines built by the regime as well as the concrete benefits delivered to the poor—including wages, pensions, hospitals, schools, and vacation opportunities are Peronist resources. These resources are, as Sewell argues, “instantiations of schemas,” since, as we’ve seen, workers understood the benefits they received in Peronist terms. For Sewell, the most important characteristic of structures is that they are “dual”: they both shape and are shaped by people’s practices. Although other scholars have stressed this duality, Sewell’s theory has the virtue of clearly specifying the way agency—understood as the self-­conscious practice of knowledgeable actors—both enacts structures and transforms them. There is a strong bias toward the reproduction of structures; this durability is, in fact, what we usually mean when we describe something as structural. Yet Sewell insists that structures are always at risk of transformation. Knowledge of schemas and access to resources empower people to act effectively in society. Structures, in other words, produce agency. At the same time, agency also implies “the capacity to transpose and extend schemas to new contexts.” Moreover, social actors are knowledgeable about many different structures simultaneously; they can draw on schemas from one structure to reinterpret resources produced by another. For example, wages paid by a paternalist boss can be reinterpreted as exploitative in light of discourses mobilized by union organizers. The extent of one’s agency is a function of one’s access to resources, which are always unevenly distributed, and of one’s ability to forge alliances with others. In this sense, agency is typically collective. In Sewell’s theory, then, a structure like Peronism produces agency, which in turn reproduces the structure but also threatens constantly to transform it. This notion of structure and agency can explicate both the origins of Peronism and its subsequent historical trajectory. The military coup of 1943 placed Juan Perón in an extremely powerful position from which to rearticulate existing discourses, in Laclau’s terminology, or transpose schemas to new contexts, in Sewell’s. But as I have argued, Peronism was forged in the encounter between this new top-­down appeal and discourses and demands mobilized from below. Perón had sought to build a broad multi-­class alliance, and he tried explicitly to appeal to industrialists and the middle class alongside workers. Yet, this effort failed.35 Unions pressed their traditional workplace demands, forcing Perón to alienate factory owners. Workers embraced Perón’s melodramatic, us-­versus-them language, more than his talk of class reconciliation. The middle class resisted a movement that seemed to empower those beneath them on the socio-­economic ladder.36 In these ways, popular agency shaped Peronism at its moment of creation. After winning the 1946 election, Perón was able to use the vast resources of the state to solidify and stabilize his power. Peronist workers reproduced Peronism: they joined Peronist unions, participated in Peronist rallies,

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voted for Perón, idolized Evita. But in being Peronist, workers also transformed Peronism. They formed and participated in myriad local organizations that eluded official control. While speaking the language of Peronism, they made their own demands and pushed their own agendas. Some workers, of course, defied Perón’s orders and resisted Peronist discipline, but I would argue that the agency of Perón’s ardent followers was probably more decisive in transforming Peronism.37 Once Perón was overthrown and the Peronist party was proscribed, the balance between top-­down control and bottom-­up contestation shifted decisively. Peronists of all types were free to imbue Peronism with their own meanings, and the result was a multiplicity of Peronisms, ranging from Catholic versions on the right to revolutionary ones on the left. Peronism’s capaciousness—its incorporation of a range of existing schemas and resources—is its distinctive characteristic as a political structure. This feature accounts for both its durability and its mutability. Peronism has retained its discursive power in large part because it validated so many different aspects of workers’ experience, including their envy and resentment of the rich, their sense of class pride and solidarity, their distinctive brand of nationalism, even, at times, their Catholicism. By articulating multiple discourses and orienting them in opposition to what it depicted as a corrupt, anti-­patriotic oligarchy, Peronism made available a wide range of schemas for Peronists to apply in changing circumstances. So while Peronism became an almost unexamined, habitual identity for many, Peronist ideology remained in a permanent state of flux, incapable of orthodoxy. Since it contained both conformism and heresy, discipline and liberation, reconciliation and resentment, Peronists could push the movement in any of these directions at any given time. By embracing Perón or adoring Santa Evita, Peronists were not blindly following a leader; they were reappropriating these political symbols, simultaneously reproducing and remaking this enduring Argentine identity.

Notes   1 Alan Knight, “Populism and Neo-­populism in Latin America, especially Mexico,” Journal of Latin American Studies 30:2 (1998), 223–48.   2 Ernesto Laclau, “Towards a Theory of Populism,” in Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory: Capitalism, Fascism, Populism (London: NLB, 1977), 143–98; Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005).   3 Laclau, “Towards a Theory,” 159–60.   4 Laclau, On Populist Reason, 154.   5 Jon Beasley-Murray, Posthegemony: Political Theory and Latin America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 15–67. In this chapter, Beasley-Murray offers a useful guide to the evolution of Laclau’s theory as well as an insightful critique.   6 Gino Germani, Política y sociedad en una época de transición (Buenos Aires: Paidós, 1962).   7 Miguel Murmis and Juan Carlos Portantiero, Estudios sobre los orígenes del peronismo. Sociología y Política (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI Eds., 2004); Walter Little, “The Popular Origins of Peronism,” in David Rock (ed.), Argentina in the Twentieth Century (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1975), 162–78.

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  8 Daniel James, Resistance and Integration: Peronism and the Argentine Working Class, 1946–1976 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 13. See also his “October 17th and 18th, 1945: Mass Protest, Peronism and the Argentine Working Class,” Journal of Social History 21:3 (Spring 1989).   9 Juan Carlos Torre, La vieja guardia sindical y Perón: Sobre los orígenes del peronismo (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1990). On this historiographical trend toward an emphasis on the “conjuncture,” see Jeremy Adelman, “Reflections on Argentine Labour and the Rise of Perón,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 11:3 (1992), 243–59. 10 See, for example: Joel Horowitz, Argentine Unions, the State, and the Rise of Perón (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1990); Roberto P. Korzeniewicz, “Labor Unrest in Argentina, 1930–1943,” Latin American Research Review 28:1 (1993), 7–40. 11 Ricardo Gaudio and Jorge Pilone, “Estado y relaciones laborales en el período previo al peronismo 1935–43,” Desarrollo económico 24: 94 (1984), 235–73. 12 Lila Caimari and Mariano Ben Plotkin, “Pueblo contra antipueblo: La politización de identidades no-­políticas en la Argentina peronista (1943–1955),” Universidad Católica Argentina, Facultad de Derecho y Ciencias Políticas. Serie Documentos de Trabajo. Documento no. 3 (Buenos Aires, 1998). 13 Some of the best of this scholarship is collected in Matthew B. Karush and Oscar Chamosa, The New Cultural History of Peronism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). For an analysis of how Peronism appropriated discourses from Argentine mass culture, see Matthew B. Karush, Culture of Class: Radio and Cinema in the Making of a Divided Argentina, 1920–1946 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012). 14 Ezequiel Adamovsky, Historia de la clase media argentina: Apogeo y decadencia de una ilusión, 1919–2003 (Buenos Aires: Planeta, 2009), 135–216; Enrique Garguin, “ ‘Los Argentinos descendemos de los Barcos’: The Racial Articulation of Middle-Class Identity in Argentina (1920–1960),” Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies 2:2 (2007), 161–84. 15 Cristián Buchrucker, Nacionalismo y peronismo: La Argentina en la crisis ideológica mundial (1927–1955) (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1987); Federico Finchelstein, Transatlantic Fascism: Ideology, Violence, and the Sacred in Argentina and Italy, 1919–1945 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); Marcela Gené, Un mundo feliz: imagines de los trabajadores en el primer peronismo, 1946–1955 (Buenos Aires: Universidad de San Andrés, 2005). 16 Silvia Sigal and Eliseo Verón, Perón o muerte. Los fundamentos discursivos del fenómeno peronista (Buenos Aires: EUDEBA, 2003 [1986]). 17 Mariano Ben Plotkin, Mañana es San Perón (Buenos Aires: Ariel, 1993). 18 The term “clerico-­fascism” is from Finchelstein, Transatlantic Fascism. The argument about melodramatic moralism is from Karush, Culture of Class. 19 Nicolás Quiroga, “Sincronías peronistas. Redes populistas a ras de suelo durante el primer peronismo,” presented to Latin American Studies Association (San Francsico, May 2012). 20 Juan Carlos Torre and Elisa Pastoriza “La democratización del bienestar,” in Los Años Peronistas (1943–1955), vol. 8 of Nueva Historia Argentina, eds. Federico Poloto and Juan Suriano (Buenos Aires: Ed. Sudamericana, 1998), 255–312. 21 On the role of secondary Peronist leaders, see Raanan Rein, In the Shadow of Perón: Juan Atilio Bramuglia and the Second Line of Argentina’s Populist Movement (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008). 22 Quiroga, “Sincronías peronistas”; See also Nicolas Quiroga, “Las Unidades Basicas durante el primer peronismo. Cuatro notas sobre el Partido Peronista a nivel local,” Nuevo Mundo—Mundos Nuevos 8 (2008).

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23 Mark A. Healey, The Ruins of the New Argentina: Peronism and the Remaking of San Juan after the 1944 Earthquake (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). Other studies that highlight the negotiation of Peronism in the interior of the country include Gustavo Rubinstein, Los sindicatos azucareros en los orígenes del peronismo tucumano (Tucumán: Universidad Nacional de Tucumán, 2005); Darío Macor and César Tcach (eds.), La invención del peronismo en el interior del país (Santa Fe: Universidad Nacional del Litoral, 2003). 24 Omar Acha, “Sociedad civil y sociedad política durante el primer peronismo,” Desarrollo económico 44:174 (2004), 199–230. 25 Steven Levitsky, “An ‘Organised Disorganisation’: Informal Organisation and the Persistence of Local Party Structures in Argentine Peronism,” Journal of Latin American Studies 33 (2001), 30. 26 See, for example, Florencia Mallon, Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Greg Grandin, The Blood of Guatemala: A History of Race and Nation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000). 27 Emilio de Ipola “Populismo e ideología (a propósito de Ernesto Laclau: Política e ideología en la teoría marxista),” Revista Mexicana de Sociología 41:3 (1979), 946. 28 Laclau, “Towards a Theory of Populism,” 157. 29 Laclau, On Populist Reason, 74. 30 Mariano Plotkin recently made this point in his “Final Reflections,” in Karush and Chamosa, The New Cultural History, 282–3. 31 Daniel James, Doña María’s Story: Life History, Memory, and Political Identity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). 32 Natalia Milanesio, Workers Go Shopping: The Rise of Popular Consumer Culture in Argentina (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, forthcoming). Similarly, Rosa Aboy has used oral history interviews to explore how people understood the houses they received from the Perón government. See Rosa Aboy, Viviendas para el pueblo: Espacio urbano y sociabilidad en el Barrio Los Perales, 1946–1955 (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2005). For more recent history, Javier Auyero has analyzed what Peronist patronage meant for residents of shantytowns in the 1990s. See Auyero, Poor People’s Politics: Peronist Survival Networks and the Legacy of Evita (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001). 33 Eduardo Elena, Dignifying Argentina: Peronism, Citizenship, and Mass Consumption (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011). 34 William H. Sewell, “A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation,” in Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2005), 124–51. Although it is beyond the scope of this chapter, the mass demonstration of October 17, 1945 is also a good example of Sewell’s notion of an “event.” 35 Adamovsky, Historia de la clase media, 245–7. 36 Natalia Milanesio, “Peronists and Cabecitas: Stereotypes and Anxieties at the Peak of Social Change,” in Karush and Chamosa, The New Cultural History, 53–84. 37 On working-­class resistance to Perón, see Michael Snodgrass, “ ‘Topics Not Suitable for Propaganda’: Working-Class Resistance under Peronism,” in Jonathan C. Brown (ed.), Workers’ Control in Latin America, 1930–1979 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 159–88.

13

Performing Populism in Paraguay: Febrerismo on Stage in the Works of Correa and Ruffinelli, 1933–43 Bridget María Chesterton

On a cool fall evening in 1933, elite Paraguayan families frantically sought out tickets to the box office smash Guerra ayá (“During the War”) by the playwright Julio Correa. Scalpers took advantage of the show’s success to sell tickets at inflated prices to eager theatergoers.1 The drama acts out the struggles of the classes rurales (rural classes) in Paraguay. Performed in Guaraní, the native language of most of Paraguay’s rural population, the work also reflected the challenges of a nation fighting a war in a hostile region known as the Chaco. The success of Guerra ayá led other playwrights, most significantly Luis Ruffinelli, to tackle the same issues: rural poverty and exploitation in early twentieth-century Paraguay. Both authors used theater to explore social and political injustices; they both determined that Paraguay’s clase rural was entitled to the benefits of citizenship (and therefore political rights) and land, because of its continued sacrifices to the nation. In 1932, Paraguay declared war on Bolivia; the war lasted over three years, the two nations reaching an armistice in 1935. The war was initiated by what Paraguayans perceived to be Bolivian expansion into their territory. The attempt at expansion was a consequence of Bolivia’s loss of ocean ports during the War of the Pacific (1879–84). Landlocked, Bolivian officials looked east toward the Chaco in hopes of securing an outlet to the sea via the Paraguay River.2 Paraguayans reacted with indignation over what they viewed as Bolivian expansion into Paraguayan territory. The war was the deadliest international conflict in Latin America during the twentieth century; almost 52,000 Bolivians and Paraguayans lost their lives.3 At the peace talks following the armistice, the Paraguayans secured the vast Chaco frontier from what they considered Bolivian marauders. Following the war, both playwrights participated in and became influential and life-­ long members of the Febrerista (Group of February) Revolution. This political movement, and later party-­in-exile, was born at the end of the Chaco War and came to power in February 1936 when returning Chaco War veterans under the leadership of the charismatic Colonel Rafael Franco overthrew President Eusebio Ayala. Franco, although in political power for only a year and half, dramatically changed the cultural

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realities in Paraguay. For example, and most importantly for this chapter, Guaraní, the language that the deposed Liberal government had felt was holding the country back and that was systematically suppressed in schools, was celebrated as the language of the people. While the language did not gain official status until the rule of Alfredo Stroessner (1954–89), it was during the brief rule of the Febreristas that the role of the language in art, culture, and politics in Paraguay shifted from repression to celebration.4 Guaraní was the language in which the soldiers communicated with each other during the Chaco War. It was the language that the Paraguayan Commander of the war, Marshal José Felix Estigarribia required that all men speak in an effort to confound the Bolivian adversary. Moreover, songs and poetry of the Chaco War were written in Guaraní and published in one of the most culturally significant magazines of the period, Ocara poty cue-­mí (“Wild Flowers of Olden Days”). Febreristas also promised land reform, one of the clearest themes found in the work of both Correa and Ruffinelli. Significantly, the plays illustrate populist notions in Paraguay during the early twentieth century. Curiously, Febrerismo has rarely been associated with populism in either the English or Spanish language historiography.5 This oversight can be attributed to the fact that historians and political scientists have consistently considered Paraguay to be disconnected from larger global political movements.6 Febrerismo, moreover, pre-­ dated many of the most significant populist movements in Latin America, further adding to its exclusion from the historiography. However, as this chapter will demonstrate, the Febrerista revolution did mirror other significant populist movements found throughout Latin America.7 At the end of the Chaco War President Eusebio Ayala’s term was ending. Under the Paraguayan constitution he could not seek a second term and he clearly supported the rise of Mariscal Estigarribia to the presidency. However, a rivalry between Franco and Estigarribia was brewing. Clearly jealous of the power that Estigarribia had garnered because of his successful management of the war, but believing that Estigarribia had failed to “win” it (having stopped short of Santa Cruz de la Sierra, the city that marked the western edge of the Chaco at the foothills of the Andes, because of concerns with supply lines in 1935), Franco began a libelous campaign against Estigarribia. Franco accused Estigarribia, and Ayala, of treason for their failure to reach Santa Cruz. This sort of aggressive behavior was not uncommon for Franco. He had almost singlehandedly started the Chaco War in 1928 when, acting without orders, he attacked the Bolivian fort of Vanguaria.8 The result was an international debacle for the Paraguayans when an international arbitration committee declared that Paraguay was responsible for the aggression and ordered them to rebuild the fort for the Bolivians. President Eligio Ayala (no relation) relieved Franco of his military duties because of his rogue action. However, with the beginning of the war in 1932, Estigarribia reinstated Franco. With the termination of hostilities in 1935, Franco began plotting for the overthrow of the Ayala government in the hopes of wielding power for himself and removing Estigarribia from contention. Estigarribia, while quite popular with the troops and many elite Paraguayans—he would be elected to the presidency in 1939, only to die a few months later in a tragic plane crash—was unable to protect Eusubio Ayala and himself from Franco’s ambitions, because he was still serving in the Chaco. As result, Franco was able to take advantage of a brewing

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economic crisis and a newfound nationalism born in the battlefields of the Chaco to launch the successful “February Revolution.”9 The major philosopher of Febrerismo, Juan Stefanich, wrote in 1945 that “the February Revolution deserves special and preferential attention [from historians] . . . because of [the attention] that it gave to large national problems [in Paraguay].”10 This attention that Stefanich felt that the Febrerista revolution deserved came from the fact that “a people, a race, or a nation is not supported without its material goods, individual wellbeing, and economy.” In other words, like many other populist movements in the hemisphere, Febrerismo focused on the economic and material well-­being of Paraguayan citizens.11 But Franco, like Juan Perón in Argentina, Lázaro Cárdenas in Mexico, and Getúlio Vargas in Brazil, lacked a coherent political vision while he worked to incorporate the interests of new political actors into a larger national government and economy. In the case of Paraguay, unlike populist movements in Argentina and Brazil where the movements focused on urban workers, the group that Franco worked to include in a new political order was the “clase rural,” a social category that is difficult to define and, Franco discovered, challenging to mobilize. Even so, the desire to incorporate rural people into a large political project was not unusual in Latin America, as clearly demonstrated in the cases of Mexico and Cuba.12 However, unlike Mexico and Cuba, the Febreristas faced a challenge which ultimately undermined their goals: they found it impossible to attempt any industrialization project or hold on to power, as Paraguay’s landed oligarchy terrorized both student and agriculturalist claims. In the end, Paraguay’s landed elites ended Febrerista hopes by ousting Franco in mid-August 1937; his land reform endeavors and cultural projects—perceived by the elites as outrageous—ensured the abhorrence of Paraguay’s powerful landowning elites and intellectuals.13 Debates about populism have consistently centered on the difficulty in defining the term and the conditions under which it arises. Torcuarto DiTella argues that populist movements arise when “an ideology or a widespread emotional state develops to help communicate between leaders and followers and to create collective enthusiasm.”14 This definition incorporates the idea that populism is both an ideology and a movement. For Laclau, this definition does not offer sufficient boundaries as “(1) the characteristic features of the populist ideology are presented in a purely descriptive way, that is incapable of constructing their peculiar unity. (2) Nothing is said of the role played by the strictly populist element in a determinate social foundation.”15 However, historians such as Joel Horowitz, looking at case studies, have come to see that a more concrete understanding of populism is possible. Horowitz explains that “populism [particularly in Latin America] is reformist, especially in its rhetoric . . . It does not try to alter the basic economic structure, but seeks to make it fairer. It attempts to include new groups in the political system.”16 This definition of populism fits the Paraguayan case well, but it fails to grasp the importance of a charismatic leader. Michael L. Conniff argues that populism in Latin America needs a charismatic leader who can identify with the poor through popular culture. For Conniff, “Populism = leader ↔ charismatic bond + election ↔ followers.”17 This definition, however, fails to take into account populist leaders being brought to power without elections, as in the case of Febrerismo. This chapter contends that elections are not necessary for populist leaders to come to

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power, as proven by Rafael Franco. However, for populists to hold on to power, elections prove useful in solidifying their power, as in the case of Perón and Hugo Chavez. While the populist Franco came to power in Paraguay, he was unable to hold on to power because Paraguay’s landed elites were too powerful and maintained control of the political power in Asunción. Moreover, those who supported Franco lived and worked in rural areas. His main supporters, the Paraguayan agriculturalists, were only temporary residents of Asunción—demobilized veterans of the Chaco War—not new permanent residents of a large capital city, like in the case of the birth of other populist movements in Buenos Aires, Mexico City, or Caracas. As a result, populism in early twentieth-century Paraguay proved fleeting. This chapter shows that while elections might be necessary for populist regimes to hold on to power (and maintain their popularity), they are clearly not needed as a means for their charismatic leaders to come to power, promising to bring new groups into the political fold. Although the Febrerista Revolution was short-­lived, the scripts produced by Correa and Ruffinelli provide a rare glimpse into Paraguayan popular culture and populist dreams. In Argentina there was a surfeit of theatrical productions, musical recordings, radio shows, and movies creating a dynamic space where, as argued by Matthew B. Karush, ideas about Argentinidad could be explored.18 By contrast, Paraguay’s economic and technological isolation limited Paraguayan artists to the aforementioned poetry magazine, Ocara poty cue-­mí, and the few theater works of Correa and Ruffinelli. Nonetheless, the limited number of sources available does not necessarily limit our understanding of Paraguayan populism as it mirrored trends in Argentina. The few works that we do have clearly demonstrate that the playwrights borrowed melodramatic themes found in theater and cinema throughout Latin America. Paraguay has traditionally been written about as isolated and removed from larger global trends. However, other larger international political trends influenced Ruffinelli and Correa. Ruffinelli in particular was shaped by the events in Italy. The son of an Italian immigrant, Ruffinelli was a regular participant in the Italian social club Circolo Italiano (the Italian Club, located in downtown Asunción), where intellectual and political ideas from the peninsula were openly discussed.19 The rise to power of Benito Mussolini was certainly a matter much discussed among the Italo-Paraguayan community and shaped Ruffinelli’s political leanings. Luis Ruffinelli was born in Villarrica in 1889 and died in Asunción in 1973. Trained as an attorney, his real love was the theater.20 Although he never achieved the same level of prestige or acclaim as Correa, Ruffinelli was well known in Asunción’s artistic and intellectual community. Ruffinelli was also an eager participant in the new Franco government. Just like after the rise of Perón, where “several cultural nationalists joined the government, helping it to elaborate a cultural policy built on the principle of harmonizing Argentine folk culture with the best of the modern world,”21 the Paraguayan playwright actively joined forces with the new Febrerista government to encourage support for the “revolutionaries.” Franco asked Ruffinelli to serve as Paraguay’s ambassador to Bolivia; in the end though, because of the short duration of Franco’s regime, Ruffinelli was never able to occupy the position.22 Julio Correa was born on August 30, 1890 in Asunción. His maternal grandfather died in one of the most important battles of the War of the Triple Alliance (1864–70),

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Curupayty.23 His mother, Amalia Mizcowsky, married a Brazilian immigrant and the couple moved in elite circles in Paraguay. Correa married the actress Georgina Martínez and the couple participated in the creation of what became known as the “Guaraní” school of theater, where ideas about Paraguayan identity were explored by using the Guaraní language, rural settings, and a glorification of Paraguayan food and nature. What is unusual about Correa was that he made his living from his art and, unlike most Latin American and Paraguayan artists and intellectuals, was not an attorney, businessman, or medical doctor. When he died on July 14, 1953, Paraguayans considered him one of the great artists of the nation. Correa’s relationship with the government is a bit more nuanced. Although he never joined the Franco government, in his home in Luque, just outside Asunción, he famously displayed the words “Fe en Franco y Febrero” (Faith in Franco and February).24 He was among the Revolution’s most vocal supporters. In certain ways Correa was an authentic voice of the Paraguayan campaña. As already noted, he lived in Luque in a modest abode surrounded by the people he represented in his plays. While certainly interested in politics, he always remained on the outside—like most agriculturalists. Correa’s political and intellectual formation is a bit more difficult to track as his formal education was limited to a few years of law school. He did, however, associate with Paraguay’s most respected artists and musicians, including José Asunción Flores, Félix Fernández, Darío Gómez Serrto, and Emiliano R. Fernández. Importantly, he associated with many of these individuals in downtown Asunción at a pharmacy, which served as a meeting place for many of Paraguay’s most important creative types.25 Although Correa was an eager Febrerista, it was not obvious in those hot summer days of 1936 that Correa would have such a profound impact on the development of Febrerismo. As noted by his wife, Georgina Martínez, “My husband admired Rafael Franco, he was a Febrerista.” Importantly, in 1967 he was recognized by Franco (14 years after Correa’s death), with the renaming of the regional committee of Febrerismo of the town of Luque (Correa’s hometown) in his honor: “Julio Correa.” While Correa never played any official role in the Febrerista party, his artistic contributions to the movement were never forgotten by Rafael Franco.26 In the end, though, Correa always remained a true artist rather than academic, educated elite intellectual or politician.

The exposition—setting the Paraguayan stage before Febrerismo After independence in 1811, popular memory and public records confirm that there were a variety of landholding arrangements in eastern Paraguay. There were small lease holdings, known as arrendamientos, large landowners, and pueblos de indios (Indian villages).27 Tensions between these various types of landholders were minimal because Paraguay’s relatively small population meant that there was plenty of land for all. Moreover, arrendatarios were able to protect themselves from larger landowners because José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, in return for the taxes paid by these small landholders, gave them adequate protection. This self-­sustaining system remained in place until Carlos Antonio López on October 7, 1848 appropriated land and cattle from the pueblos de indios. This appropriation benefited the López family. To complicate

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matters, after the War of the Triple Alliance even larger pieces of land were sold to foreign corporations for the production of yerba mate (Paraguayan green tea) and for cattle ranching. Many small landholders were thrown off their land. Nonetheless, after the passage of an 1873 law, a few Paraguayans were able to hold on to their lands by providing witnesses who testified to their ownership. These títulos supletorios (substitute titles) gave some Paraguayans the ability to survive by selling goods to larger urban areas for consumption.28 It is for this reason that Paraguay’s rural class has referred to themselves in the early twentieth century as agriculturists and not peasants, as more commonly referenced in the Andes, Mexico, and Brazil.29 While Paraguayan agriculturalists worked the land, these same men also were regularly called upon to defend the country from real and perceived foreign intervention. For example, when Manuel Belgrano attempted to invade Paraguay to bring the region back into the fold with Buenos Aires after 1811, Paraguayans fought their better-­armed and trained adversaries. In the end their heroic action saved the country from Argentine intentions. Belgrano was amazed at the resistance the Paraguayan soldiers showed in battle.30 Later, during the War of the Triple Alliance, the Brazilians, Argentines, and Uruguayans were consistently baffled by the strength of their opposition. Although the Allies eventually were able to declare victory over the Paraguayans, it came with the knowledge that half of the population of Paraguay had been killed; hardly the glorious victory the Allies had been anticipating.31 In the decades following the conclusion of the War of the Triple Alliance, Paraguayans had come to imagine that citizenship was achieved by working the land and defending that same land from foreign intervention. The Paraguayan ilustrado (intellectual) who best expressed these ideas was Genaro Romero, the Minister of Land and Colonies.While Romero has largely been excluded from Paraguayan historiography, outshone by the more famous ilustrados of his period, including Juan Emiliano O’Leary and Cecilio Baéz, Romero wrote many articles for Paraguayan newspapers, edited and wrote for his own journal, El boletín de la dirección de tierras y colonias, and regularly published pamphlets on immigration, forestry, and hydroelectric power, among many other topics. But it is his work on the nature of the ideal Paraguayan citizen, the agriculturalist/soldier, that deserves the most attention. According to Romero, it was the rural class who protected the nation “in the battlefields, in the trenches and in the ravines.” He followed this statement by arguing that the agriculturalist/soldier was committed to sacrifice in battle and in the fields “in search of a better tomorrow.”32 For Romero, the agriculturalist/soldier was entitled to land after the termination of the war because of his bravery and knowledge of the Paraguayan agricultural system. In a pamphlet published in 1933, Romero detailed a program giving rights of the returning soldier to land.33 Because of his work, by the end of the war a program was in place to reward the agriculturalist/soldier for his service. For Paraguayan agriculturalists, service in the war offered them hope of having a piece of land to call their own. It also gave the clase rural an opening to express their needs and desires to the landowning class in Paraguay. However, because most of the clase rural in Paraguay was illiterate, it was the task of Paraguay’s self-­appointed artists and intellectuals to represent them. They took up the cause with great enthusiasm; they forecast in their plays that the agriculturalist would live in peace without interference

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from authorities and that there would be justice for all; moreover, the fighting men would become full citizens in the modern Paraguayan nation.

The justice plot—Correa and Ruffinelli define the issue The works of Correa and Ruffinelli clearly reflected the larger melodramatic trend in Latin American theater and film that made reference “not only to domestic dramas [as in the case of Hollywood] but also to historical epics in which family life is viewed in relation to larger national issues.”34 So even while Paraguay’s large neighbors mostly considered the nation uncivilized and barbaric, the same themes of family, economic prosperity, and citizenship that were profoundly popular throughout the region also found an eager audience in Paraguay. Just as political life shared populist ideas of the 1930s and 1940s in Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay, popular culture throughout the region also reflected more similarities than differences. Both Julio Correa, author of Guerra ayá (“During the War”), and Luis Ruffinelli, author of Guaraní-ro (“Bitter Guaraní”), also known by the Spanish title he gave it, Los dramas del amor y de la guerra (“The Dramas of Love and War”) gave similar set design instructions. Both plays take place in a house in the Paraguayan campaña (countryside)— open to give the audience a peek into the living conditions of Paraguay’s clase rural. Both sets were designed so that the audience could see, in the background, an open field. Ruffinelli’s staging design was much clearer; he desired that the audience know that the home was “tall, clean and solid.” This direction gave the audience the clear impression that the individuals who live in the home were, although poor, respectable. Correa established the respectability of his characters by making sure to note that the female characters were “beautiful.” Ruffinelli’s play, which opened on November 23, 1943, after the fall and exile of the Franco government, considered the abuses in the campaña by documenting how the local agente (official) was drafting the adult male offspring of Paraguayan agriculturalists into war. The young men of the play, including the main character, Juan Andrés, respond to the draft by complaining that it is always the Paraguayan agriculturalist who is forced to serve the country: Juan Andrés:  (to Marcos and Pedro [other young agriculturists who were drafted])—Those men of the capital have remembered us once again. Marcos:  Us, again. Pedro:  Us, for the fields. Marcos:  Us, for the elections. Pedro:  Us, for the barracks. Marcos:  Us, for the revolutions [coup d’état]. Juan Andrés:  And now the crowning moment: Us, always us, and this time for war.35

But in the end, the men know that it is their duty as citizens to head to war. As noted by Juan Andrés’ father, Don Juan, “if they are called, they will comply with their duty.”36

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Most importantly, however, both plays open with serious injustices. In the case of Correa’s play, the main character, José Domingo, has just returned from war when he is informed that the local “administrator” and Chaco “war veteran” Luis is taking advantage of the situation by threatening their women and making unreasonable economic demands on the people. In both plays powerful government officials make demands on the agriculturalists, while they themselves stay far above the fray by claiming that they had already made great sacrifices for the nation. In the case of the hated administrator of Correa’s play, he claims (untruthfully) that he had already served and he had “killed twenty or thirty” Bolivians and “captured many more.”37 According to Luis, this “brave” and “courageous” service gave him the right to claim he was a venerated war hero. In Ruffinelli’s narrative, the comisario (the agente’s boss) claims that he, too, was working in the service of the country. He calculated that his service was needed in the rear (presumably to make sure that commodities were collected from the Paraguayan agriculturalists) and that he had requested a transfer to the front, but that it had been denied. Moreover, he claims that he was not to blame that his transfer did not come through. Both men establish their authority over the rural classes by claiming that their services were indispensable for the war effort. Ruffinelli further explores the injustice in the campaña. The comisario arrives at the home of Don Juan to procure more supplies. Don Juan loudly complains that he has already given the comisario all the “cornstarch, manioc, tobacco, and alfalfa” the family had. He also notes, unhappily, that “the little honey I had was taken as well.”38 However, the comisario feels that that he is being treated with “contempt” by the rural family and demands respect. If the family will not willingly give it to him, he is determined to take it. Just like the administrator in Correa’s play, both men felt that they had the right to defile the young women of the campaña. The abuse of women was possible because the men that were supposed to watch out for them were stationed far away in the Chaco. In Ruffinelli’s work, María Pabla, the goddaughter of Don Juan and the girlfriend of Juan, is in physical danger because of her beauty. In Correa’s play, the hated administrator takes notice of María Rosa, José Domingo’s cousin. In both cases, the powerful men use tricks to take sexual advantage of the young women. In the case of María Pabla, she is informed (via a third party) that her brother has returned from the war in the Chaco and will be waiting for her at the train station; additionally, he is in desperate need of her help as he is either injured or ill (she is not told which). She quickly prepares to meet her brother—taking no precautions to protect herself, including declining to borrow a horse from Don Juan, which he generously offers; along the way, she is raped by an unknown assailant who lay in wait for her. To add to the tragedy, María Pabla’s mother dies shortly after the end of the war. In the case of María Rosa, the administrator gives her gifts and tells her tales of his heroics in the Chaco; in the end, he is able to seduce the 16-year-­old young lady, after he had promised her a ring. She is later abandoned, pregnant. Both women have to bear the shame of their sexual exploitation. The men of the play were also suffering greatly at the end of the war. José Domingo suffers from what we would call post-­traumatic stress disorder. At one of the most

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important early battles of the war, Nanawa, a bomb exploded in front of him, leaving him confused and highly traumatized. He explains these feelings to his brother-­in-law with great clarity: “Sometimes it feels like I am in suspense . . . sometimes I want to laugh, sometimes I want to cry . . . and other times I am furious. I want to die when I feel that way.” Juan Andrés was also suffering; he returns from battle without the ability to move his arms. This physical injury leaves the young man depressed. He tells his father: “It would have been better if you had dressed for mourning. At this point you would have gotten used to it and day after day you would have felt it less.”39 Both Correa and Ruffinelli reflected the realities of the war for audiences in Asunción, who would have had only limited contact with the events in the Chaco. The reality was that most elite families were well protected in familial homes and enclosed gardens. The only contact that elite women would have had with the fighting in the Chaco was through volunteering to make mosquito netting or clothing, or writing letters to soldiers as pen-­pals. During the Chaco War, elite women volunteered to become Madrinas de Guerra (“Godmothers of War”) for the fighting men. These women gave their time and energies to write to the soldiers in the front. Although some women did lose their ahijados (godsons) during the fighting, the reality was that most women remained rather isolated from the realities of the war.40 However, this was not the case for the women of the campaña. They suffered; working long hours in the field heightened the risk of sexual abuse while their men were away. More critically, they lost their brothers, sons, and boyfriends. In Ruffinelli’s play, Doña Rita, a poor illiterate neighbor of Don Juan, loses her only son during the war. She is informed of his death only when other soldiers return from the battlefields to tell her. Because of her illiteracy the only way she could be informed was through the oral testimony of the men who witnessed his death. By recounting this experience for elite audiences in Asunción, elites were given insight into the desperation of the clases rurales.

The conflict—challenge the authority Neither José Domingo nor Juan Andrés are high-­ranking officials in the military. Indeed, they are individuals subject to the power of Paraguay’s strong ruling class. Although Juan Andrés has risen to the rank of sergeant, José Domingo remains only a “soldier.” By the end of the plays, however, the two men subvert the authority of strong, powerful, politically connected men by demonstrating how righteousness and heroism were qualities that led to land and happiness. For both men, the redemption of the women in their lives and the right to land for their own agricultural production were the direct result of their efforts in the Chaco War. Correa’s José Domingo, upon discovering that the local administrator has sexually exploited his niece, reacts with indignation. He also feels responsible because he had failed to protect the women in his family due to his obligations in the Chaco. The administrator had promised the young girl material wealth in exchange for sexual favors. However, all she received was an unwanted pregnancy, leaving the young woman un-­marriageable. As a result, José Domingo takes revenge against the ruthless

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man and murders him with a knife. Taking this final action against the hated administrator is more than just an attack against a single man; it is an attack on the entire political, economic, and social system in the Paraguayan campaña. Not only does José Domingo murder the hated administrator but, as he declares in a monologue: After this war . . . we will hug each other under the tricolor [the Paraguayan flag] . . . in this war we have demonstrated who were are . . . we are strong in the world . . . we have strength and heart . . . we will expel all Bolivians from our territory . . . and later we will expel traitors and thieves . . . Our country will be ours . . . we won it with sweat, tears and blood . . . all Paraguayans, after this, will have their own piece of land upon which to build their houses.41

José Domingo concludes that the actions of his peers in war have given them rights previously denied. He clearly understood and articulated the position of Genaro Romero: because of his service to his country in the war, he has earned the right to land and a home to call his own. Ruffinelli’s agriculturalist, Juan Andrés, also knew that he too was entitled to redemption. After Juan Andrés’ service and his life-­altering injury, he feels that he no longer has the right to a happy life. As a result, when the young man, Gregorío, comes calling asking for the hand of María Pabla in marriage, Juan Andrés agrees to ask María Pabla on his behalf. However, when the veteran approaches María Pabla about this, she states that she is already betrothed to another: Juan Andrés. The young man, while moved, feels that he is no longer deserving of her affection because of his injuries. However, she too feels that she is not worthy of love, because of her sexual assault. Yet, Juan Andrés indicates that he disagrees with her evaluation. He states with clarity: “What fault can you have if when leaving Mass there is a snake in your path and it bites you?”42 It is clear that for Juan Andrés, her rape is not an impediment to marriage. Immediately following the scene where Juan Andrés asks María Pabla if she will marry Gregorio, “Private León” brings the comisario before Juan Andrés and declares that the comisario was the man who raped María Pabla. Shocked, the sergeant jumps to his feet and his paralyzed arms began to move. He threatens the man with a belt and screams at the comisario: “Let’s go, defend yourself like a man, you, bandit, rapist. . .!”43 He continues with his rant but concludes by saying: “No. . .! No. . .! I have stained my hands with too much human blood [in the Chaco]. . .!” In the end, Juan Andrés commands Private León to let the comisario go so that he can live in the hills, banished from the rural community. As the scene unfolds, the audiences witness the physical ailments of Juan Andrés cure themselves. Immediately after the expulsion of the comisario from the community, Juan Andrés declares to María Pabla: “To the garden. . .! To the fields. . .! To the hills! To live! To work! To enjoy!”44 He is grateful to María Pabla for her efforts while he was in the Chaco and recovering from his traumas: “And you, amazing woman of my land! Thank you for everything you did for me while I could not; but now, I am once again at my post.” The above dialogue reminds the audience that María Pabla is

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just as important to him as the land that he worked. His presumed future wife and his land are returned to Juan Andrés. The rights of citizenship granted to him because of his efforts in the Chaco are restored. The promise of the Febrerista Revolution—and Paraguayan populism—come true for both José Domingo and Juan Andrés.

Complications—reflecting the Paraguayan The stage also allowed the authors to explore the most interesting and complex ideas about life in the Paraguayan campaña, including food and beverage choices, religion, and illiteracy. The visual performance of these plays put elite audiences in direct contact with ideas emanating from the campaña. While historians have traditionally looked to ilustrados for ideas concerning Paraguayan identity, the plays of Correa and Ruffinelli allow historians to develop a more nuanced understanding of Paraguayan national character. Both playwrights tapped into a long oral tradition found in the campaña. Because plays require a performance, they bestow a level of authenticity to the characters. Guaraní is traditionally an oral language.45 While the Jesuits of the colonial period turned it into a written language, there is a strong sense in Paraguay that Guaraní was, is, and should be a language to be spoken, not written. Ruffinelli’s play also reflected everyday life in Paraguay. Characters consume large quantities of mate, green Paraguayan tea. Doña Dolores, Juan Andrés’ mother, in the first scene of the play serves the herbal tea to her husband, reflecting the morning traditions in a rural household. She continues to serve mate to her loved ones throughout the play. Ruffinelli also uses the mate to demonstrate the love, affection, and attention that María Pabla gave toward Juan Andrés when he returned from war without the use of his hands. In the same scene where María Pabla declares that she will not marry Gregorio because she is betrothed to another (Juan Andrés), she lovingly holds the mate gourd in her hand as he drinks through the bombilla (straw). Ruffinelli’s stage instructions indicated that he wished her to be “maternal” in this scene. The character also expresses great concern that the water was hot enough for the wounded man. She was in this case expressing a most Paraguayan concern with women serving mate: that it be prepared properly. In no way is the audience to forget that this is the home of a loving, caring, Paraguayan family. Ruffinelli also demonstrates the hospitality of the campaña when the three demobilized soldiers appear at his house. He offers them a “drink”; in this case caña, a sugar-­based alcoholic beverage. One of the demobilized men comments after taking a swig, “it may be very tasty the drink of the gringos [foreigners], that I think is called whisky, but for who I am, I will stick with that of our land. Oh, delicious caña!”46 In this scene, Ruffinelli defines a beverage as Paraguayan, and one that the demobilized men clearly prefer to even common water which they were also offered. In Correa’s play Doña Rosa offers her son (Perú) and granddaughter (María Rosa) a piece of mbeju, a type of bread made of cornstarch. This Paraguayan staple, still enjoyed with a typical meal in modern Paraguay, demonstrated to Paraguayan audiences the real—and hopefully sufficient—food choices of those living in the campaña.

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In both works, the characters also show a strong national/religious conviction. According to Michael Huner, Paraguayan priests during the War of the Triple Alliance declared that the nation was “divinely ordained,” and used a Guaraní term to describe this special relationship: ñane retã (our soil).47 Accordingly, there developed in the campaña a strong religious tendency, one that the playwrights Correa and Ruffinelli detailed. José Domingo’s father gratefully demonstrated his profound religiosity when he declared, “There is nothing more powerful than the Virgin of Caacupé . . . She has brought you back to me . . . She is the grand lady of miracles.”48 The Virgin of Caacupé was and continues to be the most important religious shrine in Paraguay. It is believed by Paraguayans to be the site where the Virgin Mary “saved” a Christian Guaraní Indian’s life by protecting him from “savage” Mbayaes Indians who wanted to kill him. According to popular legend, when the Guaraní Indian promised to carve an image of the Virgin into a tree if he lived to see the following day, he kept his promise when he survived, and every year on December 8 thousands of Paraguayans descend on the town of Caacupé to pay homage to the Immaculate Conception. Referencing the most popular religious holiday in Paraguay, Correa gave his characters a strong religious tradition, one most certainly recognizable to those who lived in the Paraguayan campaña. Moreover, José Domingo’s grandfather postulates that he could be cured from his demons (post-­ traumatic stress disorder) if he would only drink holy water every morning.49 Ruffinelli’s characters offer blessings to one another; for example, Don Juan offers one to María Pabla and she in turn offers one to Doña Dolores.50 More importantly, however, the audience was given a visual reminder of the religiosity of the Paraguayan agriculturalist, as the set directions include an altar to the Virgin of Miracles, which the family during various points in the play either references or prostrates in front of. The playwrights once again show an understanding of the Paraguayan countryside and its deep religious traditions, tying the campaña to the Church, Paraguayan state, and national identity. Illiteracy is also explored in both plays. As already recounted, Doña Rita is only informed of the death of her son when three demobilized soldiers return from the Chaco. Her illiteracy prevents her from finding out through written forms of communication. In the case of Correa, the characters are authentically represented with language. Several times during the play, the Guaraní-speaking characters mispronounce Spanish words and names. For example, an agriculturalist named Don Nolasco says “guen día” instead of “buen día” (good day), as is necessary in well-­ pronounced Spanish. It is important to note that Don Nolasco uses the Spanish greeting even though the play is in Guaraní. The fact that the character mispronounces one of the most basic Spanish phrases demonstrates the lack of access to education suffered by the people of the campaña and is a reflection of the reality Correa was re-­creating on the stage. Moreover, characters are excluded from a complete understanding of government bureaucracy. Citing that the government had the right to enter into anyone’s home during time of war to collect essential war material, Don Nolasco complains, “As the code states ‘porcedieron’.” What he really wanted to say was “procedieron,” meaning that authorities could “proceed” as necessary to acquire the goods from agriculturalists’ homes. But what is clearly reflected here is that Don Nolasco has never read the code himself for, if he had, he certainly would not have mispronounced the word.

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Climax—the return of the “authentic” language and culture When the Febreristas took power in Paraguay after the end of the Chaco War, for a brief period of time many Paraguayan agriculturalists and ilustrados believed Rafael Franco would return Paraguayan land to those who had fought with the passage of el decreto Ley N° 1060, del la Reforma Agraria, de 5 de mayo 1936 (Decree, Law Number 1060, of the Agrarian Reform of May 5, 1936). Paraguayan newspapers were filled with accounts of how the new government would keep its promises to those who had fought in the war. Men such as Juan Emiliano O’Leary hoped that true Paraguayan identity would come to the fore after the Febrerista Revolution. Recounting the success of the revolution for the popular cultural and literary magazine Guarania, the author of the article reported with pride the observations of “French journalist Alloucerie,” who stated that when Paraguayan women spoke Guaraní, “they appear to sing.” Guaraní was not just a language of communication, it was an art form, of which the Paraguayan people must be proud. While during the early part of the twentieth century Liberal elites cautioned against the dangers of the excessive use of the Guaraní language by the populace, and warned that its continued use was dangerous to the future of the nation, after the Febrerista Revolution, glorification of the Guaraní language came to the fore in the pages of Guarania. In an article entitled “El guaraní,” the author argued that Guaraní was a complex language in which there existed an “abundance of beautiful metaphors,” and that the language had words that allow for abstract thinking.51 By writing the plays in the language of the Paraguayan campaña, the playwrights were reflecting this change in Paraguayan cultural values. While Correa’s play foreshadowed the events of the Febrerista revolution with its premiere in 1933, Ruffinelli’s play, staged in 1943, held close a lingering hope about the possibilities of the failed populist movement in Paraguay. One of the major failings of Febrerismo was Franco’s inability to keep demobilized soldiers in Asunción long enough for him to consolidate his power through elections. However, while the Febrerista Revolution was a political—and populist—failure, the ideas and hopes of those hot summer days in Paraguay were embraced in the Paraguayan campaña and were institutionalized in the surviving land ministry. Romero’s Ministerio de Tierras and Colonias became the Insituto de Reforma Agraria (Institute of Agricultural Reform) in honor of the 1936 agrarian legislation.52 The plays also reflected ideas born in the campaña about Paraguayan national identity. Paraguayans spoke Guaraní; they drank caña; they were Catholic and religious; sadly, they were often illiterate; but, most importantly, they were agriculturalists/ soldiers. As recounted in both plays, they earned the right to land by fighting off foreign invaders. They also continued to fight injustice once they returned as well. Because neither Correa’s agente nor Ruffinelli’s comisario fought, both men have their rights to live comfortably in Paraguay taken away: the agente is killed; the comisario is banished. But the heroes, José Domingo and Juan Andrés, gain family, honor, and, most importantly, land to call their own. The hope that after the war the Paraguayan agriculturalists would be rewarded with political participation and have their rural identity respected and honored continued to live on on-­stage, if not in reality.

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Notes   This chapter was conceived when Roberto Cespedes Ruffinelli, knowing my interest in Paraguayan poetry and plays, handed me a copy of his grandfather’s plays at the “Las terceras jornadas de historia Paraguay” in Montevideo, Uruguay in June 2012. Because of that serendipitous moment, I have been able to explore these ideas about Febrerismo. Gracias Roberto! Also, thanks to the members of the New York State Latin American History Workshop, specifically, Nancy Appelbaum, Ray Carib, and Ernesto Bassi for reading an early draft and providing invaluable feedback. A great discussion with Joel Horowitz in Olean, New York in the summer of 2013 helped to clarify some of the more complex issues surrounding populism. Thanks Joel. Thomas Whigham at the University of Georgia has also provided insightful commentary. Gracias a todos!   1 El Orden, May 23, 1933, 4.   2 Speculation about the causes of the Chaco War point to a proxy war between Standard Oil and Royal Dutch Shell. This myth, according to Matthew Hughes, “Logistics and the Chaco War: Bolivia versus Paraguay, 1932–1935,” Journal of Military History 69: 2 (April 2005), “focus[es] [on] non-­military aspects to the conflict, conceptualizing the war in the context of oil, economic change, and global capitalism” (415). There is no evidence, however, for such ideas in Paraguayan archives. Nonetheless, the myth of oil has proven powerful and long-­lasting; Frank Jacobs repeated it in the New York Times as recently as April 3, 2012.   3 Hughes, “Logistics and the Chaco War,” 412.   4 See Erasmo González González, El gobierno de 1936 y su proyecto de identidad nacional (Asunción Paraguay: El Lectór, 2012).   5 Of note is an argument by José N. Moríngo who wrote in “Estructuras de poder y fuerzas sociales en el proceso politico paraguayo a partir de la post-­guerra del Chaco,” Criterio 2nd ser., 2: 2 (June 1977), 12–21, that the Febrerista government was a military coup that flirted with populism. Thanks to Roberto Cespedes Ruffinelli for this information.   6 The most in-­depth study of Febrerismo is Roberto Cespedes Ruffinelli’s text El Febrerismo: Del movimiento al partido 1936–1951 (Asunción: Editorial LUXE, 1983). In his study Cespedes considers Febrerismo caught between “charismatic” leadership of Franco and an ideological movement. However, Cespedes struggles to identify the long-­term goals of the party and as such focuses on the role of class in the movement. It should be noted that Cespedes is the grandson of our playwright and that his family has a long tradition of adherence to the movement. In a defense of Febrerismo Juan G. Granada writes in Esclarecimiento ideológico: El estado de derecho y el estado totalitario, Interpretación de la doctrina del Partido Revolucionario Febrerista (Asunción: Imprenta Zamphirópolos, 1981) that “the interpretation of the Ideology [of Febrerismo] has given way to frequent confusion, and moreover, its adversaries have charged us with diverse characterizations. They have declared that we are children of the right and as such nazi-­facists, while others maintain that we are a product of the extreme left” (Prologue).   7 In her study about perceived Paraguayan exceptionalism, Lorena Soler reflects on how this legacy has contributed to the lack of knowledge about the country and how it continues to reduce interest in the country. Moreover, she demands that social scientists move beyond geographic determinism to understand Paraguayan history. This chapter hopes to add to the growing belief that Paraguay is hardly exceptional in Latin America or globally. Lorena Soler, “¿El mito de la isla?: Acerca de la contrucción

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11

12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

Transformations of Populism in Europe and the Americas del desconocimiento y la excepcionalidad de la historia política del Paraguay,” Revista electronica de altos estudios sociales de la Universidad Nacional de General San Martín 3: 6 (August 2010). Bridget María Chesterton, The Grandchildren of Solano López: Frontier and Nation in Paraguay, 1904–1936 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2013), 109. Paul H. Lewis, Politcal Parties and Generations in Paraguay’s Liberal Era, 1869–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 123–4. Juan Stefanich, La restauración histórica del Paraguay (Buenos Aires, Argentina: Editorial El Nuevo Mundo, 1945), 7. For a complete intellectual biography of Stefanich see: Herib Caballero Campos, “El Nacionalismo en el Paraguay. La obra historigráfica de Juan Stefanich,” Actas digitales del XXXII Encuentro de Geohistoria Regional, September 27–29, 2012. For more on material culture and populism in Argentina see: Eduardo Elena, Dignifying Argentina: Peronism, Citizenship and Mass Consumption (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011) and Natalia Milanesio, Workers Go Shopping in Argentina: The Rise of Popular Consumer Culture (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2013). For more on these movements see Gillian McGillivray, Blazing Cane: Sugar Communities, Class, and State Formation in Cuba, 1868–1959 (Durham, Duke University Press, 2009), and Amelia M. Kiddle and Mara L.O. Muños, Populism in Twentieth Century Mexico: The Presidencies of Lazaro Cardenas and Luis Echeverria (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2010). For more on the structure and defeat of the Febrersitas see Warren Gaylord Harris, The Politics of Exile: Paraguay’s Febrerista Party (Chapel Hill: Univeristy of North Carolina Press, 1965). Torcuarto S. DiTella, “Populism and Reform in Latin America,” in Claudio Veliz (ed.), Obstacles to Change in Latin America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 53. Ernesto Laclau, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory: Capitalism, Fascism, Populism (London: NLB, 1977), 147. Joel Horowitz, “Industrialists and the Rise of Perón, 1943–1946: Some Implications for the Conceptualization of Populism,” The Americas 47: 2 (October 1990), 212. Michael L. Conniff (ed.), Populism in Latin America, Second Edition (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012). Matthew B. Karush. Culture of Class: Radio and Cinema in the Making of a Divided Argentina, 1920–1946 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 9. Ruffinelli received materials from the Italian Embassy because of his Italian heritage and membership in the club. Consequently, he was well versed in current events in Italy. Alain Saint-Saëns, “Luis Ruffinelli,” unpublished manuscript, 19. Karush, Culture of Class, 9. Alain Saint-Saëns, “Luis Ruffinelli,” 16. The War of the Triple Alliance pitched Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay against Paraguay. Forjadores del Paraguay (Asunción, Paraguay: Aramí Groupo Empresiarial, 2004), 216. Erasmo González González, Julio Correa (Asunción: El Lector, 2013), 22–3. As quoted in ibid., 66. Pastore, La lucha por la tierra en Paraguay (Montevideo, Uruguay: Editorial Antequera, 1972), 127, 132. Jan M. G. Kleinpenning, Rural Paraguay (Asunción: Iberoamericana, 2009), 184, 217. It is important to note that this is no longer the case today. Because of the influence of foreign aid workers and Brazilian landowners, Paraguay’s rural classes today usually use the term “peasants.”

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30 Jerry Cooney, El Fin de la Colonia: Paraguay, 1810–1811 (Asunción: Intercontiental, 2010), 28. 31 See Thomas Whigham and Barbara Potthast, “The Paraguayan Rosetta Stone: New Insights into the Demographics of the Paraguayan War, 1684–1870,” Latin American Reserach Review 34:1 (1999), 174–86. 32 El Orden, October 23, 1934. 33 Genaro Romero, El chaco paraguayo para sus defensores: Iniciativa de un proyecto para colonización en el Chaco elevado al Ministerio de Hacienda (Asunción: Imprenta Nación, 1933), 3. 34 Darlene J. Sadier (ed.), Latin American Melodrama: Passion, Pathos, and Entertainment (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 3. 35 Luis Ruffinelli, Los dramas del amor y de la guerra in Gloria España Ruffinelli de Gutiérrez Yegros (ed.), El Teatro de Luis Ruffinelli (Metalúrgica: Asunción, 2012), 214. Translated from Spanish by the author. 36 Ibid., 209. 37 Julio Correa, Guerra ayá, translated by Edgar Osvaldo Brizuela, Act I, Scene 13. Archivos de los Autores Paraguayos Asociados. 38 Ruffinelli, Los dramas del amor y de la guerra, 223. 39 Ibid., 237. 40 See: Bridget María Chesterton, “Composing Gender and Class: Paraguayan Letter Writers during the Chaco War, 1932–1935,” Journal of Women’s History 26: 3 (Fall 2014), 59–80. 41 Correa, Guerra ayá, , Act 3, Scene 7. 42 Ruffinelli, Los dramas del amor y de la guerra, 248. 43 Ibid., 250. 44 Ibid., 251. 45 For more on Guaraní language policy and culture in Paraguay see Andrew Nickson, “Governance and the Revitalization of the Guaraní Language,” Latin American Research Review 44: 3 (2009), 3–26. 46 Ibid., 223. 47 Michael Kenneth Huner, “Sacred Cause, Divine Republic: A History of Nationhood, Religion, and War in Nineteenth Century Paraguay 1850–1870” (Ph.D. Diss. University of North Carolina, 2011), 2. 48 Correa, Guerra ayá, Act 1, Scene 18. 49 Correa, Guerra ayá, Act 2, Scene 2. 50 Ruffinelli, Los dramas del amor y de la guerra, 210. 51 Manuel Domínguez, Guarania, “La cruza del godo y la raza Guaraní,” 23. 52 This name stayed in place until the rise of Stroessner, when it became Insituto de Bienestar Rural (Institute of Rural Welfare). In the early 2000s its name was once again changed to Instituto Nacional de Desarrollo Rural y de Tierra (National Institute of Rural Development and Land).

Part Two

Historical Theories of Populism

14

Transformations of Producerist Populism in Western Europe John Abromeit

Der Faschismus ist kein Zufall gewesen.

Theodor Adorno1

Introduction This essay is concerned with the questions of how and why progressive populist political ideas from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were so easily and effectively integrated into fascist ideology in Western Europe in the twentieth century. After a brief discussion of four different influential authors’ analyses of the links between fascism and populism, I present a definition and genealogy of “producerist populist ideology,” which is intended to identify some basic continuities in populist ideas from the French Revolution, through certain versions of nineteenth-­century socialist thought and on into fascism. I would like to demonstrate that these continuities in ideological content greatly facilitated the appropriation of producerist populism for different functions in different historical contexts. Without such underlying continuities, such appropriations would not have been possible. Although the bulk of my effort is devoted to identifying said continuities, in the conclusion I also highlight the many significant discontinuities that exist between bourgeois, socialist, and fascist versions of producerist populism. Continuities and their significance are brought into relief by identifying the discontinuities. I have self-­consciously adopted the methodological approach of genealogy, rather than teleology, because I do not see fascist ideology as a necessary outcome of early forms of populism. Nonetheless, the significance of a specifically “producerist” form of populism in fascist ideology, makes it possible to identify retrospectively the role this ideology played in earlier articulations of progressive populism. The fact that fascism was able effectively to place itself within and draw legitimacy from this political tradition is sufficient justification for such a genealogical investigation. Conversely, a better understanding of those aspects of the progressive populism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that were not or could not be appropriated by fascism, should help us identify more clearly the progressive and reactionary dimensions of populism during this time in Western Europe. Such an

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examination should also help to illuminate the vicissitudes of populism in other geographical and historical contexts.2

Fascism and right-­wing populism Much recent scholarship on fascism has focused on the populist dimensions of fascist ideology and the key importance of populist ideas and techniques of popular mobilization in the initial success of fascist movements. In the German context, Peter Fritzsche has argued that beneath the fragmentation of Weimar parliamentary politics, new forms of populist nationalism emerged which set the stage for the success of National Socialism.3 Fritzsche contends that historians’ focus on the terms of the Treaty of Versailles and the Great Crash of 1929 as the primary causal factors of the Nazis’ rise to power has obscured the key role played by a populist political mobilization of the middle class.4 This mobilization was anticipated by the euphoria of national unity during the August Days of 1914, but it first took concrete shape in response to the working class mobilization and revolution of November 1918. It was given further momentum by middle-­class anger at the hyperinflation of 1923–4. About the German Mittelstand5 during this time, Fritzsche writes, Their radical critique of the prevailing system, their abiding determination to find an alternative to both postwar capitalism and Marxism, their vigorous commitment to self-­reliance and to giving a political voice to the “little people” and the “common man,” and, finally, their new willingness to move politics into the street and display popular strength and militancy set the stage for what might be usefully understood as German populism.6

Citing, for example, the widespread mobilization of the middle-­class during the successful presidential election campaign of Paul Hindenburg in 1925, Fritzsche argues that a broadly based political insurgency was well underway before the Great Crash of 1929 and that the National Socialists’ rise to power was based primarily on their ability to harness this movement. Fritzsche is careful not to identify this populist insurgency of the middle-­class with National Socialism. He argues that “an erosion of National Socialist support . . . would . . . neither have exhausted the radicalism of the middle class constituents nor effaced the new populist style of public activism that emerged in the 1920s.”7 Yet, at the same time, he views this mobilization as a necessary condition of the Nazis’ success. Important continuities exist between Peter Fritzsche’s work on the Weimar Republic and Geoff Eley’s work on the rise of a new radical, right-­wing populist nationalism in Germany between 1890 and 1914.8 These continuities are apparent not only in Eley’s contribution to this volume, but also in an earlier article, in which he criticized the then popular view that the success of National Socialism should be attributed primarily to the stubborn persistence of pre-­modern institutions and attitudes, and the resistance of backwards-­looking social groups to a putatively normative model of Western political and economic modernization.9 In contrast to Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Jürgen

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Kocka, and other advocates of a German Sonderweg, Eley argues that, far from being rigidly constant, the power and legitimacy of the traditional right and the pre-­capitalist elements (such as the Prussian Junkers) that had supported it, declined steadily in the decades preceding the First World War and were increasingly challenged by a new, radical right-­wing populist nationalism, which first emerged in conservative civic associations, such as the Naval League and the Pan-German League. Eley characterizes these groups as “populist” due to their hostility to both the established right as well as the increasingly powerful German workers’ movement and Social Democratic Party. Although its constituents were predominantly middle and lower-­middle class, they were not drawn mainly from the backwards-­looking “old” Mittelstand, who were hostile to capitalist modernization, but instead from the forward-­looking “new” Mittelstand, whose hostility was directed not at industry, but at parliamentary government, which they deemed too beholden to powerful forces on both the left and the right. One of the most striking novelties of this new right-­wing movement was their invocation of the traditionally progressive, democratic language of popular sovereignty to defend their radical national politics. Eley writes, An appeal to the will of the people was an organizing theme in the history of radical nationalism before 1914 . . . At each point of serious conflict with the government or the political establishment the higher legitimacy of the people’s purpose tended to be invoked. This was something quite new for the right . . . The political novelty of radical nationalism was not only that it instated such a notion in the practice of the right, but that it did so in antagonism against the latter’s existing institutions.10

In short, Eley believes that the foundations of a new radical right-­wing populist nationalism had already been laid in Germany before the First World War. In his discussion of the origins of fascism during the Weimar Republic, Eley outlines how this right-­wing populist nationalism continued to play a crucial role, even after the decline of the national civic and pressure groups in which it had first taken shape. In fact, to highlight its populist ideological dimensions, Eley characterizes National Socialism as a form of “right-­wing Jacobinism.”11 Anticipating Fritzsche’s later arguments, Eley maintains that the National Socialists’ success rested largely on their ability to harness the radical, grass-roots nationalist movement which grew exponentially in the new democratic space created by the Weimar Republic. Following Ernesto Laclau’s analysis of fascism as form of right-­wing populism—to which we will return below—Eley argues that radical nationalism and fascism ultimately triumphed over socialism and communism because the former drew ideologically on populist, democratic political traditions from the nineteenth century, whereas the latter clung rigidly to narrow notions of class, which held little appeal beyond workers. Although originating primarily among the middle class—especially the rapidly growing “new” Mittelstand of salaried employees—the ultimate triumph of radical nationalism and fascism was based on its unprecedented ability to win supporters from all segments of German society—including the working class, which composed approximately 32 percent of NSDAP party members in 1933.12 Eley writes,

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the most striking thing about the NSDAP . . . was not its disproportionate dependence on a particular social group . . . but its ability . . . to broaden its social base in several different directions. . . . It not only subsumed the organizational fragmentation of the right. It also united a broadly based coalition of the subordinate classes, centred on the peasantry and petty bourgeoisie, but stretching deep into the wage-­earning population.13

As mentioned, Eley views the populist dimension of radical nationalist and National Socialist ideology as the crucial—if not the only14—factor in explaining this success. He writes,“This line of argument reinstates the importance of ideology for our understanding of fascism. In particular, it directs us to the contested terrain of popular-­democratic aspirations, where the socialist left proved most deficient, the fascist right most telling in their mode of political intervention.”15 In other words, Eley calls the Sonderweg thesis into question by drawing our attention not only to capitalism’s complicity—as opposed to placing most of the blame on “pre-­modern” and “pre-­capitalist” attitudes and institutions— but also to right-­wing appropriations of supposedly irreproachable Western European/ North Atlantic political traditions and ideas as key to fascism’s success. In so doing Eley raises the question of the transformation of populism, that is, how and why radical, right-­wing groups were able effectively to appropriate progressive nineteenth-­century democratic-­populist traditions and ideas, and how something like “right-­wing Jacobinism” became possible. In the French and Italian context, Zeev Sternhell’s work has become a touchstone for many scholarly debates about fascism, due mainly to his controversial claim that fascist ideology first emerged in France and was fully developed before the First World War.16 As Eley does for Germany, Sternhell focuses on the emergence of new, radical right-­ wing populist nationalism between 1890 and 1914 in France.17 However, Sternhell’s argument differs from Eley’s in at least two respects. First, Sternhell claims that the roots of fascist ideology should be sought not only in this new radical nationalism, but also in a powerful national syndicalist tendency among the French left in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. For Sternhell, in other words, fascist ideology was born out of a synthesis of integral nationalism and national syndicalism. This synthesis was pioneered in the work of Georges Sorel and some of his disciples, who began to collaborate with radical nationalist intellectuals on the eve of the First World War. Second, whereas Eley’s description of National Socialism as a form of “right-­wing Jacobinism” indicates a willingness to explore the links between fascism and modern Western political ideologies and movements, Sternhell views fascist ideology as an absolute negation of the legacy of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. He emphasizes instead the irrationalist dimensions of fascist ideology. Sternhell’s work is important for our purposes here insofar as he explicitly poses and offers one possible answer to the question of the transformation of populist ideas from the left to the right. He argues that this transformation can be seen most clearly in the work of Sorel who, after becoming frustrated with the dominant reformist tendencies in the French Socialist Party and the leading trade unions, decided that the nation as a whole, rather than the proletariat, was the true revolutionary subject. Sternhell and, more recently, Mark Antliff, have documented in detail the ways in which Sorel’s ideas were explicitly

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appropriated by fascist intellectuals and politicians in both Italy and France.18 But Sternhell’s efforts to portray the French Revolution and Enlightenment ideas as the exact opposite, as bearing no resemblance whatsoever to fascist ideology, prevents an adequate understanding of why—as he himself argues—fascism was so deeply rooted in Western European culture and possessed such a broad appeal. As I will argue, such an understanding demands a more nuanced examination of which Western political and economic ideas were appropriated by fascists and which were rejected. As a final example of a scholar who has emphasized the links between fascism and populism, we turn now to Ernesto Laclau and, in particular to his 1977 study, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory: Capitalism, Fascism and Populism. This first important work of Laclau’s makes clear that his interest in developing a general theory of populism—which culminated in his 2005 study, On Populist Reason—developed in large part through a particular interpretation of fascism. Dissatisfied with the traditional Marxist analyses of the time, which viewed fascist ideology as the direct expression of the most conservative sectors of the dominant class, Laclau insisted that fascist ideology was essentially populist, in the sense that its broad appeal transcended the boundaries of class and defied any mechanical sociological explanation. Laclau’s interpretation of fascism assumed the form of an ex post facto political critique of the socialist and communist left in the 1920s. Laclau argued, in particular, that the left was defeated in Italy and Germany because they remained too beholden to a certain interpretation of Marx, which insisted upon the primacy of class as the principal guiding category of political struggle and thereby failed to appeal to the petty bourgeois (and peasants), who identified much more with “the people” than with the workers. According to Laclau, the socialist and communist left’s most serious mistake was to concede without a fight the tradition of nineteenth-­century popular-­ democratic struggles, thereby making it possible for fascists to appropriate them as their own. Laclau writes, Far from being the typical ideological expression of the conservative and reactionary sectors of the dominant classes, fascism was, on the contrary, one of the possible ways of articulating the popular-­democratic interpellations into political discourse. . . . fascism was possible . . . because the working class, both in its reformist and revolutionary sectors, had abandoned the arena of popular democratic struggle.19

For Laclau, “the working class is also part of ‘the people.’ ”20 Thus, to be effective, radical populism must conceptualize political struggle as an irreconciliable contradiction between “the people” and “the power bloc” and must prevent the neutralization of this contradiction through the integration of “the people” into dominant institutions. Laclau views Jacobinism as an example of such a successful populist movement “in its purest form,” when “ ‘the people’ . . . emerges not with isolated demands, nor as an organized alternative within the system, but as a political alternative to the system itself.”21 In short, Laclau’s theory of populism developed out of a particular interpretation of fascism. He argued that populism was key to the success of fascism, but he does not really examine which aspects of populist ideology were congenial to fascism and which

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repellant. Such an examination is necessary to better understand the link between fascism and populism.

Virtuous producers and immoral parasites: the concept of producerist populist ideology In order to provide new insights into the question of the transformation of populism— which, for our purposes here, refers to Western European fascists’ appropriation of progressive populist ideologies from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—I would like, first, to introduce a concept of producerist populist ideology, which finds expression in a discourse of virtuous producers and immoral parasites. After briefly establishing the essential elements of this ideology, I will sketch a genealogy of how it was articulated in different historical periods by different thinkers, in order to illustrate how the function of the ideology was transformed, while its content remained surprisingly constant in many ways. My genealogy will proceed in three main stages: Abbé Sieyès and the Jacobins as representatives of the bourgeois and petty bourgeois producerist populism in the French Revolution; Pierre-Joseph Proudhon as a representative of the appropriation of producerist populism among French Republican Socialism in the mid-­nineteenth century; and, finally, Georges Sorel, as a representative of the shift of producerist populism from the left to the right, which anticipates and helps set the stage for the fascist appropriation of producerist populist ideology. In producerist populist ideology, the people are defined as virtuous producers and the enemies of the people as immoral parasites. One first notices that a friend-­enemy logic is at work here, not unlike the one Carl Schmitt would later define as putatively essential to any truly political movement or ideology.22 This friend-­enemy logic is specifically populist for two reasons. First, the “friend” is defined as the vast majority of the common and/or native members of the “people,” while the “enemy” is viewed as a minority elite who live among the people, but do not really belong to them and, in fact, exploit them and prevent them from realizing a harmonious and egalitarian community.23 The friend-­enemy logic of producers and parasites is also populist because it is intended to mobilize its targets. Here, too, we see the unabashedly ideological character of the discourse of producers and parasites, which Sorel will recognize explicitly. Despite certain pretensions to a scientific analysis of society, which are most prominent in Proudhon’s work, the portrayal of society in the Manichean terms of virtuous producers and immoral parasites, represents a clear privileging of practical, political mobilization over detached theoretical analysis. In Sorel’s terms, it is a myth that is deployed in hopes of instigating a transformative social movement. What I would also like to emphasize, however, as most characteristic of the populist ideology of producers and parasites, is the striking combination of modern, liberal, bourgeois economic principles with classical republican political ideals. Most important among the former is the celebration of production itself as the highest value and the attempt to organize society in a manner that maximizes production. But, as we shall see, other key modern liberal economic principles also play a more or less important role in different incarnations of producerist populist ideology, including a defense of private

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property and a reliance upon political economy as the most advanced science of modern industrial societies. The most important classical republican ideal incorporated into this populist ideology is a pronounced moralism, which divides society into a virtuous majority of the authentic producers and an immoral and/or decadent minority. This minority is portrayed as exploitative parasites and dangerous aliens who put their selfish interests above the good of society as a whole and who must, therefore be disciplined or eliminated to restore the possibility of genuine democracy, egalitarianism, and a harmonious society. Rousseau’s concept of the volunté generale was an attempt to resolve the eighteenth-­century debate about how a republic could be realized in modern states, whose size and population seemed to render impossible the classical republican ideal of direct democracy. But we shall see how the hostility to the creation of a separate sphere of representative politics and the longing for direct, transparent democracy, which characterize Rousseau’s work, remain a defining characteristic of producerist populist ideology in almost all of its manifestations. For our purposes here, however, what is most crucial in understanding producerist populist ideology, and what will make it possible to be so easily appropriated first by traditional socialists and, later, by fascists is the peculiar combination of modern bourgeois notions of producerism with classical republican notions of virtue, egalitarianism, and popular mobilization.

Abbé Sieyès and the Jacobins’ articulations of bourgeois populism In the writings of the Abbé Sieyès one finds a clear expression of bourgeois producerist populist ideology. His famous political pamphlet, “What is the 3rd Estate?,” has been seen by many historians as most characteristic expression of the political ideals of the French bourgeoisie on the eve of the revolution. Sieyès’ ringing defense of the Third Estate is grounded theoretically in a producerist discourse, namely that of physiocratic political economy. The crux of Sieyès’ argument can be found in his claims that the aristocracy is a parasitic element, which does not contribute anything necessary or useful to the reproduction of French society, and which lives by exploiting the productive labors of the Third Estate. The following passage demonstrates clearly the combination of producerism and moralism that lie at the core of bourgeois producerist populism. It suffices to have made the point that the so-­called usefulness of a privileged order to the public service is a fallacy; that, without the help from this order, all the arduous tasks in the service are performed by the Third Estate . . . and that if the privileged have succeeded in usurping all well-­paid and honorific posts, this is both a hateful iniquity towards the generality of citizens and an act of treason to the commonwealth. Who is bold enough to maintain that the Third Estate does not contain within itself everything needful to constitute a complete nation? . . . If the privileged order were removed, the nation would not be something less but something more. What then is the Third Estate? All; but an “all” that is fettered and oppressed. What would it be without the privileged order? It would be all; but free and flourishing.24

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This passage also illustrates William Sewell’s argument, that Sieyès’ critique of the artistocracy is at the same time a theory of sovereignty, which makes membership in the nation contingent upon one’s contributions to socially useful labor.25 Based on this definition of citizenship, Sieyès argues that the aristocracy is, in fact, an enemy alien that should be eliminated for the good of the nation as a whole. Sieyès’ arguments figured prominently in the Third Estate’s decision to transform the Estates General into a National Assembly, and to abolish the aristocracy altogether during the August Days of 1789.26 As the Jacobins increasingly took control of the Revolution, they, too, deployed the language of bourgeois populism to unleash previously unimagined forces slumbering in the body politic. The moralistic, republican dimensions of Jacobin populism, whose friend-­enemy logic was essential to both their astounding accomplishments and their sanguinary excesses, hardly need mentioning. For our purposes here, it is, however, worth mentioning that the liberal economic aspects of producerist populism also played a role in Jacobin ideology, particularly insofar as they became increasingly dependent upon appeals to the sans-­culottes, who could very much identify with Sieyès’ description of the Third Estate as virtuous producers and victims of aristocratic exploitation. Although the ideology of virtuous producers provided a foundation for a political alliance between the haute bourgeoisie, the petite bourgeoisie, and artisanal sans-­culottes in the early phases of the revolution, in the further course of events, the sans-­culottes began to identify certain elements of the haute bourgeoisie with the aristocracy, as members of the parasitic ruling class. According to Albert Soboul, the historian who did more than anyone else to deepen our understanding of the culture and self-­understanding of the sans-­culottes, they were particularly hostile to those elements of the bourgeoisie who worked in what they viewed as the non-­ productive sphere of circulation—especially wholesalers, merchants, and bankers. Anticipating later socialist appropriations of producerist populism, the sans-­culottes began to subsume these sections of the bourgeoisie under the category of the hated “aristocrat” and to define themselves in opposition to them. Soboul cites as “the most striking illustration of this attitude of mind” a sans-­culotte petition from September 1793, in which the nation was contrasted with the wholesale-­merchant class, bankers, speculators and the rich in general. . . . Because the sans-­culottes are, after all, much more numerous, and it should be clear to everyone that the nation is “sans-­culotte”, and that the small number of people who dispose of its wealth cannot be the nation—they are only the privileged citizens who are nearing the end of their privileges.27

Yet, according to Soboul, the sans-­culottes’ hatred of what they tellingly called the “aristocratie bourgeoise” did not extend to a critique of property as such. Very much in line with subsequent deployments of the ideology of producers and parasites, the sans-­ culottes “were not hostile towards property so long as it was limited; they accepted property of the kind which artisans and shopkeepers already owned, and which many compagnons dreamed of owning themselves in the future.”28 Sans-­culottes’ attitudes converge here with the ideology of producerist populism in their acceptance of

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property earned by “honest labor” and their condemnation of property earned through commerce, investment, or rent.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and producerist populist socialism We turn now to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon to examine the ways in which producerist populist ideology was appropriated by French socialists in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Insofar as Proudhon was probably the single most influential theorist in the French workers movement in the mid-­nineteenth century, his work is certainly indicative of attitudes that were widespread among the French left during this time.29 Proudhon understood his appropriation of the discourse of producers and parasites as a progressive radicalization of ideas that guided the French Revolution. This self-­ understanding is abundantly apparent in the slogan Proudhon used as the masthead of the newspaper that he edited during the first turbulent months of the Second Republic, Le Representant du Peuple. A direct and unambiguous allusion to Sieyès’ main argument from What is the Third Estate?, the slogan read: “What is the producer in actual society?— Nothing. What should he be?—Everything.”30 Yet, Proudhon’s “traditional socialist”31 appropriation of this discourse maintained many of the key assumptions of bourgeois and petty bourgeois producerist populism, which would reappear in the work of Georges Sorel and eventually find their way into fascist ideology.32 Both the modern liberal and classical republican elements of producerist populist ideology are strongly present in Proudhon’s writings. In the 1841 work that first established him as a major socialist theorist, What is Property?, Proudhon makes a distinction between parasitic and productive forms of property, which would remain a foundation for his theory for the rest of his life. Parasitic property, which Proudhon famously equated with theft, was any appropriation of social wealth not based on labor.33 Proudhon, in other words, implicitly accepted John Locke’s quintessentially bourgeois derivation of property from labor without, however, following the second step in Locke’s argument, which linked the unlimited accumulation of property to the characteristics and function of money in modern societies.34 Proudhon distinguished between justly earned holdings, or “possessions,” which he considered a foundation of all social life, and unjustly accumulated “property,” which he viewed as the single greatest barrier to the creation of just society.35 Proudhon identified as “oisifs”36 those persons, whose property allegedly allowed them to ply an existence as social parasites by exploiting the honest labor of the producing classes. In Proudhon’s ideal society, this category of persons would be eliminated along with “property” as a whole. In line with the attitudes we just examined of the sans-­culottes, Proudhon distinguished between the productive and parasitic members of the bourgeoisie, and stressed repeatedly that he was opposed only to the latter.37 Finance and banking, not industry, are the problem.38 Anticipating the same argument in Sorel’s work and in fascist theories of corporatism, Proudhon believed that workers and industrialists should recognize their common interests in eliminating the “oisifs.” Proudhon’s indebtedness to modern, liberal economic theory is also apparent in his heavy reliance upon bourgeois political economy. As Friedrich Engels pointed out,39

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Proudhon was—despite his claims of absolute originality—one of a number of early socialists who based their theories on the allegedly radical implications of Ricardo’s labor theory of value.40 Rather than developing a critique of political economy and a critical theory of the historically specific form and function of labor in modern capitalist societies, as did Marx, Proudhon transformed the labor theory of value into the transhistorical, normative basis of his critique of capitalism. Whereas Marx argued that labor—and, in particular, the labor socially necessary at a historically given level of scientific and technological development—was the source of abstract (exchange) value only in modern capitalist societies, Proudhon believed that the full realization of the labor theory of value would only be possible in his ideal society.41 In such a society, the value of goods would actually be determined by the amount of labor (along with the cost of tools and raw materials) needed to produce them, not by supply and demand or the machinations of “oisifs”.42 Furthermore, social wealth would be distributed according to the principle “to each according to his labor.”43 Proudhon explicitly rejects the principle of “from each according to ability, to each according to need,” as a violation of basic principles of competition, merit and liberty, upon which his ideal society would be based.44 Proudhon’s energetic defense of these principles, as well as others such as the free market and contracts, make abundantly clear his deep debt to classical liberal economic theory.45 Proudhon’s debt to liberal political economy is also apparent in his belief that the entire sphere of politics and the science of politics should be abolished and replaced by a just and transparent organization of labor and industry. This organization would be based on the immutable principles of political economy, which he praised in 1843 in the following effusive terms: “Political economy embraces the organization of the workshop, of the government, of legislation, of public instruction, of the constitution of the family, of the direction of the globe; it is the key to history, theory of order, the last verb of the creator.”46 The main problem with the French Revolution, according to Proudhon, was that instead of recreating society based on the principles of political economy, it relied instead on republican political principles. He writes, the economic organization called for as a necessary consequence of the complete abolition of feudalism, [was] left without guidance from the first day, politics taking the place of industry in the minds of everybody, Quesnay and Adam Smith giving way to Rousseau and Montesquieu; it necessarily followed that the new society, scarcely conceived, should remain in embryo; that, instead of developing according to economic laws, it should languish in constitutionalism . . .47

In short, Proudhon sees it as his task to remind his readers that the key to creating a just society lies in the radical and unrealized principles of political economy, not in the theory or practice of representative politics.48 The second crucial component of producerist populist ideology, republican moralism, is also strongly present in Proudhon’s writings. To grasp the role it plays in his thought, one must examine his ambivalent relationship to the Republican tradition in order to determine which elements from that tradition he rejected, and which he preserved. Throughout his writings Proudhon was a consistent critic of Robespierre

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and the Jacobins, but his criticism was directed primarily at their centralization of power and the misguided belief they inherited from Rousseau that social change should be brought about through political, rather than economic changes.49 Yet, other aspects of the classical republican legacy, including its stern moralism, its desire for direct and transparent self-­rule, its idealization of the common people and banning of women from the sphere of politics, remained central to Proudhon’s thought.50 Already in the early 1830s Proudhon, whose family had also sympathized with the Republican tradition, described himself as “frankly and irrevocably republican in conviction and sentiment,” although his “republicanism is not entirely that of the blind supporters of Robespierre. . .”51 In his later work, Proudhon continued to use the concept of a Republic to refer to his ideal society, and the concept of “democracy” to refer to the corrupt present order. An examination of Proudhon’s writings makes clear that Proudhon criticized republicans, such as Rousseau and the Jacobins, for not taking certain republican principles seriously enough.52 This is true, in particular, of the radical republican distrust of political representation and concomitant desire for transparent and direct self-­rule which, as we have seen, Proudhon pushes to the logical consequence of a rejection of representative politics as such.53 Proudhon’s moralism is also apparent in his pessimistic view of human nature, which places him closer to conservative and counter-­revolutionary theorists, such as Joseph de Maistre and Louis Bonald, than socialists such as Fourier, Marx and Engels, or Paul Lafargue, in whose work the epicurean and sensualist strains in Western philosophy were well preserved. Whereas the Jacobins associated the aristocracy with decadence and licentiousness, the property owner assumes these characteristics in Proudhon’s system. He writes, “The proprietor is essentially a libidinous animal, without virtue or shame” who “is not satisfied with a life of order and discipline.”54 For Proudhon, moral values were every bit as absolute as the principles of natural law he believed he had discovered in political economy.55 Proudhon’s moralism was also reflected in his preference for the Spartan values of rural France and a corresponding disdain for Paris and urban culture. In 1839, Proudhon stated flatly, “I detest Parisian civilization.” In addition, Proudhon was, according to K. Steven Vincent, “always conservative—even puritanical—in his personal moral behavior and he harbored a strong distaste for bohemians and ‘bohemian habits’.”56 Although Proudhon occasionally questioned the ability of “the people” to rule themselves,57 a survey of his writings reveals a consistent rhetorical idealization of “the people,” in general, and workers and peasants, in particular. This idealization was particularly apparent in Proudhon’s writings during the short-­lived Second Republic, during which he founded, edited or wrote for four different newspapers. All four of them had “the people” in their titles.58 In 1849 a “bank of the people” was established based on Proudhon’s ideas. In his most substantial theoretical treatise from this time, General Idea of the Revolution of the 19th Century, Proudhon frequently invoked the “instincts of the people” and “common sense.” At one point he even deems it possible to bypass a theoretical discussion of value because his conclusions were anticipated by the practical and revolutionary instincts of the people. Proudhon states, “I am about to try to formulate their most recent practice. The People is the God who inspires the true philosophers. May they recognize their own ideas in my quick words.”59 Regarding

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workers, Proudhon claimed that “Today the genius of humanity is to be found in the workshop; it is there that will be found the heroes of the new Republic.”60 Regarding peasants, Proudhon praises their “natural dignity” and says “of all occupations it is the most noble, the most healthful, from the point of view of the morals and health.”61 Proudhon views them as instinctual allies in his plans for a radically decentralized society of small property owners, in part due to an ancient, quasi-­mystical relationship to the land, which stubbornly resists recent tendencies toward the centralization and commodification of land. Proudhon even sympathized with the peasants’ support of the crushing of the June Days uprising in 1848, which the peasants viewed as a defense of liberty against the dangerous centralizing tendencies of communism.62 Proudhon consistently opposed any collectivization of agriculture.63 Finally, Proudhon’s views of women, which combined an idealization of the “eternal feminine” with a justification of legal inferiority for women and a refusal to allow them to participate in public life, also testify to his indebtedness to the republican tradition.64

Georges Sorel Turning our attention now to Georges Sorel, the following arguments will focus primarily on Sorel’s two most important and influential works, Reflections on Violence and The Illusions of Progress, which were both first published as books in 1908, at the height of Sorel’s enthusiasm for the syndicalist movement in France. Picking up the thread of our discussion from the last section, it is important to emphasize Sorel’s extensive intellectual debts to Proudhon. Although Sorel was a prodigious intellect, who incorporated in his writings a wide variety of ancient and modern philosophical, historical, and political literature, most serious Sorel scholars recognize Proudhon as the single most important influence on his work.65 I share James Meisel’s assessment, that the political and intellectual trajectory of Sorel’s writings begins with Proudhon, moves towards Marx, but then returns to Proudhon.66 This trajectory is illustrated by the following key events: Sorel’s first serious philosophical essay in 1892, which focused approvingly on Proudhon; his conversion to Marxism in 1893; and his disillusionment with syndicalism and the workers’ movement in 1909, which led him back from Marx to Proudhon. Beyond the question of “influence,” it is also important to speak of the deeper intellectual and temperamental affinities that obviously drew Sorel to Proudhon’s writings—although we shall also point to some telling ways in which Sorel was critical of Proudhon. Sorel’s thought shared many of the modern liberal economic and classical republican political assumptions of producerist populist ideology that were present in Proudhon’s work. Regarding the former, one can point to Sorel’s defense of small-­scale private property and the free market. In a 1902 work expressing his views on economics, Sorel made clear that “this whole book . . . presupposes that private property is an unquestionable fact” and “it is one of Proudhon’s chief claims to fame to have determined . . . the domain of property and that of the economic sphere . . . I am taking it up, and I will show how the socialization of the milieu can give rise to a great number of reforms that do not harm property.”67 Sorel’s defense of the free market also pointed

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to an idiosyncratic—as we shall see, deeply problematic—interpretation of Marx, which displayed Proudhon’s influence on his thought. Sorel believed that the free market played a positive role in Marx’s thought, insofar as it maintained and, indeed, constantly increased class struggle between workers and capitalists. Sorel believed the new forms of monopoly capitalism that had arisen in Europe in the final decades of the nineteenth century, which attenuated competition through the formation of cartels and trusts, had destroyed the asceticism and uncompromising drive to increase production and profits that had made possible the bourgeoisie’s historical triumph over the aristocracy. After consolidating its hegemonic position in the early and mid-­ nineteenth century, the bourgeoisie had, according to Sorel, transformed itself into a new aristocracy, every bit as decadent as its erstwhile enemy, the old aristocracy. Sorel believed that a return to “pure” free market capitalism and “the action of free competition, raised to the highest degree” would encourage a renewed militancy among workers, which would, in turn, force the bourgeoisie vigorously to defend itself, and to recover its ascetic values and uncompromising economic practices. Sorel based this argument on a Proudhonian interpretation of Marx’s economic theory: The more deeply one examines the actual conditions on which Marxist economics is based, the more one finds that it resembles Manchesterian economics. We have already seen that it presupposes a complete judicial independence of employers and workers, the fatality of the capitalist movement, and the indifference or impotence of the state. These are the three great principles of classical economics.68

For Sorel, in other words, Marx’s theory was—like Proudhon’s—not a critique of classical political economy, but instead an effort to realize its putatively radical implications. The modern, liberal economic underpinnings of Sorel’s thought and his affinity to Proudhon are also apparent in his celebration of labor and his distinction between productive and parasitic elements within the bourgeoisie. After his break with reform socialism around 1905 and his embrace of the syndicalist movement, Sorel came to see the modern proletariat as the group in which the classical bourgeois values of hard-­ work and self-­discipline had been best preserved. Sorel states, “I am persuaded that work can serve as a basis for a culture that would give no cause to regret the passing of bourgeois civilization. We know the war that the proletariat should conduct against its masters is suited to developing in it noble sentiments that are today completely lacking in the bourgeoisie.”69 Yet it is also important to point out that Sorel’s critique of “bourgeois civilization” here is, as we already seen, directed at the specific development of the European and, in particular, French bourgeoisie. Rather than calling for an abolition of the bourgeoisie as a separate social class, Sorel believes that they need to return to the “noble sentiments” of hard-­work and asceticism, which had once guided them. He argues that the French bourgeoisie was already coopted and corrupted by the monarchy and aristocracy in the eighteenth century, which set the stage for its rise to power and moral decline in the nineteenth century.70 Sorel extends this critique to French reform socialists, such as Jean Jaurès, whose willingness to participate in parliamentary democracy allegedly betrayed a desire to emulate the decadent French bourgeoisie. He writes,

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The race of bold captains who made the greatness of modern industry disappears to make way for an ultra-­civilized aristocracy that demands to be left in peace. This degeneration fills our parliamentary socialists with joy. Their role would vanish if they were confronted with a bourgeoisie which was energetically engaged on the paths of economic progress, which regarded timidity with shame and which was proud in looking after its class interests.71

Sorel sees a positive alternative in the United States, where the youthful instincts of the bourgeoisie have not yet atrophied. He writes, When we are studying the modern economy, we should always bear in mind this similarity between the capitalist type and the warrior type; it is with very good reason that the men who directed gigantic enterprises were named captains of industry. This type is still found in all its purity in the United States: there are encountered the indomitable energy, the audacity based upon an accurate appreciation of strength, the cold calculation of interests, which are the qualities of great generals and great capitalists.72

In short, Sorel’s vituperations of the bourgeoisie are not a critique of its role as a personification of capital, as was the case for Marx, but instead a call for it to return to its original values and to contribute to the creation of a new society of virtuous producers. As it was for Proudhon, the ideology of virtuous producers and immoral parasites is an absolute cornerstone of Sorel’s thought. It undergirds not only his critique of parliamentary democracy and reform socialism, but also finance. It extends, in other words, into the sphere of capital itself, in which good, productive industrial capital is distinguished from parasitic finance capital. Sorel writes, There is not a great deal of difference between a financier who puts grand-­sounding concerns on the market, which come to grief in a few years, and the politician who promises his fellow citizens an infinite number of reforms, which he does not know how to bring about . . . Neither one nor the other knows anything about production yet they manage to obtain control over it, to misdirect it and to exploit it shamelessly: they are dazzled by the marvels of modern industry and they each imagine that the world is so rich that they can rob it on a large scale without causing any great outcry amongst the producers; to bleed the taxpayer without bringing him to the point of revolt, that is the whole art of the statesman and the great financier. 73

Sorel’s distinctions here between a “productive” and “parasitic” bourgeoisie and “productive and parasitic capital” would be conducive ideologically to the further development of a new conservative-­revolutionary nationalist syndicalism, which would be one of the direct forerunners of fascism in both Italy and France.74 Once the potentially “productive” elements of the bourgeoisie and capital had been identified, it was only one small step toward a reconciliation of virtuous workers with these elements, and a shift from the proletariat to a “nation of producers” as the new

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revolutionary subject. Before examining in more detail how Sorel himself tentatively took this step in the years preceding the First World War, let us briefly review the important classical republican elements in his thought, which further demonstrate his deep indebtedness to producerist populist ideology. Any discussion of the classical republican themes in Sorel’s thought must begin with an explanation of his deep hostility to the republic in which he lived and wrote, namely France’s Third Republic. Tellingly, Sorel consistently referred to this form of modern, moderate parliamentary government with the concept of “democracy,” which is always a pejorative term in his political lexicon.75 In so doing, Sorel followed Proudhon in preserving the concept of republicanism for his own vision of a society of decentralized, self-­governing virtuous producers. Sorel’s preference for classical, over modern, republican values is demonstrated perhaps most clearly in his discussion of Roman law and its revival during the French Revolution.76 Following Proudhon once again, Sorel discusses the distinction between civil and commercial law in ancient Rome, identifying the former, in particular, as the true secret of the greatness of Roman civilization. According to Sorel, Roman civil law had its origins in the rural domain and was intended, above all, to protect the property of the independent landowner and pater familias, not so he could accumulate wealth, but so he could pass his property on to his heirs, thereby maintaining a system of decentralized production. Sorel argues that this tradition was revived during the French Revolution and consolidated by Napoleon with his famous legal code. He writes, The French Revolution revived a hegemony of juridical ideas, which had lost much of their authority during the sentimental years of the eighteenth century. Nonnoble lands were freed from feudal services that could not be justified by civil law, and thus the Roman independence of the principal cultivator reappeared. A great number of citizens were brought to ownership and became energetic defenders of the law. The new social order was defined, proclaimed and imposed by the most fabulous general the world had known since Alexander. In theory, France was completely Roman: each head of family was supposedly a master of a rural domain, a citizen participating in the sovereignty, and a good soldier. It is easy to recognize that respect for the law has greatly weakened in us since warlike ideas, originating from the Napoleonic tradition, are less popular.77

In addition to his praise of Napoleon—which anticipates his conservative, nationalistic and authoritarian turn—the passage is striking in its illustration of the significance of Roman civil law for Sorel. He views it as the expression and guarantee of a patriarchal society of independent producers, who were at the same time soldiers—a classical republican model of society which was partially reestablished during the French Revolution. Yet, like Proudhon, Sorel remained sharply critical of Rousseau and the Jacobins for their ruthless centralization of power and their privileging of politics over political economy.78 But he praised the steps made in the Revolution towards the creation of a patriarchal society of independent producers and bemoaned the reversal of this tendency in the more recent emergence of post-­liberal forms of capitalism, in which independent producers were being replaced by corporations.79

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One of the defining characteristics of the classical republican tradition and its revival in modern times was its strict subordination of individuals’ interests and desires to their duties to the political community as a whole.80 Herein lies the prominent role of moralism in the classical republican tradition. With its anti-­elitist belief in popular sovereignty, republicanism locates the source of virtue in the people. In contrast to the liberal defense of individuals’ rights and interests, or their fear of the “tyranny of the majority,” republicanism is unabashedly populist in its efforts to mobilize the virtuous people to neutralize or eliminate putatively immoral and parasitic elites, who are the source of a perceived decline or decadence of contemporary society. What separates producerist populist ideology from classical republicanism is its definition of “the people” not just as virtuous, but as virtuous producers. Also, producerist populist ideology carries the republican suspicion of elitist politics and its desire for self-­ government to its logical extreme, by calling for the complete elimination of politics as a separate sphere and its replacement by a decentralized “organization of work.”81 Here, a radicalized republicanism converges with the suspicion of politics and the desire to separate politics from—or subordinate it to—economics, which one also finds in modern liberal bourgeois political economy. One does not have to search far in his writings to find calls for the subordination of rights and interests to duty, or appeals to the virtuous people to rise up against decadent elites. One example, which also highlights his contempt for contemporary “democracy,” is the following: “We know by the slightest observation of contemporary phenomena that democracy has the most profound scorn for everything that recalls the constraints morality tries to impose upon men.”82 Most Sorel scholars agree that he was, above all else, a moralist.83 Echoing Proudhon’s conservative domestic politics and his opposition to divorce, Sorel also bemoans decline of a notion of marriage defined by the “sacrifice of the instincts to duty.”84 In The Illusions of Progress, Sorel identifies the materialism of the philosophes as the main source of the contemporary decadence of French society. He argues that the French bourgeoisie has borrowed much from one of the most corrupt aristocracies that has ever existed; the guides of its conscience are no less corrupt than the men of letters which formed what Rousseau called the Holbachian Circle. All our efforts should tend to prevent the bourgeois ideas from coming to poison the rising class; that is why we cannot do enough to break the connection between the people and the literature of the eighteenth century.85

In marked contrast to his contemporary, Paul Lafargue and Lafargue’s father-­in-law, Karl Marx, who both emphasized the indebtedness of modern socialist theory to the materialism of the philosophes, Sorel sides with the Genevan tradition of stern moralism against the “decadence” of the Parisians.86 Next, I would like to examine briefly some of the conservative elements that were already present in Sorel’s writings at the high point of his enthusiasm for syndicalism, in order to demonstrate that his shift to the right before the First World War was not nearly as abrupt as it seemed to Sorel’s contemporaries. Many of the conservative underpinnings of Sorel’s thought can, in fact, be summarized as a rejection of Enlightenment principles. Since modern conservative and counter-­revolutionary thought emerged as a critique

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of the Enlightenment, this should come as no surprise. Let us examine briefly the four following anti-Enlightenment themes in Sorel’s work: his rejection of natural law, of abstraction, of history conceived as progress, and of attempts to develop a science of society. One of the few, and at the same time most interesting and telling ways in which Sorel parted ways with Proudhon was his rejection of natural law. Already in 1902, Sorel criticized Proudhon’s prescription for the cure of economic ills for being “influenced by natural law.”87 Citing the counter-­revolutionary theorist, Joseph de Maistre, Sorel argues that the notion of “abstract man . . . invented in the theories of natural law”88 conceals the real conflicts that exist in society. There is nothing inherently conservative about this argument, until Sorel takes the further step of rejecting abstraction and universalism altogether, which leads him, for example, to question the “recklessness” of the Jacobins’ “abruptly abolishing slavery in the colonies.”89 Demonstrating his deep dislike for the Hegelian elements in Proudhon’s thought, Sorel praises Hegel’s great romantic rival at the University of Berlin, Friedrich Carl von Savigny, who criticized Enlightenment notions of universal, rational law and sought to ground law instead in the “spirit of people.” Sorel writes, The mission of this school was to refute those who, never doubting the infinite wisdom of modern legislators, thought that law would henceforth be the expression of will enlightened by philosophy. Savigny and his students opposed to this doctrine of the rationalistic creation of law a doctrine of spontaneous creation: the juridical conscience of the people replaced universal reason.90

Sorel’s rejection of natural law also led to a more critical view of the principle of equality, which Proudhon had normally defended. Here, Sorel’s affinity to a contemporary conservative theorist, namely Gustave Le Bon, was apparent.91 Sorel admitted candidly that the revolution against decadence would require leaders who understood how to mobilize the people using irrational means, as Le Bon had also argued in his influential study, The Crowd. Here we also see how Sorel’s famous theory of myth fits into his producerist populism. In Reflections on Violence, where Sorel develops this theory, he states clearly, “The object of this study is to deepen our understanding of moral conduct . . . we need to find out how the feelings which move the masses form into groups,”92 for “the party which can most skillfully manipulate the specter of revolution will possess the future.”93 Sorel’s rejection of the Enlightenment and his proximity to its conservative and counter-­revolutionary critics is also apparent in his rejection of progressive and rationalist philosophies of history, and his conviction that history is instead dominated by myth and violence. Here again a striking affinity exists between Sorel and Le Bon, who both rejected the idea of history being guided by a hidden plan, which conservative and Christian thinkers identified with providence, and the Enlightenment thinkers secularized as progress through the spread of Reason. Instead, like Le Bon and de Maistre, he sees history as fundamentally chaotic, which leads him to reject the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-­century project of elevating history to a science and to draw the practical conclusion that great historical events were the product of the irrational forces of myth and will. As John Stanley puts it,

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whereas social scientists see primarily a progressive unity, Sorel says that reality is manifested more in chaotic struggle. Rather than viewing the entire world as representing some stage of what is today called “development,” Sorel sees history as a sea of decline (décadence) punctuated by occasional moments of historical greatness. . . . Greatness occurs only at rare times when, through heroic acts of human will, men have “forced” history.94

But Sorel’s rejection of progressive philosophies of history should not mislead us into believing that he rejected any and all forms of progress or that he was an anti-­modern thinker. In contrast to “conservative revolutionary” thinkers, such as Martin Heidegger, who viewed modern technology as a symptom of cultural decline,95 Sorel was a “reactionary modernist” who combined strict traditional morality with a defense of applied science, that is, of science and technology as means of increasing productivity. Sorel argues that science had first to emancipate itself from the frivolous projects of the Enlightenment in order to realize its true value, which lies in increasing production. Sorel demands that science be limited to its practical applications.96 Commentators on Sorel have often been stymied by the question of why someone who had such a long, highly successful and seemingly apolitical career as an engineer was drawn so quickly after retirement into debates about radical politics. But nowhere are the links between his background as an engineer and his later political views more apparent than in his recommendations for the need to restore science to its proper “productive” role. As Jeffrey Herf also points out in his study of “reactionary modernism” in Germany, engineers were crucial in popularizing a proto-­fascist ideology there, which combined enthusiasm for modern technology with a desire to liberate it from the “shackles” of democratic politics.97

Sorel’s shift to the right We have just seen some of the strong conservative tendencies that existed in Sorel’s thought even at the height of his enthusiasm for syndicalism. These and other conservative tendencies would emerge even more strongly in Sorel’s thought after his disillusionment with the syndicalist movement in 1909 and his flirtation with radical right-­wing monarchist and “integral nationalist” groups in France in the years preceding the First World War. Sorel’s shift was without doubt precipitated by his disappointment with the reformist tendencies that gained the upper hand in the syndicalist movement since the height of its success and militancy in 1906. After the defeat in 1908 of a number of syndicalist strikes and the imprisonment of the head of the largest trade union—the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT)—new leaders of the syndicalist movement emerged who favored participation in parliament and working for piecemeal reforms. Sorel’s response was quick and unequivocal. He quit writing for the syndicalists and severed all ties with Le Mouvement Socialiste, the syndicalist journal in which he had published numerous articles since its founding in 1899. But Sorel’s disillusionment went beyond the syndicalist movement to the proletariat as such. The workers’ willingness to participate in the parliamentary process and their desire for “the diminution of work,

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the abundance of wealth, easy consumption and, in the moral sphere, liberty of sexual relations and the emancipation of women” were anathema to Sorel.98 He did not, in any case, relinquish his call for the moral regeneration of France. In the following years leading up to the First World War, Sorel came to believe that the vehicle of such a moral revival could only be the French nation as a whole and not the French proletariat. Since this transference of Sorel’s “revolutionary” hopes from the proletariat to the nation and his willingness during this time to collaborate with radical right-­wing intellectuals from the Front Nationale and other integral nationalist and proto-­fascist groups has already been described elsewhere, one long passage from the scholar who has done so in most detail—Zeev Sternhell—will suffice here to illustrate the point. Sternhell writes, What happened to these hopes of regeneration when the proletariat failed to respond to Sorel’s expectations? . . . To whom did he turn when he came to believe that “this heroic proletariat, creator of a new system of values, called to found . . . a civilization of producers on the ruins of capitalist society,” did not exist anywhere, and that “the revolution foretold by Marx is chimerical”? The answer is to be found in L’independence, in the abortive plans for La Cité Française, the national-­socialist review that Sorel intended to found, in the Cahiers du Cercle Proudhon, and in the foreword to the Materieux d’une théorie du proletariat, in which the nation and tradition emerge as the only morally creative forces, the only ones that can arrest the progress of decadence. . . . It was after his attempt at saving Marxism that Sorel moved toward a synthesis of populism and nationalism in which the cult of Joan d’Arc was mingled with the crudest anti-Semitism. . . . Sorelian revisionism replaced the rational, Hegelian foundations of Marxism . . . with the result that a few years later Sorel had little difficulty abandoning the conceptual framework of Marxism and replacing the idea of the proletariat with that of the nation.99

As was the case with Proudhon, I do not wish to embrace the argument, put forward by a number of commentators on Sorel, that his thought was—even during its most conservative phase between 1909 and 1914—directly fascist itself. Sorel’s anti-­statism and his vehement rejection of the First World War separate him clearly from contemporary proto-­fascist movements in Europe. Yet the fact that he himself began to move to the right and to collaborate with several individuals and movements which would later join or sympathize with fascism raises the question of what elements in Sorel’s thought made this shift possible. We have already examined these elements. But we should briefly mention how these elements of Sorel’s thought provided direct inspiration for fascist intellectuals and movements. One cannot blame an author for the ways in which his ideas are appropriated—and Sorel’s ideas were, like Nietzsche’s, appropriated by people across the political spectrum.100 Yet one can justifiably ask which and why—and why so many—of Sorel’s ideas found their way directly into fascist ideology, particularly in its early, formative stages. Here again, I will—due to space limitations—have to be satisfied with a gesture to Zeev Sternhell and Mark Antliff, who have examined the fascist appropriation of Sorel’s work most carefully. We can see, however, in the fascist appropriation of Sorel almost all of the modern liberal and classical republican components of producerist populism

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that we have examined in Sorel’s thought. The former include: a celebration of work, workers, and labor as the source of all value;101 a fetishization of production accompanied by a rhetoric of virtuous producers and immoral parasites;102 a closely related distinction between the laudable productive and the dangerous parasitic elements of the bourgeoisie and capital (industry vs. finance);103 a rejection of class struggle and a call for the reconciliation of workers and productive elements of the bourgeoisie and capital with the larger framework of the nation104 and capitalism;105 a call for the neutralization or elimination of unproductive elements in society, which are portrayed as foreign elements within the body politic; the complete subordination of politics to economic efficiency; the defense of private property and private ownership of the means of production.106 The latter include a strict moralism, which firmly subordinates individuals’ rights, interests, and desires to their duties to the political community;107 the definition of that community in terms of a Manichean friend-­enemy logic of “the people” and its enemies; a call for the total mobilization of the people to combat its enemies;108 an identification of worker-­citizens with warriors;109 a deep suspicion of parliamentary politics, all representative politics and even politics as such, which are seen as the sphere of corrupt elites;110 and a rhetorical claim that the people is now directly ruling itself through the elimination of representative politics.111 To be sure, Sternhell’s interpretation of Sorel as a proto-­fascist thinker and his broader claims that fascist ideology emerged first in France, and was essentially complete before the beginning of the First World War have been controversial.112 My main aim here is not to demonstrate that the protean Sorel was fascist or even proto-­ fascist, but instead to use his work to illustrate how producerist populist ideology could be easily appropriated by radical right-­wing and proto-­fascist movements. In this respect, I follow Sternhell and believe that Sorel’s work is indeed crucial to answering the main question posed in this essay of how progressive populist traditions handed down from revolutionary bourgeois and traditional socialist movements in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries could be effectively appropriated by fascist ideologues in the early twentieth century. But in emphasizing that the essential components of producerist populism could already be found in the arguments used by Abbé Sieyès and the Jacobins to mobilize “the people” for their bourgeois and radical republican revolutionary projects, I am also taking issue with Sternhell’s portrayal of fascist ideology as a “revolt against the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.”113 There seems to be a tension in Sternhell’s work between his efforts to portray fascist ideology as the absolute negation of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, on the one hand, and his insistence, on the other, that “fascism was an integral part of the history of European culture.”114 Whereas Sternhell is justified in focusing on the emergence of new forms of left- and right-­wing mass politics in the late nineteenth century as the period when fascist ideology first began to take shape, I have attempted to demonstrate here that one must not ignore the important precedents and deeper continuities that existed between fascist ideology and early forms of bourgeois and traditional socialist producerist populism. Otherwise, it is difficult to explain the broad appeal of fascist ideology, which extended across the political and social spectrum.115 Sternhell is correct to emphasize that Sorel rejected many aspects of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, but he is not correct to portray Sorel’s thought as their

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absolute antithesis. The genealogy of producerist populism presented here is intended to identify those ideological elements that remained relatively constant from Sieyès and the Jacobins, through Proudhon and Sorel, and beyond them into fascism. But it is also crucial to make a distinction between the content of those elements in this genealogy, which remained relatively constant, and their function, which changed. Whereas the ideology of virtuous producers and immoral parasites played a progressive historical function in its bourgeois and—arguably116—traditional socialist incarnations, it increasingly assumed a conservative and even reactionary function as the structure of bourgeois society was transformed over the course of the nineteenth century. This transformation in the function of producerist populism, which is demonstrated so clearly in Sorel’s thought, is by no means unique. As Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse made clear in a number of major essays in the 1930s, many of the critical and progressive concepts that were formulated by the bourgeoisie during its struggle against feudalism and absolutism in the early modern period, were hollowed out, transformed, and assumed an increasingly conservative ideological function as the bourgeoisie consolidated its hegemony and faced new challenges from below over the course of the nineteenth century.117 In other words, the transformation of producerist populism cannot be separated from what I have described elsewhere, in the context of Horkheimer’s early work, as the larger “dialectic of bourgeois society” in Western Europe from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries.118 As we have seen, Ernesto Laclau has also argued that fascism succeeded because it capitalized on the broad appeal of deeply rooted democratic-­populist traditions, whereas the socialists’ overly exclusive focus upon class alienated it from broad sectors of the population. Laclau’s argument highlights the necessity of examining more closely the continuities that existed between fascist ideology and earlier forms of democratic and republican populism. As his later work also makes clear, he views not just populism, but politics as such as a struggle for the definition and control of the “empty signifier” of “the people.”119 But, as is also apparent in the subsequent development of his work, Laclau’s approach becomes increasingly formalistic. He describes the necessary conditions for populism in transhistorical “ontological” terms as: the internal division of society into two opposing camps (“the people” and their enemies), and the unification of a plurality of demands into a new popular identity that is more than the simple sum of these demands.120 But does Laclau’s move away from Marxism and the increasing suspicion of any kind of sociological arguments, which characterizes the later development of his work, cause him to overlook the historical and social-­psychological conditions necessary for the success of populist ideology? The formation of populist movements and the appeal of populist ideologies is limited and at least partially determined by the historically specific forms populist ideology has assumed in particular contexts.121 My contention in this essay has been that populist ideology in Western Europe has been largely defined since the French Revolution as “producerist populism” with the modern liberal and classical republican components one finds in thinkers such as Sieyès, Proudhon, and Sorel. Fascists’ ability to appropriate progressive populist ideology required them to appeal to specific components of that ideology as it had developed in Western Europe historically. Only insofar as producerist populist attitudes had been internalized by significant sections

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of the population, insofar as these attitudes had become part of the unconscious character structures of these groups, would fascist appeals to these attitudes resonate emotionally with them.122 The construction of “the people” is not an Althusserian “interpellation” in which new identities are formed ex nihilo through the process of “naming.”123 The relative continuity in the rhetoric of producerist populism from the French Revolution to fascism points instead to continuities in character structures formed historically among the ascendant bourgeoisie, which were then imposed or adopted willingly by workers and peasants as they were integrated into the expanding capitalist economy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.124 This essay has focused primarily on the transformations of producerist populist ideology during the long nineteenth century in France. Although scholars have begun to explore some of the ways in which German fascist and proto-­fascist thinkers appropriated ideas we have examined here in the French context, studies comparable to Sternhell’s and Antliff ’s of the fascist reception of Sorel in France and Italy, do not exist.125 In any case, it would take us too far field to even begin to examine the complex links between producerist populism in France and the development of fascist ideology in Germany. Even if we are not in a position to make any claims about historical causation, let us conclude by returning to the studies by Fritzsche and Eley mentioned at the beginning of the essay to examine some of the correlations between producerist populism in France and fascist ideology in Germany. For Peter Fritzsche, the key to grasping the success of National Socialism in Germany lies in the widespread populist political movement that developed primarily—if not exclusively—among the German middle class in the 1920s and that was well underway before the Great Crash and the Nazis’ first electoral breakthroughs in 1929 and 1930. The Nazis succeeded because they were able to place themselves at the head of this movement. Extrapolating somewhat from Fritzsche’s own claims, one could argue that this success was based largely on the Nazis’ ability to articulate a populist ideology which captured the ideas and emotions that guided and drove this populist movement. From the perspective outlined in this essay, one could say that Fritzsche’s work highlights, in particular, the radical republican dimensions of producerist populist ideology, which were appropriated by the Nazis. For example, Fritzsche describes the ways in which the primary political loyalties of Germans of all backgrounds shifted over the course of the 1920s from traditional parties or parties representing occupational interest groups to an identification with the German Volk as such. This identification was fueled by a desire to overcome the deep divisions—especially of class—in German society. Many looked back nostalgically to the euphoria of the August Days of 1914 and the subsequent proclamation by the Kaiser of a Burgfrieden between labor and capital, as the model of unity they wanted to recreate. But Fritzsche also stresses the powerful anti-­elitist character of this movement—which found an echo in Nazi ideology—which rejected the traditional parties, even when they tried to reinvent themselves along populist lines. Larry Jones’ essay in this volume demonstrates the DNVP’s failure to harness the populist anger of Weimar, because it was perceived by many as part of the old establishment. As Fritzsche points out, the Nazis harnessed populist anger in no small part by promising to abolish parliamentary politics altogether, which was seen as being dominated by corrupt special interests, in order to reestablish the unity of the virtuous people. In short, the Nazis’

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ideology appropriated radical republican themes by reducing politics to a conflict between the virtuous (and victimized) German Volk and its immoral and parasitic enemies and by promising to restore the mythical unity of the people. Although Fritzsche does not have as much to say about the producerist aspects of Nazi ideology, he does discuss the desire among many members of the populist movement in Germany in the 1920s—particularly young people—to overcome traditional middle class prejudices against the working class and to integrate them into the nation as whole. As is well known, this call for national integration based on a corporatist unification of the productive elements of labor and industry (and also the peasantry) against the “parasitic” merchants and financiers—who were, of course, often simply identified with “the Jews”—played a central role in Nazi ideology.126 Geoff Eley’s characterization of National Socialism as a form of “right-­wing Jacobinism” also highlights the radical republican dimensions of fascist ideology. His article in the present volume highlights the numerous points of agreement with Fritzsche, but also some criticisms of his arguments. So there is no need to repeat those continuities. For our purposes here it is worth mentioning, however, that Eley’s interpretation of National Socialism places more emphasis on the producerist dimensions of its ideology. Eley’s critique of the Sonderweg thesis, which has attempted to drive a wedge between National Socialism and economic modernization, is well known. Eley argues that a new, radical right-­wing nationalist movement emerged in Germany around the turn of the century, which was “forward-­looking” in both the social background of its members as well as their ideology. Far from being dominated by the anti-­modern anxieties of declining peasants, artisans, and small shopkeepers, this new radical right gathered in civic associations dominated already before the war by members of the new middle classes, that is, educated white-­collar workers and salaried employees. Eley writes, Radical nationalists were the strongest advocates of an emergently “German-­ national” standpoint in German politics before 1914 . . . Anti-­socialist to the bone, they were no less fervently hostile to conservative particularisms and traditionalisms of all stripes. As hard-­headed advocates of a national financial reform to enable the arms race and maximize Germany’s “national efficiency,” they had no patience with the landed interest’s fiscal immunities.127

Like Sternhell, in other words, Eley argues that essential aspects of the ideology that would guide fascist movements in Europe in the 1920s, had emerged already before the war. Crucial among them was a “forward-­looking” faith in technology, production, and the overcoming of divisions between labor and industry, which would create new models of “national efficiency” and lead to success in the social Darwinist struggle among nation states in the era of international imperialist competition. In contrast to Sternhell, Eley does not construct a firewall between fascism and the French Revolution, and instead points to a right-­wing appropriation of radical republican ideology as one key to their success.128 But, also in contrast to Sternhell, Eley seems to build a firewall between socialist and fascist ideology, thereby overlooking the ways in which traditional socialists’—such as Ferdinand Lasalle in the German context129—celebration of labor

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as the sole source of value and gestures toward a state mediated rapprochement between labor and industry in the name of increasing national production, may have facilitated the fascists’ ideological appropriation socialist rhetoric. As Eley himself points out, the relative weakness of a democratic political tradition in Germany, made it all the more necessary for fascists to find alternatives, such as coopting the language of traditional socialism, with its celebration of labor and workers.130

Conclusion How and why did fascist movements at the beginning of the “short” twentieth century successfully incorporate progressive populist ideas that had emerged during the long nineteenth century?131 The genealogy of producerist populism presented here is motivated by a desire to contribute to answering this question. I have attempted to demonstrate—in ideal typical form—how producerist populism developed originally as a revolutionary bourgeois ideology, was later appropriated by traditional socialists and still later by fascists. The socialist and fascist appropriations of ideas and attitudes that had originated among the ascendant bourgeoisie would not have been successful if they had not appealed to deeply rooted sensibilities that had taken root over a long period of time in significant sections of the population.132 The relative continuity of producerist populist ideology, in different social and historical contexts, helps explain how and why fascists were able so easily to appropriate progressive and leftist ideas from the late eighteenth and nineteenth century, insofar as it points to the diffusion of producerist populist sensibilities beyond the bourgeoisie to broader sectors of the population. We have described these continuities here in terms of a modern, liberal economic component and classical republican political component. But the argument only makes sense and the continuities can only be determined, if one also identifies the equally important breaks that existed between the bourgeois, traditional socialist, and fascist forms of producerist populism. With regard to the classical republican aspects of producerist populism, the most important breaks that exist between its articulation in the French Revolution and its appropriation by fascists in the early twentieth century include the following. Without doubt, the most important is the rejection of the universalism of Jacobin republicanism, which extended equal rights not only to all citizens of France, regardless of their racial, ethnic, or religious background, but were also seen as the first step toward the establishment of the universal rights of “man.” The shift from a universalist to a national republicanism is already apparent in Proudhon’s work and prefigures Sorel’s later shift from the proletariat as the “universal class” to the French nation as the revolutionary subject. Worth mentioning as well is the break between moderate forms of republicanism, which accepted the necessity of representative government, and more radical forms of republicanism, set in motion by the Jacobins and pushed to their logical extreme by Proudhon and Sorel, for whom direct and transparent self-­ government meant the abolition of politics altogether as a separate sphere. Fascists’ virulent attacks on parliamentary democracy and their ideological stylization of the Führer as the direct embodiment of the “general will” can be seen as a continuation of

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this tradition. Finally, one could mention a progressive move away from equality, especially in the sphere of practice, but also in theory. In contrast to the Jacobins’ fierce insistence on the abstract equality of all citizens, or Proudhon’s efforts to identify and remedy the ways in which the Jacobins did not go far enough in promoting equality, Sorel is closer to conservatives like Gustave Le Bon, or fascists like Hitler, who have no “illusions” about equality and see the majority of people as objects to be manipulated by elites. Such cynicism, however, in no way changes their belief in the efficacy of mobilizing “the masses” through appeals to the people (and denunciation of their enemies), even though no intention exists to create genuine social equality. Finally, regarding the modern bourgeois liberal dimensions of producerist populism, the following breaks between its eighteenth-­century expression and its fascist appropriation are most important. One notes, first, that the professed ideals of political liberalism—individual rights, tolerance, representative government, the rule of law, rational discussion, and compromise—are anathema to fascists. The continuities between fascist ideology and producerist populism lie more in the sphere of liberal economics than in liberal political ideals. The seemingly most obvious break between classical liberal economics and fascist ideology lies in the role of the state in the economy. This break is an important one, but it also demonstrates a larger dialectic of bourgeois society, insofar as classical liberal economics rested on the belief that private property and the free market would eventually lead to a massive reduction or even a withering away of the state,133 whereas fascists share the belief with many neo-­classical liberal economists that the state does play the crucial role of insuring—with force, if necessary—private property and other conditions necessary for the function of the market.134 In any case, popular perceptions of fascist economies being totally state-­controlled have long been discredited in the scholarly literature.135 Private ownership of the means of production and the private appropriation of surplus value were never called into question by either Italian or German fascism. As Adam Tooze and other economic historians of fascism have also argued, market calculations remained decisive in fascist economic policy.136 In addition to the continuities between liberal economic theory and fascist ideology already mentioned above, one should also add the following: an affirmation of competition and the “natural laws” of the market (including the labor market) as the final court of appeals, which runs from Malthus, through Social Darwinism and on into fascism. Here again one could point to a larger transformation of bourgeois society that undergirds the transformation of Malthus’s moralistic emphasis on self-­discipline and efficient production as the precondition of the bourgeois individual’s triumph in the struggle for existence against the mass of “redundant” workers, to the fascists’ emphasis on collective national or “racial” self-­discipline and efficient production as the precondition for survival under the Social Darwinistic conditions of global economic competition in the twentieth century. Although mid-­nineteenth-century liberals, such as Herbert Spencer, expressed a hope for the “civilization” of Social Darwinism—with a transition from military to economic competition137—such hopes were dashed as intensified economic competition at the end of the century led to the return of new forms of military competition unprecedented in their violence. The continuities documented here in what I have described as “producerist populism” are intended primarily as a contribution to the question of how and why it

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was possible for fascists to successfully incorporate into their ideology some of the progressive ideas of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century populist movements. Without being able to appeal to such deeply rooted continuities, fascist ideology would not have had the widespread appeal that it did. I have tacitly assumed throughout that fascist ideology did not always guide fascist practice. As Geoff Eley has recently pointed out, studies in ideology need to be accompanied by studies of the social embodiment of that ideology in concrete institutions and practices.138 My aim here has been the more limited one of illuminating a key aspect of fascist ideology and demonstrating the ways in which it was—and was not—grounded in much deeper Western European traditions of political and economic thought.

Notes   1 “Fascism was not a coincidence.” “Vorlesungen zur Ästhetik,” November 30, 1967; cited in Wolfgang Kraushaar (ed.), Frankfurter Schule und Studentenbewegung, vol. 2 (Hamburg: Zweitausandeins, 1998), 328.   2 I am thinking, in particular, of the crucial role that producerist populism—as I have defined it here, with both strong classical republican and modern bourgeois liberal dimensions—has played and continues to play in the United States. See, for example, David R. Roediger’s discussion of a producerist populist “herrenvolk republicanism” that emerged among the American working class in the mid-­nineteenth century in his Wages of Whiteness (London and New York: Verso, 1991), 43–64; in Artisans into Workers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989), 11–14, Bruce Laurie also argues that producerist populist radical republicanism emerged as the dominant political ideology in the US in the nineteenth century, but that, in contrast to France, it never evolved into republican socialism. In Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort (New York: Guilford, 2000), Chip Berlet and Matthew Lyons also stress the centrality of the discourse of “producers and parasites” to right-­wing populist ideology throughout the history of the US. For further discussions of the centrality of producerism to the history of populism in the US, see the essays in this volume by Ron Formisano and Peter Breiner. Formisano also stresses the importance of producerist populist ideology for contemporary Tea Party movements, in The Tea Party: A Brief History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 20. In their recent study of the Tea Party, Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson also argue that the ideology of productive versus parasitic citizens is the single most important feature of its ideology: The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 54–68.   3 Peter Fritzsche, Rehearsals for Fascism: Populism and Political Mobilization in Weimar Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990) and Germans into Nazis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).   4 Fritzsche, Germans into Nazis, 150–61.   5 Mittelstand means “middle-­class” and is usually qualified as “old” or “new” middle-­ class—with the former including such groups as small shopkeepers and independent artisans, and the latter including office workers and managers, and technicians of various sorts. Fritzsche includes both “old” and “new” in his discussion of middle-­class German “burghers.”   6 Fritzsche, Rehearsals for Fascism, 6.

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  7 Ibid., 9.   8 Geoff Eley, Reshaping the German Right: Radical Nationalism and Political Change after Bismarck (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980).   9 Geoff Eley, “What Produces Fascism: Pre-Industrial Traditions or a Crisis of the Capitalist State?,” in From Unification to Nazism: Reinterpreting the German Past (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1986), 254–82. 10 Eley, Reshaping the German Right, 188. 11 Eley, “What Produces Fascism,” 270. 12 Ibid., 268. Although, as Eley points out, these were mainly unorganized workers, who had not benefited from the political education that accompanied membership in Social Democratic or Communist trade unions or parties. 13 Ibid., 269–70. 14 Eley also stresses the contingent and historically specific factors of the crisis that erupted in Weimar in the years following the war and again after 1929 as creating the conditions that greatly enlarged the appeal of radical nationalist ideology. Ibid., 271–4. 15 Ibid., 270. 16 Despite the firestorm of criticism to which Sternhell has been subjected, he was not the first to argue that crucial aspects of fascist ideology developed first in France. George Mosse and Hannah Arendt also argued that “national socialism,” which was deeply imbued with producerist anti-Semitism, first emerged in France. Mosse, Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (New York: Howard Fertig, 1978), 150–4; Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York and London: Harcourt, 1968), 45–50. For overviews of the rancorous debates of Sternhell’s work, see Robert Wohl, “Both Right and Left: Reflections on the Sternell Controversy,” The Journal of Modern History 63: 1 (March 1991), 91–8; and Robert Soucy, French Fascism: The Second Wave, 1933–39 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 1–25. 17 Zeev Sternhell (with Mario Sznajder and Maia Asheri), The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution, trans. David Maisel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). 18 Sternhell, Birth of Fascist Ideology and Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France, trans. David Maisel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); Mark Antliff, Avant-Garde Fascism: The Mobilization of Myth, Art, and Culture in France, 1909–39 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). 19 Ernesto Laclau, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory: Capitalism, Fascism, Populism (London: Verso: 1979), 111 and 124. 20 Ibid., 109. 21 Ibid., 116. 22 Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 23 See the introduction to this volume for a discussion of how the friend-­enemy dichotomy fits into populist ideology more generally. 24 Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, What is the Third Estate?, trans. M. Blondel (New York: Praeger, 1964), 56–7. 25 Sewell argues that Sieyès’ intimate knowledge of the emerging discourse of political economy is what set him apart from his peers, who relied more exclusively on political theory, in general, and classical and modern notions of republican virtue, in particular. According to Sewell, “This difference was the foundation of his originality: the arguments Sieyès used to exclude nobles from the nation and those he employed to combine national sovereignty with representation were drawn directly from political

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Transformations of Populism in Europe and the Americas economy.” A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution: The Abbé Sieyès and What is the Third Estate? (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1994), 66. At first glance Sieyès’ arguments in “What is the Third Estate?” appear uncompromisingly radical. Yet, when one reads the pamphlet more carefully, his status as a bourgeois theorist becomes apparent. For example, he argues that political participation should be limited to so-­called “active” citizens, who possess a certain level of wealth and education. Although Sieyès had presciently provided a clear theoretical defense for this course of events, he refused to renounce the more conservative elements in his thinking, which led to his increasing marginalization as the revolution took a more radical course in the following years. But the producerist populist ideology, which was so crucial to “What is the Third Estate?”, would remain central to French politics well into the nineteenth century and beyond. Albert Soboul, The Parisian Sans-Culottes and the French Revolution, 1793–94, trans. Gwynne Lewis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), 28. Ibid., 23–4. For a more detailed examination of how the originally bourgeois “language of labor” was appropriated and recast by workers in France, see William Sewell, Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). Cited in Steven Vincent, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and the Rise of French Republican Socialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 166. Here I am building upon a distinction made by Moishe Postone between “traditional” and “critical” Marxism: the former he defines as a “critique of capitalism from the standpoint of labor” and the latter as “a critique of labor in capitalism.” Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 5 (emphasis his own). Postone goes on to elaborate and explicate this preliminary definition throughout much of the rest of his path-­breaking reinterpretation of Marx. This distinction is crucial for our purposes here insofar as it draws attention to Proudhon’s uncritical acceptance of the transhistorical labor theory of value, upon which the edifice of classical, liberal political economy was constructed. In this essay I follow Postone in endeavoring to demonstrate how Marx’s critical theory differed fundamentally from Proudhon’s (and Sorel’s) insofar as it rested upon a critique, not an affirmation of the labor theory of value and political economy more generally. In contrast to certain scholars, who have argued that Proudhon’s work can be considered proto-­fascist in a direct way, my intention here is to demonstrate how the central tropes of bourgeois producerist populism reappear and play a central role in Proudhon’s theory and thus help us answer the larger question of how and why certain key elements of progressive populist ideology from the nineteenth century could be appropriated by fascists in the early twentieth century. On Proudhon as an alleged proto-­fascist, see for example, Ishay Landa, The Apprentices Sorcerer: Liberal Tradition and Fascism (Boston: Brill, 2010), 141–53, and J. Salwyn Schapiro, Liberalism and the Challenge of Fascism: Social Forces in England and France, 1815–1870 (New York, Toronto, and London: McGraw Hill, 1949), 365–9. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What is Property?, ed. and trans. Donald R. Kelley and Bonnie G. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 120. John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980), 18–30. Proudhon, What is Property?, 214–15; Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, The General Idea of Revolution in the Nineteenth Century, trans. John Beverly Robinson (New York: Gordon Press, 1972), 207–14.

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36 One common French dictionary defines “oisif ” in the following way: “1. Someone who has no occupation or doesn’t practice a profession. 2. Someone who has a lot of leisure.” Le Robert Micro (Paris, 1997), 868. 37 Proudhon stated, “as for the industrious, laboring bourgeoisie, it has nothing to lose; it is the head of our column.” Quoted by Vincent, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, 148. 38 Proudhon, What is Property?, 200; General Idea of Revolution, 53. In fact, Proudhon went so far as to dedicate his General Idea of Revolution to the bourgeoisie. Ibid., 5. 39 In his 1884 preface to the first German edition of Marx’s 1847 polemic against Proudhon, The Poverty of Philosophy. 40 Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (New York: International Publishers, 1963), 7ff. 41 Marx writes, “relative value, measured by labor time, is inevitably the formula of the present enslavement of the worker, instead of being, as M. Proudhon would have it, the ‘revolutionary theory’ of the emancipation of the proletariat” and “all of the ‘equalitarian’ consequences which M. Proudhon deduces from Ricardo’s doctrine are based on a fundamental error.” Ibid., 52 and 54. 42 Vincent, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, 142. 43 Proudhon, What is Property?, 136. 44 Proudhon, General Idea of Revolution, 84 and 96. 45 For further evidence of the fundamental significance of liberal economic categories, such as the free market and contracts, for Proudhon’s thinking, see his late work, The Principle of Federation, trans. R. Vernon (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979). For an interpretation of Proudhon as liberal thinker, see also Alan Ritter, The Political Thought of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969). 46 Quoted by Vincent, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, 85. 47 Proudhon, General Idea of Revolution, 45. For Proudhon’s interpretation of the ways in which the French Revolution brought about progress toward a more just society, while at the same reinstating basic principles—such as property and sovereignty—that hindered the full development of its potential, see also What is Property?, 26–32. 48 Proudhon, General Idea of Revolution, 170. 49 Proudhon writes, “Rousseau does not know what economics means. His program speaks of political rights only; it doesn’t mention economic rights.” General Idea of Revolution, 119. 50 Steven Vincent argues that the republican legacy shaped from early on and remained a foundation of Proudhon’s thought until the end of his life. He argues convincingly that republicanism filled the void left in Proudhon’s thought after he abandoned religion and ceased to define himself as a “religious socialist” in the early 1840s. The Republican tradition provided Proudhon—and other French socialists at the time— with the foundations of a new civic religion, which informed his fundamentally moral view of socialism. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and the Rise of French Republican Socialism, 70–8. Vincent’s interpretation is important for my argument here not only because he highlights the classical republican dimensions of Proudhon’s thought, but also because he places it within the context of a much broader “republican socialist” movement in France in the mid-­nineteenth century. 51 Cited in Vincent, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, 31. 52 See, for example, Proudhon’s critique of Rousseau and Robespierre for introducing, and then subsequently abandoning the principles of popular sovereignty and direct self-­rule: General Idea of Revolution, 118f. and 145f.

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53 Proudhon writes, “In the Republic, every citizen . . . participates directly in legislation and government, as he participates in the production and the circulation of wealth. There, every citizen is king, because he has the plenitude of power, he reigns and governs. The Republic is a positive anarchy.” Cited in Vincent, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, 169–70. 54 Proudhon, What is Property?, 131. 55 As Vincent points out, Proudhon even believed that “the dogma of the Fall—of original sin—was accurate symbolic expression of the evil inclination of mankind” and “the depravity of man” was “not simply a stage in man’s evolution” but instead “a constituent element of man’s makeup.” Vincent, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, 102–3. 56 Ibid., 117. 57 Vincent characterizes him as an “ambivalent democrat.” Ibid., 59. 58 Vincent, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, 173. The titles were: Le Peuple, Le Representant du Peuple, La Voix du Peuple, and Le Peuple de 1850. 59 Proudhon, General Idea of Revolution, 227. 60 Cited by Vincent, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon 160. 61 Proudhon, General Idea of Revolution, 215. 62 Ibid., 97. 63 Vincent, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon 199. 64 Proudhon writes, for example, “Marriage, which is founded on mutual and absolute devotion, entails the sharing of fortune and honor. But this equality does not and cannot exist in social and public life, in anything to do with the business and organization of life, or with the administration and defense of the republic. To put it more clearly, woman does not count in these spheres.” Selected Writings of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, ed. Stewart Edwards, trans. Elizabeth Fraser (London: Macmillan, 1970), 255. 65 Armin Mohler, Georges Sorel: Erzvater der konservativen Revolution (Bad Vilbel: Edition Antaios, 2000), 29. 66 James H. Meisel, The Genesis of Georges Sorel (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982), 94. 67 Cited by Sternhell, The Birth of Fascist Ideology, 44. 68 Ibid., 45. 69 Georges Sorel, The Illusions of Progress, trans. John and Charlotte Stanley (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969), 157. 70 Ibid., 30–71. 71 Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence, trans. Thomas Ernest Hulme and Jeremy Jennings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 72. 72 Ibid., 75. See also Sorel’s paean to Yankee captains of industry on p. 232, where he compares them to Nietzschean “über-Menschen.” 73 Ibid., 221–2. 74 The distinction between “productive” (schaffendes) and “parasitic” (raffendes) capital also played a key role in Nazi ideology in Germany. For an analysis, see Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 141–4. 75 Sorel writes, for example, that “nothing is more aristocratic than the aspirations of democracy. The latter tries to continue the exploitation of the producing masses by an oligarchy of intellectual and political professionals.” Illusions of Progress, 150. 76 Sorel, Illusions of Progress, 170–6. Sorel’s idealization of classical and, more specifically, classical republican virtues, had been present in his writings from the very beginning. According to Jeremy Jennings, Sorel’s first work, The Trial of Socrates, was “nothing less than a retrial of Socrates,” which found him guilty not only of corrupting the youth of

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Athens, but also of destroying the moral foundations of Greek society as a whole. Sorel interpreted ancient Greece at this time as a society that “possessed moral certitude,” was “poor, rural and pious,” “in which men were frugal” and “there was no superfluous extravagance.” Even more important to Sorel, was the heroic tradition of ancient Greece, in which all citizens received military education, thereby creating “a class of citizens who could be called farmer-­soldiers, farmers who, when the need arose, abandoned their farms to defend their homeland.” As Jennings also points out, Sorel did not hesitate to draw direct comparisons to the decline of ancient Greece and the contemporary situation of France. Sorel’s discussion in The Illusions of Progress of the corruption of the bourgeoisie in the eighteenth century, and the emergence of the philosophes as the new leaders of public opinion parallels closely the corrupting effect of Socrates teachings in ancient Greece. Jeremy Jennings, Georges Sorel (Oxford: Macmillan, 1985), 16–36. In his discussion of Sorel’s early work, K. Steven Vincent also argues that “moral-­republican themes” are what is most important. For example, in Sorel’s 1894 study La Ruine du monde antique, Christianity seems to have the same effect on the classical republican virtues of the Romans that Socrates’ teachings did on the farmer-­warrior society of ancient Greece. Vincent writes, “The general message of La Ruine du monde antique is that Christianity is hostile to republican values . . . By emphasizing the contemplation of God, retreat, consumption and ‘mystical social relationships,’ Christianity undermined what remained of vigorous production-­oriented mores in Roman society.” Vincent sums up the message of Sorel’s early work in the following way: “Sorel’s recommendation is for modern man to combine aspects of classical civic morality with the virtues of modern productivity.” K. Steven Vincent, “Interpreting Georges Sorel: Defender of Virtue or Apostle of Violence?” History of European Ideas 12: 2 (1990), 239–57. Sorel, Illusions of Progress, 174–5. Ibid., 48–55. Ibid., 169. See, for example, Adrian Oldfield, Citizenship and Community: Civic Republicanism and the Modern World (London: Routledge, 1990), esp. 1–15, 31–77, 145–54. Sorel, Illusions of Progress, 58. Ibid., 150. John Stanley writes, “Sorel was a moralist; this is the single most outstanding trait of the man.” “Translator’s Introduction” to Illusions of Progress, xxix. Ibid., 167. Ibid., 57. Paul Lafargue, The Right to Be Lazy (Chicago: Charles Kerr, 1989), 17–20; Karl Marx, The Holy Family, in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 4 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975), 134–5. Quoted by Meisel, The Genesis of George Sorel, 99. A few years later he wonders “if Proudhon was not victim of a strange illusion when he assumed that our nature leads us toward justice. On the contrary, it would seem that law was imposed on man by historical accidents . . .” Sorel, Illusions of Progress, 170. Ibid., xlv. Ibid., 94. Ibid., 131. Jeremy Jennings describes Sorel as an “assiduous reader” of Le Bon’s works. Reflections on Violence, xi. Sorel had reviewed Le Bon’s work as early as 1895 in Le Devenir Social, as James Meisel points out. The Genesis of Georges Sorel, 16. Sorel, Reflections on Violence, 40.

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  93 Ibid., 52. Here one also sees the seeds of Sorel’s later admiration for Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution. According to Jeremy Jennings, “Sorel’s emphasis upon the need for action, intelligence and moral authority in the revolutionary process led him to justify Lenin’s innovatory stress upon dictatorship. The Russian Revolution had been accomplished because the revolutionaries, through their moral authority, had been able to free the masses from ‘the instincts which always impel humanity towards the lowest spheres of life.’ The dictatorship of the proletariat was no more than the institutionalization of this moral authority.” Georges Sorel, 164.   94 Stanley, “Translator’s Introduction,” Illusions of Progress, xxxv.   95 See, for example, Michael Zimmerman, Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity: Technology, Politics and Art (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).   96 Sorel, Illusions of Progress, 72–91.   97 For Herf, proto-­fascist and fascist “reactionary modernists” were those “who rejected liberal democracy and the legacy of the Enlightenment, yet simultaneously embraced the modern technology of the second industrial revolution.” Cited by Antliff, Avant-Garde Fascism, 20.   98 Gaetan Pirou, Georges Sorel (Paris, 1927), 37. Cited by Jennings, 144.   99 Sternhell, Neither Right nor Left, 79–80. 100 On the eclectic receptions of Sorel’s and Nietzsche’s work, see Alice Kaplan, Reproductions of Banality: Fascism, Literature and French Intellectual Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 59–74, and Stephen Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany: 1890–1990 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), respectively. 101 Antliff, Avant-Garde Fascism, 140–42. Sternhell, Neither Right nor Left, 105–6. 102 Sternhell, Birth of Fascist Ideology, 106–7; Antliff, Avant-Garde Fascism 151. 103 Sternhell, Neither Right Nor Left, 160–7; Birth of Fascist Ideology, 124–5, 158. 104 Antliff, Avant-Garde Fascism, 111–21; Sternhell, Neither Right nor Left, 108; Birth of Fascist Ideology, 106–7, 144, 154–5; this applies only to the conservative phase of Sorel’s thought, 1909–14. 105 Sternhell, Birth of Fascist Ideology, 217–18. 106 Sternhell, Neither Right nor Left, 105; Birth of Fascist Ideology, 101. 107 Sternhell, Birth of Fascist Ideology, 152. 108 Ibid., 115–16, 126, 145. 109 Ibid., 160–2. 110 Sternhell, Neither Right nor Left, 106. 111 Ibid., 96–7. 112 For overviews of the debates surrounding Sternhell’s work, see footnote 16 above. 113 Sternhell, Birth of Fascist Ideology, 3. Sternhell’s position here is also puzzling in light of the fact that he himself often points to continuities that fascists themselves emphasized between their ideas and the ideas of 1789; for example, Georges Valois’ claim in 1926, which Sternhell cites, that “fascism is completely in line with the movement of 1789 . . . it goes beyond it in providing it with a conclusion that the people have been seeking for a century—a conclusion that will give the historical period that began in 1789 its definitive form.” Neither Right nor Left, 106. To be sure, Valois’ views may not have been representative of “fascist ideology” as a whole, yet they do make clear that such perceived continuities did exist and need to be examined more closely. 114 Ibid. 115 Matthew Karush makes this same point in his essay in this volume, 201–2.

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116 One of the aims of this chapter is also to emphasize the bourgeois origins of producerist populist ideology and, thus, to stress its inadequacy for a progressive socialist critique of modern capitalist society. So, even if populist producerist discourse could be mobilized for socialist purposes, it was never an adequate theoretical basis for socialist politics, which also explains why it was so easily appropriated by fascist ideology later. Walter Benjamin makes a similar point in his critique of “German Jacobinism” in his essay “Eduard Fuchs, Collector and Historian,” Selected Writings, ed. Michael W. Jennings, vol. 3 (London and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 277. 117 Max Horkheimer, “The Latest Attack on Metaphysics,” in Critical Theory, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell (New York: Continuum, 1992), 132–87; Herbert Marcuse, “The Concept of Essence” and “The Affirmative Character of Culture,” in Negations: Essays on Critical Theory, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), 43–133. 118 John Abromeit, Max Horkheimer and the Foundations of the Frankfurt School (New York and Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 1–15, 425–32. 119 Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London and New York: Verso, 2005), 67. 120 Ibid., 77. 121 See footnote 115 above. 122 Theodor Adorno, “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda,” in Soziologische Schriften, vol. 1, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972), 408–33. 123 Laclau, On Populist Reason, 104–5. One of the pitfalls of the linguistic turn in political theory, psychoanalysis, and elsewhere, has been an idealistic privileging of language as—to put it in Kantian terms—the active component of knowledge and the reduction of drives and emotions to inert matter, which passively assume whatever form they are given by language. The idea that drives and emotions possess an objective character of their own—both before and after they have been historically formed through socialization—is not adequately addressed by partisans of the linguistic turn. So, while Laclau does attribute an important role to affect in his theory of populism, he also insists that it “is not something which exists on its own; it constitutes itself only through the differential cathexes of a signifying chain” (111). 124 Max Horkheimer, “Egoism and Freedom Movements: On the Anthropology of the Bourgeois Epoch,” in Between Philosophy and Social Science: Selected Early Writings, trans. G. Frederick Hunter (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 49–110; John Abromeit, “Whiteness as a Form of Bourgeois Anthropology? Historical Materialism and Psychoanalysis in the Work of David Roediger, Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse,” Radical Philosophy Review 16: 1 (2013), 325–43. 125 Some work has been done on Sorel’s reception in Germany. See, for example, Manfred Gangl, “Mythos der Gewalt und Gewalt des Mythos. Georges Sorels Einfluß auf rechte und linke Intellektuelle der Weimarer Republik,” Intellektuellendiskurse in der Weimarer Republik. Zur politischen Kultur einer Gemengelage, ed. Gérard Raulet (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2007), 243–66. Michel Prat, “Georges Sorel in Deutschland,” Internationale Wissenschaftliche Korrespondenz zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung 23 (1987), 157–70. 126 In nineteenth- and early twentieth-­century Europe, producerist populism and anti-Semitism often went hand in hand. Exploring the relationship between them in any detail would be impossible here, although my essay is also intended to contribute to an understanding of such forms of anti-Semitism, insofar as producerist populism was often seen as their “theoretical” justification. On links between producerist

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130 131 132 133

134 135 136 137 138

Transformations of Populism in Europe and the Americas populism and anti-Semitism, see Mosse, Towards the Final Solution; Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment; Moishe Postone, “The Holocaust and the Trajectory of the Twentieth Century,” in Moishe Postone and Eric Santner (eds.), Catastrophe and Meaning: The Holocaust and the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 81–116; Pierre Birnbaum, Le Peuple et le Gros: histoire d’un mythe (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1995); and Mark Loeffler’s essay in this volume. Eley, this volume, 22–3. Carl Schmitt’s direct recourse to Rousseau’s concept of the “general will” is telling in this regard. See Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, trans. Ellen Kennedy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 13–14. Like Proudhon and Sorel, Lasalle’s version of socialism was based on an attempt to realize, rather than criticize the principles of classical political economy, in general, and the labor theory of value, in particular. Marx’s “Critique of the Gotha Program” was a response to the triumph of these Lasallian tendencies in the Social Democratic Party. It should come as no surprise that Sorel reproached Marx in 1920 for not understanding the “the important reasons that were to give Lasalle’s ideas supremacy over his in Germany.” The Illusions of Progress, 208. Eley, From Unification to Nazism, 270. Following Eric Hobsbawm and others, the “short” twentieth century refers here to 1914–1989, and the “long” nineteenth century to 1789–1914. See notes 122 and 124 above. Adam Smith’s arguments for the reduction of state interference in the economy are well known. Herbert Spencer went a step further and argued that the state was a symptom of early, immature forms of human society, which would eventually disappear at higher stages of development. Herbert Spencer, On Social Evolution: Selected Writings, ed. J.D.Y. Peel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 134–41. See, for example, Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 89–90. Beginning already with Franz Neumann’s Behemoth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1942). Adam Tooze, “The Economic History of the Nazi Regime,” in Jane Caplan (ed.), Nazi Germany (Short Oxford History of Germany) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 168–95. Spencer, On Social Evolution, 149–66. Geoff Eley, Nazism as Fascism: Violence, Ideology and the Ground of Consent in Germany, 1930–45 (New York: Routledge, 2013), 59–90.

15

Populists and Parasites: On Producerist Reason Mark Loeffler

“Populism” has been a notoriously polysemic and contested category. This has been due in part to general social scientific reorientations and their political entailments. During the 1960s and 1970s, populism often was defined with reference to its social bases, as a politics characteristic of peasants, farmers, and/or the petty bourgeoisie. Where scholarship proceeded from the teleological frameworks of modernization theories or traditional Marxisms, it also tended to view populist mobilization as an irrational pathology grounded in the persistence of “traditional” social elements and their defenses against “modern” industrial society.1 Frequently this included an emphasis on demagogic, top-­down political manipulation. In response to accumulating anomalies, but also as a moment of broader disciplinary turns to culture, scholars since the late 1970s have tended to approach populism as a set of discursive phenomena.2 At the same time, those broader turns challenged long-­standing assumptions regarding the class character of an array of historical social movements.3 Here archival research that was not necessarily undertaken to investigate populism as such sometimes revealed not only that political identities did not cleave according to ascribed class interests, but also that in their own discourses historical actors identified with “the people.” Thus we might say that a “populist turn” in the literature has been coupled with cultural turns.4 The effects of the above turns on the political evaluation of populism have been ambivalent. They have opened new perspectives on the populist features of fascism, as well as contemporary radical right mobilizations.5 At the same time, where cultural and discursive reorientations were responding to earlier accounts of backwardness and irrationality, they often motivated more positive reevaluations. This dovetailed with a perceived need to rethink the bases of progressive political solidarity, occasioned by the collapse of working-­class power in Europe and the United States and the rise of new social movements. Perhaps the most extreme rehabilitation of populism for politics today has been attempted by Ernesto Laclau, whose redefinition focuses not on ideological contents, but rather on the ways that those contents are articulated in the course of politico-­discursive struggles for hegemony.6 Laclau’s framework has further motivated arguments that populism is a phenomenon necessarily generated by tensions intrinsic to modern democracy, however regrettable specific examples may be.7

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My purpose in this essay will not be to propose a new definition of populism, but rather to develop critical perspectives on some of the elements that recur persistently in populist discourse. Today the invocation of “the people” in antagonism with a perceived power bloc often serves as a necessary if not sufficient criterion for populist politics. As other histories of populism have registered, that opposition mapped onto the binary of “producers” vs. “parasites” with considerable frequency. What I will call “producerist” populist discourses affirm the virtuous creators of material goods, whom they then oppose in Manichean, friend/foe fashion with an unproductive, exploitative, and often conspiratorial elite. In this essay I shall focus on a more specific but similarly recurrent instantiation of these oppositions, wherein labor is united with industrial and agrarian capital under the sign of “producers,” while the parasitic elements are identified chiefly as the agents of monetary institutions—the banker, the financier, the “money power,” and so on. Since the manifest onset of economic crisis in 2008, criticism of finance capital has proliferated globally and animated two purportedly populist movements in the United States. The discourses that have emerged to prominence often have been structured by the above oppositions. They also have imputed economic crisis exclusively to financial factors, they have tended to focus on actors rather than systemic factors, and some have shaded into conspiracy theory. In these respects they have recalled historical populist contestations of finance. During the so-­called “Great Depression” of 1873–96, for example, similar discourses peaked in incidence and virulence; they can be located not only in the Populist Party of the United States, but also in, for example, bimetallist and Tariff Reform demands in the United Kingdom, or the forms of political anti-Semitism that emerged in Germany. Discontent with finance then reached an apogee during the interwar period. In this context, money reformers from the heretical fringe to the academic and political mainstream targeted a banking bloc allegedly exercising its domination through the gold standard. Smoldering agrarian rage against “usurious” mortgages reignited on the land, while politicians across the spectrum accused financiers of bringing down governments. Anti-Semitic forms of these discourses purported to unmask vast financial conspiracies, and they became central to European fascisms. Addressing the significance of contemporary populist discourses on finance thus demands historical perspective, to which this essay seeks to contribute. Other chapters in this volume highlight populist producer-­parasite discourses in France and the United States.8 I begin by extending this field with examples from Britain and Germany. Such transnational currency itself impacts on a number of further historiographic and theoretical questions. It for example bears directly on the kind of approach that would be necessary in accounting for popular contestations of finance. I proceed to explore theoretical frameworks that could grapple critically with those contestations and contribute to such an account of why they became meaningful and compelling for a wide cast of historical actors. I first review Ernesto Laclau’s influential account of the logics of populist identity formation, including his exchange with Slavoj Žižek on the subject.9 I regard Laclau’s interventions as fundamentally important in problematizing the materialist reductionism of previous approaches to populism. The exchange, however, clarifies some of the limitations of his approach, specifically with regard to a critical genealogy

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of populism—a critique that could illuminate the historical conditions of possibility of populist political-­economic discourse. I argue that in this connection Žižek is justified in gesturing at theories of social abstraction and misrecognition, but that these would have to be pursued more consistently and formulated on different bases than he intimates. I then begin to sketch some of the features of such a theory. Beginning with Max Weber’s polemics concerning securities and commodity futures markets, and then pursuing parallel insights from the Marxian critique of political economy, I argue that we can best understand the widespread historical plausibility of producerist populist discourses by recovering their relation to historically determinate forms of social practice that are constitutive of capitalist society (thus traversing otherwise fundamentally different cultures, societies, and polities), but that also have the propensity to appear in ways that obscure capitalism’s core dynamics.

Producerism and the critique of finance in Britain and Germany after 1873 Distinct patterns of critical discourse on finance have arisen transnationally and synchronously, and they could be approached within the framework of a global history. Here I can only cull a few vignettes from German and British histories, but this sampling should provoke parallel reflection on the breadth of the phenomena. Commentators often have understood these two political economies, and especially their financial systems, as opposite ideal-­typical varieties of capitalism.10 Yet there were fundamental continuities in critical discourses on finance, as well as comparable incidence and virulence. In both contexts producer-­parasite binaries informed the imaginaries of significant social movements and conditioned far-­reaching policy transformations. In both contexts there were notable drifts towards conspiracy thinking, including anti-Semitism. Such similarities indicate that contestations of finance constitute a general pattern that cannot be understood adequately with reference to the local or particular, including these two storied national peculiarities. They rather must be approached on a plane of abstraction capable of accounting for transnational homogeneities.11 A broad array of discourses have targeted finance as “parasitic,” including criticism of “speculation,” rural “usury,” and so forth. Given constraints of space, I am going to narrow the sampling further to a specific ideal-­typical construction, examples of which I will then narrate briefly. A common form of discourse structured by the producer-­ parasite binary strongly associated the latter with the gold standard. Allegedly bankers and financiers had secured the international institutionalization of this monetary regime. They had further secured a virtual monopoly on gold, and they had artificially limited its supply in order to raise its price. Typically this meant that they were constraining the supply of currency in order to maintain high interest rates and to thereby exploit “producers.” This limitation of the money supply then was allegedly responsible for crises and slumps. In some allegations money-­lenders intended to cause such crises, for example with the goal of foreclosing on property. Especially during the interwar Depression, some further maintained that financiers sought to

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prevent governments and/or monetary authorities (whether by individual coercion or conspiratorial collusion) from engaging in contra-­cyclical, proto-Keynesian styles of crisis management, such as more accommodating monetary policies. The prescriptions deriving from these kinds of discourses were wide-­ranging. Often reformers sought to free the currency supply from the control of financiers, and to augment circulation. Insofar as the gold standard also represented an “automatic” mechanism for stabilizing trade flows and exchange rates, albeit one manipulable by financial elites, during the interwar years many prescriptions were framed as a demand for a “managed currency.” Under such a regime, money would be managed in contra-­cyclical fashion, and to promote the development of “productive” industry and agriculture.12 Two further conceptual clarifications are appropriate. First, it may be apparent that much of this has basic affinities to modern forms of anti-Semitism. Although I will adduce a number of anti-Semitic discourses below, one can nonetheless differentiate analytically and historically. On one hand I take anti-Semitism to be a heterogeneous phenomenon, incorporating religious and pseudo-­biological discourses among others. And on the other hand one could cite a number of conspiracy-­theoretical discourses on finance that rejected anti-Semitic associations of finance with Jewishness. I therefore would resist reduction in either direction. Second, it is not a novelty to point out the prevalence of conspiracy thinking in populist discourse, and certainly it has been a recurrent feature across many of the producerist instantiations that I review. Typically conspiracy theories envision a number of actors who have joined together in secret collaboration to achieve a hidden goal that is deemed malevolent, unlawful, or dangerous to wider populations. They further accord what seems an inordinate degree of power and efficacy to the individuals involved in the conspiracy, the effects of which are realized on a grand scale and scope.13 In this sense, conspiracy theories seek to explain historically momentous events and/or sweeping changes with reference to the agency of the conspirators alone. If one defines populism with reference to its discursive appeals to “the people” against an elite, then conspiracy thinking often incorporates populist reasoning. However, neither populism nor criticism of finance necessarily engages in conspiracy theory.14 We can certainly recognize elements of the ideal-­type in those late nineteenth-­ century movements that have been called “populist.” In perhaps the most famous American artifact, William Jennings Bryan demanded a bimetallic augmentation of the currency on behalf of “producers,” as against the “Cross of Gold” that he associated with finance. But against the background of a protracted and international deflation stretching from 1873 through 1896, comparable discourses also arose transnationally. Let me illustrate anecdotally. Arthur Kitson had been an accomplished engineer and inventor, most famous for the “Kitson lamp” that was widely adopted in the late nineteenth century. During the 1890s, however, Kitson became especially invested in issues of monetary reform. In polemics against the gold standard, he claimed that bankers and financiers were consciously colluding to secure a monopoly of gold and to restrict its supply in order to raise its price.15 During the 1920s, Kitson would become known as the “Father of Monetary Reform” in Great Britain. He also would become rabidly anti-Semitic, and he would exert an influence on Arnold Leese’s Imperial Fascist League.16 But during the “Great Depression” of 1873–96, Kitson’s writings brought him

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within the orbit of American Populists, and he stumped for Bryan’s bimetallist campaign in 1896.17 Over these same years, the infamous demagogue Hermann Ahlwardt became one of the first politicians to win a seat in the German Reichstag on an explicitly antiSemitic platform. Shortly thereafter, Ahlwardt also traveled to the United States, where he also campaigned on behalf of Bryan.18 As he expressed in an interview with the New York Times shortly after reaching port, his purpose was to defend “all who in any way control any power of work” against a “gold clique” that “owned the supply and controlled the output of gold.”19 This convergence of Kitson and Ahlwardt on the Bryan campaign trail speaks to the transnational and synchronous development wherein producerist populist discourses on finance became meaningful to a wide range of historical actors. Turning to this broader field, it is first worth noting that bimetallism, which has so often been associated with populisms in the United States, was very much an international phenomenon. As the historian E.H.H. Greene has shown, bimetallism in Britain, as well a wider array of British Conservative discourses including eventually Chamberlain’s Tariff Reform movement, were structured fundamentally around the producer-­parasite binary.20 During the annual meeting of the Bimetallic League in 1893, for example, R.L. Everett, an MP from Ipswich, imputed agrarian distress of the preceding decades to “a combined effort on the part of the great money-­lending powers to force up the value of the commodity they own, to the injury of the industrial classes.” This moreover was a “movement to help the drones at the expense of the working bees,” as “producers live by industry, Jews and money-­lenders upon it.”21 With regard to late nineteenth-­century Germany, Paul Massing was perhaps the first to emphasize the persistence of producerist discourses and specifically their importance to the emergence of political anti-Semitism.22 Here a first wave of such discourses crested following the stock market crash of 1873. Otto Glagau, for example, published a famous series of articles in the Mittelstand periodical Der Gartenlaube, blaming Jewish financiers for the crisis. He would eventually conclude that “Jewry . . . creates nothing for itself but lets others work for it,” while “it haggles and speculates with the manual and spiritual products of others.” From its center in the stock exchange, it “fastens itself on the German people and sucks their marrow.”23 David Peal’s social history of the political anti-Semite Böckel and his rural cooperative movements in Kurhessen revealed similar patterns.24 Peal showed that the producer-­parasite opposition was at the center of the discourses of those movements, and he further effected important comparisons with agrarian populism in the United States.25 Böckel’s political rise and election to the Reichstag paralleled that of Ahlwardt, who in a speech before the Reichstag of March 6, 1895 stated that “We Germans stand on the cultural soil of labor [Kulturboden der Arbeit]; each of us seeks to work for others and demands in return that others work for him.” The Jews, by contrast, “do not stand on the cultural soil of labor, they do not want to create values themselves, but want to appropriate, without working, the values which others have created.”26 They were not “productive,” but are rather “exploitative” [ausbeuterisch] and “parasitic” [parasitisch.]27 While the above examples demonstrate that criticism of finance operated with the familiar binaries, we can also note that many popular discourses explicitly engaged and opposed alternative theories of class conflict and domination. For example, in 1882 Adolf Stoecker, Bismarck’s Court Chaplain and the founder of the anti-Semitic

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Christlich-Soziale Partei, stated that “Marx and Lassalle looked for the roots of the problem not in the stock exchange, but rather in industrial production . . . Our movement corrects this. We show the people that the roots of their misery are in the power of money, in the spirit of Mammon [Mammonsgeist] of the stock exchange.”28 In similar fashion, Theodor Fritsch, a prominent author and publisher of anti-Semitic literature, noted that the “social question” often had been viewed in terms of the class conflict between capital and labor. The problem with that perspective, he argued, was that it overlooked the ways that this conflict was itself driven by the influence of “mobile capital” on industrialists. It was mobile, financial capital and the need for credit that forced industrialists to treat workers in an unhealthy, exploitative manner. From Fritsch’s perspective, Social Democracy then became an agent of finance (which he referred to as a “golden international”) by obscuring this form of domination and displacing the social question onto the conflict between labor and industrial capital.29 Such sentiments were expressed perhaps most famously by Max Liebermann von Sonnenberg, the founder of the Deutschsoziale Antisemitische Partei. During Reichstag debates concerning trade agreements with Italy and Austria-Hungary, he sought to correct what he saw as misperceptions of anti-Semitic parties. According to him, fears had arisen that anti-Semites were hostile not only to Jewish capitalists, but also were agitating against capitalism as such. He countered this by stating that anti-Semites were opposed “neither to Jewish capital nor to capital in general,” but that they differentiated “between harmful [schädlichem] and useful [nützlichem] capital.” As he framed the distinction, “useful capital” was employed in “agriculture and healthy industry, where it enabled millions of workers to live.” This was “capital, which increases within modest margins when actual labor first is performed for this increase.” Liebermann von Sonnenberg alleged that his party sought to “cultivate, support and protect” this kind of capital. “Harmful capital,” by contrast, was “capital which increases without limits and without the performance of actual work, capital which sets the scene for lies and deception and swindle, in order to plunder trusting people.” Such capital was to be found at the “stock exchange,” and according to Sonnenberg, anti-Semites could not help it if this capital was “mostly Jewish.”30 Kitson exemplified the figure of the money reformer or “currency crank” that emerged in the late nineteenth century and enjoyed something of a golden age during the interwar period. As we move briefly into the twentieth century, such figures are useful insofar as they condense and attempt to render consistent a number of the forms of thought and practical impulses which also arose in more fragmentary and socially diffuse fashion; by at least beginning from their texts, it becomes possible to recognize the elements of these forms of thought in more disparate locations. Like Kitson, Silvio Gesell also began developing his monetary reform strategies during the Depression of 1873–96. Several movements formed around his ideas in the twentieth century. The largest of these was in Germany, where it was known as the Freiwirtschaft movement, but there were organizations in Britain and the United States as well. Gesell argued that money, like any good, only possessed value and could only draw interest where it was scarce. Money, however, did not deteriorate or depreciate, and this generated an asymmetry in regard to other commodities; it grounded the fact that money could be held from circulation in a hoard. From these observations, Gesell went on to conclude

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that bankers and financiers were intentionally limiting the supply of money in order to increase its value and to charge high interest rates. This in turn left “producers” with a dearth of credit.31 Gesell understood the gold standard within this general framework: as an institution that served the interests of money-­capital by limiting the money supply to its gold backing. And so prescriptively, he had engaged debates on bimetallism, though he preferred a system of fiat money in combination with stamp scrip. In the long term, his schemes allegedly would remove barriers to productive accumulation, allowing capital to be amassed at such a rate that it would no longer be scarce. The interest rate then would fall to zero, and the parasitic financier could no longer plague modern society. Insofar as Gesell had defined “capitalism” itself as a system in which monetary scarcity gave rise to interest, he was able to argue that capitalism itself would be overcome if his proposals were pursued.32 Gesell also is a good example of figures who reproduced binaries of “producer” vs. “financier,” and who veered towards the conspiracy-­theoretical, but who consistently rejected anti-Semitic ideologies.33 Unfortunately this was not the case for all members of the Freiwirtschaft movement. By the late 1920s, some of them were promulgating such ideologies, and a number of Gesell’s former followers also began to look to National Socialism as a solution. For example, Max Roosen and Werner Kertscher maintained in general outlines that the monopoly of purchasing power exercised by Jewish financiers was responsible for the Depression. The “bankers calculating in metal” had “survived behind the curtain,” while they “forced their bill on the workers, manufacturers and businessmen.”34 On April 9, 1932, they then attempted to assassinate Reichsbank President Luther. They fired on him at point-­blank range on a train platform, but managed only to graze his elbow.35 In order to understand why such figures would be attracted to Nazism, we can consider for the moment Gottfried Feder. Feder is now known chiefly as an early economic advisor to Adolf Hitler. His lectures and pamphleteering of the early 1920s did much to popularize the binary of schaffendes and raffendes Kapital. The former included labor as well as “creative” industrial and agrarian capital, and it was subject to manifold forms of exploitation at the hands of the latter, “rapacious” capital, which Feder identified with finance and “loan-­capital.”36 Feder further aligned the cosmopolitanism of financial capital with Bolshevic internationalism, both of which he regarded as threats to the German nation. Indeed, Feder’s binary was meant explicitly to counter Marxist theories of exploitation: he argued that schaffendes vs. raffendes Kapital was the real axis of modern exploitation and conflict, and that the “Jewish” left, including Marx, had tried to obscure this by fomenting proletarian revolt against industrial capital. Feder demanded instead the revolt of national and healthy German capital against parasitic finance. In this, his core demand became the Brechung der Zinsknechtschaft—the breaking of interest-­slavery. Following the First World War, the Reichswehr had employed Feder as a lecturer, in the hopes of inoculating the military in Bavaria against socialist influences. Among the audience members was a decommissioned Adolf Hitler, who later indicated that Feder’s lectures were a formative moment for the emergent horizon of National Socialist meaning: Hitler was enlightened as to the “enormous importance” of the distinction between financial capital and industrial capital for the future of the German Volk.37

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Feder’s influence in the famous 25-Point Program of the NSDAP is clear, and those points included the abolition of unearned incomes, the execution of “usurers,” and of course Brechung der Zinsknechtschaft.38 Here I will not be able to demonstrate that the critique of finance remained a core discourse of the Nazi Party, but I do wish to note that, during the Depression, Feder became an early proponent of expansionary policy that has in retrospect been called “proto-Keynesian,”39 and that in this context his attention focused increasingly on the gold standard. According to Feder, the state established the value of money, and, as currency notes were but a claim to national labor-­power, the only backing necessary was the national production of material goods. For Feder, this implied that there should be no fundamental constraints on the ability of the state to issue currency. But of course the gold standard was thought to represent precisely such a constraint. Thus for Feder the gold standard then became a primary instantiation of Zinsknechtschaft, and he diagnosed the Depression in terms of a financial conspiracy fettering state currency management. By July 1932 he was arguing that the “anchoring of a currency in gold . . . leads only to the most dangerous shortage of the means of payment, and serves at bottom exclusively the interest of the gold-­holder, or high finance.” It was, moreover, “Jewish thought” that had “placed gold at the center,” and had “forced the peoples [Völker] of the western world to be the payers of interest and tribute to finance capital.” “Disentanglement from the gold currency” thus became the precondition for breaking interest-slavery and for the reconstruction of the German economy.40 It would seem that whereas in Germany National Socialism achieved an early and bloodless Gleichschaltung of monetary reform movements, with Freiwirtschaft representing the only major organizational alternative, in Britain there was a proliferation of such movements. One of the most prominent was Social Credit. Most enumerations of populisms include the Social Credit Party in Canada, but here I want to return to the origins of Social Credit discourses in England, as initially formulated by Clifford Hugh Douglas. Similar to Feder, the Social Credit organ New Age argued that “the line of conflict to-­day, the real trench warfare [is] not between Capital and Labour; it is between Finance, on the one side, and Capital and Labour, more or less in the same army, on the other side.”41 In his writings of the 1920s, Douglas developed a number of rather sophistic formulae to demonstrate that there was a monetary shortage.42 These would be tedious here, and in any case they seem to have been jettisoned over time in favor of appeals to a banking conspiracy. In a manner that I hope is now familiar, Douglas argued that there was a vast conspiracy by bankers, operating through the gold standard, to restrict the money supply, and thereby maintain high interest rates. This often was expressed in terms of a “paradox of poverty amidst plenty”: technological forces seemed adequate to provide basic necessities for all, but nonetheless people were starving. The experiences evidencing that paradox would only be multiplied by Depression-­era destructions of value (burning grain, slaughtering livestock), and in the 1933 edition of Social Credit Douglas emphasized such apparent irrationalities, while quoting William Jennings Bryan on the “money power” as the solution to their riddles.43 Some factions of Social Credit initially embraced Oswald Mosley’s programs, and this was not without good reason: since his earliest days as a Labour politician, Mosley

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had displayed a keen interest in these kinds of monetary and financial problems, and a typically virulent critique of the City of London. This became all the more prominent in the literature of the short-­lived New Party that he formed upon departing from Labour. In A National Policy, Mosley described British policy since the return to the gold standard as an effort to “transfer to the passive rentiers or bondholders from the active producing sectors of the Community, from workers and employers alike, a huge annual tribute.”44 In The New Party and the Old Toryism, W.E.D. Allen claimed that conservative politics were in a state of decline primarily because the Tories had “ceased to stand for the producer,”45 which for him included at least “businessmen and professional men,” “scientific workers,” and the “younger Trade Unionists.”46 In Allen’s narrative, this decay had begun when the landowner became a rentier who treated his holdings as a mere investment asset. The industrialist then had succeeded the land-­ owner in leading Tory politics, but this also was fading as the party had been “impregnated by the influence of those who stood for the interests of financial capitalism.” They now faced the alternative of following the “high road” and continuing to be the “Party of the Producers,” or opting instead to follow the “low road” that led “by many devious channels and subterranean passages to the Street called Wall.”47 Allen further proceeded to explain the postwar return to the gold standard within this framework; it was engineered by a “gigantic REACTIONARY RENTIERS’ RAMP.”48 The literature of Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, like that of the Imperial Fascist League, is similarly dense with the kinds of discourse on finance that I have been reviewing. The Greater Britain, Mosley’s first programmatic articulation of a full-­ throated fascist corporatism, began from the familiar binary. He argued that “the producer” would be the “basis of nation.” That producer’s labor might be based on “hand or brain or capital,” and it was the duty of the corporatist state to assist him in the reconstruction of the British economy. Finance represented the “forces which thwart and destroy productive enterprise,” and which had recently “rocked the structure of British industry to its foundations.” Under the fascist state finance accordingly would be “met with the force of national authority.”49 By adopting this position, according to Mosley, “for the first time in British politics, after the weak surrender of all parties to the power of finance, the British Government would have the overwhelming support of the mass of the people, both worker and employer, whose productive efforts have been frustrated by the policy of high finance.”50 With more space, we could return at this point to the United States and think about a Ford or a Father Coughlin, both of whom divined a conspiracy to limit purchasing power that was causing crises and constraining productivity. We could address J.M. Keynes’ animosity towards the City of London, as well as the wider resonance of these ideas in the British Trades Union Congress, or peak employer organizations like the Federation of British Industries, or party staffs like the Conservative Research Department, all of which had established divisions on money and finance, not least because their constituencies were barraged by currency reform literature. And we could address high political discourse: there were charges, for example, that a “bankers’ ramp” had brought down Ramsey MacDonald’s Second Labour government in 1931, while German Chancellor Brüning accused Oscar Wassermann of the Deutsche Bank of orchestrating high Nazi voter returns in order to induce capital flight and incapacitate

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weaker competitors.51 But for present purposes the above may suffice to establish that reductive Manichean binaries and conspiracy theories of financial domination circulated widely during the period that I have highlighted. In the remainder of this essay I consider theoretical frameworks that could help to address the question of why historical actors found these discourses compelling.

Laclau vs. Žižek Clearly these discourses cannot be deduced from class positions and their putative material interests. Moreover, assumptions of top-­down manipulation at best elide the question of why such discourses could have been plausible to either the subjects or the objects of that manipulation. Thus in my view turns to culture have been correct to reject these kinds of reductionism. With regard specifically to populism, the argument that objective social class position does not generate political identity was central to Ernesto Laclau’s scholarship since his Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory. Although Laclau also problematized some discursive approaches to populism, arguing for example that they remained descriptive catalogues of a capacious and indeterminate set of ideological contents,52 his recent formulations of the analytical core of populism nevertheless do focus on discourse in a broad sense, and he has been grouped and embraced as a part of these turns to culture. I therefore want to begin this discussion of theoretical frameworks by considering his work and engagement with Slavoj Žižek. In recent iterations of Laclau’s approach, the “demand” serves as the smallest unit and the point of theoretical departure.53 When particular demands are initially posed to power, they operate within a structuralist logic of difference: they are meaningful through their oppositions with other such demands. The addressees of these demands are often local and easily identifiable. To the extent that a variety of demands are denied or frustrated, actors with ostensibly heterogeneous demands may begin to form solidarities. In contrast with the system of differences, this initiates an equivalential logic: particular demands begin to be viewed as equivalents, and an equivalential chain is formed in and through only the shared antagonism with the frustrating power. The “popular subject” of these demands—i.e, “the people” of populism—thus emerges through the construction of an enemy Other and the Manichean “dichotomization of the social space.” As Laclau notes: “There is no populism without discursive construction of an enemy.”54 Since there is no common intrinsic feature but only particularistic difference across the demands themselves, since they are united in a chain of equivalence only by opposition with the enemy, their unity as the demands of a popular subject cannot be represented directly. Rather, for Laclau, a particular demand emerges to represent the chain. In this appropriation of Gramsci, it is the process of the universalization of a particular demand that constitutes the struggle for “hegemonization.” For Laclau, an intrinsic tension also marks this process. Where the chain of equivalences extends to include a proliferation of demands, the connection between this chain and the particular demand that has come to symbolically represent it will weaken. This demand, then, will tend to become an “empty signifier.” It can achieve the symbolic

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homogenization of the chain only by tendentially sacrificing its own particularistic claims and contents.55 It would appear that these logics could inhere in any political field, such that all political phenomena could be populist. Laclau explicitly accepts this outcome, arguing that populism is essentially “synonymous with politics.”56 He further claims that to ask whether a movement is populist already represents something of a misunderstanding; the real question should be “to what extent is a movement populist?”57 That gradation is then based on the degree to which the equivalential logic, with the correlative construction of an enemy, dominates the relevant discourse. (The diminution of that logic in favor of a differential logic characterizes “administration.”) The dispute between Laclau and Žižek covers a broad terrain and becomes quite acrimonious. I am concerned here only with some of Žižek’s responses to Laclau’s definition of populism. First, Zizek argues that in populist discourse the cause of social problems is “never the system as such but the intruder who corrupted it (financial manipulators, not necessarily capitalists, and so on); not a fatal flaw inscribed into the structure as such but an element that doesn’t play its role within the structure properly.” Thus the enemy is “reified into a positive ontological entity . . . whose annihilation would restore balance and justice.”58 For Žižek, Nazi anti-Semitism is the prominent example of this tendency, and this in turn is one of the main reasons why fascism should be considered a form of populism. He further frames similar considerations with the conceptual opposition abstract/concrete, arguing that populist discourse is characterized by the “pseudoconcreteness” of the figure of the enemy—the “singular agent behind all threats to the people.” Here too anti-Semitism provides the most dramatic example. Thus it is the “pseudoconcrete populist figure of the Jew that condenses the vast multitude of anonymous forces that determine us.”59 Žižek in these arguments insists that he is accepting Laclau’s treatment of populism as a “formal political logic, not bounded by any content.” He therefore emphasizes that his proposed features are supplementary, and that they “remain at the formal-­ontological level.” From this Žižek draws the conclusion that “populism by definition contains a minimum, an elementary form, of ideological mystification.”60 A number of Žižek’s suggestions in these passages are in my view insightful and important. They first imply that impersonal forms of domination are core features of capitalism, and as Žižek then emphasizes explicitly, the “fundamental systemic violence of capitalism” is “no longer attributable to concrete individuals and the ‘evil’ intentions but is purely objective, systemic, anonymous.”61 This suggests an analysis which could be quite different from an exclusive critique of class exploitation, and which would likewise break with the kinds of class-­based analysis against which Laclau had set himself. Moreover, if there is a “reification” or an “ideological mystification” operative here, this could mean that the manifestations of “abstract,” impersonal compulsions and constraints are mistakenly imputed to specific social groups, and in this way accorded a “pseudoconcreteness.” This is turn would be quite different from an analysis in which mystification would amount to displacing the “truth” of labor-­capital antagonism onto, for example, “ideological” producer-­parasite binaries. Žižek’s brief elaboration of Marxian political economy further specifies these kinds of misrecognition as well as the primary object of social critique. Referring to the “mad

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self-­enhancing circulation of capital” that “reaches its apogee in today’s metareflexive speculations on futures,” he argues that “it is far too simplistic to claim that the specter of this self-­engendering monster that pursues its path disregarding any human or environmental concern is an ideological abstraction and that one should never forget that, behind this abstraction, there are real people and natural objects on whose productive capacities and resources capital’s circulation is based and on which it feeds itself like a gigantic parasite.”62 The problem with this kind of formulation, Žižek suggests, is that “this abstraction is not only in our (financial speculator’s) misperception of social reality but that it is real in the precise meaning of determining the structure of the very material social processes.” Žižek here appears to be referencing forms of social critique which treat the impersonal character of capitalist social relations and their logics of accumulation as a fetish or a veil which obscures real, human relations of exploitation. Such perspectives may be found, for example, in some anti-­globalization discourses, or Georg Lukács’ theory of reification.63 In contrast to these kinds of analysis, Žižek instead wishes to emphasize that those abstract relations are not false appearances, and certainly not just the mystifying ideologies of financiers; rather, abstract, impersonal relations are real abstractions, constitutive of capitalism.64 These perspectives could allow Žižek to raise important questions concerning Laclau’s theories. Although Laclau insists on the discursive construction of political identities over and against any reduction to economic class or interest, his notions of hegemonic struggle and its equivalential chains are based on an understanding of modern social domination that reduces to a group or groups dominating others. Moreover, Laclau understands abstraction and universality as the discursive effects of hegemonic projects; he does not elaborate a theory of real abstractions—i.e., of impersonal capitalist social relations which are themselves peculiarly abstract and tendentially universal. Žižek thus could raise the question of whether a genuinely anti-­ systemic politics, which took as its critical object impersonal social structures rather than forms of group exploitation, could be accommodated by: 1. Laclau’s theory; 2. Populism, if one accepts Laclau’s definition; 3. Politics itself, if Laclau’s ontology succeeds in remaining one. In my view, each of these would be issues worth pursuing. Žižek, however, does not appear to develop these issues in a clear and sustained manner, and moreover some of his comments seem to be in tension with the above. He is clearly motivated to establish grounds for a more critical approach to populist phenomena. Indeed, he seeks to ground a global skepticism of all instantiations of populism, and he therefore attempts to build critical specifications into the definition of populism itself, and moreover to remain at Laclau’s formal/ontological level of politico-­discursive logics in formulating that definition. Žižek thus introduces his critical theory of populism as a “supplement” to Laclau’s definition, and he attempts to formulate notions of “reification,” “mystification,” etc. on this basis. Here I can raise two brief concerns about this procedure. First, it would appear that for Žižek those formal politico-­discursive processes are themselves supposed to generate the kinds of misrecognitions concerning political solidarities and their enemy others to which he has alluded. Laclau’s analysis does portray a certain narrowing or simplification of the political field. However, it is difficult to see how his framework could illuminate the specific, patterned directions in which those reductions have operated historically.

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Alternatively, if it is not those logics themselves which generate the misrecognition, then Žižek would owe an account of why some forms of domination appear other than they are, and an account of how this integrates into the analyses of formal politico-­ discursive processes that he otherwise accepts from Laclau. Second, despite the gestures in a systemic direction, at other moments Žižek’s mode of supplementation seems to accept implicitly the premises of personal domination along with the production of friend/foe binaries through politico-­discursive logics. As he phrases matters, populism by definition “displaces the immanent social antagonism into the antagonism between a unified people and its external enemy.”65 The thrust of such comments is that there is a conflict integral to capitalism, presumably the social antagonism between labor and capital, and that in populism this is “displaced” onto a different antagonism, such as that between “producers” and “parasites.” This approach further implies that there is some form of normative political identity against which the outcomes of hegemonic struggle could be judged. In these respects, Žižek’s argument sometimes appears to collapse back into positing class-­based identities as preexistent, “objective,” and normative. And indeed Laclau has portrayed Žižek as one among “new versions of traditional Marxism,” in which “popular identity is reduced to class unity.”66 Laclau typically associates “reification” with his bête noire Georg Lukács, who in turn modeled his theory on Marx’s analysis of the “fetish.” For Laclau this category necessarily entails an operation of inversion: “things . . . appear as the true social agents.”67 Tearing away this fetishistic mask, or reversing the inversion, would then reveal that behind these false appearances are real, human relations—by which are meant class relations. Laclau then takes this theory of reification to have direct bearing on the kinds of hegemonic contests that he has treated as an ontology of the political. Assuming that a chain of equivalences “needed to be expressed by some form of symbolic unity,” he argues that there are two opposing possibilities for understanding that expression. In the reification model, there could be a “conceptually specifiable content” running through populist demands, which could be “directly expressed.” Laclau then contrasts this with his own model, in which heterogeneous demands only share the negative feature of their frustration. There is no positive feature common to or underlying all of the different demands, and so there can be no direct representation of the equivalential chain; rather, equivalential negativities will be represented by the single demand that symbolizes the chain. Here, according to Laclau, the opposition “true/ distorted,” allegedly an entailment of the theory of reification, would be nonsensical. The homogenization of heterogeneous demands through the tendentially empty signifier is not the “revelation of any underlying ‘true’ identity,” but rather “the construction of something essentially new.” It is a “creatio ex nihilo that it is not possible to reduce to any preceding or ultimate reality.” Therefore “there is no question of true or false consciousness,” and so one is instructed to “forget reification.”68 For Laclau, moreover, the category of “reification” necessarily entails that of “false consciousness.” By the latter, he has always meant an ideology which masks forms of class domination, and which therefore prevents the proletariat from coming to consciousness of the exploitative relations in which it is embedded.69 According to Laclau, such a framework implies teleological assumptions as to the role of the proletariat as the revolutionary subject; false consciousness is that which prevents the

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proletariat from grasping the objective class position which would render it the proper agent of revolutionary transformation—of History. As the language of a creatio ex nihilo will already suggest, Laclau opposes these putative teleologies with assertions of radical contingency in the generation of political identities. In the remainder of this chapter I begin to outline a different approach to these issues. Although I share Žižek’s motivation to develop a more critical approach to phenomena-­that-often-­have-been-­called-“populist,” I do not think it necessary to build that critique into the definition of populism itself. I shall concede Laclau’s definition of the term as referring to a politico-­discursive logic of identity formation. Certainly this has proved its utility to researchers.70 I rather contend that the kinds of critique towards which Žižek sometimes gestures are more adequately pursued at the level of what Laclau would view as the content of at least some populist phenomena. But that is also to say that the kinds of theoretical frameworks that Laclau employs in delineating the formal politico-­discursive logics of populist identity formation may not be adequate to the questions that one should want to raise regarding those contents. If for example we wish to inquire into why binaries such as “producer-­ parasite” have been plausible to historical actors and have been historically recurrent contents, which is to ask why they have been persistently available for populist politico-­ discursive articulation, then I argue that the best way of approaching this question is by relating those discourses to forms of capitalist practice. As a point of departure for this analysis, let us consider briefly how Laclau treats such contents, taking the thematically pertinent example of his comments on Chartism, which he derives from Gareth Stedman Jones’ classic research on the subject.71 Stedman Jones set out to question the traditional historiography on Chartism, which treated it as a social movement that responded directly to the industrial revolution and was immediately expressive of material interests. Such histories had failed to explore the discourses of the movement itself, and those discourses located it not as a proto-­ proletarian class movement, but rather in a tradition of British radicalism beginning with eighteenth-­century Tory opposition to Whig oligarchy. A recurring feature of this discourse was the imputation of social problems to parasitic and speculative groups that allegedly had gained control of the state. In Stedman Jones’ words: “If the land could be socialized, the national debt liquidated, and the bankers’ monopoly control over the supply of money abolished, it was because all these forms of property shared the common characteristic of not being the product of labor. It was for this reason that the feature most commonly picked out in the ruling class was its idleness and parasitism.”72 Laclau renders this as a dominant discourse dividing society into two “camps,” within which the above demands constitute links in an equivalential chain. Thus the Chartist discourse was not a “sectional” discourse of the working class, but rather a “popular” discourse addressed to all “producers” and positioned against all “idlers.” Since those idlers had allegedly monopolized state power, this also featured anti-­statist demands.73 Laclau further recapitulates in his own framework Stedman Jones’ account of the failure of Chartist hegemonic struggle, seizing in particular on two critical moments. First, although the anti-­statist dimensions of Chartism might have been able to “amalgamate social protest” against centralizing reforms of the 1830s—i.e., to expand

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and name the equivalential chain—the middle classes ultimately sought alternatives to allying with potentially threatening groups, and the popular camp soon fractured. Second, state policy changed in such a fashion as to accommodate needs like housing, health and education, thereby further breaking the chain of equivalences (and reverting to a logic of difference). Moreover, insofar as the state “relaxed its grip on the economy,” it could no longer be positioned as the source of all problems, thus undermining Chartism’s construction of the enemy other. As Laclau explains, this meant that the “opposition between producers and parasites, which had been the foundation of the Chartist equivalential discourse, lost its meaning.”74 The first conclusion we might draw from this is that Laclau is not especially interested in the specific contents articulated in these processes. He has developed the ontological/formal analysis of populism in part in the effort to circumvent the difficulties of defining “populism” in terms of its ideological contents. In the analysis of Chartism, the producer/parasite binary appears to enter the analysis as that which unites the “middle class” with the more radical elements in opposition to the enemy. In these stretches of his argument, Laclau appears to be engaged with the content of these constructions often only with regard to their functions within the discursive logic that he delineates. Second, we should further note what kinds of discourses he actually attends to. The basic unit in Laclau’s political ontology is again the “demand.” Although this may well stem from an understandable aversion to privileging any group or subject, it also indicates that the contents of politico-­discursive systems are often expressions of interest. Typically, moreover, those demands seem to look like relatively direct expressions of material interest. In more than one text, for example, he cites such demands as housing and transportation.75 The bulk of his theory is then devoted to the ways that varied demands can constitute chains of equivalence, etc. Thus if Laclau’s theory represents a turn to discourse, the discursive/political mediation often enters the analysis only after the demand has already been articulated. By contrast, I will be focusing on logically prior questions as to the discursive and cultural matrices through which interests and demands could be posited in the first place. Third, in those moments where Laclau begins to discuss substantively the discourses in which those demands were formulated, he tends to refer them back to ongoing traditions. Thus in the example of Chartism above, Laclau embeds the producer-­ parasite discourse in the tradition of British Radicalism stretching back to the eighteenth century. It is of course the case that any form of thought that we wish to analyze will draw from past discursive frameworks in grasping new conjunctures. However, this then raises the further question of why social actors in the 1830s should find that producerist discourse especially compelling. The approach that I will outline below would instead treat each such appropriation as if it were an instance of conceptual genesis, and inquire into the conditions of its possibility.76 Finally, as I have noted above, Laclau is keen to stress the contingency of any specific hegemonic articulation. This again is in opposition to the kinds of determinisms and teleologies that he rightly detected in traditional Marxist and modernization-­ theoretical approaches. However, if the specifically Chartist articulation of the producer-­parasite binary “lost its meaning” according to Laclau, then its ideological

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contents did not. This further indicates that, however contingent that specific articulation and its passing may have been, some of its contents represented a more durable formation. Moreover, I hope that the brief review of producerist discourses above indicates that a distinct pattern emerged transnationally and synchronously. These kinds of patterns call into question theses of radical contingency. Thus, while I might accept the forms of contingency that Laclau locates at the level of hegemonization, I shall insist that, when we turn to analysis of the ideological contents of populism and their availability for hegemonic articulation, we avoid applying post-­structuralist ontologies in totalizing fashion and instead remain attentive to the mixtures of contingency, pattern, and compulsion.

Towards an account of producerist populisms I have presented anti-­financial discourses that shared a number of features, including binaries that pitted producers against financial parasites, criticism of the gold standard, and conspiracy-­theoretical reasoning. In beginning to develop a framework for understanding how these discourses could become compelling for historical actors, I will focus primarily on the first of these features. In the social imaginaries expressed in these oppositions, producers were engaged in labor processes that generated concrete, material goods. This production was deemed creative and healthy, and thought to satisfy the needs of the community. The community of producers in turn was often understood to be homogenous and organically rooted in the national community. It constituted in this sense a form of Gemeinschaft. By contrast, finance capital was identified as “mobile” capital, indifferent to community or geography, and concerned only with the greatest return on investments. Its agents were often judged to be rootless and cosmopolitan. They were thought to produce no material, concrete, useful goods, but to be focused purely on quantitative gain. Their accumulation of profit was, in some discourses, not only without labor but without limit. In order to profit without work, they cheated, swindled, and exploited those engaged in concrete, material forms of labor. In contrast with the health of productive activities and the communities they served, finance was thought to be unhealthy and parasitic. In some cases, moreover, the perceived negative features of productive enterprises, such as the harmful or exploitative treatment of industrial workers, were imputed to the kinds of pressures exerted on industrial employers through debt relations and the domination of financial parasites. In addressing these patterns of affirmation and demonization, I want to begin from a little-­known essay by Max Weber. In 1887, in the midst of the first “Great Depression,” conservatives in the German Reichstag had proposed an inquiry to examine the commodity and stock exchanges and their alleged damage to primarily agrarian economic interests.77 The ensuing debates concerning legislative intervention occurred during a period of heightened anti-Semitic agitation, the discourses of which continued to oppose financial parasitism with producers, and to associate Jewishness with the stock exchange. In this climate Max Weber composed “Die Börse” for Friedrich Naumann’s Göttingen Arbeiter-Bibliothek.78 One strand of his argument furnishes especially useful points of departure.

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Weber began by indicating that recent criticism of the exchanges had viewed it as a “conspirator’s club,” which “aimed at lying and deception at the expense of honest laboring people.”79 In response to this, he observed that the stock and commodity exchanges were indispensable to modern, large-­scale commerce, and that their necessity had arisen “from the same bases upon which the modern form of commerce itself had grown.” Tracing this growth, he suggested that perhaps individuals had always been dependent upon “social relationships.” However, where historically individuals had produced goods only to meet their own needs, the “social” was the immediate and personal relations of the family, which “produced goods through common work and consumed them in common.” By contrast with this form of social relations, in modern capitalist societies the individual “does not produce goods that he himself will use; but rather those that, according to his expectation, others will need; and thus each individual consumes the product of others’ labor.”80 For Weber, an “historical process” had “dissolved the old communities,” and in their place “embedded the economic practices undertaken by the individual” into a “community of exchange.” As these exchange relationships broadened and deepened into everyday life, producers and consumers became increasingly dependent upon distant counterparts. Weber had thus begun to outline an account of capitalist societies based on forms of impersonal interdependence. Those forms of interdependence were mediated by labor: although individuals did not produce all that they consumed, their labor nonetheless served as the primary means to acquire the goods produced by others. He then began to assimilate these kinds of social relationships characteristic of capitalist society in general with those operative in the stock and commodities markets, in order to demystify the latter and thus to defuse criticism of a “conspirators’ club.” Two moments of his argument are important here. First, he argued that what appeared to distinguish stock and commodities markets was that goods were entirely fungible and significant only in their quantity. Modern commodities markets were based on the sale and purchase of standardized goods, which were significant to market participants solely for their relative prices. Likewise, stock markets dealt in claims on future incomes, and as such were concerned with apparently pure quantities of value. In contrast with this, he noted, one does not buy a “house in general,” but rather “a very specific, given house.” Thus it might seem that the everyday production and exchange of tangible goods, and the subjective dispositions of participants, are in contrast oriented towards the qualitative, concrete particularities of a given commodity. Yet for Weber any differences here were a matter of degree. Although stock and commodities exchanges were overt and extreme cases of practices based upon quantification, as well as of subjective dispositions oriented towards purely quantitative considerations of profit, these were features common to all modern, capitalist social production and exchange. According to Weber, then, there was nothing essential differentiating the production and sale of a house from the trade in standardized amounts of grain, sugar, or bonds and stocks.81 Second, Weber proceeded to analyze the relation between the owner of a financial instrument and the person or persons contributing to interest or dividend payments on that instrument as a specific instance of the impersonal social relations that, as he had argued, were constitutive of modern, capitalist society as a whole.82 One thrust of

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his argument here was to counter any conclusion that the owners of such financial instruments were idle, unproductive, or otherwise disreputable. Rather, as he argued: In itself, a mutual owing-­of-payments is not necessarily a sign that a few “lords of tributes” confront a mass of those bound to pay tributes. The existence of interest payments and dividends . . . is far more only the further outgrowth of the modern “exchange economy,” erected upon the peculiar fact that each person survives on the basis of the output of the work done by others; and the individual works as well for the needs of others.83

Thus the impersonal, market-­mediated forms of social interdependency characterizing credit relations were again not fundamentally different in kind from those characterizing modern capitalist society in general. Weber thus was arguing that capitalist society is utterly saturated with what we might call forms of “abstraction.” It is characterized by social relations that are impersonal, and its practices of exchange and accumulation abstract from the qualitative particularities of goods and laboring activities. They entail forms of quantification, as well as subjective dispositions oriented towards quantitative gain. In these respects, Weber also was arguing in a fashion quite parallel with traditions of classical political economy. When, for example, Adam Smith introduced his categories of “value in use” and “value in exchange,” he was not simply formulating a pre-­marginalist theory of price determination. Rather, he intended those categories to grasp forms of social practice and interdependence. The opening chapters of The Wealth of Nations can be read as attempts to grapple with the character of those forms. In Smith’s version of the labor theory of value, the product, viewed as an exchange value, was significant purely as a quantitative expenditure of labor time; its qualitative properties, and the concrete, particular features of the relevant laboring processes, were not relevant. By contrast, those qualitative properties were directly relevant to the product considered as a use-­value. Moreover, when individuals produced, sold, and purchased exchange-­values, they were thereby engaged in relations of mutual interdependence that were impersonal and that functioned at a spatio-­ temporal distance. In Smith’s example, the buyer of a coat became related to individuals (shepherd, carder, weaver, ship-­builder, etc.) with whom he would never come into contact, and of whom he would never be aware.84 Those forms of interdependence operated behind the backs of the social actors constituting them, depending neither on their consciousness nor their intentions. They also were coercive: the constitution of value by an average labor time posited a norm to which producers were constrained to conform, and it drove the attempt to economize on time through the division of labor. Within these kinds of frameworks, the capitalist social world is constitutively dualistic: its social relations and practices are characterized by an opposition between abstraction and concretion. Although Weber had adduced these considerations primarily to demystify financial markets, his comments nonetheless may be developed in the direction of an account of why criticism of the exchanges, and more broadly populisms, grasped their world in the binary fashions that we have been exploring. Weber implied that, insofar as stock market and credit-­mediated relationships involved

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more overt and dramatic performances of capitalist practices of abstraction, they could appear as the primary or even exclusive sources of that abstraction, of the pursuit of pure quantitative gain, and of impersonal relations. As he further intimated, this was so emphatically the case that they could even appear fundamentally different from other forms of capitalist practices, such as forms of industrial or agrarian production and exchange. Weber’s comments thus could begin to illuminate the conditions of plausibility of producerist populist binaries. Everyday experiences of dualistic capitalist social practices render plausible a binary social universe in which abstraction is opposed with concretion, and in which financial forms of capital could be singled out and criticized as the main exemplars and even causes of these social phenomena of abstraction, while, conversely, industrial and agrarian laboring practices could be viewed as entirely external to those phenomena—as representing concrete, qualitatively specific laboring acts that produce goods for an immediate community of fellow-­ producers—a Gemeinschaft. Some strands of Marxian political economy have been concerned with similar issues, and I will proceed to develop my account with reference to these traditions.85 As expressed in Marx’s famous treatment of the “commodity” as a value and use-­value, he was concerned with practices characterized by dualistic oppositions between abstraction and concretion similar to those explored by Smith. However, whereas Smith attempted to deduce social practices from the transhistorical propensity to truck and barter, and thus treated them as the natural human relations that feudal institutions had impeded, Marx sought to grasp such relations as historically specific to capitalism. In the third chapter of Capital, in the process of exploring the relation of value to price, he noted that commodities require a “guardian” to “lend them his tongue.” To this he added that “savages and semi-­savages use the tongue differently,” and he proceeded to relate reports of barter among Eskimos in which the participants licked articles upon receiving them.86 This is one moment of an argument designed to alienate the reader from everyday capitalist practices, to illuminate their peculiarity, and through this their ultimate historical contingency. Marx developed his categories and theoretical apparatus in order to grasp what he saw as a field of impersonal compulsions and an historical dynamic at the core of capitalism. As he demonstrated, the determination of value by socially necessary labor-­ time exerts temporal compulsions on social actors, driving them to maximize the accumulation of value by increasing productivity. They achieve this by altering the material constitution of concrete laboring activities: they divide labor, apply science and technology, and so on. Each newly achieved level of productivity then serves as a baseline as they are again compelled by value to innovate again. Hence, even in these most preliminary terms, these dynamics involve dialectical interactions between the abstract, value dimensions of capitalism and concrete, use-­value dimensions. Indeed one could argue that it was in order to grasp this core dynamic of capitalism that Marx critically appropriated the categories of political economy, with their labor theory of value and their opposition between abstraction and concretion. Marx also was concerned to develop an account of how patterns of practice appeared to those who performed them, and he argued that this interaction between forms of social abstraction and concretion, and thus the sources and features of capitalist

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dynamics, were especially difficult for actors to discern. As he argued in the opening chapters of Capital, value was the “social” dimension of the commodity, and it was historically specific to capitalist society. Yet of course one can’t see value by examining a product. Rather, the existence of value was only expressed in the practice of exchanging one commodity with another, including that most common exchange of a product for the money-­commodity. This latter practice generated the money-­name for the value of the product, which is its “price.” However, these very practices of exchanging a product for money simultaneously expressed but also seemed to obscure the existence of value, as well as the existence of the abstract, value-­constituting dimension of labor.87 Marx attempted to develop this account of value and its appearance on a number of levels, and I can only touch upon one here. The monetary price of a commodity can differ from its value, and in practice must necessarily differ if price is to fulfill its function of allocating social labor.88 The determinants of price then include all manner of contingencies, including the vicissitudes of supply and demand. Although the “expression” of value must always occur in and through these contingencies, this itself obscures the fact that there is such a phenomenon as a determinate value, constituted, in the over-­arching historical sweep of capitalist practice, by socially necessary labor time. Actors nonetheless continue to perform practices characterized by abstraction, and the experiences of this abstraction and the social compulsions exerted by it often become associated with money and finance. Insofar as actors register social forms of abstraction and compulsion but impute them reductively to these latter phenomena, their consciousness warrants the term “misrecognition.” This kind of analysis informed Marx’s approach to Proudhonian socialists, who were able to conflate the reform of money and banking with the abolition of capitalism.89 Nonetheless, Marx never fully worked out an account of why precisely the attributes and effects of the social practices grasped with the category of “value” have historically been imputed to finance. In pursuing that question further, Weber’s comments could provide one useful point of departure: as phenomena like finance capital present social actors with especially overt and dramatic processes of abstraction, these can then come to represent the lived experience of socially general patterns of abstraction as a whole. Further, for Marx the experience of capitalist crisis seemed to reinforce these tendencies. In suggestive accounts of what we today might call “financialization,” Marx argued that periodic bouts of overaccumulation generated money capital that could not be invested in industrial production, and that this capital could then flow to wherever it might find the highest rates of return—i.e., irrespective of the qualitative specificities and geographic locations of its deployment. This deployment of money capital could then contribute to the generation of bubbles and busts familiar in capitalist history. Yet these historical processes seemed to appear to social actors in dramatically foreshortened terms: they blamed finance and “mobile capital” alone for capitalist crises. As Marx claimed with reference to these understandings of crisis, “the political economists, who purport to explain through speculation the regular spasms of industry and trade, are similar to the now extinct school of Naturphilosophen, who regard fever as the cause for all illnesses.”90 Where exclusively money and finance are associated with processes of abstraction, compulsion, crisis, etc., they have been opposed in binary fashion with industrial

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and agrarian production. The latter are conceived as their concrete “other,” and as external to those processes rather than intrinsically bound up with them. This further impacts on conceptions of labor. With the mediational, abstract, value-­constituting dimension of labor obscured, “labor” in capitalism could appear as only concrete, qualitatively specific practices aimed at the production of socially useful material goods, for the benefit of a concrete, geographically rooted, immediate community of fellow producers. This was one reason why Marx sometimes described the combined effect of these appearances in terms of an “externalization” of the commodity form.91 Aside from its Hegelian resonance, the purchase of that category is to indicate that value and use-­value dimensions are intrinsically related to each other, and that understanding their interaction is critical to grasping capitalist historical dynamics. But where these dimensions were misrecognized and viewed in binary terms as an external opposition of money/finance and labor/production, the source of those dynamics became opaque. These analyses, I am arguing, could help to account for the plausibility of producerist populist discourses, in which “labor,” and with it the “producers” of use-­values were opposed with money and finance. Moreover, the ways that these conceptions obscure the core dynamics of capitalism help to understand how the sensed impersonal compulsions that drove dramatic transformations of social life have been identified with and ascribed to finance. Financiers then could be held responsible for some of the negative social dislocations associated with processes of capitalist development. In the set of discourses that I have reconstructed above, Fritsch, for example, was able to argue that, if employers had been forced to treat their workers in a harmful and exploitative manner, then this was because finance had imposed such imperatives on the industrial bourgeoisie. In these types of discourses, it sometimes seemed that finance alone was involved in dynamics of accumulation and profit seeking, and that it imposed this “mammonistic spirit” on the rest of the economy. Based on the frameworks I am elaborating, then, Fritsch’s conclusions are an overt example of the misrecognition of impersonal compulsions, and their imputation to finance and financial agents. Although forms of misrecognition are an important part of the accounts that I have been developing, these are also quite different from the kinds of Marxian analyses that Laclau had targeted. They do not focus on “false consciousness,” or on class “ideologies”: they do not attempt to explain producerist discourses as ideologies that hide the exploitation of labor by capital, displacing putatively normative class antagonisms and interpellating subjects instead as “producers.”92 The approaches I am developing adduce forms of capitalist practice in the effort to render plausible some of the binary constructions of populist discourse, and in this they focus on the ways that impersonal social relations and structural forms of domination (rather than putatively more “real” forms of class exploitation) have been misrecognized and imputed to finance and financial agents. Moreover, those forms of impersonal domination may help to grasp the sources of “systemic violence” to which Žižek alluded, but I have sketched an account of their misrecognition that does not operate through the politico-­discursive processes that Žižek accepted from Laclau’s theory, and that instead questions at a logically prior level the persistent historical availability of producerist discourses for processes of hegemonization.

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These differences have fundamentally important political consequences insofar as they entail very different critical standpoints. The kinds of Marxism that Laclau rejects would again criticize producerist populist politics for distorting the “real” antagonism of labor and capital. Such a position has cohered historically with programs in which proletarian labor is the standpoint for the critique of the market and private property, and in which this labor should be realized in a post-­capitalist society. The framework that I have been elaborating instead entails the abolition of that labor, and it problematizes producerist populism in quite different terms. At the center of the capitalist dynamics that I introduced above is a structural compulsion to augment productivity through technology. This tends to displace labor and expel it from production processes. In doing so, it begins to create the possibility for a general and permanent reduction in the need for human labor, and thus the possibility for new forms of social life that would not be organized around the expenditure of that labor. For Marx this trajectory is not linear, and it does not automatically generate a post-­capitalist, post-­labor society. Rather, the achievement of those possibilities is constrained by countervailing dynamics, which reconstitute the need to expend human labor. As Marx put it: “Capital itself is the moving contradiction, [in] that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth.”93 By this he meant that although capitalism does tend to render human labor superfluous to the production of material goods, individuals nonetheless continue to act out a pattern of practice in which labor-­time serves as a measure of value, and in which they are compelled to expend human labor as the means to the acquisition of material goods. In this analysis, labor is thus retained as a structural feature of capitalist social life, and the possibilities of reducing human labor are not realized. Indeed the very category of “capital” is meant to denote these simultaneous and countervailing tendencies, and it was in this sense that capital “itself ” could be a “contradiction”: it itself both generated new possibilities for an emancipatory reconfiguration of social life, and it itself simultaneously constrained their realization. Within this framework, emancipatory critique would aim ultimately at seizing these historically constituted possibilities, overcoming the need for labor as we know it, and thus overcoming the historically specific, structuring role played by labor in capitalist societies. This would radically alter the structuration of time, allowing for the pursuit of practices more fulfilling than labor under capitalism. From this perspective, the ultimate problem with a social imaginary constituted through producerist binaries is that labor is affirmed as healthy and virtuous; as the standpoint for the critique of financial parasitism, this labor is a vision of the future. It would seem that a politics aimed at the abolition of labor will always remain beyond the horizon of producerist populisms.94

Conclusions In this chapter I have characterized producerist critiques of finance, provided examples of their persistence in phenomena often named “populist,” and sketched some of the theoretical resources that could help to approach them critically and account for

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their recurrent plausibility. In doing so, I have emphasized transnational and temporal homogeneities. This of course is not to deny that there have been important transformations both in contestations of finance and in populism, and I shall conclude by considering one example very briefly. I have addressed discourses on finance linked with criticism of the gold standard and prescriptions for a managed currency. By contrast, some contemporary right-­wing populisms in the United States seek to limit the supply of currency by re-­instituting a gold standard, and yet they have framed these demands in critical discourses on financial domination not dissimilar from those proto-Keynesians above, often also constructing conspiracy theories. To approach such variations adequately would require addressing a number of topics that clearly exceed my purview here. Tensions between the centralization and decentralization of banking institutions, for example, would be absolutely vital. So too would be the historical transformations of capitalism (from laissez-­faire, to KeynesianFordist, to neoliberal) intervening in and between such discourses. There are nonetheless preliminary advantages to the approach that I have outlined. First, I have proceeded here at an extraordinarily high level of historical and conceptual abstraction. This, however, is necessary if one wishes to avoid identifying producerist forms of populism too closely with one of their historical instantiations—with, for example, arguments for or against the gold standard.95 Second, if the deployment of producerist binaries has been marked by these kinds of historical variability, it has not been without overarching patterns (and thus not entirely contingent). Rather, in the above example concerning international currency regimes, the kind of theory I have outlined above would be able to illuminate the relevant positions and their interrelatedness by locating them within tensions intrinsic to capitalist practices themselves. Political economy, whether critical or affirmative, has always registered a tension between the need to pursue expansionary monetary and fiscal policy on one hand, and the need to avoid inflation and maintain the value of a currency on the other. This tension has structured a number of historians’ narratives of interwar Europe and the Depression.96 Marxists have identified it as a “contradiction”—a scenario in which actors are compelled to pursue countervailing, mutually exclusive courses of action.97 In perhaps the most widely known non-Marxist articulation, the “Trilemma” of international finance states that nations cannot simultaneously maintain: 1. Open flows of capital across borders; 2. Control over domestic monetary policy; 3. Control over the stability of the exchange rate (including a fixed exchange rate regime like the gold standard).98 Each of these goals and capacities might be desirable. Indeed historical actors have been compelled to attempt to pursue them all at once. But the Trilemma formally describes the fact that at least one of these three demands must be sacrificed. From the perspective that I am outlining here, the producer-­parasite binary can be understood as affirming one pole of these contradictions and aligning it with the values of “producers,” while associating the opposing pole of the contradiction with the enemy “parasites.” Thus both affirmation and criticism of the gold standard, both Keynesianism and austerity, have emerged as producerist populisms. On this basis one might finally attempt to shed further light on conspiracy theories. As I noted above, it often has been argued that conspiracy theories conflate structural factors with the agency of conspirators. My analysis locates one very specific conflation.

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Where historical actors have aligned “producers” discursively with, for example, that pole of the above contradiction that compels expansion of the currency supply vis-àvis slumps or crises, they have sensed the constraints on such policy. However, rather than recognizing those constraints as issuing from the intrinsic structural tensions of an international monetary regime, they have misrecognized them as the hypertrophied agency of international conspirators.

Notes   1 See for example the essays collected in Ernest Gellner and Ghita Ionescu (eds.), Populism: its Meanings and National Characteristics (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969). For classic statements see also Gino Germani, Política y sociedad en una época de transición, de la sociedad tradicional a la sociedad de masas (Buenos Aires: Editorial Paidos, 1962); and Authoritarianism, Fascism, and National Populism (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1978).   2 “Discourse” here includes emphases on ideological contents, their logics of articulation, rhetorical styles, etc. See for example Ernesto Laclau, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory: Capitalism, Fascism, Populism (London: New Left Books, 1977); and On Populist Reason (London and New York: Verso, 2005); Margaret Canovan, Populism (London: Junction Books, 1981); Paul Taggart, Populism (Buckingham and Philadelphia: Open University Press, 2000); Yves Mény and Yves Surel, “The Constitutive Ambiguity of Populism,” in Yves Mény and Yves Surel (eds.), Democracies and the Populist Challenge (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 1–20; Cas Mudde, “The Populist Zeitgeist,” Government and Opposition 39: 4 (2004), 541–63; Francisco Panizza (ed.), Populism and the Mirror of Democracy (London and New York: Verso, 2005); Daniele Albertazzi and Duncan McDonnel, “Introduction: The Sceptre and the Spectre,” in Daniele Albertazzi and Duncan McDonnell (eds.), Twenty-First Century Populism: The Spectre of Western European Democracy (Houndsmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 1–11. For an overview of the turn to discourse with emphasis on Latin American cases, see Robert S. Jansen, “Populist Mobilization: A New Theoretical Approach to Populism,” Sociological Theory 29: 2 (June 2011), 75–96.   3 For reflections on cultural turns consonant with my analysis, see William H. Sewell, Jr., Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).   4 For an essay sensitive to this coupling in British history, see James Epstein, “The Populist Turn,” The Journal of British Studies 32: 2 (April 1993), 177–89. Others have claimed to discern internal relations between populism and Cultural Studies in Britain: see Jon Beasley-Murray, Posthegemony: Political Theory and Latin America (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).   5 See for example Peter Fritzsche, Rehearsals for Fascism: Populism and Political Mobilization in Weimar Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Cas Mudde, Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).   6 Laclau, On Populist Reason; Ernesto Laclau, “Populism: What’s in a Name?,” in Francisco Panizza (ed.), Populism and the Mirror of Democracy (London and New York: Verso, 2005), 32–49.

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  7 See for example Yves Mény and Yves Surel (eds.), Democracies and the Populist Challenge (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).   8 See in this volume John Abromeit, Peter Breiner, Ron Formisano, and Charles Postel.   9 Laclau, On Populist Reason; Slavoj Žižek, “Against the Populist Temptation,” Critical Inquiry 32: 3 (Spring 2006), 551–74; Ernesto Laclau, “Why Constructing a People Is the Main Task of Radical Politics,” Critical Inquiry 32: 4 (Summer 2006), 646–80; Slavoj Žižek, “Schlagend, aber nicht Treffend,” Critical Inquiry 33: 1 (Autumn 2006), 185–211. 10 The classic reference remains Alexander Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective: A Book of Essays (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1962). For recent reconsiderations see Caroline Fohlin, Mobilizing Money: How the World’s Richest Nations Financed Industrial Growth (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 11 For further consideration of the epistemology of comparison consonant with my perspective, see Manu Goswami, “Autonomy and Comparability: Notes on the Anticolonial and the Postcolonial,” Boundary 2 32: 2 (2005), 201–25. 12 I shall return below to relate this kind of proto-Keynesian discourse to apparently opposing demands for hard currency, which have been expressed in quite similar producerist discourses. 13 The formal definition here draws upon Brian R. Keeley, “Of Conspiracy Theories,” The Journal of Philosophy 96: 3 (March 1999), 109–26; David Coady (ed.), Conspiracy Theories: The Philosophical Debate (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006). 14 For further consideration of these issues consonant with my approach, see Mark Fenster, Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). 15 Arthur Kitson, A Scientific Solution to the Money Question (Boston: Arena, 1894). 16 Arthur Kitson, The Bankers’ Conspiracy! Which Started the World Crisis (London: Elliot Stock, 1933). 17 Robert W. D. Boyce, British Capitalism at the Crossroads, 1919–1932: A Study in Politics, Economics, and International Relations (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 64. 18 Richard S. Levy, Entry for “Hermann Ahlwardt,” in Richard S. Levy (ed.), Antisemitism: A Historical Encyclopedia of Prejudice and Persecution (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2005), 7–8. 19 “Ahlwardt for Mr. Bryan,” The New York Times, September 15, 1896. 20 E.H.H. Green, “Rentiers versus Producers? The Political Economy of the Bimetallic Controversy c.1880–1898,” The English Historical Review 103: 408 (July 1988), 588–612; and The Crisis of Conservatism: The Politics, Economics, and Ideology of the Conservative Party, 1880–1914 (London and New York: Routledge, 1995). 21 The Bimetallic League, Report of the Proceedings of the Annual Meeting (London: Effingham Wilson; Manchester: J.E. Cornish, 1893), 47. 22 Paul W. Massing, Rehearsal for Destruction: A Study of Political Anti-Semitism in Imperial Germany (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949). 23 Otto Glagau, Der Bankerott des Nationalliberalismus und die “Reaktion” (Berlin: Friedrich Luckhardt, 1878), 71. 24 David Peal, “Anti-Semitism and Rural Transformation in Kurhessen: The Rise and Fall of the Böckel Movement” (Ph.D. Thesis, Department of History, Columbia University, 1985). 25 David Peal, “The Politics of Populism: Germany and the American South in the 1890s,” Comparative Studies in History and Society 31: 2 (April 1989), 340–62.

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26 Hermann Ahlwardt speech in Reichstag, March 6, 1895, Stenographische Berichte über die Verhandlungen des Reichstages. 9. Legislaturperiode 3. Session 1894–95, 53 Sitzung, Vol. 2 (Berlin: Julius Sittenfeld, 1895), 1297. 27 Ibid., 1298. 28 Walther Frank, Hofprediger Adolf Stoecker und die christlichsoziale Bewegung (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1935), 77. 29 Theodor Fritsch, Das ABC der Sozialen Frage (Leipzig: Fritsch, 1892), 8–9. 30 Liebermann von Sonnenberg speech in Reichstag, December 7, 1893, Stenographische Berichte über die Verhandlungen des Reichstages. 9. Legislaturperiode 2. Session 1893–94, 15 Sitzung, Vol. 1 (Berlin: Julius Sittenfeld, 1894), 322. 31 Silvio Gesell, The Natural Economic Order: A Plan to Secure an Uninterrupted Exchange of the Products of Labor, Free from Bureaucratic Interference, Usury and Exploitation, trans. Philip Pye (Berlin: Neo-Verlag and Berlin-Frohnau, 1929). 32 Ibid., 110. 33 See for example “Nervus Rerum: Forsetzung zur Reformation im Münzwesen,” in Hamburg Stiftung für Reform der Geld- und Bodenordnung (eds.), Gesammelte Werke, bd. 1 (Lütjenburg: Gauke, 1988–2009 [1891]), 69–153; “Ford und die Juden,” Freiwirtschaftliche Zeitung 34 (1923). 34 Werner Kertscher and Max Roosen, Die Entscheidung: Die Wissenschaftliche Begründung der neuen Reichsbankpolitik (Hamburg: Hamburger Studiengeselschaft für organische Wirtschaft, 1933), 56. 35 “Would-Be Assassin Wounds Dr. Luther,” New York Times, April 10, 1932. 36 See for example the collection Gottfried Feder, Kampf gegen die Hochfinanz (München: Franz Eher, 1933). 37 Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1939 [1925]), 287. 38 Gottfried Feder, Das Programm der NSDAP und seine weltanschauliche Grundgedanken, ed., Nationalsozialistische Bibliothek (München: F. Eher, 1935 [1927]), 166–9. 39 For Feder’s narration, see his “Grundsätzliches zur finanzierungsfrage des Arbeitsbeschaffungsprogramms. Eine Antwort an Dr. Brüning,” Die Deutsche Volkswirtschaft 5 (May 1932). Reprinted in Kampf gegen die Hochfinanz. See also Hauke Janssen, Nationalökonomie und Nationalsozialismus: Die deutsche Volkswirtschaftslehre in den dreißiger Jahren (Marburg: Metropolis-Verlag, 1998), 410–13. 40 Gottfried Feder, “Goldwährung?,” Völkische Beobachter, July 2, 1932. Reprinted in Feder, Kampf gegen die Hochfinanz, 348. 41 “Notes of the Week,” The New Age 27: 15 (July 22, 1920). 42 See for example Clifford Hugh Douglas, Economic Democracy (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920). 43 Social Credit, revised ed. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1933), v–vi. 44 Oswald Mosley et al., A National Policy: An Account of the Emergency Programme Advanced by Sir Oswald Mosley, M.P. (London: Macmillan, 1931), 42. 45 W.E.D. Allen, The New Party and the Old Toryism, New Party Broadcasts (London: The New Party, 1931 [?]), 4. Copy in Mosley Papers, University of Birmingham, XOMN/B/7/1. 46 Ibid., 8. 47 Ibid., 5. 48 Ibid. Emphasis is Allen’s. 49 Oswald Mosley, The Greater Britain (London: British Union of Fascists, 1932), 27–8. 50 Ibid., 118–19. 51 Harold James, “Banks and Bankers in the German Interwar Depression,” in Youssef Cassis (ed.), Finance and Financiers in European History, 1880–1960 (Cambridge:

Populists and Parasites: On Producerist Reason

52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64

65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78

79 80

291

Cambridge University Press, 1992), 263–81; Philip Williamson, “A ‘Bankers’ Ramp’? Financiers and the British Political Crisis of August 1931,” The English Historical Review 99: 393 (October 1984): 770–806. Laclau, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory, 147. See for example Laclau, “Populism: What’s in a Name?.” Ibid., 39. Laclau, On Populist Reason, 67–128. Laclau, “Populism: What’s in a Name?,” 47. Ibid., 45. Žižek, “Against the Populist Temptation,” 555. Ibid., 556. Ibid., 556–7. Ibid., 566. Ibid., 565–6. Georg Lukács, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” in History and Class Consciousness (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971), 83–222. I return to elaborate on these notions below. For important formulations of such a theory of practical abstraction beyond those of Marx, see Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Andrew Sartori, “Global Intellectual History and the History of Political Economy,” in Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori (eds.), Global Intellectual History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 110–33; Sewell, Logics of History. Žižek, “Against the Populist Temptation,” 555. Laclau, On Populist Reason, 232. Laclau, “Why Constructing a People Is the Main Task of Radical Politics,” 650. Ibid., 653. Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory, 164. See for example Karush in this volume, and Geoff Eley, Reshaping the German Right: Radical Nationalism and Political Change after Bismarck, reprint with new introduction (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991). Gareth Stedman Jones, “Rethinking Chartism,” in Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832–1982 (Cambridge, New York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 90–178. Ibid., 157. Laclau, On Populist Reason, 90. Ibid., 90–1. Ibid., 73; “Populism: What’s in a Name?,” 37; “Why Constructing a People Is the Main Task of Radical Politics,” 654. My formulation here is indebted to Andrew Sartori, Bengal in Global Concept History: Culturalism in the Age of Capital (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). For further context, see Steven Lestition, “Historical Preface to Max Weber, ‘Stock and Commodity Exchanges’, ” Theory and Society 29: 3 (2000), 289–304. Republished as Max Weber, “Die Börse,” in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Soziologie und Sozialpolitik (Tübingen: Verlag J.C.B. Mohr, 1924 [1894]). References here are to the English translation: “Stock and Commodity Exchanges [Die Börse (1894)],” Theory and Society 29: 3 (2000), 305–38. Weber, “Stock and Commodity Exchanges [Die Börse (1894)],” 305. Ibid., 306. Emphases are Weber’s own.

292 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90

91 92

93 94

95

96

97 98

Transformations of Populism in Europe and the Americas Ibid., 309ff. Ibid., 315ff. Ibid., 320. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976 [1776]), 15. My reading of Marx in the following is indebted to Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory. Karl Marx, Capital, trans. Ben Fowkes, vol. 1 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 189–90, fn2. Ibid., Ch. 1. Ibid., 196–7. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), 155–238; Capital, vol. 1, 181. “The Trade Crisis in England,” in Marx/Engels Collected Works, Vol 15: 1856–58 (New York: International Publishers, 1857), 401. For one elaboration of this aspect of Marx’s theory of crisis, see David Harvey, The Limits to Capital (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 153. Such approaches would either be functionalist, or they would assume intentional constructions of ideologies and a top-­down model of manipulation. Aside from the fact that many of the figures reviewed above were self-­evidently invested in producerist imaginaries, these latter approaches also would reveal very little as to why the subjects and the objects of this manipulation found those imaginaries compelling. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (London: Penguin, 1873), 706. With more space I would address rare exceptions to this argument, such as the Social Credit movements noted above. Some factions of Social Credit projected a reduction in human labor time, which was in deep tension with their otherwise producerist discourses. The result was a form of anti-Semitism in which Jewish bankers allegedly conspired to limit the currency supply, and thereby to maintain the need for human labor. In this respect my approach differs from that of Charles Postel in this volume. I certainly agree that both pro- and anti-­gold standard arguments have shaded into conspiracy thinking. However, whereas Postel limits the term “populism” to putatively progressive demands for expanding the currency supply, and then uses similarly conspiracy-­theoretical and demagogic discourses of gold standard advocates as a foil to these progressives, I would take this commonality as provocation to rethink the meaning of “populism” and to inquire further into why (beyond specificities of “American political practice”) similar conspiracy theories could be constructed around otherwise contradictory demands. Charles Maier, Recasting Bourgeois Europe: Stabilization in France, Germany and Italy in the Decade after World War I (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975); Barry Eichengreen, Golden Fetters: The Gold Standard and the Great Depression, 1919–1939 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). See Harvey, The Limits to Capital. The first articulations are typically attributed to: J. Marcus Flemming, “Domestic Financial Policies under Fixed and Floating Exchange Rates,” Staff Papers, International Monetary Fund 9 (November 1962), 369–79; Robert A. Mundell, “Capital Mobility and Stabilization Policy under Fixed and Flexible Exchange Rates,” Canadian Journal of Economic and Political Science 29: 4 (1963), 475–85.

Part Three

Recent Tendencies in Populist Movements in Latin America, Europe, and the United States

16

Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe Today Cas Mudde

Introduction The late Eric Hobsbawm1 termed the twentieth century the “Age of Extremes,” because of how it was dominated, and scarred, by the extreme right of fascism and the extreme left of communism. Nowhere is this more relevant than in Europe, which was torn apart by both political extremes for most of the twentieth century. It has only been since the 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union, that the continent could reintegrate within a liberal democratic context. Today, almost all European countries are democratic and most of these are members of the European Union (EU). But while truly anti-­democratic forces are marginal, reduced to (sometimes violent) sects on both sides of the political spectrum, liberal democracy is not without its political challenges in contemporary Europe. The most significant challenge comes from the populist radical right, which constitutes the third wave2 of postwar far right politics, by far the most successful so far. While it doesn’t attack the system in an all-­out fashion like the political extremes of the early twentieth century, it presents a significant challenge to some of the core values of the European political system, i.e. liberal democracy. This chapter will provide a comprehensive but inevitably concise overview of the populist radical right challenge to European liberal democracy. In particular, I would like to answer four separate but related questions. First, what is the populist radical right? Second, who are their main representatives? Third, why are they electorally successful? And, fourth, what is their political relevance in contemporary Europe? It should be clear that, despite the ongoing economic crisis, Europe is not reliving the 1930s. While European democracies are being challenged, they are strong and vigilant.

What is the populist radical right? What is termed “populist radical right” in this chapter, is more generally termed “extreme right,” “radical right,” or “right-­wing populist” in most academic and media accounts. This is in part a consequence of the fact that, unlike other party families (such as Greens and socialists), populist radical right parties do not self-­identify as

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populist or even (radical) right. Many reject the left-­right distinction as obsolete, arguing that they are, in the terms of the French National Front (FN), “neither left, nor right, but French.” It is not surprising that a phenomenon that goes under many different names is defined in many different ways. But while there are widely different definitions out there, most authors define the essence of the “populist radical right” in fairly similar ways. This is in part a consequence of the professionalization of the study of the populist radical right, or perhaps better: the increasing dominance of social scientific studies over mainly historic or pseudo-­scientific studies.3 For example, today few scholars still use terms like “neofascist” and “extreme right,” or argue that the parties in question are anti-­democratic, racist, or violent. Today, populist radical right parties share a core ideology that combines (at least) three features: nativism, authoritarianism, and populism.4 While individual parties might have additional core features, such as anti-Semitism or welfare chauvinism, all members of the party family share these three features and in the case of all parties these three features constitute (part of) their ideological core. This is not to say that different parties will not express their ideology in different ways, for example by attacking different elites and minorities or holding dissimilar opinions on the death penalty. Simply stated, nativism entails a combination of nationalism and xenophobia. It is an ideology that holds that states should be inhabited exclusively by members of the native group (“the nation”) and that nonnative (or “alien”) elements, whether persons or ideas, are fundamentally threatening to the homogeneous nation state.5 Nativism is mostly directed at “immigrants” (i.e. guest workers and refugees) in Western Europe and “indigenous minorities” (e.g. Hungarians or Roma) in Eastern Europe. In the late 1980s nativism was primarily framed in ethno-­national terms with economic concerns, but particularly since the terrorist attacks of 9/11 West European populist radical right parties (PRRPs) have shifted to an ethno-­religious discourse with strong liberal-­ democratic and security concerns. Concretely, whereas previously “Turkish immigrants” were opposed because of their different culture and alleged drain on the economy and welfare state, today “Muslim immigrants” are rejected because of their purported anti-­democratic beliefs and violent culture. Authoritarianism refers to the belief in a strictly ordered society, in which infringements of authority are to be punished severely.6 This translates into strict law and order policies, which call for more police with greater competencies and less political involvement in the judiciary. The parties criminalize social “problems” (such as abortion, drugs, prostitution), call for higher sentences, less rights for criminals, and more discipline in schools. Often crime and immigration are directly connected; such as, for example, in the slogan “more safety, less immigration” of the Dutch Party for Freedom (PVV). Populism, finally, is an ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, “the pure people” and “the corrupt elite”, and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people.7 Populist radical right politicians claim to be “the voice of the people” and accuse the established parties of being in cahoots with each other. For

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example, the FN would refer to the four mainstream parties (of left and right) as “the Gang of Four,” while the main slogan of the Flemish Bloc (now Flemish Interest, VB) was “One Against All, All Against One.” The three different ideological features are often interconnected in the propaganda of the parties.8 All PRRPs devote disproportionate attention to crimes by “aliens,” be they Roma in the East or immigrants in the West. Similarly, populism and nativism are often connected, as mainstream political parties are accused of ignoring immigrant crime (and suppressing any critique with political correctness) and of favoring immigrants at the expense of the native people. This has led some scholars to conflate the two, i.e. arguing that populism and nativism lead to the same exclusions. This is incorrect, however, as the nativist distinction is between natives and aliens, while the populist division between “the people” and “the elite” is within the native group! Importantly, it is the combination of all three ideological features that makes a party populist radical right. Unlike the extreme right of the 1930s, the populist radical right is democratic, in that it accepts popular sovereignty and majority rule. It also tends to accept the rules of parliamentary democracy; in most cases it prefers a stronger executive, though few parties support a toothless legislature.9 Tensions exist between the populist radical right and liberal democracy, in particular arising from the constitutional protection of minorities (ethnic, political, religious). The populist radical right is in essence monist, seeing the people as ethnically and morally homogeneous, and considering pluralism as undermining the (homogeneous) “will of the people” and protecting “special interests” (i.e. minority rights).

Who are the populist radical right? In contemporary Europe the populist radical right mobilizes primarily in political parties, given that European politics is party politics. In fact, most street activists are extreme right, i.e. rejecting democracy per se (such as neo-Nazis); one of the few exceptions is the English Defence League (EDL). Given that no party self-­defines as populist radical right, classification is up to scholars, and they tend to disagree almost as much as agree. While there are many parties that virtually all scholars agree on, such as the German Republicans (REP) or the FN, fierce debate exists on some others.10 These debates are mainly related to the different definitions used, but are also the result of a continuing lack of detailed academic studies of several parties in smaller European countries. Table 1 lists the highest and most recent electoral results of the sixteen main PRRPs in contemporary Europe.11 What directly stands out, are the huge differences within both the highest results, ranging from 5.6 to 29.5 percent of the vote, and the most recent results, from 1.5 to 26.6 percent. The average high result of these successful parties is 14.7 percent, while their average most recent result is 9.5 percent. It is important to note that Table 1 includes less than half of the roughly 40 European countries. In the other half of the continent PRRPs are electorally unsuccessful, consistently gaining less than 5 percent of the national vote (e.g. Estonia, Germany, Portugal), or do not contest national elections at all (e.g. Iceland, Ireland). In addition,

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Table 1  Electoral results of main populist radical right parties, 1980–2014 Country

Party

Highest result (%)

Last result (%)

Austria Belgium Bulgaria Croatia Denmark France Hungary Italy Netherlands Poland Romania Russia Serbia Slovakia Sweden Switzerland

Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) Flemish Interest (VB) Attack Croatian Rights Party (HSP) Danish People’s Party (DFP) National Front (FN) Movement for a Better Hungary (Jobbik) Northern League (LN) Party for Freedom (PVV) League of Polish Families (LPR) Greater Romania Party (PRM) Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR) Serbian Radical Party (SRS) Slovak National Party (SNS) Sweden Democrats (SD) Swiss People’s Party (SVP)

26.9 12.0 9.4 7.1 13.8 15.3 20.5 10.1 15.5 8.0 19.5 22.9 29.5 11.6 12.9 28.9

20.5 3.7 4.5 3.0 12.2 13.6 20.5 4.1 10.1 — 1.5 11.7 2.0 4.6 12.9 26.6

the electoral successes of European PRRPs do not coincide in time; hence, the often-­ used metaphor of a populist radical right “wave” is only accurate if one uses fairly long time frames (of several decades). Only two of the 16 PRRPs in Table 1 gained their highest result in the last election (Jobbik and SD), while four are no longer represented in their national parliament (LPR, PRM, SNS, SRS). In short, while PRRPs contest elections in the vast majority of European countries, they have been more or less successful in only half. Moreover, in many cases their electoral success was only short-­lived. Today, PRRPs are relevant political actors in about one-­third of all European countries, even if many seem to be beyond their electoral peak. This notwithstanding, the populist radical right is by far the most successful new party family in postwar Europe. In average electoral support only the Greens rival them, but they are only successful in Western Europe.

Why are they electorally successful? The question why PRRPs are electorally successfully has dominated the field, largely driven by the idea that the populist radical right is a “normal pathology” in postwar Europe, a remnant of a pre-­modern past, which should be limited to a tiny part of the population.12 In line with the normal pathology thesis, the explanation is found in crisis: globalization has divided societies into winners and losers, and it is the latter that disproportionately support PRRPs.13 The globalization theory is the latest incarnation of the classic modernization theory, which has been dominating the field of nationalism studies.14 Simply stated, the (underdeveloped) theory holds that globalization has interconnected the world economically, which has created insecurity for large parts of the population (the

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“losers”), which look for salvation in the populist radical right. Globalization finds its most concrete expressions in mass immigration, post-­industrialization, and European integration—in Eastern Europe this comes on top of the multifaceted transition from a socialist dictatorship to a capitalist democracy at the end of the last century.15 At first sight, the losers-­of-globalization thesis seems to be confirmed by the socio-­ demographic profile of the typical populist radical right supporter: a white, lowly educated, blue-­collar male. We also know that populist radical right voters tend to consider immigration more important than the average voter, believe there are more immigrants than there really are, and want to limit immigration.16 But more comprehensive research points at the limits of the loser-­of-globalization thesis.17 First of all, white blue-­collar males constitute only a small part of the electorate of successful PRRPs. Second, the majority of voters in most European countries share most of the populist radical right electorate’s positions on immigration (crime, corruption, or European integration), so the difference is not so much in terms of attitude towards these issues, but in the salience of the issue to the individual.18 This is not to say that globalization is irrelevant to the electoral success of PRRPs. Rather, it explains both too much and too little. Defined in absolute or relative terms, there are many more losers of globalization than voters of PRRPs. Moreover, as Table 1 has shown, the electoral success of PRRPs differs greatly between countries, yet globalization affects European democracies in fairly similar ways. In short, globalization theory is too rough an instrument to explain the electoral successes of PRRPs. The reason is that it only focuses on the demand-­side of populist radical right politics, i.e. it tries to explain why people would support PRRPs. It completely ignores the supply-­ side of politics, i.e. what established and populist radical right parties offer the voters and the political context in which they operate.19 While the electoral system might have an effect on the success of PRRPs,20 most European countries have some form of proportional system, which is believed to favor the rise of new parties. Within multi-party systems, the behavior of established parties seems crucial, particularly in the breakthrough phase of PRRPs. If the established parties, most notably of the right, ignore populist radical right issues like crime, corruption, European integration, and immigration—or take centrist positions on it—PRRPs have an opportunity to exploit the existing frustration of parts of the population. At the stage of electoral breakthrough, i.e. the first electoral success and entry into parliament, the actions of the PRRP are probably less important than the inactions of the established parties—in part because they will not be well known to the broader electorate yet, in part as a consequence of the unofficial boycott by the mainstream media.21 Once a PRRP makes it into parliament, however, it will attract broader media and public scrutiny, and its actions will be vital for its future. There are many examples of PRRPs that have lost their electoral support as a consequence of incompetence and infighting, rather than a decrease in demand among the electorate. But while it is relatively straightforward to explain why some PRRPs fail to establish themselves in the political system, it is much harder to pinpoint the reasons for enduring success. There is no doubt that truly successful PRRPs, i.e. those that are able to maintain their electoral success over several elections, have an attractive leader, a well-­run organization,

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and professional propaganda.22 Moreover, they often have particular Hochburge, (significant) local or regional strongholds, from which they have developed their national success and where they can recover from electoral defeat—examples include Antwerp for the VB, the Provence-Alpes-Cote d’Azur (PACA) for the FN, Žilina for the SNS, and Zurich for the SVP.

What is their political relevance? While for long the literature was focused almost exclusively on debating the correct terms and theories to understand the rise of the populist right, only recently have scholars started to address the key “so what?” question. Are populist radical right parties relevant to contemporary European politics? And, if so, in what way and under which conditions are they relevant? In both the academic and public debate about the populist radical right the answer to the so-­what question was assumed to be clear and above debate: yes! This was based on a broad consensus that PRRPs constitute the main challenge to contemporary European democracies, even if there was a fierce debate about what that challenge exactly entailed—most notably, whether PRRPs are anti-­democratic or anti-liberal democratic. With the mainstream media and politicians similarly obsessed with “the rise” of the populist radical right, leading to disproportionate attention after each individual electoral success of a PRRP, scholars in the field would seldom be challenged on the relevance of their topic. It was relevant because of its ideological threat! Even well before PRRPs entered national governments, scholars would write about their important effects on mainstream parties and politics. Using rather vague terms like Rechtsruck (“pull to the right”), virtually every change in politics in the (assumed) direction of the populist radical right agenda was interpreted as a direct effect of PRRPs—even in countries where PRRPs were not present or relevant. Once different parties started to enter national government coalition, from 2000 onward, scholars finally turned their attention to the empirical study of their effects and influence.23 Not surprisingly, the conclusions were much more modest and less straightforward. In terms of direct power, i.e. government participation, PRRPs play at best a secondary role in European politics. Table  2 lists all government participation of PRRPs in European states since 1980. All in all, a mere twenty-­one of well over three hundred European governments have included a PRRP since 1980.24 The cases are fairly equally spread over the eastern and western parts of the continent, but most East European governments with radical right participation are of the 1990s, while most West European governments are of the twenty-­first century. Still, at the end of 2014, only one European country, Switzerland, had a government that included a PRRP, while no European country had a minority government that was supported by a PRRP. Given that most legislation in western democracies is initiated and passed by governmental parties, the fact that almost 95 percent of all European governments do not include a PRRP should be a caution to expecting too much influence. That said, non-­governmental parties could influence the behavior of governmental parties

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Table 2  Participation in government by populist radical right parties, 1980–2014 Country

Party

Austria

Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ)

Croatia Denmark1 Estonia Greece Italy Netherlands1 Poland Romania Serbia Slovakia Switzerland2

Period(s)

2000–2 2002–5 Alliance for the Future of Austria (BZÖ) 2005–6 Croatia Democratic Union (HDZ) 1990–2000 Danish People’s Party (DFP) 2001–5 2005–7 2007–11 Estonian National Independence Party (ERSP) 1992–5 Popular Orthodox Rally (LAOS) 2011–12 Northern League (LN) 1994 2001–5 2008–11 Party for Freedom (PVV) 2010–12 League of Polish Families (LPR) 2005–6 Romanian National Unity Party (PUNR) 1994–6 Greater Romania Party (PRM) 1995 Serbian Radical Party (SRS) 1998–2000 Slovak National Party (SNS) 1994–8 2006–10 Swiss People’s Party (SVP) 2000–

Coalition partner(s) ÖVP ÖVP ÖVP V & KF V & KF V & KF Isamaa ND & PASOK AN & FI AN & FI & MDC PdL & MpA CDA & VVD PiS & Samoobrona PDSR & PSM PDSR & PSM SPS & JUL HZDS & ZRS HZDS & Smer SPS & FDP & CVP

  Minority governments in which PRRPs function as the official support party.   Swiss governments are longstanding, voluntary governments based on a “magic formula,” rather than the outcome of the parliamentary elections. 1 2

through a variety of different mechanisms. I will here shortly assess the impact of PRRPs on four aspects of European politics: people, parties, policies, and polities.25 There is a lot of debate about whether the rise of PRRPs is the cause or the consequence of the rise of certain values. As Ronald Inglehart has shown, Europe has gone through a “silent revolution” since the 1960s, which has seen a sharp increase in the importance of socio-­cultural over socio-­economic issues.26 While Inglehart and others used this theoretical framework to explain the rise of new social movements in the 1970s, and Green parties in the 1980s, various scholars have argued that PRRPs are the illegitimate children of the silent revolution.27 According to some, they have even caused a “silent counter-­revolution.”28 Logically, PRRPs should have the strongest impact on issues and values that are directly connected to their ideological core; in the case of nativism this would be immigration and European integration, for authoritarianism it would be crime, and for populism the issue of corruption and dissatisfaction with democracy/the political system. Many scholars argue that PRRPs, through their agenda-­setting power, have indeed impacted the issue positions (and salience) of the European people.29 Backing this popular view up with some survey evidence, Charles Westin30 concludes that: “When protest parties such as the VB and FN receive a considerable share of the vote, the gravitational centre of public opinion is shifted significantly to the right.”

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However, other studies show very different results, and all of them suffer from limited or problematic data. For example, with regard to mass attitudes toward immigration and integration, some studies find a significant effect,31 while others find a more limited effect,32 or no significant effect at all.33 The picture is not much clearer on issues such as Euroscepticism, crime, and political dissatisfaction.34 In fact, it looks like PRRPs have not needed to change the issue positions of large parts of the European public, because they were already largely in line with the core program of the parties.35 One of the most widespread ideas is that PRRPs have pushed the other parties to the right, most notably the mainstream right-­wing parties. Jean-Yves Camus36 voices this opinion on the basis of the French case: “the FN’s ideas . . . have had an influence on the political agenda of the right on issues such as immigration, law and order, multiculturalism and the definition of national identity.” It is particularly with regard to immigration policies that scholars have claimed the impact.37 However, the picture is quite complex; the impact should be qualified in both strength and scope. In those cases that PRRPs have been able to influence other parties on the broader immigration issues, it has been across the political spectrum on immigration control (mostly political asylum), yet only on the right side of the spectrum on integration.38 With regard to other issues, such as crime and Euroscepticism, the influence of PRRPs seems even more modest. In most cases mainstream (right-­wing) parties needed little external stimulus to move to the right. There is little doubt that most European countries have developed more authoritarian policies on issues related to immigration and integration as well as crime and national security since the rise of PRRPs started in the late 1980s. However, this rise is just a minor factor in the process. Hence, neither the electoral success of PRRPs nor their government participation seems to be highly related to the adoption of authoritarian policies.39 In fact, almost all studies of governments with PRRP participation note the limited impact of the populist radical right;40 even in the Berlusconi governments41 and even on their key issue of immigration.42 In light of the limited influence on the people, parties, and policies of Europe, it should come as little surprise that PRRPs have not had much impact on the polities of Europe. Even when in government, PRRPs have not substantially changed the political system in which they operate. In line with their contentious ideological relationship with liberal democracy, several PRRPs have tried to undermine the liberal aspects of their democratic system; at times helped by other illiberal democratic parties—like the Italian Forza Italia43 or the Slovak Movement for a Democratic Slovakia (HZDS).44 In all cases they were fought back by a remarkably resilient coalition of opposition parties, civil society and, most importantly, courts.

Conclusion Populist radical right parties are experiencing their biggest electoral and political success in postwar Europe history, but remain relatively secondary political actors at the same time. Just as the Great Depression did not lead to a Europe-­wide rise in electoral support for fascist parties,45 the Great Recession has not led to a Europe-­wide

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rise in electoral support for PRRPs. Both Adolf Hitler and Marine Le Pen are more the exception than the rule. At the same time, warnings for a new Weimar era grossly overestimate today’s challengers, while at the same time underestimating the contemporary democracies of (particularly Western) Europe.46 The extreme right of the early twentieth century was fundamentally anti-­democratic, rejecting both popular sovereignty and majority rule, yet the populist radical right of the early twenty-­first century is anti-liberal democratic, rejecting minority protections and pluralism, but supporting popular sovereignty and majority rule. Even more importantly, while most European democracies were relatively new and lacking support in the 1930s, they are mature and broadly supported today. At the same time, PRRPs are the most successful new party family of postwar Europe and are increasingly part of national governments—for the moment, without much success. There are at least five reasons for their governmental impotence. First, PRRPs focus on only a few issues, most notably immigration and integration. Second, political parties are just one of the major actors in the policy-­making process and PRRPs tend to lack allies among the other major actors (such as bureaucrats and NGOs). Third, PRRPs are always junior partners in coalition governments, much less experienced than their coalition partners. Fourth, coalition agreements are the outcomes of the processes of policy convergence predating the government cooperation.47 Fifth, PRRPs prefer to keep “one foot in and one foot out” of government.48 There is no reason this will continue forever, however. While the thesis that populist parties are destined for success in opposition but failure in government is popular in the academic literature,49 it is factually incorrect. Like social democratic parties before the Second World War, and Green parties in the 1990s, populist parties can make the transformation from successful opposition party to effective governing party.50 And as the (after)effects of the economic crisis will impact elections for many more years to come, and mainstream parties continue to converge with the populist radical right on socio-­cultural policies, PRRPs will continue to challenge Europe’s liberal democracies. But even in case of unprecedented success, the changes will not lead to a fundamental transformation of the political system, as the populist radical right is not a pathological normalcy of European democracy, unrelated to its basic values, but rather a pathological normalcy, which strives for the radicalization of mainstream values.

Notes   1 See his The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991 (New York: Pantheon, 1995).   2 Klaus von Beyme, “Right-Wing Extremism in Post-War Europe,” West European Politics 11:2 (1988), 1–18.   3 Tim Bale, “Supplying the Insatiable Demand: Europe’s Populist Radical Right,” Government & Opposition 47:2 (2012), 256–74.   4 For an elaborate discussion of the definition and ideology, see the first chapter of Cas Mudde, Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

304   5   6   7   8

  9 10

11

12 13

14 15

16 17 18

Transformations of Populism in Europe and the Americas Ibid., 18–20. Ibid., 22–3. Cas Mudde, “The Populist Zeitgeist,” Government & Opposition 39:4 (2004), 543–63. On the ideology of PRRPs, see, among others, Sarah Harrison and Michael Bruter, Mapping Extreme Right Ideology: An Empirical Geography of the European Extreme Right (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Cas Mudde, The Ideology of the Extreme Right (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000); Marc Swyngedouw and Gilles Ivaldi, “The Extreme Right Utopia in Belgium and France: The Ideology of the Flemish Vlaams Blok and the French Front National,” West European Politics 24:3 (2001), 1–22. See Mudde, Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe, 138ff. It would lead too far to discuss all categorizations in detail here (see ibid., 32ff). The most important parties that are excluded from this analysis, but that some other authors include, are the Dutch List Pim Fortuyn (LPF), the Finns Party (PS), the Greek Golden Dawn (XA), the Hungarian Civic Union (FIDESZ), the Italian Forza Italia (FI) and National Alliance (AN), the Latvian National Alliance (NA), the Norwegian Progress Party (FP), the Swedish New Democracy (ND), the Turkish Nationalist Action Party (MHP), and the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP). All share some but not all of the features of the populist radical right. In most cases the debate is over the question whether nativism (most often anti-­immigrant sentiments) is ideological or opportunistic, i.e. only used strategically in election campaigns. The Greek Golden Dawn is excluded because it is an extreme right party, i.e. it is anti-­democratic, rejecting popular sovereignty and majority rule. I have included only PRRPs that have won more than 5 percent of the vote in at least two consecutive national parliamentary elections since 1980 and only one PRRP per country. The most important PRRPs that have been excluded are the Alliance for the Future of Austria (BZÖ), which was always second to the FPÖ (from which it split), and the Greek Popular Orthodox Rally (LAOS), which only once gained more than 5 percent of the vote in national elections. Both parties have lost representation in their national parliament in recent elections. Erwin K. Scheuch and Hans-Dieter Klingemann, “Theorie des Rechtsradikalismus in westlichen Industriegesellschaften,” Hamburger Jahrbuch für Wirtschafts- und Sozialpolitik 12 (1967), 11–19. See, among many others, Mabel Berezin, Illiberal Politics in Neoliberal Times: Culture, Security and Populism in the New Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Michael Minkenberg, “The Renewal of the Radical Right: Between Modernity and Anti-Modernity,” Government & Opposition 35:2 (2000), 170–88. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983). See, for example, Michael Minkenberg, “The Radical Right in Postsocialist Central and Eastern Europe: Comparative Observations and Interpretations,” East European Politics and Societies 16:2 (2002), 335–62; Sabrina Ramet (ed.), The Radical Right in Central and Eastern Europe since 1989 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999). See Cas Mudde, “The Single-Issue Party Thesis: Extreme Right Parties and the Immigration Issue,” West European Politics 22:3 (1999), 182–97. See, most comprehensively, Tim Spier, Modernisierungsverlierer? Die Wählerschaft rechtspopulistischer Parteien in Westeuropa (Wiesbaden: VS, 2010). Cas Mudde, “The Populist Radical Right: A Pathological Normalcy,” West European Politics 33:6 (2010), 1167–86.

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19 For one of the first comprehensive analyses of the supply-­side, see Elisabeth Carter, The Extreme Right in Western Europe: Success or Failure? (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005). 20 See, among others, Kai Arzheimer and Elisabeth Carter, “Political Opportunity Structures and Right-Wing Extremist Party Success,” European Journal of Political Research 45:3 (2006), 419–43; Pippa Norris, Radical Right: Voters and Parties in the Electoral Market (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 21 See Mudde, Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe, Part III. On the role of the media, see more elaborately David Art, The Politics of the Nazi Past in Germany and Austria (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); David Art, “Reacting to the Radical Right: Lessons from Germany and Austria,” Party Politics 13:3 (2007), 331–49; Antonis A. Ellinas, The Media and the Far Right in Western Europe: Playing the Nationalist Card (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 22 Mudde, Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe, chapter 11. For a comprehensive study of radical right organizations, see David Art, Inside the Radical Right: The Development of Anti-Immigrant Parties in Western Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 23 See Stefanie Frölich-Steffen and Lars Rensmann (eds.), Populisten an der Macht: Populistische Regierungsparteien in West- und Osteuropa (Vienna: Braumüller, 2005); Reinhard Heinisch, “Success in Opposition—Failure in Government: Explaining the Performance of Right-Wing Populist Parties in Public Office,” West European Politics 26:3 (2003), 91–130. 24 I count the Swiss government as one, as it doesn’t fundamentally change composition as a consequence of parliamentary elections. Obviously, even if I were to count them by parliamentary period, the overall percentage of European governments with PRRP participation would still be hovering around 5 percent. 25 Cas Mudde, “The 2012 Stein Rokkan Lecture. Three Decades of Populist Radical Right Parties in Western Europe: So What?,” European Journal of Political Research 52:1 (2013), 1–19. Unfortunately, the issue of impact has so far been hardly studied within Central and Eastern Europe. Consequently, much of this section focuses predominantly, if not always exclusively, on Western Europe. 26 Ronald Inglehart, The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles among Western Publics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977). 27 See, most notably, Herbert Kitschelt (in collaboration with Anthony McGann), The Radical Right in Western Europe: A Comparative Analysis (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 1995); Paul Taggart, “New Populist Parties in Western Europe,” West European Politics 18:1 (1995), 34–51. 28 Piero Ignazi, “The Silent Counter-Revolution: Hypotheses on the Emergence of Extreme Right-Wing Parties in Europe,” European Journal of Political Research 22:1–2 (1992), 3–34. 29 Michael Minkenberg, “The Radical Right in Public Office: Agenda-Setting and Policy Effects,” West European Politics 24:4 (2001), 1–21. 30 Charles Westin, “Racism and the Political Right: European Perspectives,” in Peter H. Merkl and Leonard Weinberg (eds.), Right-Wing Extremism in the Twenty-First Century (London: Frank Cass, 2003), 97–125 [123]. 31 See, for example, Moshe Semyonov, Rebeca Raijman, and Anastasia Gorodzeisky, “The Rise of Anti-Foreigner Sentiment in European Societies, 1988–2000,” American Sociological Review 71:3 (2006), 426–49; Jessica Sprague-Jones, “Extreme Right-Wing Vote and Support for Multiculturalism in Europe,” Racial and Ethnic Studies 34:4 (2011), 535–55.

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32 Such as Rima Wilkes, Neil Guppy, and Lila Farris, “Right-Wing Parties and AntiForeigner Sentiment in Europe,” American Sociological Review 72:5 (2007), 831–40; Michelle H. Williams, The Impact of Radical Right-Wing Parties in West European Democracies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 33 Kris P. Dunn and Shane Singh, “The Surprising Non-Impact of Radical Right-Wing Populist Party Representation on Public Tolerance of Minorities,” Journal of Elections, Public Opinion & Parties 21:3 (2011), 313–31. 34 Mudde, “The 2012 Stein Rokkan Lecture.” 35 Mudde, “Pathological Normalcy.” 36 Jean-Yves Camus, “The Extreme Right in France: Redrawing the Map to Be Expected,” in Nora Langenbacher and Brigitte Schellenberg (eds.), Is Europe on the “Right” Path? Right-­wing Extremism and Right-­wing Populism in Europe (Berlin: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, 2011), 83–99 [83]. 37 See, for example, Joost Van Spanje, “Contagious Parties: Anti-Immigration Parties and Their Impact on Other Parties’ Stances on Immigration in Contemporary Western Europe,” Party Politics 16:5 (2010), 563–86. 38 Mudde, “The 2012 Stein Rokkan Lecture.” 39 See Tjitske Akkerman and Sarah L. De Lange, “Radical Right Parties in Office: Incumbency Records and the Electoral Cost of Governing”, Government & Opposition 47:4 (2012), 574–96. 40 Examples include Daniele Albertazzi, “Switzerland: Yet Another Populist Paradise,” in Daniele Albertazzi and Duncan McDonnell (eds.), Twenty-First Century Populism: The Spectre of Western European Democracy (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008), 100–18; Reinhard Heinisch, “Austria: The Structure and Agency of Austrian Populism,” in Daniele Albertazzi and Duncan McDonnell (eds.), Twenty-First Century Populism: The Spectre of Western European Democracy (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008), 67–83. 41 Marco Tarchi, “Italy: A Country of Many Populisms,” in Daniele Albertazzi and Duncan McDonnell (eds.), Twenty-First Century Populism: The Spectre of Western European Democracy (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008), 84–99. 42 Tjitske Akkerman, “Comparing Radical Right Parties in Government: Immigration and Integration Policies in Nine Countries (1996–2010),” West European Politics 35:3 (2012), 511–29. 43 Carlo Ruzza and Stefano Fella, Re-­inventing the Italian Right: Territorial Politics, Populism and “Post-Fascism” (London: Routledge, 2009). 44 Marianne Kneuer, “Die Stabilität populistischer Regierungen am Beispiel der slowakischen HZDS: Wechselwirkungen innen- und außenpolitische Prozesse,” in Stefanie Frölich-Steffen and Lars Rensmann (eds.), Populisten an der Macht: Populistische Regierungsparteien in West- und Osteuropa (Vienna: Braumüller, 2005), 149–71. 45 Alan de Bromhead, Barry Eichengreen, and Kevin H. O’Rourke, “Political Extremism in the 1920s and 1930s: Do German Lessons Generalize?”, The Journal of Economic History 73:3 (2013), 371–406. 46 The only country that shows some similarities with the Weimar Republic is Greece, where support for democracy has plummeted as a consequence of the economic crisis, and truly extremist (i.e. anti-­democratic) political parties, the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn and neo-Stalinist Greek Communist Party (KKE), command almost 25 percent of the Greek electorate. Still, the Greek case is unique for both domestic and international reasons. On the situation in Greece, see Takis Papas, “Why Greece Failed,” Journal of Democracy 24:2 (2013), 31–45.

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47 Sarah L. De Lange, “New Alliances: Why Mainstream Parties Govern with Radical Right-Wing Populist Parties,” Political Studies 60:4 (2012), 899–918. 48 Daniele Albertazzi, Duncan McDonnell, and James L. Newell, “Di lotta e di governo: The Lega Nord and Rifondazione Comunista in Office,” Party Politics 17:4 (2011), 471–87. 49 See, among others, Heinisch, “Success in Opposition;” Yves Mény and Yves Surel, “The Constitutive Ambiguity of Populism,” in Yves Mény and Yves Surel (eds.), Democracies and the Populist Challenge (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 1–21. 50 See Kurt Richard Luther, “Of Goals and Own Goals: A Case Study of Right-Wing Populist Party Strategy For and During Incumbency,” Party Politics 17:4 (2011), 453–70; Duncan McDonnell and James L. Newell, “Outsider Parties in Government in Western Europe,” Party Politics 17:4 (2011), 443–52.

17

Ideologies of Economic Populism in America and their Subversion by the Right Peter Breiner

The United States has a long and robust history of economic populism. However, it seems that a good part of American politics of the last third of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-­first has seen a recurrent appropriation of the language of economic populism by parties of the right. The political and ideological dynamics of this appropriation has been much discussed, though no discussion has captured the problem as pointedly as the fierce debate between the journalist, Thomas Frank, and the political scientist, Larry Bartels, over whether or not this shift involves a fundamental change in the beliefs of the traditional American working class. In his much discussed book, What’s the Matter with Kansas, Thomas Frank attributes the more recent (and recurrent) success of the right in US politics to its ability to divert a class-­based notion of economic populism into a rejection of and rage against an ostensibly unpatriotic cosmopolitan liberalism. Arguing not as a detached political scientist but as a partisan of economic populism hoping to alter the situation, Frank maintains that the recent ability of the Republican Party to gain support from members of the working classes while pursuing policies inimically opposed to their interests has been based on inverting a classical leftist notion of populist ideology derived from the agrarian revolt of the 1890s; specifically, the concept so central to this period of “the two nations.” The first nation is that of the producers whose labor is exploited even though they are the organic, the authentic, members of the American polity; the second nation is that of the well-­to-do elites of finance, of capital, of imported culture, who are economic parasites on the first nation.1 In a cunning act of ideological displacement, Frank argues, the Republican Party in the decades between the 1980s and the 2000s successfully convinced a large part of the working population that it is the party of the productive members of society, the authentic Americans, while portraying the Democratic Party as the party of the liberal “elite” parasitically living off the hard productive work of the heartland. This fictional elite is characterized not by its economic function but by its cosmopolitan urban tastes, its geographic location in the cities and on the coasts, its educational attainment, and above all by its ostensible control over government, media, and educational institutions.2 Through its presumed control, this elite supports redistributive policies, which ostensibly only benefit those who are not productive, while imposing on “authentic” productive Americans an alien

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culture that tolerates abortion and sexual differences, teaches humanism, and promotes alien life styles. What strikes Frank about this peculiar populist rebellion is that the very beneficiaries of reform liberalism—a reform liberalism that was given its impulse by movements of economic populism—now support the party that promotes tax policies of upward redistribution, that exacerbates income disparities, and seeks to eliminate the limited basket of programs the US welfare state has to offer: “The state erupts in revolt, making headlines around the world with its bold defiance of convention. But what do its rebels demand? More of the very measures that have brought ruination on them and their neighbors in the first place.”3 The secret of this strategy on the part of the right, Frank points out, is not to repress class hostility, but to displace it so that economic grievances are shifted to matters of “authenticity.”4 Oppression is now caused by a foreign, conspiratorial liberal elite exercising cultural hegemony over a victimized, resentful majority. The terms of populist ideology are all present, but they have been redistributed to a class struggle in which capitalism has been factored out of the equation and cultural authenticity in. More recently Larry Bartels has leveled what would appear to be a series of devastating empirical criticisms against Frank’s argument.5 Redefining class by income shares and ideology by individual beliefs, Bartels shows quite convincingly that those voters in the bottom one-­third of pre-­tax family income shares not only have steadily supported the Democratic Party in elections in the last 50 years, but have increased their support during the very period when Frank claims they have defected (66–7). Bartels also shows that the majority of the voters across the distribution of income express the belief that income is skewed in favor of the wealthy and that this is not a desirable outcome (130–48). Bartel’s explanation for the shift in policy in favor of increasing income inequality rests not on the growing influence of conservative cultural values on poor and workingclass voters, but on the fact that the majority of voters do not connect their egalitarian beliefs with policy outcomes and so fail to hold Republican presidents accountable for diminished income growth over the terms they are in office. The reason he argues why they do not hold Republican administrations accountable is that voters in the United States suffer “cognitive myopia”: they react only to economic performance in the year before elections. So while income growth overall is greater during Democratic administrations, and especially greater during the second year of Democratic administrations, it is only greater during the election years of Republican presidents (98–104, 109), and declines thereafter. And voters in the United States seem to hold Presidents accountable for economic well-­being only during the year prior to an election. Thus Republican administrations produce overall diminished income growth for the majority of working families but have been able to control the political business cycle in their favor. But Bartels admits two points that could reinstate Frank’s thesis, even if not precisely on the grounds that the latter is arguing it. First, Bartels points out that the cause of increased income inequality is a direct result of the ideologies of the political parties, and not economic changes (27, 31), and that the field of ideologies within which policy is discussed has shifted dramatically to the right from 1980 to 2004 (79). Second, he

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argues that if we look at non-­college educated whites, who encompasse middle income earners as well as lower ones, there has indeed been a discernible shift among that group during that same period to the Republican Party and a greater voter identification with that party (68, 70). If this is the case, there can still be a rightward shift among income earners whose status is different from their income and a rightward shift in the whole spectrum of political-ideological dispute. It would thus seem that even if the bottom third of family income earners have increased their support for the Democrats, this has taken place in a setting in which a portion of middle and lower income earners who work for a living—and often have traditional working-class occupations—has supported not just the Republicans but a rightward shift in political alternatives. That is, the rightward shift in the spectrum of political alternatives and the increased support for Democrats by lower income earners are compatible. It would appear then that Bartels’ and Frank’s interpretations of why the majority of voters voted against their interests are complementary, providing different perspectives on the same political development—one in which inequality increased when Republican presidents were in office, and yet political discourse was steadily defined by Republican political ideology whose central principle was class conflict against liberalism. If this reading is correct, Frank’s argument still has much to recommend it, for it recovers the thesis that populist class conflict has been a recurrent feature of American politics and that liberalism in the American context has cut itself off from economic populism much at its own cost. But the question it leaves open is why the rightward redirection of class grievances has proved successful—and what might be its limits. Frank argues the reason is that present-­day reform liberalism has cut itself off from economic populism, leaving the latter prey to right-­wing mobilization under a political ideology based on rage against cosmopolitanism.6 However, while this thesis makes sense as political programmatic, it begs the question interpretively, for it is precisely the initial breach between economic populism and reform liberalism that needs to be explained. Before discussing the breach between economic populism and reform liberalism, I would want to suggest a working definition of the latter term as I am using it here. Drawing on Alan Brinkley’s usage in The End of Reform, I intend “reform liberalism” to refer to a kind of liberalism that rejected the unregulated market and argued that society was an interconnected organic whole endangered by concentrated corporate power. For this brand of liberalism both the dangers of corporate power and the defects of the market had to be overcome through state intervention. And it was the job of the state to provide a basic level of economic support and equal treatment often articulated in the language of equal opportunity or equal rights to a basic level of well-­being.7 How this was to be achieved was often disputed. But what is crucial for the argument I want to make here is that “reform liberalism” as a political ideology was often wary of populist initiatives and had a strong bias toward not just state intervention but also decision-­making and the shaping of policy by political elites. In addressing then the tension between populism and reform liberalism, I want to revisit the interpretation of populist ideology and its associated movements in the United States, as it relates to de Tocqueville’s renowned thesis that the United States had never experienced a revolution for equality of condition and Louis Hartz’s equally

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influential interpretation of de Tocqueville that the result of this was that all popular movements, in particular socialist ones, were ensnared by an unconsciously accepted Lockean vocabulary.8 Following Hartz part-­way, I argue that viewed through their political-­economic ideologies, twentieth-­century radical movements in the United States have been unable to sustain a class-­based attack on economic inequalities of wealth and power because of the peculiar way they have had to extend political egalitarianism into the social and economic realms under the rubric of liberal rights. But I also want to argue that, except in one very significant case, the political ideologies behind economic populism in the US were susceptible to exploitation by the right because of a peculiar dynamic tension between reform liberalism’s distrust of populist ideology. What reform liberalism distrusted, though at times also made use of, was the fact that proponents of populist ideology typically demanded economic equality with regard to both income and wealth; but in pressing this demand these self-­same proponents of populism also claimed to represent the genuine producers with genuine native roots in the country while simultaneously defining themselves against a nonnative parasitic (class) enemy. This dynamic tension, I argue, has provided an opening for movements on the right, in Frank’s words, to create “a fantasy” class struggle against liberal cosmopolitanism, one that does not have to provide economic benefits such as reduced inequality of assets or income or greater social provision, but only symbolic revenge against a distrusted ally. This paper will focus less on the historical particulars of populism and liberalism in the United States than on the tensions within and between both of these strands of American politics when they are viewed as political ideology.

The problem of economic populist discourse There is no authoritative strand of economic populist theory in the United States similar to that of twentieth-­century European socialist theory.9 So in lieu of discussing any one populist theory, I would suggest we speak of the discourse of economic populism and the historical interpretations of its role in American politics. In focusing on this, I will discuss a recurrent economic populist vocabulary, or more accurately a shifting series of concepts constituting populist political ideology. Following Michael Freeden’s work on political ideologies, we will trace the core and peripheral concepts constituting populist political ideologies from the 1890s through the twentieth century.10 But I will also want to emend this approach with my own, which sees the structure of these concepts as enabling as well as preventing certain political programs and political practices. Further, following Karl Mannheim, I would like to view the varieties of economic populism and their tense relation to reform liberalism as constituting a political field consisting of political ideologies.11 This political field, though in part an artificial construct, provides us with a tentative account of both the conceptual and the prudential resources for political-­ideological conflicts. It also allows us to see the points of contention as well as overlap in the struggle of political ideas, especially as contending political ideologies do not just seek to draw clear distinctions with their opponents but also incorporate them in a critical frame.

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Egalitarianism as political theory and as political ideology: the case of the European left as master script At times the ideologies of economic populism in the United States have been at odds with reform liberalism, and as a consequence their proponents suffered political defeat (though the rightward redirection described by Thomas Frank is a more recent development); at other times, though less frequently, they have been able to unite with reform liberalism to avoid this outcome. Nevertheless the script for this political struggle is best understood in the backdrop of the European dynamic in which the parties on the left sought the expansion of political equality either into social citizenship or beyond it toward socialism. As is well known, it was the job of labor parties and the socialist movement in nineteenth and twentieth-­century Europe to make good on liberalism’s promise of equal political and civil rights.12 In almost all European countries in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, universal political equality was either not guaranteed, or guaranteed in name and not in fact. Thus socialist parties had to make as their first goal the achievement of full universal suffrage; but in the process of demanding full political equality, including equal treatment and equal rights, socialists also demanded the conditions for the realization of these rights, which pushed beyond liberal guarantees toward the supersession of private property as the ownership of capital. In a sense, the socialist movement played out at the level of political-ideological struggle a logic of equality in political theory according to which the principle of equal political rights for all citizens requires both instrumentally the conditions for such realization and provides a principle of equal treatment that logically should apply to the economic and social realms if citizenship is to mean full membership.13 Though it took multiple forms depending on national history, we might for the purposes of the argument distinguish two forms of this struggle for democracy. First off, we might turn our attention to the debate over reform and revolution in the pre-First World War period in Germany sometimes known as die Massenstreikdebatte, the “Mass Strike debate.”14 The debate rotated around whether the transformation of the struggle for political equality into reforms promoting social equality needed to be supplemented by the mass strike or whether the mass strike itself should be regarded as the way to socialism and not merely as a means to gain reforms through parliament. In either case, the debate on how to link extra-­parliamentary mass action with the electoral struggle of parties was historically occasioned by the question of how to struggle for full universal suffrage, as Germany still had a three-­tiered voting system while the socialist parties of Sweden, Holland, and Belgium had won full universal suffrage by means of the general strike.15 A second version was less concerned with the vertical relation of party to mass action in winning political equality and gaining control of production within a partly liberal state and more the horizontal development of citizenship across different spheres of society and politics. Emblematic for this approach is T. H. Marshall’s seminal essay, “Citizenship and Social Class.”16 Rather than focus on the relation between the mass strike and parliamentarism, Marshall provides a model for the steady progress of translating political equality, that is, equality of political citizenship rights, into social citizenship against the counter thrusts of proponents of the market.

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Needless to say, the debate over whether the mass strike should serve as an instrument of reform or revolution was not part of the political discourse of populist movements in the United States; and the translation of political into social citizenship remains to this day rather underdeveloped as a justification for the system of public provision in this country. In part this had to do with de Tocqueville’s famous insight that Americans had the advantage of attaining democracy without a democratic revolution and thus they assumed they were “born equal” in social status and political rights “instead of becoming so.”17 De Tocqueville’s point was not that political equality was fully achieved in the United States prior to the revolution for independence, but that it could not be the impetus for intensive class conflict because Americans had never had a revolution for this principle against an aristocracy seeking to uphold inequality of condition.18 Nevertheless, the European script was in fact played out in the United States in a diminished form, though certainly with no lesser intensity of conflict.

A revised Hartzian interpretation of American populism An American version of this “European” problem of the left appears in economic populism. If we date economic populism in the United States from the farmer-­labor revolt of the 1890s, we see a struggle for economic distribution and democratic control, but one bereft of the dual European struggle by the left to expand political equality and transfer the demand for equal political rights into the social and economic realms. This meant that the tension within the European socialist response to the democratic revolution between superseding liberalism and delivering on its promises through civil and political rights takes a different turn. We can see this in the variety of interpretations of American populism—in particular those concerned to show populism is continuous with the struggle over industrialism and corporate power.19 But the much disputed interpretation of Louis Hartz still captures fairly accurately the dynamic of political struggle in the United States between the possessing and the non-­possessing classes when the struggle for political equality and its extension is missing: One of the reasons those European liberal correlations have gone neglected is quite obvious once you try to make them. America represents the liberal mechanism of Europe functioning without the European social antagonisms, but the truth is, it is only through these antagonisms that we recognize the mechanism. We know the European liberal, as it were, by the enemies he has made [that is the laboring classes and the feudal aristocracy seeking restoration]: take them away in American fashion and he does not seem like the same man at all.20

Hartz’s point, though often misunderstood, is not that all social and political conflict between classes over economic distribution and control was simply dissipated in an unconscious Lockean consensus.21 Rather, compared with the European development, the intensity of the struggle among classes in the United States was telescoped down to a restricted set of terms derived from different parts of

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liberalism in which the antagonism could be articulated and fought out.22 Specifically, lacking a Tory class that felt it had a right to inherited private property and therefore explicitly fought the expansion of democratic rights and suffrage (“loves capitalism and fears democracy”), Hartz argues, both the agrarian and working class fought a right-­wing enemy who claimed to be distinctly “American” like themselves and who embraced an ethos of the self-­made individual in a laissez-­faire economy, and again like them evinced a distrust of the central government as an institution to realize policies. In turn, argues Hartz, “the American Democrat . . . was a liberal peasant and a liberal proletarian,” that is a potential individual entrepreneur denied his/her opportunity by greed of the propertied and the politically influential.23 I would argue that in the latter judgment Hartz overstates the case somewhat by mistakenly substituting the categories in which populist struggle was fought out for the actual intentions, goals, and political strategies of the agents. Michael Rogin’s gloss of Hartz puts the matter more accurately: “To defend the natural right to acquire property was not an alternative to pragmatic politics but a powerful political weapon itself. If conservatives used this appeal to attack social legislation, reformers used it to attack a society in which property rights were becoming restricted to the few.”24 Thus if we see the radical attempt to calibrate mass action with party politics and subsequently to press equal political rights into the economic sphere as constrained by a distribution of liberal categories across the political-­ideological field, we also have a glimpse into both how these categories enabled political struggle and how these antagonisms could be dissipated or redirected before they have achieved comprehensive social provision, limitations on income differentials, or steadily expanding intrusions on market price.25 The upshot of this revision of the Hartz thesis, I would argue, is that democratic populism in the United States did indeed face the European problem of mass action in tension with institutional party representation, and even more so, the struggle over realizing democratic equality against corporate influence; and the struggle to overcome obstacles to democratic citizenship did indeed at moments become a struggle over unequal property and control over the market. But, I would also argue, the terrain and outcome of that struggle in the American setting was (and still is) shaped by the fact that these struggles for all their intensity were contained because they never could draw the principles of the American polity itself into question—or more specifically, that the resistance of the ruling and economic elites to expansions of equal political rights into social and economic realms could not be seen by populist political ideology as chronically connected to the American concept of nationhood, but rather, populist ideology in its many variants had to wrest the concept of nationhood from the claims of propertied and political elites. Within this struggle—though this will be less central to my argument until the end—reform liberalism tends to have an ambivalent relation to both antagonists; for it is opposed to the privileges of the propertied classes claiming to hide behind the laissez-­faire market model; and yet it fears the populist demands for expanding democracy. It is this ambivalence that has provided the opening for the Right to redirect and displace class conflict toward revenge against reform liberals.

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Six political ideologies of American populism and their relation to economic populism From the various narratives of American populism we can derive six political ideologies of American populism each of which takes a different attitude toward both economic redistribution, economic control, and the interventionist state.26 What interests me in constructing these types of economic populist ideology is to specify their economic programmatic and its relation to democratic equality, and the way each of these ideologies locate themselves in the distinctly American political setting in which they are trying to intervene. I also in each case try to distinguish how each of them perceived the enemy they were fighting because it is closely related to their view of what counted as genuinely American. There may be other constructs of populist ideology that are more concerned with the groups they are appealing to, the material backdrop of their emergence, and their style of political appeal rather than their economic principles. And these constructs may produce different conclusions from the ones offered here. But again, what interests me here is the relation between their economic programmatics and the way they see themselves in the struggle to expand political equality into other spheres of society and economy, especially where they must take up the failures of reform liberalism to achieve their aims. I thus, perhaps unfairly, exclude progressivism from this list, because of its explicit desire to introduce reforms without capitulating to populism.

1.  The political ideology of agrarian radicalism rooted in the program of the People’s Party The fundamental core concept of the populist party was the notion of the “cooperative society” modeled on the rural cooperatives of late nineteenth-­century Farmers Alliance, formed to resist the dependence on the agents of manufacturers for their equipment, the steadily diminishing prices offered to individual farmers for their product, and the inability to obtain adequate bank credit.27 From this core notion was derived the collateral claim that in an industrial age, the farmer was also a worker rather than the individual small entrepreneur that Hartz attributes to this personage.28 In effect the Lockean liberal language of the individual producer is transformed here into that of the collective producer who should own what s/he produces. The economic proposals flowing out of these concerns are well known: government ownership of railroads and other public modes of transport, a release from the deflationary economic policy of the gold standard, a graduated income tax, transference of monetary authority from the banks to the federal government, and guaranteeing the rights of unions to organize. Politically they expected the federal government to implement these demands. But in their famous Omaha program they claimed that none of this could be attained unless the government was chosen by voters rather than the political bosses of both parties and the influence of the corporations over the economy was ended. In short, they directly attacked inequalities of assets, income, and influence and unequal political resources that prevented a cooperative society both in land and industry from emerging. What is important for our definition here is that this is not the expression of

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a nostalgic return to rural communal roots but in fact an attempt to make use of modern economic organization and redistribute the essential economic goods generated by an industrial society in an equal manner, a redistribution that would benefit both urban laboring and rural interests.29 This populist program went hand in hand with a particular characterization of the enemy of the ordinary people in which the combination of farmers and industrial laborers represented the “authentic” Americans while the banks, investment houses, and industrialists were viewed as alien forces, “a moneyed aristocracy,” subjecting the economy and the people to its whims.30 Populist ideology valorized the producers as the foundation for society while portraying corporations, stock companies, and banks as parasites. This was accompanied by the claim that as the producers the farmers and the laborers represented true manhood as opposed to those who live off the work of others, though populism did later support women’s suffrage. And this overall narrative was intertwined with language of Christian redemption of the poor and downtrodden. But all of this contains a double aim not unlike that of European socialist movements: the program of populism is compatible with developments in modern industrialism and the conditions of labor—indeed, as quoted in the paper The Farmers Alliance, it “shall make of this nation an industrial democracy in which each citizen shall have an equal interest”31—and at the same time represents a purification of the United States politics and economy so that it will achieve a genuine democracy that has been thwarted both by the modern party system and the modern corporate economy.32

2.  The integrative labor ideology model This more truncated notion of populism was famously represented by Samuel Gompers and the American Federation of Labor that he led. The core concept of this ideology also consisted of the patriotic wage earning laborer as the backbone of American productivity. However, this laborer was a craftsman who through the union fought for better wages and working conditions, and in doing so defended the rights of all American citizens against the depredations of business.33 This collateral concept of citizen rights allows for the argument that the defense of unions to organize and strike becomes at the same time a defense of the civil liberties of all citizens—though not necessarily a justification for labor to organize politically or for that matter to fight for the extension of political rights into social rights or a demand for industrial democracy. On the contrary, as Kazin points out, almost as a counterpoint to agrarian populism, Gompers and the AFL resolutely rejected pursuing their goals through a labor party; they also rejected any attempt to abolish the wage system or the expansion of labor conflict into class conflict.34 As for the distribution of friend and enemy in this ideology, Gompers and the AFL saw the centralized state not the employer as its main foe. Thus in the name of preserving union independence to bargain with the employer, Gompers rejected a state-­sponsored minimum wage, national health care, the imposition of an eight-­hour day, and unemployment and health insurance as measures that would make the laboring masses dependent on the state.35 Moreover, in characterizing his business opponents, he drew a distinction between the good rich who treated their employees

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well and accepted unions from the bad rich who exploited their workers and rejected unions. But the main objects of ire for this ideological position were the courts, which regularly intervened to prevent organizing and to end strikes. The courts were the central enemy precisely because they prevented unions from bargaining with employers without state interference. This displacement of the enemy from capital to the state affected the way this ideology treated the relation of the unions of wage earners to the American context. Gompers and AFL in general portrayed the laborers and trade unionists as the best citizens rather than the opponents of capital engaging in struggle for expansion of citizenship into the economy. Recasting the concept of the producer as the source of the commonwealth, the AFL saw labor as resolutely “in the middle,” between the marginalized poor and shiftless mass and the wealthy owners of capital.36 In this way, labor could portray itself as representing the whole working population and, the decent productive part of society, the majority of American citizens, without having to draw out the political or economic implications of this position, namely that civil and political rights expand by analogy to become a principle of social provision and restrictions on market price.

3.  The socialist political-­economic ideology exemplified by the pre-First World War Socialist Party of America Fin-­de-siècle socialism in the United States was an amalgam of different positions on how a cooperative socialist commonwealth could be brought about; and so it did not develop one uniform political-­economic ideology but several each of which were closer or further from the European script of winning the struggle for democracy as a prelude to winning the battle for socialism and more significantly deciding on the relation of mass action to electoral action.37 The first tendency exemplified by Victor Berger asserted paradoxically on the basis of Marx’s materialist concept of history that the transition to socialism in the United States was still a long way off, given the emergence of economic trusts. He therefore maintained in a position similar to Kautsky in Germany that socialism should be adapted to the conditions of the workers in the present setting. So until the conditions for socialism were ripe, which meant sufficient concentration of industry, the job of socialists was to educate the workers and improve them economically and morally. To accomplish this, socialists must win over a majority of the population through the ballot rather than violent revolution.38 Others argued that the workers were not numerous or strong enough to bring about a socialist revolution and urged they unite with other classes. This was the strategy of the numerous municipal electoral campaigns in which socialists were successful. Yet others argued the party should work through the unions turning the integrationist ideology of Gompers toward a socialist one. And still others claimed that one need not adapt one’s tactics to the long view, but instead encourage mass strikes where one could. All of these positions contain so to speak a kind of adaptation of Marx to American conditions but only at the strategic level. The core concept of socialism was not in dispute. Nevertheless, in the American setting, socialism had to appeal to a citizenship already achieved, rather than one waiting to be achieved as foundation for eventual

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control of production by the producers. So leaders like Eugene Debs spoke of citizenship being subverted by capital. Debs also appealed to Biblical notions of the hard work of the producers while the laborer was portrayed as an emblem of American manhood. Above all, he viewed the dominance of capital as draining an originally achieved American citizenship of content.39 Thus while the core concept of socialist ideology unsurprisingly was the achievement of a cooperative model of socialism, the adjacent concept was the exploited worker as citizen denied his/her citizenship rights, and short of revolution, the policies that followed from these concepts were those pursued by elected socialists in municipalities, such as public ownership of utilities and transport, increased social and cultural services—parks, cultural centers, libraries and the like—and a sympathetic attitude toward strikers.40 All of these policies, however, could be and were pursued by non-­socialist progressives as well. Obviously, the enemy of socialism was capital and private ownership of the means of production, portrayed in ways quite similar to that of the populists—as a parasitic and exploitative force imposed on the producers. But there was an additional enemy, who was often seen as treasonous, namely Gompers and his integrationist ideology of economic populism that refused to condemn capitalism but instead sought cooperation between labor and capital.41 But who one’s friends were for American socialism was shifting depending on whether one belonged to one strategic faction or the other.

4.  The populist labor ideology of the CIO as the left ­wing of New Deal liberalism The labor ideology of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) is the only populist ideology surveyed so far that explicitly connects democratic citizenship to the expansion of social rights and social provision.42 Moreover, developed during the formation of the CIO, it was also the one populist ideology whose economic programmatic was linked to a political party in power, in this case, the Democrats and the Roosevelt administration. Its specific economic program was a demand to guarantee full employment, civil rights for all minorities, universal health care, and public housing.43 This is, of course, the standard demands of labor parties seeking to extend political citizenship into welfare provision. But what distinguishes this populist ideology from the other candidates in the American setting is that it subsumed its program under the core concept of “industrial democracy.”44 This meant that unionization was seen as the realization of democratic control over press, the state, and the corporations.45 It was around this core concept of industrial democracy that the CIO defined its economic programs, the friend-­foe relationship, and the location of the movement in the American setting. By placing industrial democracy as the core concept of its populist ideology, the friend-­enemy relation was altered. For now the struggle for industrial democracy served as the binary to the inherited privileges of class, replacing the simple language of alien parasites in conflict with the genuinely American producer. To be sure, we also see the familiar counter language of the democratic popular voice in opposition to a “financial and economic dictatorship” exploiting common resources, as well as the language of “Tory industrialists” as implacable opponents of democracy.46 However,

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unlike previous populist ideologies the corporate and financial opponents are now organic parts of American political development though enemies nonetheless. As for the friends, we see economic populism as linked to a struggle for citizenship (“industrial democracy”) and demanding the inclusion of all producers whatever their ethnic or racial background with the goal of winning both full rights in civil society, political society, and economy, including comprehensive state-­provided public services. As for the American setting, this new industrial ideology portrayed the organizations of industrial unions as the left wing of New Deal liberalism, that is, a kind of left vanguard of reform liberalism.47 It is thus the one populist ideology since the People’s Party whose economic concepts were unambiguously connected to the expansion of political citizenship both into the industrial aspects of civil society and the social rights connected to public provision through the state. Moreover, it encouraged labor militancy outside of existing parties in direct tension with electoral political activity and the wishes of politicians. Late into the New Deal this populist ideology shifts its central concept of industrial democracy to the periphery and substitutes in its place collective bargaining and employer-­employee cooperation combined with a strong identification with American patriotism as its collateral concept. It thus becomes more like the earlier AFL ideology.

5.  New Deal liberalism as populism New Deal liberalism is a kind of populism without popular mobilization in opposition to the state. Although ostensibly based on “pragmatic experimentation,” it initially embraces the concept of the state as the organ responsible for the economic well-­being of the citizens as a matter of right. The state is seen as providing work, security, and redistribution in crises. At first the collateral concepts central to the original debates over the meaning of the New Deal rotate around this concept of the state in a contradictory and ambiguous manner with several policies all in competition: the anti-­ monopolists who argued the lack of economic well-­being of the country was the result of too great concentrations of economic power and therefore the concentration of capital needed to be broken up though not so much to restore competition but to devolve corporate power to “the people”;48 the planners who argued the lack of economic well-­being was the result of uncontrolled investment and so the state should engage in administrative planning by either redirecting investment back into areas that will produce employment or creating public works; the under-­consumptionists who argued the lack of economic well-­being was the result of a maldistribution of income and therefore under-­consumption, and so the state should redistribute income downward to revive demand and encourage investment.49 However, once the pressure of the populist economic ideology of industrial unionism abated, all of these collateral notions collapsed in the words of Alan Brinkley, into a theory of “compensatory government.”50 With the concept of “compensatory government” as its core idea, the European script of mass action in tandem with reform and translating political into social equality is arrested, and the constraining effects of liberal categories come to define policy. The New Deal, now under pressure from a resurgent conservative right in

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Congress, adopts a consumption-­centered concept of public policy. Thus through a progressive tax structure, social security, social welfare for the needy divided between the deserving and undeserving poor, and above all the stimulation of consumption through Keynesian-­inspired government spending, the state could promise economic growth and full-­employment; and it could accomplish all of this without challenging capitalism.51 This revised ideology, now closer to “reform liberalism” than economic populism, “fused a welfare state to the larger vision of sustained economic growth” as a collateral concept. In turn social security was defined as one of a range of mechanisms to distribute income and enhance purchasing power. So liberalism now divests itself of economic populism and embraces capitalism because it can now treat welfare programs as instruments to produce “abundance.”52 This, as is well known, becomes the basis for “liberalism” in the post-Second World War period. It should be noted that this concept of the welfare state incorporates a recurrent Lockean distinction shared by both American populism and its opponents into its concepts of distribution of public provision to the poor.53 The deserving poor gain benefits on the basis of contributions made during their work life; the undeserving poor gain public assistance, such as aid to families with dependent children, which was replaced in 1996 by welfare for work. In both cases public provision was means-­tested and severely limited in the amount of aid provided and the range of eligible beneficiaries included. Once again, the assumption is that the productive members of society are entitled to universal compensation based on their contribution, while those needing public assistance due to bad luck occupy a place beneath that of the middle productive strata. It should also be noted that while public services such as unemployment insurance and social security are universal entitlements based on something resembling social citizenship, they are seen under the ideology of New Deal liberalism as an instrument of growth and economic stability rather than as an expansion of citizenship proper. Indeed, social citizenship related to universal entitlements becomes a most peripheral concept rotating far from the central concept of the “compensatory” Keynesian state or any of the adjacent concepts defining its means of provision.

6.  The New Left as populist political ideology Not always recognized, the core of New Left political ideology, at least as articulated in its founding document, “The Port Huron Statement,”54 echoes a version of the anti-­ corporate and anti-­statist features of nineteenth-­century populist ideology (though it also reflects the labor ideology of industrial democracy). But this criticism is now deployed against New Deal liberalism as a faux populist ideology masking a new relation between political economy and the state, namely “corporate liberalism.” To the New Left, corporate liberalism represented the ultimate development of reform liberalism, of the New Deal “compensatory state,” namely an integration between corporations and state in a technocratic welfare state. The fundamental characteristic of this new state was the ability to regulate the economy through demand management while leaving all economic and political decisions to elites moving seamlessly between corporations and government. The ordinary citizens were in effect paid off through welfare policies and full-­employment but left politically alienated and apathetic.55 Thus

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the counter political term to corporate liberalism was “participatory democracy”— famously, “that the individual share in those social decisions determining the quality and direction of his life” with numerous arenas for such participation.56 It was from this dichotomous set of core terms—corporate liberalism and participatory democracy—that the New Left derived its original programmatic. The New Left version of populist ideology focused largely on two conflicting aims: democratizing the state through participatory institutions; but also solving problems derived from the failures of the political ideology of New Deal liberalism to become a full-­fledged welfare state: in particular, racial discrimination, poverty, and war. So in its theory of participatory democracy as an alternative to a technocratic and bureaucratic state it was reacting to the ideology of welfare state liberalism as if it had been fully realized; yet the issues that the New Left saw as manifestations of this new kind of state were in fact the result of its inadequate realization. Thus the core concepts of this political ideology anti-­corporate liberalism and participatory democracy shaped a programmatic that spoke directly to a post-­ economic set of demands rotating around resisting bureaucracy in universities, government, and corporations; democratizing these institutions; and making work meaningful. On the other hand, the concrete issues of political activism were all related to those who had been marginalized by policies of an incomplete, indeed, developmentally arrested, welfare state. As the movement developed, the range of these issues kept expanding becoming central to New Left ideology while the original concept of participatory democracy became increasingly peripheral.57 In any event, neither the core concepts nor the programmatic following from them spoke to the working classes who, as middle-class producers and beneficiaries of this corporate state, did not find this ideology appealing. In turn, “The Port Huron Statement,” reproached organized labor for having bought into the integrationist labor ideology at the expense of its one-­time struggle for industrial democracy.58 As largely a post-­economic criticism of the undemocratic nature of the corporate liberal state, the enemies of populism for the New Left became an amalgam of institutions and rulers: the military-­industrial complex, the power elite that moved among government, military, and corporations—in C. Wright Mills’ formulation—but also the faceless bureaucracies and administrators who oversaw the division of labor. And yet to this list must be added the liberal politicians of the Democratic Party, who had pursued the Vietnam War as part of the ideology of Cold War liberalism and engaged in a politics of interest group negotiation from which those with the fewest political resources were systematically excluded. As for the relation between the New Left populism and the American setting, the theory of participatory democracy itself had its roots—both in the American ideals of local democracy as well as, at least for the Port Huron statement, in the left-­liberal theory of John Dewey.59 In turn the anti-­corporatism was firmly rooted both in the agrarian populist rebellion and in the Progressive and New Deal attacks on corporate power. And yet, for many—especially the working classes and white collar employees— the New Left rejection of the producer as the model for populist rebellion, its explicit rejection of economic well-­being as the goal of work, and its embrace of those who had been marginalized by the corporate liberal state, among them blacks, the poor, the

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oppressed of the less-­developed countries, seemed to be part of an alien non-American ideology of a privileged elite. Thus a clever right wing could embrace the New Left’s attack on corporate liberalism, political alienation, as well as its emphasis on direct democracy and turn it on the New Left itself. The latter became part of the foreign and subversive ideology of “liberalism” itself.

Core concepts and peripheral concerns—friends and enemies When we examine the core concepts of these political ideologies of economic (or in the case of the New Left post-­economic) populism, we notice that the only ideologies that seem to have found a durable place in the discourse of American politics were those that made peace with their corporate capitalist opponents: specifically, the integrationist labor ideology of the AFL, the New Deal ideology in its diminished form of the compensatory state, and the CIO ideology once it abandoned industrial democracy. This would seem to demonstrate the Lockean consensus at work preventing the European script of democratic socialism from playing itself out. But the more remarkable aspect of the remaining ideologies is that their core concepts of a cooperative community or economy or participatory democracy, and related concepts of the democratization of the state against both corporate influence and ordinary party politics seems to be a recurrent resource of resistance even if temporary. At the same time, disagreement on whether the state, or political authority in general, is to be an instrument for the realization of economic demands or whether in fact it should be regarded as a hindrance to or even an enemy of that realization seems to be in tension in all of these moments of populist resistance. For the difficulty seems to be that the proponents of these populist ideologies must call for the strengthening of the state to realize their specific demands against economically based opponents while at the same time, it is the failure to have a fully democratized state that has prevented this from occurring. This, incidentally, is a dilemma built into the very notion of political equality as an ideological demand and not a peculiarly American one. A further aspect of these political ideologies worth noting is that they deploy a similar conceptual structure in defining their opponents. Partisan political movements and parties always have to label some force or group as their enemy, their “other”—this is a crucial part of their identity or self-­definition politically—and populist ideology is no exception. What is remarkable about the various populist ideologies above is the continuity in the distribution between partisan and enemy. Specifically, in a number of these political ideological types, specifically the populist, socialist, and New Deal versions, the opponents appear as an alien corrupting force—an aristocracy of a nonAmerican kind imposing itself on a genuine American tradition of hard-working producers or hard-working citizens. The enemy or “other” of these populists ideologies does not have indigenous roots but is a parasite on genuine American workers or producers or democratic citizens: “finance capital,” “corrupt politicians of political machines,” “economic royalists,”—Roosevelt’s reference to an aristocracy of corporate wealth alien to the United States—and for the New Left, “the power elite.” The great exception is the CIO ideology of labor rooted in industrial citizenship which, as the

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left wing of reform liberalism, understood its corporate opponents to be at once systemic and indigenous. Thus the CIO could view its strategy of seeking to impose industrial citizenship on the economy as part of an organic struggle for labor rights and social policies imposed by a liberal state. Of course, each of these political-­ideological types appears in American history at different times and under different conditions, but they all leave residues and resources for political persuasion and mobilization across the historical divide. Thus, if we view them as constituting the strategic landscape for the struggle over economic populism, we discover that, once again with the exception of the CIO labor version, which was aligned with reform liberalism, there is a peculiar and unresolved tension in which reform liberalism has an ambivalent relation toward economic populism even when taking up its economic demands, and in turn economic populists see reform liberals as potentially alien to the world of producers—or, in the case of the New Left ideology, to the post-­producer world of participatory citizens. This tension has provided an opening for conservatives to play the latter against the former. However, the right did not find a way of exploiting this opening until the latter half of the twentieth century with the campaign of George Wallace and the coming to power of the Reagan administration.60 From that point on the attack on liberals as a shadowy elite ruling class allied with a variety of minorities—sometimes blacks, sometimes Hispanics, sometimes immigrants or a whole host of non-American “others” as circumstances warranted—could be portrayed as a defense of the genuine “people” of the hard-­working lower classes.

Populist political ideology and reform liberalism: the stalled dynamic Viewed against the political-­ideological background above, it is less than surprising that the right wing in the United States in the latter half of the twentieth century could divert economic populism into an attack on “liberalism”—that is, as an attack on the cosmopolitanism and class superiority of educated urban elites who are portrayed as the “real” ruling class as opposed to corporate elites who are depicted as more successful versions of ordinary people. Indeed, the real question is why it took so long. While the answer to this question would require a separate inquiry, one can say that none of this would have been possible if class conflict were not a recurrent element of American political and economic life. Indeed, until the latter half of the twentieth century labor conflict in the United States was more militant and more violent, though not as radical, as its European counterpart.61 So, over and against de Tocqueville’s claim that the United States did not have class conflict as in Europe because it had no revolution for egalitarian rights against feudalism, and Hartz’s extension of this thesis, I would argue that even without such a revolution class conflict was constant. However, it was only intermittently politically organized by proponents of reform liberalism who distrusted it. In turn populist movements had to incorporate in their programs elements of reform liberalism that reform liberalism often found too radical. That is, economic populists had to make up for the deficiencies of reform liberalism while reform liberalism frequently alternately incorporated and feared actual populism. And

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thus populist movements of the lower classes, that of the Populist party, the integrationist labor movement, and the socialist movement could never quite organize themselves into durable movements to translate the demand for citizenship rights into social provision and redistribution of economic assets precisely because at any one point in time they were always dependent on a reform liberalism that distrusted it.62 And what reform liberalism distrusted in populist economic ideology was the way it linked the question of class to its attack on financial capital, economic centralization, and corrupt influences on the political system coming from both business and the political parties. As well, it distrusted the populist appeal to Christian religious revival as an analogy to economic and political revival. Above all, it distrusted the populist claim to be distinctly American against an opposition of foreign interlopers on genuine American producers. Therefore, as we have seen, populist ideology in the United States only infrequently represented a force pushing reform liberalism to the left. Indeed, reform liberalism typically portrayed itself ideologically as overcoming the defects of economic populism and thus sought to distance itself from the source of some its own programmatic proposals. In this sense Hartz is quite right to argue that in the period from 1900 to the New Deal the difference between liberal reforms and socialists in Europe “became not radicalism but how much of it,” while, as we have seen, the problem of economic populism in the US in all but one of its various political ideological manifestations, at least as schematically presented above, was imprisoned in portraying itself as distinctly “American” and as vindicating a model of the autonomous self-­sufficient individual producer and possessor of equal rights over and against an alien centralized corporate power and corrupt elitist government—even when, as in the case of Roosevelt’s early New Deal, collectivist measures were adopted that distinctly echo European socialism.63 This has produced a distinctive ideological tension in the United States that has both enabled and discouraged the alliance of populist economic movements with reform liberalism. If we survey the variety of populist economic ideologies we discover that they often pursued demands associated with reform liberalism: diminishing the economic power of large capital over the market, trade union rights, ending the translation of economic power into political influence, ending the stranglehold of banking over national credit for investment and providing a basket of social services from health care to unemployment insurance to old-­age pensions as matters of citizen entitlement, and a centralized state to realize these goals. Often they had to press for precisely these goals because liberal reformers were unable to realize them. At the same time, in the case of the agrarian populist ideology, the CIO labor ideology, and the New Left ideology, these demands were tied to goals that went far beyond reform liberalism: state control over major industries and utilities, industrial democracy as a complement to union rights, and in the case of the New Left, echoing agrarian populism, participatory democracy in which citizens would make the decisions affecting their lives. Reform liberalism has incorporated parts of the first list but has sought to distance itself from the second, but in either case, reform liberalism has sought to incorporate the democratic claims of economic populism but distance itself from the populists’ motives lest the first set of demands start to tip over into the second, which it often regarded as dangerously extreme. Alternatively, it could and sometimes did incorporate populist elements of the agrarian populists, New Left, and CIO in its programs. Thus for

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moments populism and reform liberal ideology could overlap in a momentary alliance of purpose. Nevertheless, the recurrent tensions within the two ideological strands provided a fissure which the right could ideologically exploit. Not surprisingly, then, the variety of populist ideologies has produced the conceptual pieces from which the right wing could cobble together a populist ideology of its own. From the populist party, labor integrationist, and socialist party, it took the treatment of ruling elites as a foreign invader on the hard-working producer of the American body politic; from the populist ideology it took the specific language of Christian revival, as well as the notion common to the three mentioned above that labor represented the hard-working middle below which was a lazy, foreign, and parasitic class who didn’t produce; it then turned this conceptual combination against the alliance of labor and New Deal liberalism. More recently, it did this in combination with an attack on New Left ideology as alien and not genuinely American, as showing contempt for the hard-­working producers, though borrowing in a curious sense the New Left critique that corporate liberalism and technocratic elitism was distinctly intertwined with reform liberal ideology. Thus, a right wing employing a curious conceptual combination of an idealized unregulated market and an ethic of social discipline through moral restriction and individual responsibility for one’s own risks could tie this political ideology to an additional ideology of class revenge against the educated urban elite whom it claimed monopolized the educational, economic, and political institutions. By portraying itself as anti-­populist but democratic in its approach to social provision and redistribution of income, reform liberalism was unable to counter this inverted class mobilization. Hence, the Thomas Frank thesis in What is the Matter With Kansas still has explanatory force despite Bartels’ discovery of the durability of egalitarian attitudes among the majority of American citizens.

Conclusion: exhaustion on the right and the fusion of populism and liberalism under equal opportunity The redirection of populism by the right wing into class conflict against cosmopolitan liberalism may very well be a fairly new stage in political development, as Thomas Frank implies. But the ideological political field that made it possible is of rather long standing. Indeed, it is the latest move within a cyclical process in which the right seeks to restrict state intervention in the economy while strengthening the state in order to provide private clientage privileges to its supporters and the liberal left seeks, at the very least, to protect existing social provision from the market on traditional grounds and at the most diminish economic inequality—in Albert Hirschman’s terms, a process of “progressive thrust” and “ideological counter-­thrust.”64 It would seem at the moment that the counterthrust of right populist ideology centered on displacement of the language of class conflict onto imputed governing liberal elites may very well have exhausted its political efficacy both as a programmatic and as a way of mobilizing majorities. Right populist ideology seems to have failed on several fronts. It has failed to deliver on its aims, or rather its strategy of promising to

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deliver on undeliverable aims—restoring a homogeneous culture of self-­sufficient individualists—has become manifest. It also seems to have exhausted the range of alien enemies it can attach to liberalism. Above all, the political ideology of the right may have turned the majority of the population into its enemies. This failure politically may signal in Paul Krugman’s words “the collapse of a decades-­long project” of using the language of displaced class anger to undermine the welfare state.65 On the other side, we see at the moment (April 2015) portions of the Democratic Party reviving liberal reform ideology through the use of left populist language that invokes the older populism of the farmers and workers: to wit, the Democratic Party now portrays itself as defending the hard-­working productive members of society against the class of non-­productive wealthy individuals, especially of finance, who are the beneficiaries of rents instead of productive work. However, now this productive class is labeled “the middle” rather than the “working” class. And perhaps more significantly, the egalitarian assumptions behind such a revival of populist vocabulary have now been displaced to the open-ended vocabulary of “equal opportunity” to compete for income, assets, and job opportunities, or in the words of President Obama’s reelection slogan, that all he was running on was to give the hard-working middle class “a fair shot” at the American dream.66 In effect, the concepts of populist ideology we have seen throughout this chapter— American society made up of productive workers robbed of the wealth they have created by parasitic banks and speculators who gambled away society’s assets—are used to support the open-­ended use of equal opportunity as the foundation of reform liberalism. Whether this tense fusion of populist and reform liberal ideology can offer a clear set of aims, provide a coherent map of the political field, and mobilize a majority over the long run or whether a revived right can once again prize populist vocabulary away from the ideology of reform liberalism remains an open question. The most one can predict is that the triangular struggle over the vocabulary of economic populism will continue.

Notes   1 Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2005), 23.   2 Ibid., 114–15.   3 Ibid., 76.   4 Ibid., 113.   5 Larry Bartels, Unequal Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 65–66. I will cite page numbers from Bartels in the text.   6 Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas, 260.   7 Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform (New York: Random House, 1996), 14.   8 Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1955).   9 See Charles Postel, The Populist Vision (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 14. 10 Michael Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 77–8.

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11 Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, trans. Louis Wirth and Edward Shils (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1936), 147–53, 162–3. The term “political field” (politisches Feld) is incorrectly translated in the English version either as “political sphere” or as “political realm” (149). 12 See Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 5–6. 13 See David Miller, “Democracy and Social Justice,” British Journal of Political Science 8: 1 (1978), 13–17 and Desmond King and Jeremy Waldron, “Citizenship, Social Citizenship and the Defense of Welfare Provision,” British Journal of Political Science 18: 4 (1988), 430–1. Arthur Rosenberg, Democracy and Socialism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 9. 14 See Antonia Grunenberg (ed.), Die Massenstreikdebatte. Beiträge von Parvus, Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Kautsky und Anton Pannekoek, (Frankfurt am Main: Europa Verlag Gesellschaft, 1970). 15 Susan Tegel, “Reformist Social Democrats, the Mass Strike and the Prussian Suffrage 1913,” European Historical Quarterly 17: 3 (1987), 307–8. 16 T. H. Marshall, “Citizenship and Social Class,” in Seymour Martin Lipset (ed.), Class, Citizenship, and Social Development (New York: Doubleday, 1965), 71–134. 17 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969), 509. 18 Ibid., 16. De Tocqueville was well aware that the equality of condition as expressed in both sentiments and political institutions excluded slaves and women. After all, he predicted that the greatest challenge to equality of condition in America would be the issue of slavery (360–3) and in “Two Weeks in the Wilderness” he noticed that women in the United States, once married, lived grim and constricted lives. 19 See Norman Pollack, The Populist Response to Industrial America (New York: Norton, 1962) and Charles Postel, The Populist Vision. 20 Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America, 16. 21 Ibid., 14. 22 Philip Abbott, “Still Louis Hartz After All These Years: A Defense of the Liberal Society Thesis,” Perspectives on Politics 3 (2005) defends Hartz by demonstrating how liberal language was deployed by opposing sides in a different setting, the culture wars of the 1960s and 1970s. Answering Abbott, Sean Wilentz claims Hartz’s approach is deficient because it reduces the battles between political forces into a battle between liberal concepts when fundamental social cleavages have produced a liberal reformist and a conservative traditionalist version of Lockean liberalism, “Uses of the Liberal Tradition: Comments on ‘Still Louis Hartz After All These Years’,” Perspectives on Politics 3 (2005), 118. But that is precisely Hartz’s point—that these intense, often violent, struggles were fought out using common Lockean concepts, though each side attached different meanings to them and deployed them to discredit their opponents. 23 Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America, 17. 24 Michael Rogin, The Intellectuals and McCarthy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1967), 38. 25 For an acute understanding of the way populist demands for expanding democratic equality were cut short through distrust of government see James Morone, The Democratic Wish (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). 26 In constructing this typology, I have relied heavily though not exclusively on Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion, 2nd edn. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998). 27 Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 25–35, 66–84. 28 Ibid., 39.

328 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

51 52 53 54 55

56

57 58 59

Transformations of Populism in Europe and the Americas See Charles Postel, The Populist Vision, 16–17, 141–63. Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion, 31. Norman Pollack, The Populist Response to Industrial America, 15. Ibid., 162–6. Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion, 53–4, 57. Ibid., 55. Ibid., 63. Ibid., 58. See James Weinstein, The Decline of Socialism in America 1912–1925 (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), 4. Ibid., 6–7. Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion, 66–7. James Weinstein, The Decline of Socialism in America 1912–1925, 108–9. Ibid., 30. Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion, 137. Ibid., 138. Ibid., 139. Ibid., 145. Ibid., 139, 149. Ibid., 143. Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform, 113. Ibid., 104, 127, 134–5. Alan Brinkley, Liberalism and its Discontents (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 47. For a more thorough analysis of precisely how the New Deal contracted from experiments in state planning, the encouragement of cooperative associations of capital, labor, and state, and the valorization of government over capitalism to the embrace of “compensatory government” side by side with the acceptance of corporate capitalism see Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform, 31–9, 58–64, 139. Ibid., 53–9. Ibid., 59. See Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform, 229–31, 270–1, 232–4. Ibid., 23. “The Port Huron Statement” reprinted in James Miller, Democracy is in the Street: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995). Ibid., 336–7. “The American political system is not the democratic model of which its glorifiers speak. In actuality it frustrates democracy by confusing the individual citizens, paralyzing policy discussion, and consolidating the irresponsible of military and business interests” (336) and “Worried by his mundane problems which never get solved, but constrained by the common belief that politics is an agonizingly slow accommodation of views, he [the voter] quits all pretense of bothering” (337). Ibid., 333. Also, Staughton Lynd, “The New Left,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 382: 1 (1969), who emphasizes the centrality of the dichotomy corporate liberalism/participatory democracy to the American New Left but points to its inadequacy as a guide for determining New Left strategy. See James Miller, Democracy is in the Street: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago, 317–28. Ibid., 343. Ibid., 149. See John Dewey, “Democracy and Educational Administration,” in The Later Works, 1925–1953: 1935–1937 (Carbondale, IL: SIU Press, 1987), 217–25.

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60 See Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (New York: Scribner, 2008). 61 Louis Adamic, Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1931) and Jeremy Brecher, Strike (Connecticut: Fawcett Publishers, 1974). 62 This interpretation of the populist and labor movements has been challenged for the period between the end of the nineteenth century and the end of the First World War in Elizabeth Sanders, Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State 1877–1977 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). Sanders focuses largely on the success of these movements in Congress. My focus here is on the resources available for political conflict given the ideological field produced by various populist ideologies and their relation to reform liberalism. 63 Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America, 204–5. 64 Albert Hirschman, The Rhetoric of Reaction (Cambridge: Harvard Press, 1991), 85–6. 65 Paul Krugman, “The GOP’s Existential Crises,” New York Times, December 13, 2012, A41. 66 Barack Obama, “Text of Obama’s Speech in Kansas,” New York Times, December 12, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/07/us/politics/text-­obamas-speech-­in-kansas. html [accessed on January 19, 2013].

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The Contested Meanings of Populist Revolutions in Latin America Carlos de la Torre

Scholars portray the governments of Hugo Chávez-Nicolás Maduro, Rafael Correa, and Evo Morales as democratic innovators. Highlighting their democratizing credentials through their commitments to social justice, they also note dramatic breaks with neoliberal orthodoxy via increased state planning and nationalism. Additionally they observe that these presidents democratized their societies by convening national assemblies, which were tasked with rewriting constitutions to reflect the policy goals of the new administrations. These new constitutions expanded citizenship rights and established models of direct and participatory democracy that have the potential to lead to better forms of political participation and representation. These presidents won elections and referenda that had multiple societal effects, such as limiting the reach of corrupt political elites. They also used populist rhetoric to empower “the people” as the embodiment of the nation and of democracy. Contrary to these positive assessments, other intellectuals highlight their authoritarian and undemocratic traits. They argue that they are fundamentally different from the pragmatic-­moderate-responsible left that accepted liberal democracy and the market economy. Scholars have also shown how these governments “invented” the notion of living under a permanent revolutionary moment to attack pluralism and fundamental liberal freedoms. Academics are concerned with the instrumental use of laws, the concentration of power in the executives, and the disregard for the rules and procedures that characterize liberal democracies. These contradictory assessments about the state of democracy in these nations are based on how democracy has been understood through four democratizing traditions. The first is the liberal republican democratic tradition with its emphasis on individual freedoms, pluralism, procedural politics, accountability, and institutional designs aimed at maintaining the checks and balances between the different branches of government. The second tradition, rooted in Marxism, emphasized social justice, and advocated for direct forms of democratic representation and participation in pyramidal citizen councils where representatives could be recalled. Populism represents the third democratizing tradition. Populist leaders constructed politics as an ethical and moral confrontation between the virtuous people and the evil oligarchy. Democracy is based on direct forms of representation, and on the occupation of public spaces in the name

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of a leader constructed as the embodiment of the excluded plebs. The fourth democratic tradition arises from grass-roots and social movement struggles. Some movements have sought to improve liberal democratic institutions, while others have advocated for non-­mediated forms of democracy inspired in the Marxist and populist traditions. These traditions have worked as ideologies that appeal both to logic and to passion. They depict what democracy ought to be, and have been used as political myths that have mobilized and inspired people to participate in politics. Even though many scholars argue that the liberal-­republican model can accommodate many of the demands of the other traditions, others, drawing on Marxism and populism, claim that it does not allow for the direct expression of popular sovereignty or for genuine democratic representation. Substantive models have been presented as alternatives that can fulfill the unmet expectations of genuine participation and decision-­making in the affairs of the collectivity. Populists and Marxists advocate for direct and unmediated forms of participation and representation of the people’s sovereignty. Contrary to liberals who argue that in a differentiated society with a plurality of interests the will of the people cannot be conceived as one and homogeneous, populists and Marxists have understood the people as having one will. Populists and Marxists also contrast a politics of the will, where crowds directly express their sovereignty, to the legal procedures and compromises of liberal politics. Marxists and populists share understandings of politics as a struggle between enemies. The interests of the people are as potentially antagonistic to those of the oligarchy, as the interests of the proletariat are to the interests of the bourgeoisie. This chapter explores the tensions between these different logical and emotional understandings of democracy in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela. It is divided in three parts. The first reviews debates about the relationships between populism and democracy. Whereas some scholars view populism and democracy as antagonist traditions, others have analyzed them as intimately intertwined. The second section studies how the regimes of Chávez-Maduro, Morales, and Correa have done away with previous political elites by using permanent electoral campaigns, and how they have attempted to create new social and political orders by constitutional change. The third section investigates how the populist and Marxist traditions have become hybridized in their understandings of democracy as “the politics of the will.” It analyzes how the myth of the “redeeming people” has given form to understandings of democracy as moments in which common people take their destinies into their own hands. Rebellions, insurrections, and revolutions were conceptualized as episodes of total rupture where the people directly expressed their sovereignty without the procedures and mediations so keen to the liberal representative models. The chapter concludes arguing that populist authoritarian tendencies are prevailing over the democratizing promises of these administrations.

Populist democracy Both critics and supporters of these regimes frequently employ the term populism. Most use this word to paint regimes as undemocratic, irrational, and irresponsible.

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Others give positive connotations to populism. These disputes over the meaning of populism turn out to be debates over “the interpretation of democracy.”1 Whereas some scholars see populism and democracy as incompatible and antagonistic, others understand them as intimately interdependent. The incompatibilities between populism and democracy can be explained by how these traditions have conceptualized political representation, their different notions of the people, and their divergent understandings of politics as contests between rivals or as struggles between enemies. Whereas liberals advocate for mediated forms of representation, populists argue that mediated institutions do not allow room for the expression of the voice of the people. In turn, supporters of populism promoted direct and non-­mediated forms based on “the unity and total identity between a representative and those who seek to be represented.”2 Populists conceived “the people” as a homogenous body with a single political will. Liberals argue that in complex societies the people cannot be conceptualized as a homogenous body with one identity and one will. The populist image of the people is fixed in time, it is transparent, so to speak, especially when they resist and challenge the symbolic, economic, and political domination of the oligarchy. But as Paulina Ochoa shows, the people is a process, it is an unfolding series of events. “The people” is always under construction and for this reason its will is also incomplete.3 Unlike liberal self-­limiting views of the people as a process in construction, populists claim to know “the content of the people’s will.” Those who do not agree with their construction of what is the will of the virtuous people are portrayed as enemies. As opposed to adversaries who fight according to a shared set of rules, and whose positions could be accepted, enemies represent an evil threat. Despite their authoritarian excesses, Latin American populist experiences have not resulted in totalitarianism. Populists have discursively constructed their adversaries as enemies, and have certainly silenced and at times prosecuted their opponents. But this is as far as they have gone because these regimes have not rejected all forms of liberal institutional politics. Instead they have searched for a double legitimacy inside and outside institutional and procedural politics, in the streets and in elections. Populism has interacted with other democratic traditions such as liberalism and grass-root demands. The interrelatedness between populism and other democratic traditions could lead to different outcomes where authoritarianism represents just one possibility.4 Rather than arguing that the logic of populism is inherently anti-democratic, it is more fruitful to analyze its uncertain relationship with liberal democratization. Margaret Canovan maintains that populism is closely interrelated with democracy. She argues that democracy has a pragmatic and a redemptive phase: From a pragmatic point of view, corresponding to the ordinary, everyday diversity of people-­as-population, modern democracy is a complex set of institutions that allow us to coexist with other people and their divergent interests with as little coercion as possible. But democracy is also a repository of one of the redemptive visions (characteristic of modernity) that promises salvation through politics. The promised savior is “the people”, a mysterious collectivity somehow composed of us, ordinary people, and yet capable of transfiguration into an authoritative entity that can make dramatic and redeeming political appearances.5

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The inherent tension between these two phases of democracy explains why populism continues to reappear. Whenever the demos feel that politicians have appropriated their will, they can demand to get it back. Populism however does not have the same effects in different institutional settings. In institutionalized political systems “populism can be read as a fever warning which signals that problems are not being dealt with effectively, or point to the malfunctioning of the linkages between citizens and governing elites.”6 In poorly institutionalized systems, “populist fever” can run out of control, and may not necessarily lead to an improvement of democratic governance and accountability. In “democracies where the ‘rules of the game’ are more contested and constraints on populist actors are weaker: here populism’s association with charismatic leadership and organizational de-­institutionalization has a natural tendency toward messianic leadership.”7 Latin American populists have appealed to the principles of equality and sovereignty. Historically they have given priority to social and political rights at the cost of civil rights. Understanding sovereignty as a function of free and open elections, populists expanded the franchise, incorporating previously excluded groups. But populists have not valued the liberal traditions of civil rights, pluralism, and accountability. Populists’ lack of regard for liberalism can be explained by the fact that, in contrast to the contractual bases of authority based on the individual, they have advocated for organic and holistic conceptions of community.8 These views have allowed populist leaders to claim to embody the voices of undifferentiated communities that share the same identities and interests. Instead of arguing for the improvement of liberal representative institutions, populists have searched for alternatives to liberal democracy, yet they have not totally abandoned all the institutions of representative democracy.

Embodying “the people” in Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia To further explore the tensions between substantive and liberal notions of democratization in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela I will focus on two areas. First, I will investigate Chávez-Maduro, Correa, and Morales’ strategies of governing as if they were in permanent campaigns and second, I will examine their promises to bring change through constitution making. As Laclau sustains, “populism presents itself both as subversive of the existing state of things and as a starting point for a more or less radical reconstruction of a new order whenever the previous one has been shaken” (emphasis in the original).9 In order to get rid of the previous social order instead of using bullets they have resorted to ballots employing elections to displace “traditional” political elites and create new hegemonic blocks. Constitution making served as opportunities to create new social pacts in order to found again the nation and democracy freeing them from neoliberalism, traditional elites, and by incorporating previously excluded groups. Latin American populists understand sovereignty not just as plebiscitary acclamation, but also primarily as elections. Classical populism expanded the franchise. Contemporary radical populists embarked on permanent political campaigns. After gaining offices, they convened referendums calling for constituent assemblies to write new constitutions.

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They organize elections to elect representatives to constituent assemblies, to get the new constitution approved in referenda, and to elect new officers, including presidents. The electoral logic, based on a confrontation between enemies, has had primacy over the need to search for pacts and agreements with their political adversaries. The constant need to keep alive the myth of a redeeming people that is struggling against imperialism, local elites, and other enemies induced these leaders to use a confrontational rhetoric. They have engaged in “a ‘permanent revolution’ of social mobilization and confrontation” against political parties, the media, some business elites, and the US government.10 When they exhaust external enemies, they search for enemies inside their coalitions. Opponents of populist politics, especially in Venezuela, also embarked in a war against these regimes. The Venezuelan opposition unsuccessfully organized a financially and politically costly coup d’état and national strikes in an attempt to remove Chávez from office. In Bolivia, there was a threat of national disintegration when powerful autonomous movements challenged Morales’ authority. Politics in these nations resembled more and more Schmittian scenarios of struggles between friends and enemies, and it is difficult to imagine peaceful alternations of power. The democratic credentials of Chávez-Maduro and Correa are grounded in winning open and clean elections, that in theory they could lose. Participating in elections opens the possibility of their defeat, and hence these leaders skewed the electoral playing field. Incumbents are given extraordinary advantages such as using the media, selectively silencing the privately owned media, selectively harassing the opposition, controlling electoral tribunal boards and all instances of appeal, and using massive public investment before the election. For instance, before the elections of October 2012, Chávez massively increased social spending, launched new missions that focused on housing, social security benefits for those who were not part of the system, and cash transfers for the children of adolescent parents.11 In contrast to Rafael Correa, who has been campaigning since he became president in 2007, the opposition only had 42 days to campaign during the February 2013 Ecuadorean elections. Correa used televised broadcasts, that all stations were forced to transmit, for instance to challenge media reports that his running mate Jorge Glass had plagiarized his college thesis from the Internet. The government used state media outlets to broadcast live from Correa’s campaign trail. According to Participación Ciudadana, an NGO that monitored the election, Correa’s exposure on television was more than double that of his rivals. In order to assure a majority in the new Assembly, additional electoral districts were designed in Quito and Guayaquil, two strongholds of Correa. The National Electoral Council refrained from stopping the incumbent using state resources, as when Correa made use of army helicopters in his campaign. The Electoral Council did not control how pro-Correa propaganda was broadcasted in the state-­run media, and forced the left-­wing ticket to withdraw a televised ad entitled “the little king and his court,” alleging that it was offensive to President Correa. The government regulated how the privately owned media reported the campaign, prohibiting it to endorse candidates. As a result, most newspapers refrained from publishing photographs and stories about the closing campaigns acts.12 Their use of public resources, the abuses of their time in the media, and the lack of mechanisms of control led some scholars to use the concept of “competitive

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authoritarianism” to characterize these regimes.13 Populists continued to claim legitimacy in winning open and free elections. Yet, if incumbents do not respect the institutions of pluralism, the recognition of the rights of minorities, and the principle of alternation of power, these regimes might be moving away from democracy towards authoritarianism. The logic of confrontation, a key component of the permanent campaign, walked hand in hand with their call to construct a new social, economic, and political order. This new order has been created through permanent rounds of elections that have displaced the previous political elites, and most fundamentally through constitutional design. These regimes followed populist and Marxist views of the need for a total rupture with an unjust and immoral past. Because the previous order represented the rule of neoliberal corrupt elites, it needed to be replaced by a completely different order. The preambles to the Venezuelan, Ecuadorian, and Bolivian Constitutions illustrate how seriously these regimes have taken their tasks of re-­founding their nations. The Venezuelan Constitution of 1999 changed the name of the nation to the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, citing as its main goal the re-­foundation of the Republic and the establishment of participatory and protagonist democracy. The Ecuadorian Constitution of 2008, drafted only ten years after the recognition of indigenous and women’s right in the Constitution of 1998, is aiming to “construct a new way in which all citizens will live together in diversity and in harmony with nature to reach the ‘good life’ ” (“the sumac kasay”). The Bolivian Constitution of 2009 contains the longest and most radical preamble. This document, at least through language, re-­ founds the nation, “leaving in the past the colonial, republican, and neoliberal state.” The Constitution also tasks Bolivians to the “historical challenge to build collectively a Unitary Social State of Rights Plurinational and Communitarian.” Contemporary populist leaders, like their predecessors, used religious symbols to bring redemption, and promised the coming of a holistic and uncontaminated community. José Pedro Zúquete analyzed Chávez as an emblematic case of “missionary politics.” This is defined as a secular “form of political religion that has at its center a charismatic leader who leads a chosen people gathered in a moral community struggling against all-­powerful and conspiratorial enemies, and engaged in a mission towards redemption and salvation.”14 Chávez’s goal was not to reform the system but to create a new Venezuela, a new republic that needed to be baptized again as the Bolivarian Fifth Republic. To bring about a new millenarian order, “a comprehensive moral and spiritual revolution” was required to demolish “the old values of individualism, capitalism, and selfishness.”15 The chosen people, baptized as “the most powerful force that there is between the sky and the earth, sovereign Venezuelan people,” became incarnated in the leader. Chávez reiterated the phrases: “I am not myself, I am the people” and “I represent, plainly, the voice and the heart of millions.” In this Manichaean struggle, the enemies of the leader are those of the people, as Chávez asserted: “this is not about the pro-Chávez against the anti-Chávez but the patriots against the enemies of the homeland.” “Infused by a holistic vision of politics as a soteriological tool, this missionary dimension provides a worldview aimed at increasing the followers’ sense of belonging and identity, and, thus, maximizing their levels of commitment to both the leader and the mission of ‘saving’ Venezuela.”16

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During his first presidential campaign in 2006, Rafael Correa embarked on a mission to lead a citizens’ revolution, which counted as its goal the total transformation of the economic and political system. To reinforce the idea of a citizens’ revolution, Correa’s mass rallies resembled street fairs and celebrations where onlookers sang and danced along with Correa to revolutionary tunes. Unlike other politicians who delivered stump speeches, Correa blended popular music and speech-­making. He spoke to the crowds in relatively brief “sound bites” that were interrupted periodically by the campaign’s signature songs. The format engendered a festive atmosphere, with Correa lip-­synching and dancing alongside musicians and the supporters who accompanied him onstage. These gatherings invited the crowd as both entertained spectators and active participants in what seemed more like a street party than a political rally. Drawing on traditions in Ecuadorian political culture, Correa framed his messages in populist terms, building his discourse around the struggle between citizens (embodied in his candidacy) against the cartel of old and corrupt politicians. This classic populist rhetoric was compelling to many Ecuadorians, who were convinced that political parties and politicians were responsible for corruption and all types of political and economic problems. Correa’s message was inclusive, embracing Ecuadorians of all backgrounds who felt disenfranchised by the political system, and who assumed that redemption would come with the destruction of previous institutions, and the creation of new order.17 Correa’s rhetoric was Manichaean and authoritarian. Those who did not blindly follow him were branded as enemies of the citizenry, extremist right-­wingers, and as members of the decaying and corrupt oligarchy. For Correa, the term oligarquía is an elastic concept, one that encompasses almost anyone who opposes his political project. Thus, in Correa’s terms, the oligarchy includes bankers, politicians, journalists, and leaders of social movements who he deems to be servants of the interests of the establishment. He characterized journalists and journalism as “mafiosos, journalistic pornography, human wretchedness, savage beasts, and idiots who publish trash.”18 He sued journalists and newspaper-­owners, claiming that editorial pieces and investigative reports on corruption had caused him moral harm. Social movement organizations have also been the target of his belligerent rhetoric. He called environmentalists “aniñaditos” (well-­to-do, infantile and pampered children, lacking proper masculinity) “with full bellies who oppose everything all the time.” He contended that “infantile radical” ecologists are “the main danger to our project.” A few months later he corroborated: “We always said that the main danger to our political project, after defeating the right in elections, are the infantile left, environmentalists, and indigenists.”19 In the midst of a conflict over water usage, he called the leadership of the indigenous organization, the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), “golden ponchos” and “Indian Whigs,” out of touch with their social base.20 Rafael Correa, who has a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Illinois-Urbana and who chaired the department of economics at the private Universidad San Francisco de Quito, is a charismatic leader with a biblical calling. His mission is to lead his homeland to its second and definitive independence. The new nation will be just, equitable, sovereign, and free from foreign interference. He declared, “We are ready to

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risk our lives to bring change.”21 Addressing an academic audience at Oxford, Correa defined himself as a “leftist Christian in a secular world.”22 Following the teachings of Liberation Theology, he argued that the main moral dilemma in Latin America is the problem of extreme social and economic inequalities. Previously, addressing a leftist crowd on May 1, 2007, he quoted Pope John Paul II to assert that the worst legacy of neo-­liberalism was the immoral exploitation of labor and the transformation of workers into an instrument for the accumulation of capital.23 Correa sees himself as the only voice that can speak on behalf of “the people.” Dissent, even from the left, is portrayed as treason. He is not just the voice of “people,” he also acts as if he embodies their unitary will and interests. The people’s trust in his leadership is reiterated in all the elections he has won. Electoral triumphs and carrying social policies on behalf of the poor transformed him into the embodiment of the new liberator, the leader whose task is to lead the nation to its second and definitive independence. In his symbolic inauguration at the archaeological site of Tiwanaku to a predominantly indigenous crowd, Evo Morales said these millenarian words: “in Tiwanaku starts a new era for the peoples of the world, only with the strength of the people we will finish with the colonial state and with neo-­liberalism, we will be able to bend the hand of imperialism.”24 The themes of the ending of neo-­colonial oppression, racism, and the exclusion of indigenous people were also central motifs in his official inauguration address. His electoral campaign was articulated through a re-­elaboration of the category the people, understood as indigenous. The goal of Morales’ citizens’ revolution is the democratic re-­foundation of Bolivia through votes, not bullets. President Morales follows the practices of communal democracy when he consults policies with social movement organizations. For instance, he gave a parallel state of the union address of his first year in government to peasant organizations and unions. He discussed fundamental governmental policies such as the law on education, coca leaf, and social security after consulting with peasant, indigenous and other popular organizations. Scholars contest the extent to which these long meetings—which sometimes last for up to 20 hours—are based on the participation of all, or on the imposition of Morales’ criteria. For the government this is a democracy of social movements. For critics, the regime uses followers to intimidate the opposition through mass rallies and other forms of collective action. Morales’ attempts to speak on behalf of the Bolivian people are sometimes supported and other times challenged by social movements. The relations of the MAS with social movements are “flexible and unstable.”25 On some occasions social movements lead the government, on others they are subordinated to the MAS, and at times they actively challenge its policies. For example, social movements organized in the Pacto de Unidad had an active and independent role in the drafting of the new constitution. In 2007 social movements previously organized in the Pacto de Unidad became part of the CONALCAM (Coordinadora Nacional por el Cambio). This organization was presided by Morales who mobilized movements from the top down in struggles against the opposition. They marched to support several MAS legislative initiatives, and in 2008 they campaigned for Morales in the recalled referendum. When in December 2010 the price of gasoline was increased by 75 percent, social movements forced Morales to

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reverse the hike. Morales did not consult on this policy with the CONALCAM, and the coca growers and the miners unions who were consulted did not fully commit their support. The changing relations between the state and social movements challenge assertions that it is a government of social movements where Morales rules by obeying. It also questions assertions that movements are fully subordinated to Morales’ leadership. In Bolivia the ambiguity “of the concept of the people leave politics open-­ended: even Morales who is portrayed as the embodiment of ‘the people’, can be challenged in the name of ‘the people.’ ”26 These debates between social movements, Morales, and the MAS about who can speak for the authentic people of Bolivia take place in a context of decolonization. The symbolisms of power attest to the hopes and promises of overhauling the legacies of colonialism. Anthropologist Nancy Postero writes, “On January 21 [2006] Morales participated in a popular ceremony at Tiwanaku, a pre-Inca site near La Paz, where, after walking barefoot over coca leaves, he was blessed by Andean religious leaders and recognize as the Apamallku, the highest indigenous authority. To the thousands of admirers shivering in the freezing altiplano morning, he declared, ‘A new millennium has arrived for the original peoples of the world.’ ”27 The empowerment of indigenous people is evidenced in the symbolic changes in the Bolivian political landscape. Indigenous rituals are performed in the Presidential Palace, previously a center of white power. The cultural and symbolic inclusion of indigenous people is carried with populist understandings of rivals as enemies. The authoritarian specter is present in small communities and at the national level. For example, after learning the results of the 2005 presidential election in the small village of Quilacollo an indigenous leader affirmed: “in our community there was one vote for Tuto Quiroga [Morales’ rival in the election], we are going to investigate who this is because we cannot tolerate betrayals by our own comrades.”28 This undemocratic view of opponents as enemies characterizes the president and vice-­president’s worldviews and speeches. Morales defined enemies at different levels. At the external level, the foreign, especially the United States, the drug Enforcement Administration, and the transnationals, are the enemies of the nation and the sovereign. At the domestic level, the oligarchy, whites, and Western culture are the enemy, as opposed to the people, the indigenous, and specially the Andean. Finally, at the level of the economy, neo-­liberalism and the traditional parties are the enemies, opposed to socialism, social movements, and peasant economic strategies.29

The politics of the will Margaret Canovan wrote that the term “the people” “is not only the source of political legitimacy, but can sometimes appears to redeem politics from oppression, corruption, and banality.”30 Latin American Marxists, as well as populists, have shared distrust in

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views of democracy as accommodation and compromise. Instead, they advocated democracy “as the politics of the will” where the people express their sovereignty directly and without intermediaries. Over the past ten years Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela have experienced intense political mobilizations and insurrections carried out in the name of popular sovereignty and democracy. Supporters and opponents of Chávez polarized Venezuela, using collective action as means of expressing their views in the streets. In 2002, the military briefly ousted and then restored Chávez to power, arguing they were fulfilling the will of the masses marching both for and against the president. Between 2000 and 2006 Bolivia lived under a period of intense collective action. Scholars have debated whether or not this nation went through a revolutionary epoch.31 In Ecuador since 1996 three elected presidents were not allowed to finish their terms due to constitutional coups carried out under the pretense of implementing what the people had willed in the streets. Many analysts of recent rebellions interpreted them as populist resurrections; “the people,” without intermediaries, took their political destinies into their own hands. Since the heyday of Latin American populism in the 1940s, when the excluded masses became incorporated into politics, democracy has been lived and experienced as the occupation of public spaces in the name of a leader exalted as the embodiment of poor people’s aspirations. In Argentina, workers’ mass demonstrations to rescue General Juan Perón from military arrest in 1945 became enshrined as “loyalty day” and a part of Peronist myths and rituals. Velasco Ibarra, five-time president of Ecuador, eloquently constructed the notion of democracy as the occupation of public spaces: “the streets and plazas are for citizens to express their aspirations and yearnings, not for slaves to rattle their chains.” Populism is based on a Manichaean rhetoric of “us” versus “them.” In Latin America, this antagonism has been constructed as that of the people against the oligarchy. Under populism, all social, economic, and ethnic differentiations and oppressions assemble into two irreconcilable poles: the people who encompass the nation and “lo popular” versus the foreign-­led oligarchy that has illegally appropriated the will of the people. The notion of “the popular” incorporates the Marxist idea of class understood as antagonistic conflict between two groups, with the romantic view of the purity of the people. As a result, “the people” has been imagined as an undifferentiated, unified, and homogenous entity.32 Marxists share the populist emphasis on reducing the complexity of social struggles to a struggle between two antagonistic camps. Both traditions disdain liberal mediated politics and seek instead radical substantive democracy based on the direct enactment of sovereignty, and as direct representation. These traditions however have departed on the role given to different actors. Whereas Marxists give normative and theoretical priority to the proletariat, populists search for the vaguer category “the people.” Given their similarities, it is not a surprise then that a few Marxist academics, despite the bad reputation of the term, have searched for a combination between populism and socialism.33 The word “revolution” has returned to Latin America’s political vocabulary. Chávez, Maduro, Correa, and Morales have not limited themselves to changing solely the course of neoliberal economic policies or to modifying existing institutional arrangements. Reform has certainly not been their goal. Instead, they are carrying out

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revolutionary processes by urging supporters to pick up ballots rather than bullets. However, at least in the case of Chávez and Maduro, this strategy has left room open for the possibility of violence to defend the revolution from imperialism and their allies. The terms “citizens’ revolution” and “Bolivarian revolution” have allowed these governments to legitimize their regimes with Marxist and populist notions of the need for a total rupture with the existing order to bring meaningful and long lasting change. The term “revolution” also grounds their feats in previous popular struggles for national and popular liberation, and in new interpretations of their nations’ history. Perhaps the most dramatic example is the resuscitation of the figure of Simón Bolívar, the “Liberator” of South America, from conservative historians in order to cast him with the dubious credentials of a non-­white, anti-­imperialist revolutionary icon. The notion of a total rupture with the past helps to paint elections as Manichaean struggles between historical projects. Revolutions also require new social pacts, expressly new constitutions, to begin the construction of a new order. But revolutions, even when depicted as peaceful and based on electoral legitimacy, also call for special measures. Because their goal is to construct a new regime, the tools used to implement change are not necessarily required to respect the old procedures. Even if the goal is the manifestation of greater democratic practices and values through moments of rapid and drastic change, special measures, that might not be fully democratic, could be needed. Revolutions signify active participation of common people, their politicization, and their presence in the streets and in the plazas. Polarization in permanent elections helps create a revolutionary atmosphere in which people feel they have embarked on an extraordinary project. Revolutionary moments have the particular quality of making people feel part of a project and a moment where a new chapter in history is being written. It forces people to take sides, and does not allow for skeptical bystanders. Society becomes polarized and simplified into two antagonistic blocks: the camps of history and anti-­history.

Conclusions This chapter has analyzed the hybridization of Marxism and populism. These traditions have despised liberal mediations, seeking instead mechanisms to allow for the people to express sovereignty directly and without intermediaries. Because Marxists and populists conceived of politics as an antagonistic confrontation between two camps, they have assumed that diverse interests, identities, and demands could be homogenized and simplified in moments of rupture and struggle. Both traditions look for authentic values and traditions of “the people” in idealized precapitalists pasts. Despite advocacy of non-­mediated and direct representation and participation by populists and Marxists, both the populist leader and the Leninist party, respectively, have assumed the roles of embodying the interests and demands of the people and of the proletariat. Both traditions have demonstrated little tolerance for pluralism, and finally civil rights have been understood as facades for the domination of the oligarchy or of the bourgeoisie.

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The self-­understanding of these processes as electoral revolutions encapsulates well what supporters and critics have observed. The search for a total rupture with the past, in line with Marxist and populist traditions, has the virtue of involving people into politics and the danger of bypassing institutions leading to personalization and authoritarianism. Populist rupture has also implied the creation of a new order. Perhaps the main difference of these administrations with previous neoliberal regimes is the emergence of economic and social policies that have brought back state planning, nationalism and a commitment to social justice. The state has returned to protect common people from the excesses of the market economy and to reclaim a central role in development. These “citizens’ revolutions” have also meant the replacement of old political elites by new elites. New constitutions expanded and deepened social, political, and individual rights. These new charters included many of the demands of social movement organizations. The discursive glorification of common people, the symbolic attacks to the privileges of the elites, the symbolic democratization of spaces of white power and privileged, all of these factors explain why these regimes are regarded by their social bases as experiments in democratization. These regimes, as did their populist predecessors, search for mechanisms to bring the “leaders” and the “led” into close and unmediated contact. Their permanent electoral campaigns, novel modes of communication such as Chávez’s and Correa’s weekly television and radio addresses, the constant movement of presidencies to remote areas that lack the oversight of other authorities, bring to the foreground evidence that a democratic revolution is under way and that leaders are in close contact with their electors, particularly those at the margins of state and nation. Chávez, Maduro, Morales, and Correa share the use of a populist discourse to represent politics as a Manichaean struggle between two antagonistic poles. But they differ in the type of relationship between leaders and followers. Morales’ administration has given spaces of autonomy to movement organizations. Chávez, Maduro and Correa, on the contrary, have followed a top-­down approach to organization. They have had little patience with autonomous social movement organizations, and have actively tried to directly supervise grass-roots organizations. They resorted to a leadership style based on unity and command from above where the leader appears to be the condensation of diverse demands made from below. Evo Morales followed a different leadership strategy. Similarly to Lula in Brazil, he has pursued convergence and persuasion allowing for more autonomy to his grass-root constituency.34 These Andean experiments are part of a regional turn to the left that has done away with neoliberal orthodoxy. The state has returned to protect common people, and in these mineral rich nations to redistribute rent. Yet it would be reductionist to underscore rent redistribution as the sole reason for increasing levels of common people support. The combination of redistribution, populist discursive empowerment, and an increasing presence of the state and the nation might explain the popularity of the leaders of these self-­described citizens’ revolutions. Focusing on the excesses that a revolution could entail, does not mean that I am arguing that reform was the appropriate or even only possible route to bring about change. Nor I am idealizing previously existing political regimes. Preexisting democracies in these nations were exclusionary, based on clientelism, corruption, and

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on politicians’ instrumental use of laws. Perhaps a total breakdown of these regimes was needed given the inability of political elites to reform and change their practices. However, life under a constant “revolution” has come at the cost of many of the freedoms and practices of liberalism. It seems that the baby of liberal democracy has been thrown out with the dirty water of neoliberalism, patrimonial and clientelist political systems. Without values of pluralism, civil rights, and the construction of political opponents as rivals who share the same discursive and institutional spaces, the authoritarian, messianic, and Jacobin temptations could prevail in these experiences. The death of Chavez at the age of 58 dramatically underlined the problems of succession in populist charismatic regimes. Despite attempts by Nicolás Maduro to portray himself as Chávez’s heir, he does not have his charisma. He narrowly won the presidency in 2013, and his rule is considered to be illegal and illegitimate by broad sections of the population that took over the streets in February 2014 to protest against his economic policies, repression, and the erosion of democracy. Some protesters are even demanding his removal from office. Despite the oil boom, Venezuela is going through a deep economic crisis, with shortages of consumer goods, rapid inflation, and an unsustainable exchange rate. Maduro responded to the crises by increasing repression, and mobilizing followers from the top down. His regime might survive because of the loyalty of armed forces and the police to quell popular protest, in coordination with armed militias loyal to the regime. While we need to know much more about the armed forces and their relation to populist regimes, it appears that only in Venezuela, with its armed popular militias and a military that over time has been purged of anti-Chávez leaders, would such a capacity even theoretically exist. In speculating about the future of populist regimes, it is important to separate tangible economic benefits from other sources of popular support and legitimacy. Chavismo was not just based on material distribution in exchange for political loyalty. Chávez had enormous personal charisma and established profound emotional connections with large segments of the electorate. Even though he could not transfer his charisma to Maduro, his successor still has the support of many of Chavez’s loyal followers including the popular militias. Chávez created political identities, cleavages, and a sense of empowerment among the poor that might outlast his rule and his followers will not easily be demobilized. In Bolivia as well, Morales and the MAS have empowered indigenous and poor mestizos, as individuals and especially as collective actors organized in powerful social movements. These movements will not be easily deactivated in the event that Morales himself loses legitimacy in the eyes of his followers. Even though Ecuador is less dependent than Venezuela on oil revenues, commodity rents nonetheless finance permanent political campaigns and subsidies distributed in clientelistic fashion. However, the plebiscitary character of the Correa regime, the absence of, and indeed conflict with, grass-roots organizations, and the reliance on middle-class technocrats and public opinion also create fragilities that could cause the regime to implode as quickly as it arose from the political chaos of the early 2000s. This is the reason why Correa will push for a change in the constitution to allow for his permanent reelection. Without a successor that could unite his coalition, he claims that he needs to be reelected to stop the challenge of the right. The dangers

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of personalism illustrated by the crises of Maduro’s regime should give incentives for the routinization of Correa’s charisma. The 2011 presidential elections in Peru, in which Keiko Fujimori and Ollanta Humala—two outsiders, of dubious democratic credentials—competed in a run-­off, would seem to illustrate that calls to radical populist formulas to “re-­found the nation” are not as appealing as they were only a few years ago. In the mid-2000s, Chávez was at the peak of his power, generously distributing petro-­dollars and attempting to consolidate an alternative model of hemispheric leadership that was statist, militarist, anti-­globalization, and anti-US. However, when Ollanta Humala made his second bid for the presidency in 2011, Chávez’s influence was waning. The Venezuelan economy was in crisis and Chávez’s image throughout the region in tatters. Leftist leaders from Paraguay to El Salvador took pains to distance themselves from Chávez’s model of political transformation. Ollanta Humala explicitly stated in 2011 that it had been “an error” to have allied himself so closely with Chávez during the 2006 presidential campaign. Humala’s election could signal the end of the diffusion and the attraction of the chavista populist model of re-­foundation.

Notes   1 Nadia Urbinati, “Democracy and Populism,” Constellations 5: 1 (1998), 116.   2 David Plotke, “Representation is Democracy,” Constellations 4: 1 (1997), 28.   3 Paulina Ochoa Espejo, “Power to Whom? The People between Procedure and Populism,” in Carlos de la Torre (ed.), The Promises and Perils of Populism (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2015), 59–91.   4 Francisco Panizza, “Unarmed Utopia Revisited: The Resurgence of Left-­of-Centre Politics in Latin America,” Political Studies 53: 4 (2008), 716–34.   5 Margaret Canovan, The People (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), 89–90.   6 Yves Mény and Yves Surel, “The Constitutive Ambiguity of Populism,” in Yves Mény and Yves Surel (eds.), Democracies and the Populist Challenge (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 15.   7 Luke March, “From Vanguard of the Proletariat to Vox Populi: Left-­populism as a Shadow of Contemporary Socialism,” SAIS Review 27: 1 (2007), 73.   8 Loris Zanatta, “El populismo, entre la religión y la política. Sobre las raíces históricas del antiliberalismo en América Latina,” Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina y el Caribe 19: 2 (2008), 29–45.   9 Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005), 177. 10 Luke March, “From Vanguard of the Proletariat to Vox Populi,” 71. 11 Margarita López Maya and Luis Lander, “Las elecciones de octubre del 2012 en Venezuela y el Debate de la democracia en América Latina,” unpublished document, 2012. 12 Carlos de la Torre, “Technocratic Populism in Ecuador,” Journal of Democracy 24: 3 (July 2013), 33–46. 13 Kurt Weyland, “The Threat from the Populist Left,” Journal of Democracy 24: 3 (July 2013), 18–32; Steven Levitsky and James Loxton, “Populism and Competitive Authoritarianism,” Democratization 20 (2013), 107–36; de la Torre, “Technocratic Populism in Ecuador.”

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14 José Pedro Zúquete, “The Missionary Politics of Hugo Chavez,” Latin American Politics and Society 50: 1 (2008), 92. 15 Chávez quoted in Zúquete, “The Missionary Politics,” 114. 16 Zúquete, “The Missionary Politics,” 115. 17 Carlos de la Torre and Catherine Conaghan, “The Hybrid Campaign: Tradition and Modernity in Ecuador’s 2006 Presidential Election,” International Journal of Press and Politics 14 (2009), 335–52. 18 Catherine Conaghan and Carlos de la Torre, “The Permanent Campaign of Rafael Correa: Making Ecuador’s Plebiscitary Presidency,” International Journal of Press/ Politics 13: 3 (2008), 274. 19 Rafael Correa, “Informe a la Nación en el Inicio del Tercer Año de Revolución Ciudadana” (Quito, January 19, 2009, Plaza de la Independencia). 20 Carlos de la Torre, “El Teconopopulismo de Rafael Correa,” Latin American Research Review 48: 1 (2013), 33. 21 Discurso de Posesión del Presidente de la República, Economista, Rafael Correa (Quito, August 10, 2009). 22 Rafael Correa, “Experiencia de un Cristiano de Izquierda en un Mundo secular” (Oxford Union Society, October 26, 2009). 23 Rafael Correa, “Intervención del Presidente de la República, Rafael Correa, por el día del trabajo” (Quito, May 1, 2007). 24 Nancy Postero, “Morales’s MAS Government. Building Indigenous Popular Hegemony in Bolivia,” Latin American Perspectives 37: 3 (2010), 18. 25 Eduardo Córdova, “Movimientos Sociales en Bolivia. Acción Colectiva y Democracia en Tiempos de Cambio,” in Martín Tanaka and Francine Jácome (eds.), Desafíos de la Gobernabilidad Democrática. Reformas Político-Institucionales y Movimientos Sociales en la Región Andina (Lima: IEP, 2010), 175–213; Fernando Mayorga, “Movimientos Sociales y Participación Política en Bolivia,” in Isidoro Cheresky (ed.), Ciudadanía y Legitimidad Democrática en América Latina (Buenos Aires: CLACSO and Promoteo, 2011), 19–43. 26 Sven Harten, The Rise of Evo Morales and the MAS (London and New York: Zed Books, 2011), 162. 27 Nancy Postero, “Morales’s MAS Government. Building Indigenous Popular Hegemony in Bolivia,” Latin American Perspectives 37: 3 (2010), 18. 28 Pablo Stefanoni and Herve do Alto, La revolución de Evo Morales: de la coca al palacio (Buenos Aires: Capital Intelectual, 2006), 20. 29 Postero, “Morales’s MAS,” 29. 30 Canovan, The People, 125. 31 James Dunkerley, “Evo Morales, the ‘Two Bolivias’ and the Third Bolivian Revolution,” Journal of Latin American Studies 39 (2007), 133–66. 32 Leonardo Avritzer, Democracy and the Public Sphere in Latin America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 72. 33 Ernesto Laclau, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory (London: NLB, 1977); D.L. Raby, Democracy and Revolution. Latin America and Socialism Today (London: Pluto Press, 2006). 34 John French, “Understanding the Politics of Latin America’s Plural Lefts (Chavez/ Lula): Social Democracy, Populism and Convergence on the Path to a Post-­neoliberal World,” Third World Quarterly 30 (2009), 367.

Index 1934 Constitution, Brazil 182 A National Policy (Mosley) 273 AAA see Agricultural Adjustment Act Academy of Sciences and Arts (SANU) 79–80 Acha, O. 204–5, 207 Adams, G. 167, 168 Adams, J.Q. 140–1 Adorno, T. 107 ADV see Alldeutscher Verband African-Americans 119–20, 141–3 Agrarian National Union 53 agrarian populism American populism 106–7, 141 Paraguay 224 Puerto Rico 165 radicalism 315–16 Serbian populism 75–6 Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) 110 agriculturalists see farmers Alldeutscher Verband (ADV) 34 Allen, W.E.D. 273 Allen, W.S. 16 “alter or abolish” provisions 137 American populism 103–49 anti-populism 116–35 economics 308–29 Hofstadter, R. 105–15 progressive movements 136–49 reactionary movements 136–49 see also Caribbean and Latin American populism Andrews, G.R. 164 antagonism concepts 24 anti-Asian bigotry 121 anti-black racism 141–2 anti-bureaucratic revolution (antibirokratska revolucija) 78, 80–2 anti-populism in America 116–35

anti-Semitism 105–15 American populism 120–3 producerist reason 268–71, 275 antibirokratska revolucija (antibureaucratic revolution) 78, 80–2 Antliff, M. 249–50, 252 Arabic vocabulary 95–6 aristocracy see bourgeois populism armchair-politicians 80–1 army see military Arraes, M. 179 arrendamientos (lease holdings) 216–17 Ataturk, M.K. 95–6, 100 authoritarianism 296 auto industry 188–9 Ayala, E. 212–14 Baldwin, T. 145 Balkan populism 49–102 Bosnia 90–102 Croatia 51–67 modernization 51–4 roots 51–4 Serbia 68–89 “bank of the people” 241 ban of fez 95 BANU see Bulgarian Agrarian National Union Barros, A. de 179 Bartels, L. 309–10 Beck, G. 127, 128 Benjamin, W. 15 bimetallism 269 biologizing of nationalist thought 19 Blanco, T. 164 Bogosavljević, A. 75 Bohlen und Halbach, G.K. von 32 Bosnian populism 90–102 bourgeois populism 10, 16–17, 20–1, 236–9, 243–6 Brazil 178–96

346 breach, political 22 Brinkley, A. 310 Britain post-1873 finance 267–74 West Indian populism 166–71 Brizola, L. 179 Broszat, M. 16 Brown, D. 106, 112–13 Brüning, H. 40 Bryan, W.J. 125, 126 Budjahn, G. 19–20 Bulgarian Agrarian National Union (BANU) 53, 70, 78 Bürgerräte (bourgeois council) 10 Bustamente, A. 166–71 Butler, U. 166, 168 Caliphs 97 Campos, P.A. 163–5 cane-farmers 162–3 Canovan, M. 138, 332 Cárdenas, L. 154–5, 184 Caribbean and Latin American populism 151–227 1920–60 153–77 Brazil 178–96 British West Indian populism 166–71 Cuba 158–63 Dominican Republic 156–8 Jamaica 166–71 Mexico 154–5 Nicaragua 155–6 Paraguay 212–27 Peronism 197–211 Puerto Rico 163–5 carsilije (market culture) 76 Catholics 141 CGT see Confédération Générale du Travail Chaco frontier 212–27 Chavez, H. 130–1 Chávez-Maduro 333–5 Chinese immigrants 121 Christian-National Peasants and Farmers’ Party 38–9 Christlich-Nationale Bauern- und Landvolkpartei see ChristianNational Peasants and Farmers’ Party

Index CIO see Congress of Industrial Organizations Circolo Italiano social club 215 Citizens United decision 127 Civil Defense Leagues 10, 34 Civil Rights movement 142–3 “clase rural” 214, 217–18 “class privilege” 12 class reductionism 199 CLT see Consolaçao das Leis do Trabalho coffee industry 159–60, 180 Čolović, I. 71, 76, 82 “common sense” 241 Communist CNOC 161 Communist Party of Brazil 182 communist revolution in Croatia 60–1 CONALCAM see Coordinadora Nacional por el Cambio Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) 248 Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) 142–3, 318–25 Conservatives American anti-populism 116–35 Germany 15–31, 32–48 Serbian populism 72–3 Western European theories 246–7 Consolação das Leis do Trabalho (CLT) 184 Constitution (1934), Brazil 182 Contrapunteo cubano (Ortíz) 164 Coordinadora Nacional por el Cambio (CONALCAM) 337–8 Correa, J. 212–27 Correa, R. 333–7 Ćosić, D. 83 cotton producers 156 counter-revolutionaries 246–7 Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) 63 Croatian populism 51–67 communist revolution 60–1 democracy 61–3 Democratic Union 62–3 Peasant Party 53–60 post-communism 61–3 war 60–1

Index Cuba 158–63 “cultural browning” 164 dairy industry 180 decree (ferman) 72 decree laws, Cuba 159–60 demobilization, Serbian populism 68–9, 80–2 democracy 61–3, 331–3 Democratic Party, American populism 121, 125 Democratic Promise (Goodwyn) 108 democratization of welfare 203–4 demonstrations see protest; strikes Departamento Administrativo do Serviço Público (DASP) 183 Departamento de Imprensa e Propaganda (DIP) 183 Deutsche Bauernpartei (German Peasants’ Party) 38 Deutsche Zentrumspartei (German Center Party) 40 Deutscher Flottenverein (German Naval League) 34–5 Deutscher Ostmarkenverein (League for the Eastern Marches) 34–5 Deutschkonservative Partei 36 Deutschnationale Volkspartei (DNVP) 19–21, 35–42 developmentalist policy, Brazil 178–96 DIP see Departamento de Imprensa e Propaganda discourse of populism 178–96, 311 divorce 246 Djordjević, T. 76–7 DNVP see Deutschnationale Volkspartei Domínguez, J. 163 Dominican Republic 156–8 Doña María’s Story (James) 206–7 Douglas, C.H. 272 Đozo, H. 91, 93–4, 96 Duesterberg, T. 40–1 Dzabic, A.F. 90–1, 94–5 “Echoes and reactions” column 82 economic populism 7–9, 243, 275–6, 283–6, 308–29 Edsall, T.B. 145 Education, Ministry of (Brazil) 181

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egalitarianism 312–13 Einwohnerwehren (Civil Defense Leagues/ Home Guards) 10 “El guaraní” 224 El-Hidaje (The True Path) 91 Elections, Mass Politics and Social Change in Modern Germany (Fritzsche) 33 Elena, E. 207 Eley, G. 33–4, 41–2, 116–17, 232–4, 253–4 elites Bosnian populism 92–3 National Socialist Germany 32–48 Paraguay 220 empirical peasants, Serbian populism 73–4 Engels, F. 239–40 equivalence concepts 24 Ernesto, P. 179 Estado Novo (New State) 182–3 Estigarribia, M. 213–14 “ethnic quotas” 78 ethnic solidarity, Serbian populism 83–4 European populism 231–64 egalitarianism 312–13 radical right 295–307 see also Germany extended family households 54, 72 factory owners American populism 141 Serbian populism 80–1 farmers Alliances, American populism 120, 138, 141 American populism 120–2, 124–5, 138–9, 141 Cuba 162–3 Hartzian populism 313 Paraguay 217–18 Trujillo regime 157 Weimar Germany 38–9 fascism 15–31 see also Nazism; right-wing populism Febrerista Revolution 212–27 Feder, G. 271–2 Federal Reserve Act 1913 128 ferman (decree) 72 fez 95 “Fifty Years of Progress in Five” 188–9 Formisano, R. 125–6

348 foteljaši (armchair-politicians) 80–1 Franco, R. 212–15 Frank, T. 308–10 Frankfurt School 107 free market populism 242–3 Freikorps 10 friend–enemy concepts 236, 238, 251, 322–3 Fritz, C.G. 137 Fritzsche, P. 16–21, 24–5, 33–4, 232, 252–3 Gairy, E. 166 Garvey, M. 166 Gay, P. 113 General Idea of the Revolution of the 19th Century (Proudhon) 241 Germani, G. 199–200 Germany 3–48 Center Party 40 Communist Party 36 DNVP 19–21, 35–42 fascism 252–4 Naval League 34–5 Peasants’ Party 38 post-1873 finance 267–74 Gesell, S. 270–1 Godmothers of War see Madrinas de Guerra Gold Bugs 125 gold standard 128 Göll, F. 8–9, 12 Gomez, A.S. 167 Good Neighbor policy 157–8 Goodwyn, L. 108 Goulart, J. 179, 187–91 Grant, M. 122–3 grass-roots populism 143–4, 206–7 green tea 216–17 Greene, E.H.H. 269 Griffin, R. 15, 21–2 Grundsätze der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei 36 Guaraní language 224 Habsburg Empire 74 Handžić, M. 91, 92–3 Hanna, M. 125, 126 Hard Cider and Log Cabin Campaign 140

Index Harrison, W.H. 140 Hartz, L. 313–14 hats 95 HDZ see Croat Democratic Union Healey, M. 204 Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (Laclau and Mouffe) 199 Hicks, J.D. 106 Hitler see Nazism Hofstadter, R. 105–15, 120–2, 124 Home Guards 10, 34 Homeland War of 1991, Croatia 63 homosexuality 145 Honoratiorenpolitik (bourgeois notability) 16–17 Horkheimer, M. 251 House of Representatives, Cuba 162–3 hrvatska seljačka stranka (HSS) 53–60, 70 Hugenberg, A. 39, 41–3 ICTY see Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia “immoral parasites” 236–7, 248–50 Independent Socialist Party 36 Indian populism 166–71 Indian villages 216–17 industrial strikes, Brazil 180–1 Industrial Trades Unions (BITU) 166–7 inflation, Germany 7–9 “instincts of the people” 241 Integralists, Brazil 182 integrative labor ideology model 316–17 Intentona 182 Invisible Hands (Phillips-Fein) 108 Ipola, E. de 205 Iqbal, M. 91 Irish Catholics 141 Islamic Declaration (Izetbegovic) 90–102 Izetbegovic, A. 90–102 Jackson, A. 140–1 Jackson, J. 143–4 Jacobinism 236–9, 253–4 Jamaica 166–71 James, D. 200–1, 206–7 Japan 96

Index Jewish authors 105–15, 120–2, 124 jihad 96–7, 99 Jinnah, M.A. 98 Johnson, L. 123 Johnson, S.E. 122 Joint Commission, Brazil 186–7 Jones, L. 16–17 Jovanović, D. 75–6 Jungdeutscher Orden (Young German Order) 34 Justice Party 37 Karadjordjević, A. and P. 57–8 Karadzic, R. 92 Karush, M.B. 215 Kazin, M. 108, 126, 142–3 Kitson, A. 268–71 Klemperer, V. 9–10 Know Nothing movement 141 Koch Industries 144 Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (German Communist Party) 36 Körner, T. 38 Koshar, R. 16–17 Krauthammer, C. 130 Kriegsgemeinschaft (war community) 18 Ku Klux Klan 141–2 Kubitschek, J. 178–9, 188–91 La vieja guardia sindical y Perón (Torre) 201 labor ideology/populism 120–1, 124–5, 313, 316–19 Labor, Industry and Commerce Ministry (Brazil) 181 Labor, Ministry of (Brazil) 186–8 Labor Party, Jamaica 167–70 Laclau, E. 24, 170, 198–201, 205–6, 235–6, 251, 274–80 laissez-faire doctrine 124, 127–9 landowners Cuba 159–60 Paraguay 216–17 Somoza regime 156 Trujillo regime 157 Western European theories 245 Landvolk (rural protest groups) 7, 11 Landvolkbewegung (Rural People’s Movement) 37–8

language Bosnian populism 95–6 Paraguay 224 Peronism 203–5 Latin American populism revolution 330–44 see also Caribbean and Latin American populism Le Pen, M. 129 League of Communists 60–1 League for the Eastern Marches 34–5 lease holdings 216–17 Lease, M.E. 120 Lebenstraum language 19 Levitsky, S. 204–5 Lewis, J. 112–13 liberalism 72–3, 319–20, 323–5 Life and Death in the Third Reich (Fritzsche) 16 Lincoln, A. 130 López, C.A. 216–17 Lower Saxony 16–17 Maček, V. 56–60 McKinley, W. 125 Macune, C. 118 Madrinas de Guerra (Godmothers of War) 220 Manley, M. 166–7, 169–70 Marcuse, H. 251 Marín, L.M. 163–5 Marković, S. 72 marriage 145, 246 Marx, K. 92, 198, 200, 235, 243, 275–6, 283–6 Maschmann, M. 12 Massing, P. 269 Mendieta-Batista regime 158–63 Menem, C. 198, 204–5 Mexico 154–5 Milanesio, N. 207 military force Brazil 182 Cuba 158–60 “million man march” 157 Milošević, S. 71, 80–2, 84 Minas Gerais 180

349

350

Index New Left as political ideology 320–2 Nicaragua 155–6 Noakes, J. 16–17 not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) protest 146 Novick, P. 109 NSDAP see National Sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei

Minimum Wages Technical Commission 159 mir institutions 54 missionary politics 335 Mittelstand 232–4 Mittelstandsbauch, “the People” of Germany 5 Mladi Muslimani (Young Muslims) 91 mobilization American populism 120 Cuba 158–9 Serbian populism 68–9 Weimar Republic 32–48 modernism, Balkan populism 51–4, 93–4 moralism 236–7, 241, 248–50 Morgan, E. 136–7 Mosley, O. 272–3 Muslim National Organization 90–1 Muslimanska narodna organizicija see Muslim National Organization

Obama, B. 128–31 Obrenović, M. 72–3 Ocara poty cue-mí poetry magazine 215 Occupy Wall Street protest 146 Odjeci and reagovanja column 82 oil companies 187 Omaha Platform 118 On Populist Reason (Laclau) 205–6, 235 opština-based narodniki 72–3 Ortíz, F. 164 Ostler, J. 108 Ostwald, H. 9

narod (the people) 73–4 narodna država (people’s state) 73–4 narodniki 72–3 National Cane-farmer Association 162–3 National Defense Tribunals 159–60 National People’s Party see Deutschnationale Volkspartei National Rural League 38–9 National Socialism in Germany 3–48 conservative elites/fascism 15–31, 32–48 role of “the people” 5–14 theories 252–4 National Sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP) 16–17, 20–1, 36–7, 40, 233–4, 271–2 nationalism, Croatia 51–67 nativism 141, 296 Naval League 34–5 Nazi populism 5–14, 41–3, 252–3, 271, 275 see also National Socialism in Germany Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) 166, 168–9 Negro-themed poetry 164 Nettleford, R. 169 New Deal liberalism 319–20

Package Plan, Brazil 190 Palin, S. 127 “palingenetic” idea of fascism 21–2 palmacristi torture 161 Palmer, R.R. 136–7 Pan-Germans 34–5, 39 Paraguay 212–27 parasitic populism 236–7, 248–50, 265–92 Partido Popular Democrático (PPD) 165 Partido Social Democrático (PSD) 185, 189 Partido Trabahlista Brasileiro (PTB) 185, 189 Pašić, N. 73–4 pater familias 245 Patriotizam, narodnost i nacionalizam sa islamskog gledišta (Patriotism, Nationality and Nationalism from and Islamic point of view) 93 Pavelić, A. 57, 60 Payne, C. 167 peasants conservative populism in Germany 38–9 Croatian populism 53–60 producerist populism 242

Index Serbian populism 73–7 Somoza regime 156 Trujillo regime 157–8 Pedro, D. 180 people’s community see Volksgemeinschaft People’s Justice Party 37 People’s Radical Party 53, 71, 73–4 Pernambuco state 179 Perón 178–9 Peronism 197–211 as an identity 198–201 historicized 201–3 language 203–5 reproduction/transformation 205–7 structural account 207–9 Perovic, L. 71, 75 Persian vocabulary 95–6 petroleum 187 Phillips-Fein, K. 108 philosophes 246–8 Piñero, J.T. 165 playwrites 212–27 poetry 164, 215 political breach 22 political mobilization see mobilization Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory: Capitalism, Fascism and Populism (Laclau) 198, 200, 235 “politics of symbols” 71 politics of will 338–40 Politika newspaper 82 Ponce, Puerto Rico 165 Popov, L.D. 77, 82, 84 Populist Persuasion (Kazin) 108 Postel, C. 108 Poulantzas, N. 15 Praxis Circle 78–9 Prestes, L.C. 182 Primat des Nationalen (primacy of the national) 22 private property 242–3 producerist populism American populism 138, 141 parasites 265–92 Western European theories 236–7, 239–51 progressive US populist movements 136–49

351

property owners 241 protest movements American populism 131, 141–3, 146 Bosnian populism 94–5 see also strikes Protestants 141–2 proto-fascism 252 proto-Keynesian policy 272 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph 236, 239–42 PSD see Partido Social Democrático pseudo conservatism 107 PTB see Partido Trabahlista Brasileiro pueblos de indios (Indian villages) 216–17 Puerto Rico 163–5 Quadros, J. 179, 189 Queremistas 185 Quiroga, N. 203–4 Qutb, S. 91–2, 96, 99 racial populism American populism 119–20, 141–2 British West Indian populism 166, 168–9 Germany 15–16, 19, 21 Puerto Rico 164–5 Trujillo regime 158 Radić, S. and A. 53–7 Radical Party, Serbian populism 71, 73–4 radical right parties (RRPs) 295–307 definition 295–7 delegates 297–8 electoral results 297–8 political relevance 300–2 success 298–300 radicalism 15–31, 315–16 see also right-wing populism reactionary US populist movements 136–49 Red Shirts 131 Reflections on Violence (Sorel) 242–8 reform American populism 141 Bosnian populism 95–6, 98–9 liberalism 323–5 Puerto Rico 165 Regency Council, Croatia 58

352 Rehearsals for Fascism: Populism and Political Mobilization in Weimar Germany (Fritzsche) 16–17, 33 Reichs-Landburn (National Rural League) 38–9 Reichspartei für Volksrecht und Aufwertung (VRP) 37 religion 141–2 Republican Party, American populism 125, 127, 141, 144–5 Reshaping the German Right (Eley) 16–17, 34 Resistance and Integration (James) 200–1 revolution American populism 137 contested meanings 330–44 Croatian populism 60–1 Paraguay 212–27 Serbian populism 78, 80–2 rhetoric 140–1 right-wing populism 3–48 American populism 144 conservative elites 15–31, 32–48 Jacobinism 236–9, 253–4 Nazi populism 5–14, 41–3, 252–3, 271 role of “the people” 5–14 Western European theories 232–6 “Rightfully-Guided” (Caliphs) 97 Rio, Brazil 186–7 Rio Grande do Sul 180–1 Río Piedras, Puerto Rico 165 Romanian Peasants’ Party 53 Romero, G. 217 Roosevelt, T. 119, 127 Rosewater, E. 122 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 237 RRPs see radical right parties Ruffinelli, L. 212–27 Rural People’s Movement 37–8 rural populism 7, 11 Paraguay 214, 217–18 Trujillo regime 157 same-sex marriage 145 Sammlung (middle-class party) 20–1 samouprava (self-rule) 73, 83

Index San Juan 204 sans-culottes 238–9 Santiago-Valles, K. 164 SANU see Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts São Paulo 181–2, 186–7, 189 Savez Komunista Srbije (SKS) 79–80 Saxony 16–17 Scheidemann, P. 10, 36 Schleswig-Holstein farmers 38 Schützenfest 11 Sciences and Arts (SANU) Academy 79–80 self-rule 73, 83 Seligman, E. 125 Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SANU) 79–80 Serbian League of Communists (Savez Komunista Srbije) 79 Serbian People’s Radical Party 53, 71, 73–4 Serbian populism 68–89 interwar era 75–7 nineteenth century 72–5 societal perspectives 77–84 Serbian Timok Rebellion 52–3 Sewell, W. 208, 237–8 Sieyès, A. 236–9 SKS see Savez Komunista Srbije Skupština (Serbian parliament) 72–3, 75 Social Democratic Party (SPD) 17 socialism, political-economic ideology 317–18 see also National Socialism in Germany Somoza regime 155–6 Sonderleidensweg, Germany 6 Sonderweg thesis 253 Sonnenberg, M.L. von 270 Sorel, G. 234–5, 236, 242–54 southern populism 123–4, 141–3 SPD see Social Democratic Party Spengler, O. 10–11 Stahlhelm 11–12, 20, 34–5, 39–43 Stamboliiski, A. 53 Stanley, J. 247–8 Stefanich, J. 214 Sternhell, Z. 234–5, 249–52

Index strikes Brazil 180–1 British West Indian populism 166 Cuba 160 Jamaica 166 National Socialism in Germany 8 Puerto Rico 165 Serbian populism 80–1 substitute titles 216–17 Sugar and Coffee Stabilization Boards 159–60 sugar industry 159–63 Sultan Mahmud 72 Sumner, W.G. 124 supply-side policies 188–90 Supreme Court 127 symbols, politics of 71 tasseled hats 95 Tea Party populism 127–31, 144–6 Technical Commission on Minimum Wages 159 That Noble Dream (Novick) 109 The Age of Reform (Hofstadter) 106, 111–12, 120–1 The American Political Tradition (Hofstadter) 107, 112–13 The End of Reform (Brinkley) 310 The Greater Britain (Mosley) 273 The Illusions of Progress (Sorel) 242–8 The New Party and the Old Toryism (Allen) 273 The Party of Humanity (Gay) 113 The Passing of the Great Race (Grant) 122–3 “the people” of Germany 5–14 “The Populist Heritage and the Intellectual” (Woodward) 111 The Populist Revolt (Hicks) 106 The Populist Vision (Postel) 108 theories of populism 229–92 producerist reason 265–92 Western Europe 231–64 Timočka Buna 73 Tito, J.B. 60, 91 titulos supletorios (substitute titles) 216–17 Torre, J.C. 201 Treaty of Versailles 7–8

353

Trujillo regime 156–8 Tuđman, F. 91, 92 Turits, R. 157 UDN see União Democrática Nacional Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (Independent Socialist Party) 36 “uncontrolled populism” 84 UNIA see United Negro Improvement Association União Democrática Nacional (UDN) 185–6 unidaded básicas 204 United Fruit Company 159 United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) 166, 168–9 United Patriotic Associations 35 US populism see American populism Ustaša 57–60, 91 Vargas, G. 179–91 Vasconcelos, J. 164 Velike ideje i mali naroda (Great Ideas and Small Nations) 91 Venezuela 130–1 Vereinigte Vaterländische Verbände Deutschlands (United Patriotic Associations) 35 Versailles Peace Treaty 36 “virtuous producers” 236–7, 248–50 Vladisavljević, N. 81 Volk (“the people” of Germany) 5–14 National Socialism in Germany 252–4 in politics 15–31 Volksgemeinschaft (national community) 5–6, 8, 10–11 conservative elites/political mobilization 35–6 in politics 16–18, 21, 24–5 Volkspartei (people’s party) 17 volunté generale 237 voters, American populism 126, 141–3, 145 Walker, F.A. 125 Wall Street 146

354

Index

Wallace, G. 123–4 war Croatian populism 60–1 Germany 18 Paraguay 212–27 Serbian populism 75–7 Watson, T. 122–3 Weber, M. 280–3 Webster, D. 140 Weimar Germany 6, 32–48, 232–3 see also National Socialism in Germany welfare, Peronism 203–4 Werkstudent (work student) 12 West Indian populism 166–71 Western European populism 231–64 What’s the Matter with Kansas (Frank) 308–9 Whig Party 140 “white backlash” 143 white supremacists 119–20 White, W.A. 125 Wilders, G. 129 will, politics of 338–40 women American populism 120, 138, 145

Brazil 181–2 Paraguay 220 Peronism 206–7 producerist populism 242 Woodward, C.V. 111, 119–20 working classes Peronism 201–4, 205–7 Serbian populism 77–84 see also peasants Workingmen’s Party, California 121 xenophobia, Germany 19 see also racial populism Yellow Shirts 131 yerba mate (green tea) 216–17 Yoghurt Revolution 81 Young German Order 34 Yugoslavia, League of Communists 60–1 zadruga (extended family households) 54, 72 Zivilizationsbruch (political breach) 22 Žižek, S. 274–80