Politicians, especially Republicans, do not recognize the revolution that is taking place...

Towards a New Populist Moment?

The left Democratic weekly the Nation focuses most of its ire on an easy target—the out-of-power Republicans. It says that "Obama Needs a Protest Movement" (November 13, 2008), not that the people and democracy need one—an excellent expression of so-called liberalism's deeply ingrained habit of subordinating movement concerns to the needs of the Democrats' leading politicians. The Nation also absurdly calls Obama's tepid budget proposal "an audacious plan to transform America" in progressive ways.

Many of the Nation's so-called left liberals might want to take another look at Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States along with Frances Fox Piven's and Richard Cloward's classic Poor Peoples' Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail to review some elementary lessons on how serious progressive change occurs. These authors demonstrate in rich historical detail how direct action, social disruption, and the threat of radical change from the bottom up forced social and political reform benefiting working- and lower-class people and black people during the 1930s and the 1960s. They show the critical role played by grass-roots social movements and popular resistance in educating presidents and the broader power elite on the need for change. Today, we can be sure that the in-power Democratic Party and president will not move off the corporate and military "center" unless "the power of the people asserts itself in ways that the occupant of the White House will find dangerous to ignore" (Zinn, "Election Madness," the Progressive, March 2008).

For what it's worth, the Democrats are best exposed as agents of empire, inequality, and "corporate-managed democracy" (Alex Carey's useful term) when they hold top offices. That's when their populist and peaceful sounding campaign rhetoric hits the cold pavement of corporate imperial governance.

It's not too late for genuinely progressive activists and citizens to pursue radical-democratic change in defiance of both the profit system and that system's Democratic Party guardians. Thankfully, we may be heading for something of a new populist moment in the U.S., despite efforts of leading political, economic, ideological, and communications institutions. As giant financial bailouts expose the crippling chasm between the investor and political classes and the broad citizenry, "people everywhere learned a blunt lesson about power, who has it and who doesn't. They watched Washington run to rescue the very financial interests that caused the catastrophe. They learned that government has plenty of money to spend when the right people want it. 'Where's my bailout,' became the rueful punchline at lunch counters and construction sites nationwide. Then to deepen the insult, people watched as establishment forces re-launched their campaign for 'entitlement reform'—a euphemism for whacking Social Social Security benefits, Medicare and Medicaid" (Greider).

This is essential raw material for a radical rebellion, one where citizens and workers move from "watching" to demanding and acting in ways too "dangerous to ignore." Happily enough, there is left-progressive potential in the confrontation between Obama's progressive-sounding rhetoric and his corporate and imperial commitments. The popular resentment and hopes he rode to power need more genuinely democratic and effective solutions than an Obama (or a Hillary Clinton) presidency could have been realistically expected to provide. Obama and other Democrats have been riding a wave of citizen anger and excitement that goes beyond their conservative worldview and agenda. They have done their best to contain and co-opt that popular and progressive energy, but their lofty political rhetoric seeks to safely channel popular expectations that may well transcend the political class's capacity for top-down management and control.