In a long
article for
National Journal tracing the history of progressive populist efforts at reducing income disparities in the U.S., John Judis stumbles across conservative populism. He sees the Democrats' emerging platform of government action to reduce income disparities being based on unwarranted assumptions.
The first flaw has to do with the status of the middle class. The populists assume that the rich are currently getting richer and that everyone else is suffering; that the middle class is vanishing.
While incomes and wealth at the very top have soared, and while people at the bottom of the economic ladder—many of whom have only high school degrees or less—are indeed threatened with falling incomes and joblessness, middle America is not dying or disappearing.
The real division in Chicago—and, I would suspect, in other cities and states—is not so much between the very rich and everyone else, but between thriving middle- and upper-middle-class neighborhoods and those boarded-up neighborhoods inhabited by the very poor.
This is not a class division that is conducive to a progressive populism that seeks to unite the 90 percent against the very rich. In fact, outside of a Democratic town like Chicago, it may be more conducive to a right-wing populism than a left-wing populism.
Of government programs to ameliorate inequality, he reports pollster Greenberg found:
Voters understood appeals to fairness as appeals to use their tax money for government programs to aid minorities. Outside of very blue areas, today's populist appeals to reduce economic inequality could well be understood in the same manner.
No question, they are understood as exactly that. Judis' bottom line can be found in the article's title:
Dear Democrats: Populism Will Not Save You
