The Future of Populist Politics

Colorado College's 125th Anniversary Symposium
Cultures in the 21st Century: Conflicts and Convergences

Delivered at Colorado College on February 6, 1999 at 12:00 PM
in a discussion forum with the same title.

by

Linda Chavez-Thompson

I’m delighted to be here, and I want to thank Anne Hyde for that kind introduction.

She left just one thing out.

I’m a candidate for the White House in the elections of 2008.

It all started with Parade magazine not too long ago. I was reading it on a Sunday morning, and I saw my name as one of twenty women whom readers could vote for as a potential president. If you wanted to vote, you just had to call a 900 number, then tap in a special code. I’ve been thinking about this ever since then, and, the more I think about it, the more I like it.

I’m starting to look at everything in a different light. In fact, I’m already shopping around for a Secretary of Agriculture, so if any of you are interested, drop me a line.

Now, I realize that if this is going to happen, I’ve got to break through a glass ceiling. Just look at me, and you’ll know what I mean. I’m five feet, one and one-half inches tall. If you look back in American history, the shortest president we’ve had was James Madison, and he was five feet four inches, so he would have towered over me. Well, I don’t care. I think it’s about time that the little people have a voice in running America. In fact, it’s overdue.

I want to pay tribute to my union sisters and brothers who are with us. They’re the best there is. The working families of Colorado Springs are lucky to have leaders of their high quality.

I’d also like to pay tribute to Anne Hyde and Joseph Sharman, who have done such a fantastic job of organizing this panel, and to my fellow panelists, Bob Kaplan and Pat Limerick. They’re the best.

I also want to pay tribute to each of you who lives and studies and works in Colorado Springs. I know something about this area, and it reminds me of Texas, where I’m from. Sometimes, I think the Lord decided to give us just a little more than our share of right-wing extremists because He wanted to do a favor for us progressives. He wanted to teach us to struggle a little harder—and smarter—and longer than those nice people in Brooklyn and San Francisco and Chicago ever have to do.

I want to congratulate you on all you achieve here against some tremendous odds, and I want to offer a special invitation to those of you in school here at Colorado College who’ve worked in some of the good political campaigns around here, or the campaign to defeat Amendment 2, or any of the other battles for a more decent, more fair Colorado. The invitation is to join hands with the movement where I’ve spent most of my adult life and help to organize more working people into unions for a better life. Give some serious thought to signing up with the AFL-CIO Organizing Institute. We need people like you. If you’re interested, talk to my friend Fernando Bribiezca. He’s a graduate of the Institute, and he’s spent a year and a half organizing strawberry workers in California. And that is a standing invitation. It is an invitation to make the very best and the very fullest use of everything you’re learning.

Now, let’s get down to the business of the day: populism.

Let me offer you some advice. If you want to find out about populism, there are two ways to do it. The first way will drive you absolutely nuts. The second way is the right way.

The first way is to put together a list of people who are supposed to be populists and then figure out how they’re all alike. Let me read you just a few of them: Jesse Jackson, Pat Buchanan, Ross Perot, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, Paul Wellstone, Bruce Springsteen, and Crown Prince Abdullah of Jordan. Abdullah is my personal favorite. They called him a populist in the New York Times a couple weeks ago. I’ve got to warn you, if you ever try to figure out what all these people have in common, make sure you have a big bottle of Prozac nearby. You’ll need it.

The truth is that, if we’re going to get anywhere, we need to start out with a good, solid definition of populism. That leads us to the very best way to learn about populism and what it means for people like us. Pick up a copy of a wonderful book called The Populist Persuasion by a terrific historian named Michael Kazin. Mike is someone you should know about. He’s a big influence on my own views.

Mike’s definition is that populism is really about a struggle between two sides. On one side are, in his words, "ordinary people, a noble assemblage not bounded narrowly by class." On the other side are "their elite opponents self-serving and undemocratic." The whole point of populism is to mobilize the ordinary people against the elite. That’s the bottom line.

Now, just to make sure we’re all on the same track, let me say a word about how populism got its first big start in this country. The populist movement really came together in the late 1800s, and it was made up mainly of two groups: small farmers and skilled workers. The movement was strongest in the cotton states of the South and the wheat states of the Midwest but also right here in Colorado and the other silver mining states.

It’s interesting who they thought were the common people and the elite. Right at the start, the populists believed that the ordinary people were the producers, the people who lived by the sweat of their brow, and the elite were the rich, the bankers and the speculators, who didn’t do productive work but just lived off of everyone else’s labor.

The populists fought as hard as they could for the producers, and even today, a lot of their battles still look good. They fought for stronger trade unions. They fought for a progressive income tax, with the wealthy paying higher rates. They fought for railroad rates to be regulated so the big rail barons couldn’t gouge the farmers who needed their produce taken to market. The populists worked hard for cooperative marketing instead of the dog-eat-dog system, and they thought that America’s finances should be run democratically, not by a handful of bankers. They started their own party, the People’s Party, back in 1892.

One of their leaders, Ignatius Donnelly, said what their goal was: "We seek to restore the government of the republic to the hands of the ‘plain people’ with whom it originated."

They won twenty-two electoral votes that year and elected hundreds of populists to local and state offices, and even a few to Congress. But, in 1896, they split in two over what to do in the presidential race, and, in a few years, the populist movement just shriveled away and finally died.

Was that the end of the story? Not by a long shot. The populist movement may have died, but the populist values and language and view of the world have lived on to this day.

That’s really why we’re here right now. I strongly believe that several of the populist insights still fit with who we are and where we are now. The first is the core idea of theirs, which is the huge gap between the very rich and all the rest of us.

Of course, a lot has changed. A century ago, the elite looked like the big Wall Street tycoons, the guys like Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan and Andrew Carnegie. They seemed pretty frightening and evil. Today, the super-rich people look different, more like that nerdy billionaire guy from Seattle, Bill Gates. That’s on the elite’s side of the fence.

On our side, a majority of the working people in the days of the populist movement were farmers. Now, it’s down to just 1.6 percent. Instead, most of us who work are in the industrial or service sectors. So the cast of characters has changed, and goodness knows that work has changed, but the inequality that the populists talked about is still here.

Look at the latest statistics. The top one percent of households in this country control thirty-eight percent of the wealth. And as for the stock market boom that’s supposed to be making all of us happy and rich, well, it isn’t. Almost ninety percent of the value of all stock is in the hands of the richest ten percent of households. And that richest tenth got eighty-five percent of the benefits of the stock market increase between 1989 and 1997. That kind of inequality, that kind of unfairness, would outrage the populists.

If you ask me, they were right on target. That belief in equality, that belief in the dignity of productive work, is one of their insights that we can make our own. Another insight is that the populists knew they had a wonderful weapon in their arsenal. It’s called America. They understood something very important about this country, which is that, when we’re at our best, we stand for something that’s wonderful. The great historian Richard Hofstadter got it exactly right. He wrote, "It has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies, but to be one."

What we are—what we stand for—is the idea that each of us really deserves to be treated equally, each of us deserves a voice in how the country is run, each of us deserves a chance to build a better life for ourselves and our loved ones. Those aren’t just our opinions, those are how we live. Mike Kazin says it’s "breathtakingly idealistic," and it is. What’s more, it all goes together.

A perfect example was Mother Jones. Some of you may have heard of her. She was a union activist who worked and struggled and organized for fifty years in the coalfields. She was a tough one. When she spoke at rallies, she’d denounce lawyers as "grafters." She’d take out after the "Wall Street gang of commercial pirates." And then, if there weren’t a band at the rally, she’d bring out one of her most prized possessions, her phonograph, and play the Star-Spangled Banner and other patriotic music. Mother Jones knew that she and the working people she fought for were being true to Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln while the Wall Street millionaires, the aristocrats, the empire builders were undermining everything good and decent about America.

Has this country always been true to its ideals? Of course it hasn’t. I’m a woman of color, the daughter of sharecroppers. I know where America has failed to meet its own standard of democracy and equality and fairness. And that’s why I can tell you here and now that the populists, just like the union and civil rights and feminist movements, all did America a great and precious favor. Each movement drew on the American Creed in an important way. And each movement fought hard to make America live up to that creed. You and I owe them more than we can ever repay.

The third populist insight that we can make our own is their strategy for making things better. They saw the world around them, and they knew that you can’t change things very much when you’re on your own. You can’t get very far if the only fuel you have is your own outrage. They understood that individualism may be fine in some parts of life, but, when you’re fighting for change, individualism is a losing game. You have to join with others.

The populists knew that they needed a movement. Sometimes they called it a "crusade" or a "society" or a "party," even when it didn’t run candidates in elections. But it really was what you and I would call a movement, and what a terrific movement it was. In the 1880s, the Knights of Labor signed up more than a million members from the productive classes, wage earners, and small-trades people. The Knights had high standards for joining. If you were a banker or a speculator or some other unproductive low-life, you weren’t admitted. A few years later, in 1919, at a time when working people had to assert their rights by going on strike, more than four million people, which was a fifth of the total work force, went on strike.

There’s something else that’s very interesting about their movement. The really smart populists knew that it was important to reach out for allies so they built some good coalitions along the way with the middle-class Progressives. When they worked together, it made all of them stronger and more effective. When you look back at all that the populists did, how hard they fought, how much they sacrificed, you realize that they took their movement very seriously. And you also realize that they were great optimists. They expected that their movement would beat back the elites who were doing so much damage, and the productive hard-working people would reclaim America.

Did their dream come true? In some ways, it didn’t. The United States, which is supposed to be the land of equality, is now the most unequal in wealth and income of any country in the industrialized world. The elites are running hog-wild. But it’s also true that some of the very best things that have happened in America in this century—the legal right of working people to organize into unions for a better life, the eight-hour work day, creation of Social Security, the progressive income tax, the preserving of plenty of family farms against the giant agribusiness interests—all of these are part of the populist legacy to us.

Now, it’s also true that populism had its limitations and its failures. Most of the time, in most places, it was a movement of white males. Even though there was a women’s movement that was growing around the country, the populists usually didn’t connect with it at all. What’s more, the populist record on racism was sometimes excellent but sometimes awful.

Let me give you an example: Tom Watson of Georgia, who was one of the most important populist leaders in the country. When he was young, he tried to do what no one else in American history had done, which was to put together a political coalition in the South of poor blacks and poor whites. He’d tell his white audiences, "You are kept apart that you may be separately fleeced of your earnings," then he’d ask his listeners to take an oath to defend the constitutional rights of black citizens. One time, he even mobilized two thousand white populists at his own home, guns at the ready, to protect a black populist from a lynch mob. To him, the issue was economic class, not color. But Watson failed to build that coalition of poor blacks and whites, and, after he kept getting defeated, he changed. He turned around completely. In his later years, Tom Watson became one of the most vicious, racist, anti-Semitic politicians in the entire South. It was an awful thing to watch.

Was he a populist when he trying to build the black-white coalition in Georgia? The answer is yes. Was he a populist later on when he was baiting blacks and Jews? Here too, the answer is still yes. What’s the lesson for us in all of this?

I believe that we have to look at the populist tradition [in] the same way we should look at every tradition. We need to understand both its strengths and its weaknesses. We need to see both where it was wise and where it was foolish and then take only the good, wise, humane parts and make them our own. Believe me, many of the populists had plenty of flaws and failings, but there’s still enough that’s good in what they offered to make it well worth preserving.

Who’s doing that now? Who’s really keeping populism alive? I can tell you that in the last generation, there have been quite a few conservative politicians who have used populist themes but distorted them in some pretty weird ways.

Ronald Reagan was so skillful at this game that he could pretend that a big tax cut for the wealthy was "getting government off the backs of the American people." Richard Nixon pulled the same neat trick with his talk about the "silent majority" pitted against people like us. In some way, they were heirs of populism, heirs of the meaner, nastier side of populism. But I would argue that the heir of the better side of populism is the movement I’ve been part of for more than a quarter-century, the union movement.

We’re determined to improve the lives of working people and their families—both those who are already union members and those who don’t yet have a chance to join. Do unions really make a difference for working people? You bet they do. Take a look at the data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and you find something very interesting—the union wage premium. It tells us how much more the average union member is earning over the average non-union member. Among all full-time workers, female and male, of all colors, the union wage premium is thirty-two percent. Make no mistake about what that means. For millions of workers who build our houses, clean our offices, sew our clothes, and care for us when we’re sick, a union membership translates into a lot more groceries, [affordable] utility bills, a larger home in a better neighborhood, a chance to educate their kids, a brighter and more secure future. That’s a terrific advantage for being in the union.

And that doesn’t even count the fact that union members are much more likely to have decent health insurance and an adequate pension. The Bureau of Labor Statistics proves what we’re seeing in our neighborhoods and supermarkets and bowling alleys. The fact is that all working people need a voice, and that voice is the union. That’s why we’re working hard to organize new members, offering more working women and men the chance to join our movement. It’s our highest priority.

For us, organizing isn’t a luxury. It isn’t something we do in our spare time. It’s something that we have to do, and it is the most important thing we do. But it’s a tough job. The truth is that, here in America in 1999, you can express any opinion you want, you can worship where and how you choose, but if you want to exercise your legal right to join a union and bargain for a contract, you’re in for big trouble.

Why? The reason is very simple. It’s because workers joined together have power: the power to close the income gap, the power to get decent health care and pensions, the power to build their communities. That’s good for America, but it’s bad for all the well-heeled special interests that get richer by keeping everything just the way it is. It’s something the populists understood very well.

I am absolutely certain they’d be delighted to know that we’ve welcomed into the union movement 19,000 passenger service employees at United Airlines, 2,500 construction workers and 8,000 hotel workers in Las Vegas, 1,900 nurses in Iowa City, 900 Head Start workers in Houston, 2,500 college professors in New Jersey, 10,000 reservations agents at US Airways, 3,000 school teachers in the Archdiocese of New York. And the list goes on and on.

Why are we doing all of this? Why are we organizing and struggling and building and dreaming? Because the populists, at their very best, were exactly right. Because Ralph Waldo Emerson was exactly right when he said, "March without the people, and you march into the night." And because Woody Guthrie was exactly right when he sang fifty years that "this land is made for you and me." His song is still true.

This land wasn’t made for union busting and race baiting, for oppressing women and bashing gays.

This land wasn’t made for our jobs to be privatized, downsized, chopped up, and turned into deathtraps.

This land wasn’t made for the least of us to be insulted, humiliated, and denied a voice when they need it the most.

This land wasn’t made to break people’s spirits in the sweatshops and break their backs in the fields.

This land was made for you and me to live with security and equality and hope.

This land was made for every young person in America, including my two little grandchildren, to have a future of freedom and promise, wherever they work, however they look and live, whomever they love, whatever they dream. We’re making this fight, and we’re going to win it.

So I want to close with an invitation and a challenge. Together, we can make the best of the populist dream come true, and we can make that dream even finer and deeper and better than the populists ever imagined.

Together, we can turn this society of ours around.

Together, we can reclaim America.

Together, we can build a country that cherishes working people and values the work they do.

Together, we can create a community where [all are] treated with dignity, regardless of their sex or skin color or orientation, regardless of whether their family came here on a slave ship or the Mayflower four hundred years ago or through Ellis Island at the turn of the century or from Central America last year.

Together, we can make a land where justice is done.

If we don’t do it, nobody will.

And we will.

Thank you.

© 1999 by Linda Chavez-Thompson