How Anti-Populists Will Weaponize the Capitol Riots

Sneak Peak: Episode 3 with Thomas Frank

As DC prepares for more potential right-wing violence, we wanted to focus in on what the long term fallout from the Capitol riots might ultimately be. It’s unlikely to lead to anything good. If history offers any guide, the insurrection attempt or “diet coup” as Kyle calls it, will only lead to an expansion of the police state and further consolidation of elite power.

This Friday, we’ll be talking to historian Thomas Frank. His most recent book The People, No tracks the history of anti-populism and how it’s been used to crush democratic reforms and social democratic policies since the early days of the Republic.

Frank has good news to offer though too. During a time of deep division within the left, he offers a model of populist movement-building that is taken directly from the American tradition. For decades, Frank has written about the “power and wisdom of ordinary citizens,” whom the political establishment has ignored at its own peril. Now, in anticipation of Friday’s conversation, we’ve asked him a few questions about the distinctly American populist tradition, about the anti-populists who have demonized ordinary citizens in the Trump era, and about how to build the populist world that we would want to live in.

KK&F: Can you tell us about your political background? What brought you to your current historical interests?

TF: It's a long story. I'm originally from Kansas, and back in the eighties, I got very interested in Populism, a phenomenon that was centered in Kansas. Kansas was where the Populists first came to power; they elected a number of governors, senators, members of Congress. I became interested in their story a long time ago, when I was in graduate school, studying history. At some point I gave up on that and moved on to other things. I eventually decided to come back to it, and that's how I got here. It was fairly easy to write my new book, The People, No, because I knew the whole story of Populism, and I had done all of the elementary research on it already. All I had to do was brush off that old research and start going again.

KK&F: What is the specific character of the populism that you discuss in The People, No?

TF: It's a homegrown American left-wing tradition of working-class politics that is primarily focused on economic issues, but is also focused on issues of democracy — extending franchise, allowing people to vote, cracking down on corruption. Populism is about the power and wisdom of ordinary citizens, and populists tend to be very optimistic about the abilities of ordinary people. This is a long tradition in American life. You can trace it over decades, as I do.

KK&F: How do you think anti-populists will weaponize what happened at the Capitol? Tracing that back further, how have anti-populists ascribed populism to the far right over the past four years?

TF: As I wrote the book, I became fascinated by something I did not expect to find, which was an anti-populist tradition — a tradition of fearing and hating working-class people, ordinary citizens. Just in the past week, people have been forwarding me essays, published here and there, about this ransacking of the Capitol, arguing that this is what happens when you let ordinary people into politics. That is an insult. The anti-populist tradition is in full cry right now.

When the party of the left — which is what the Democrats technically are in this country — gives up on the populist tradition, it allows the party of the right to make its demented class-based appeal. This is the lifeblood of Trumpism. It's a situation that has explained the triumph of the right for decades. The left gave up on the commanding position in American politics, the position of being on the side of the vast majority of people. When you give up on that to become the party that cares most about a professional elite, that is a recipe for disaster. And that's what has happened with the Democratic Party.

There is also an economic question to address. What happens to a middle-class society when you no longer have a real left? Well, we know what happens; it comes apart. We're watching it with our eyes. In the last four years, the the liberal culture in America, which is far and away the dominant culture of this country, has become overwhelmingly concerned with rescuing or buttressing the authority of the respectable. Of people with advanced degrees. Of the foreign-policy establishment. Even of the CIA. This is one of the great themes of the Trump years. What kind of party of the left does that? It's not a party of the left; it's something else. 

KK&F: The People, No seizes upon the appeal of populism as something distinctly American. Why does it matter, in the United States in 2021, that we trace a progressive lineage back to the founders, instead of, say, tracing a leftist lineage back to Marx?

TF: We live in a time where the left is completely marginalized. It's important to recall that this hasn't always been the case, and that, in fact, there is a really strong tradition of economic progressivism in American life — of Populism! This tradition goes way back, and is instantly meaningful to millions and millions of people. It's not alien.

If you read about the Cold War and about the history of the hard left — your socialists or communist left in the 1930s — you find that these were people who looked to foreign theorists and foreign ideas. They never got very far in America. Socialism and communism have always been dirty words in America; they've never caught on. But the Populist tradition has been enormously powerful, and it's important to understand that left ideas are not alien in this country. They are as American as apple pie, and they go all the way back to the founders. They are deep in the American grain.

There's a deeper problem here, which is that so much of what we call leftism in America isn't about building a movement. It's about being right. People like to be morally right, and they're not really interested in building a movement. As a result, we have a liberalism of scolding, where it's all about being more righteous than others, and informing them constantly of how wrong they are, when what it should be about is building a mass movement, recruiting millions of people to the cause, and getting things done — changing the world. That's what Populism was.

KK&F: You show in your book that there are myriad lessons and tactics that we can take from the Populist movement in order to build the left in America. What are those tactics?

TF: There are two important things to realize. First, the Populists talked a lot about social class. They were obsessed with the idea that farmers, workers, and all other working-class people had the same interests. Populism tried to bring people together across traditional barriers. That's always been the lifeblood of the left in this country.

The other important thing: How do you build a mass movement like populism, or like the civil rights movement? The historian Larry Goodwin was an expert on this; he called it "ideological patience." He said that the temptation of left-wing movements is always to celebrate individual righteousness, and to celebrate the purity of your particular stance or your vision. But that's not how you build a movement. It might be satisfying to individuals, but the way you build a movement is by practicing ideological patience. You have to suspend judgment toward ordinary people because they didn't go to graduate school or learn the jargon. They're not going to be up to speed yet. The idea of a movement is to bring people into the movement and build consciousness. But to demand it already is a recipe for disaster. That's a lesson that Goodwin associates with populism. We really need to learn that lesson.