Tea Parties = Populist Movement?

Recently I’ve been reading Richard Hofstadter’s classic history of 1890-1940, The Age of Reform. The book focuses on the Populist movement of the 1890s, which briefly brought a prominent third party into American politics and then flamed out in 1896, and the Progressive movement of the early 1900s, which rallied many middle class people to their banner and sparked one of great reformist waves of American history. (The book also includes a conclusion about the New Deal.)

While I was reading the segment of The Age of Reform devoted to The People’s Party (the Populist Party) I kept coming across points that reminded of today’s Tea Partiers and the Conservative movement more generally. But how much do the two really have in common?

Hofstadter describes People’s Party and the Populist movement as a “heightened expression…of a kind of popular impulse that is endemic to American political culture…[a tendency towards] periodical psychic sprees that purport to be moral crusades…”. He goes on to argue that grassroots discontent is often brought to the fore by sweeping, macrocosmic economic developments, which are well beyond the control of those impacted. It is easier to pin those problems on some monolithic terrible force (say, the Alinskite Presidency, the Vast Liberal Conspiracy, Marxists in the White House, etc.) than the complex politico-economic forces that are really at the root of these problems.

Sound familiar?

“At the grass-roots of American politics there is a wide and pervasive tendency to believe…that there is some great but essentially very simple struggle going on, at the heart of which lies some single conspiratorial force…and that this evil is something that must be not merely limited, checked, and controlled but rather extirpated root and branch at the earliest possible moment….”

“…the conception of history as conspiracy, an obsessive concern with the fabulous enjoyments deemed to be the lot of the plutocrats, cynicism about the two party system, the notion that the world is moving towards an immense apocalypse, the exclusive attention to the greed and other personal vices of bankers, [etc] as opposed to a structural analysis of the social system, anti-Semitism and xenophobia, the appeal to the native…[hatred of trade unions and the East Coast are mentioned further on]”.

I’d say the dynamic described above is much more applicable to today’s right-wing than the left. .

But the comparison between the Teabaggers and the Populists isn’t exact (the latter were largely left-wing for one thing). The People’s Party actually made two relatively successful third party bids in 1892, where their presidential candidate won four states outright, with electoral votes from two others, and 1894 (in both elections Populist candidates won numerous local and Congressional elections as well). But the Teabaggers are more likely to consistently vote with the Republican Party than to harbor third party ambitions, as recent polling suggests. In 1896 the Democratic Party co-opted the Populist movement, basically killing the People’s Party by incorporating many of the planks from their policy platform and fielding a Populist-leaning candidate. The Teabaggers, on the other hand, barely have a platform (beyond the usual anti-government/anti-tax stuff) and the Republicans wouldn’t need to co-opt them anyway: they’ve seen eye-to-eye since the movement’s conception.

Furthermore, the Populists of the 1890s wanted greater government involvement in the economy, a notion anathema to today’s conservatives. Lastly, Hofstadter’s understanding of the economic-sociological make up of this grassroots tendency doesn’t synch up with contemporary conservatives either.

“This kind of thinking frequently occurs when political and social antagonisms are sharp. Certain audiences are especially susceptible to it—particularly, I believe, those who have attained only a low level of education, whose access to information is poor, and who are so completely shut out from centers of power that they feel themselves completely deprived of self-defense and subjected to unlimited manipulation by those who wield power.”

This doesn’t apply to the Teabaggers, who tend to be wealthier and better educated than the general public. When you combine those factors with the excessive media coverage the Tea Parties receive it would seem as though they are very powerful, indeed disproportionately so given their numbers.

But despite these differences, both movements share the notion that “their” America is being taken away from them by forces beyond their control, forces that are identified with East Coast elites and immigrants. They share an essential “undercurrent of provincial resentments, popular ‘democratic’ rebelliousness and suspiciousness, and natvism”. But as Hofstadter also points out, such movements generally have a pretty short shelf life. Recent Tea Party events have drawn smaller and smaller numbers. Has their 1896 come already?

Jake Blumgart is a freelance reporter-researcher living in Philadelphia and a former Campus Progress staff writer. His work has been published by the American Prospect, Alternet, the Philadelphia Inquirer, The Stranger, and the New York Daily News. Follow him on Twitter @jblumgart.

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