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

Patricia Nelson Limerick

… My plan is to speak a little further, briefly, on the advantages and disadvantages that the company of historians brings to a topic like this and then, first, to examine definitions of populism, both capital P and small p; then, second, describe some different ways historians have interpreted 1890s populism—actually embody more than describe; third, explore the ways 1890s populism makes a kind of difficult heritage for the contemporary United States; fourth, reflect on the reasons why the contemporary right wing has had a much easier time in making use of the language and rhetoric of populism. And yes, like other speakers in this conference, I’m not entirely comfortable with my definitions—or anyone’s definitions—of right or left. I should say, as an on-the-road person, I have had transcendent encounters with Republicans in the last few years. If they were videotaped and put on PBS, people would weep or shudder—I don’t know what they’d do, but they would be as amazed as I am at what can happen on the ground level in bipartisan conversation these days. I should say, if I don’t have an entire certainty about right or left, I’m pretty sure I know what category I occupy, and the category is that of paleo-liberal—an idea I stole from my friend, Joe Fender. Then, fifth, I would like to end with a touching vision of the future of populist politics in which I will leap forward to the Colorado College’s 150th anniversary in 2024 and image an era in retrospect, which I will call the AM era of United States politics—AM, After Monica; AM, at last it is really morning in America.

People in the twentieth century who claim to be small p populists are making a revealing statement about what they think of that capital P populism and what they think it was one hundred years ago. And that claim on political ancestry, that claim to a lineage or a political line of descent, puts them into an awkward relationship to historians because, in these matters, not just [with respect to] populism [but in] many other cases, historians are often party poopers. We are party poopers because of an uncontrollable enthusiasm we have for fact checking. I think, for instance, of Mr. Kaplan’s remark about how optimistic he would have been as a speaker in the 1890s—a curious notion for a decade so wrapped with agrarian trouble, with labor struggle, with incidents that permitted Nell Painter to write her book called Standing at Armageddon, which was not an optimistic title. Mr. Kaplan himself … might have had some interesting opportunities to talk with historians about the progression of optimism on democracy.

When the National Aeronautics and Space Administration adopted the comparison of space to the Western frontier, Western American historians had to be party poopers and point out that the westward movement was a very complicated situation. Rather than a cheery metaphor of progress, the history of the nineteenth century frontier suggests that space aliens and extra-terrestrials are in for a pretty rough encounter. No wonder the Navajo people have attempted to send signals into space saying, "Beware of those folks!" When advocates of space exploration say, "This will be just like the nineteenth century frontier," historians are inclined to say, "Are you sure you really want this?" Failures of fact checking may be even more common when it comes to the celebration of populism and other occasions of folk activism in American history.

I brought quite a few examples of this, but this is the one that just broke my heart. I happened to be in the audience when the person I’m quoting said this, and I shrieked in the back of the room. Nobody else in the room apparently knew what had happened, but here this thing is in print. This is a person I admire in many ways, Ron Takaki, who is writing in this section in response to Charles Murray’s book and is trying to say there are some very inspirational moments in American history where the people came together and crossed racial and ethnic borders and worked together in a common cause. So, I was sitting in the back of the room in Boulder when this was shared with me:

If we look again at American history, and we had just gone through some rather dark episodes, we can find other habits of the heart of community, social responsibility, and a collective spirit. We find them in Bacon’s rebellion of 1676 [Anyone want to squeak over this?] when the poor of Virginia, black slaves, and white indentured servants joined together and revolted against the planter class. We also find them in the populist movement of the 1890s and so on.

Well, colonial scholars here, you know what’s the problem with that. Indeed, a black and white coalition did exist in some form, but the first thing they did was attack Indians.

So, [if] you want examples of interracial collaboration and cooperation, you can get some in American history where, indeed, the greater cause of attacking another enemy brought people together—Camp Grant, 1871: Hispanics, Anglos, Papago Indians in a coalition against Apaches, massacring women and children there. So, that’s not the populism that Takaki had in mind. But that’s a problem, an oops problem, a blooper problem. There are plenty of occasions where you need to be cautious about that. If you want to claim a lineage that connects you to something in the nineteenth century or the eighteenth century, look before leaping. Take an historian to lunch; what could be more fun, right? I guess kind of a downer, not fun, when you think about it—and talk through what you are about to do before you do it.

So, what is populism? What does this term mean, now and then, over time, 1890s, 1990s, and capital P and small p? One of the most memorable definitions, a kind of definition in practice, comes from that wonderful old fellow, Studs Terkel, who was quoted as saying, "I call myself a Populist. It avoids the God damn liberal label." In our time, the meaning of populism seems to have precipitated out into a set of synonyms and phrases: protests, insurgency, discontent, grassroots, and, most important, peoples’ opposition to elitism. Most simply, writes one advocate of a new late twentieth century populist movement, populism calls for the return of power to ordinary people. Now, instantly the historian begins to twitch. The return of power to ordinary people? In what lost, undocumented age of American history did ordinary people hold this power which could now be returned to them? Remember the restrictions on suffrage in the nineteenth century, the exclusion from voting on the basis of property, race, and gender, and you get a glimpse of how much of populism is governed by nostalgia, by the desire to return to an imagined past that can’t bear much in the way of close examination or fact checking. Of course, that’s a remark of limited usefulness since high octane nostalgia powers [run] right over and through fact, and that has been proven in many, many experiments and case studies. Whether or not ordinary people hold power or held power in the past, the desire to return to that state of affairs can still exercise a big influence on peoples’ thinking and actions.

This story is Michael Kazin’s. … [He] offers a definition of populism that spares us this squabble over fact and gets more directly to the point. It will seem familiar to you because you have heard it from a previous speaker [Linda Chavez-Thompson]. "Populism is a language whose speakers conceive of ordinary people as a noble assemblage, not bonded narrowly by class, speakers who view their elite opponents as self-serving and undemocratic, speakers who seek to mobilize the people against the elite." Now, claiming to speak for the vast majority of Americans, who work hard and love their country, is obviously an act of ventriloquism. Speaking for the American people is questionable since no one knows what the American people actually want to have said on their behalf, and it seems possible to me, probable to me, that the endless polls of our times may actually have made this even harder to figure out. So, there’s a paradox: the people, many of those people who have spoken the language of populism, have been a fairly select group of public figures. Those who have spoken for the people could even be called, in some circumstances, maybe particularly the last forty years or so, by some definitions, an elite. Just an elite claiming to have a particular validating, legitimizing connection to the people themselves, and that is a paradox we’ll return to. But, how surprisingly easy it is in American politics to denounce elites while being an elite; to denounce elites in order to lobby for elite interest. But let us bring the problem of definition to a focus by returning to 1890s populism and the differing interpretations that historians have offered of that movement and that moment.

When I teach the U.S. [history] survey course, the populist movement gives me my best opportunity to demonstrate to the students the really quite extraordinary variation in how historical understanding has changed over time. Populism gives me my chance to challenge that widespread habit of mind that history is something that settles down, that it is a bunch of facts, that, once we get them proven and sorted out, that’s the end of that. This is a way of thinking common among undergraduates but also pretty common among the general public. ...

I use populism because the differences in historical interpretations are so unmistakable and because I happen to have known and observed one of the most influential recent historians of populism, and he has more or less given me permission to do an imitation of him. So, at this point in the course, we’ve gone over the facts of the populist movement; the difficult coalition between southern farmers and western farmers, not to mention western miners; the complicated business of trying to form a rural-urban labor coalition; the forceful and clear demands of the Omaha Platform of 1892—in which the free coinage of silver was only one of many more substantive proposals—and the fusion of the Populist with the Democratic Party in 1896 with the candidacy of William Jennings Bryan, in which the broad package of populists’ demands contracted to that one about silver in the currency.

So, how did this story get told in different times? I picked three fellows—John Hicks at the end of the 1920s, Richard Hofstadter in the mid-1950s, and Lawrence Goodwin in the mid-1970s. Goodwin, again, is the only one I know personally, and I have observed his speaking style quite closely. I don’t know the first two so I will not try to imitate their speaking style, just their point of view.

So, it’s the late 1920s, and, for the next minute or two, this is populism as John Hicks saw it: Populism was very much a product of the end of the frontier. The populists were good-hearted people. They had believed the promise of farming in the west so, when troubles came upon them—grasshoppers, drought, mortgages, debts, low crop prices, blizzards, prairie fires, middle men, high railroad rates, elastic currency—they teamed up with southern farmers who were also having tough times. The alliance between the south and the west was a difficult one because their situations really were quite different, and so it is no surprise it was hard to hold the movement together—and it never really worked as a third party. But the story is really a very heartening one because, over time, nearly all the sensible reforms—things like national regulation of the railroads and the direct election of senators—that the populists proposed were picked up by the progressives, and so what we really have here is a story of short-range defeat and long-range success. So the fusion with the Democrats in 1896 is part of a happy story. The populists rejoined the mainstream and proved that they were a good, constructive movement and not so radical after all.

We were always told—I guess it might have been folklore—but we were told that John Hicks was the first American historian to make one million dollars with a textbook, which could explain some of the cheer in that rendition.

Now, it’s a couple of decades later. It’s the 1950s, and it’s Richard Hofstadter telling the story of populism. This time, the story is being told by a New York intellectual with recent memories of Joseph McCarthy and the dangers that can come from stirring up the folk: Populists were people driven by nostalgia. They brought a belief in a golden age for farmers, and most of their policies were tied to that fantasy and to a dream that those imagined times could come back. Farmers, after all, are businessmen and have been businessmen for a long time, but populists like to imagine that farmers should be set apart from the world of the market and rewarded for their special virtue. Populists were also anti-Semitic, and they were drawn to improbable conspiracy theories. They were, at their best, impractical sentimentalizers, and their disappearance in 1896 was in its own way a blessing. But the bad news is that populism with a small p never entirely disappeared, and it keeps coming back in the form of movements based on provincial resentments, naive suspensions, and nativistic scapegoating of outsiders.

Now, the 1970s and Larry Goodwin. Larry Goodwin was a former muckraking reporter for the Texas Observer before he went to graduate school. He has a speaking style very much unlike my own. When we first met, it was at a conference in 1981. He sat down next to me, and his memorable first thing—before "hello" or "have we met" or anything—he said, "Patty Nelson, you’re fightin’ for your soul at Harvard, and you’re gonna lose it!" ([That] might have been true, for all we know! We can’t deny him prophetic powers on that.)

So now, we have Lawrence Goodwin, author of The Populist Moment: We live in a culture of deafness. Look at your passivity! Look at your willingness to sit and let other people do your thinking for you. Now, we all know perfectly well what’s wrong with our society. You know who runs the world, you know who you should be standing up to, you know who the enemy is, you know who controls the money and the power in this world, but you haven’t got the nerve to stand up and act on what you know! So you drift in deference. But there was once a time in history when people acted. Southern farmers were trapped in debt. They were the most oppressed of Americans, they experimented with cooperative purchasing and marketing, they tried to find their own way out of the strangle hold of debt to merchants, but none of this could work if they couldn’t get capital. So they had to turn to politics, and they had to organize themselves into a party. The party was betrayed in 1896. That’s a bitter story, but it is not the whole story because the populists didn’t just organize a political party, they made a movement. They had picnics and parties and newsletters and classes and courses, and they taught themselves, and they taught each other, and they became a group of people with a sense of purpose, a group of people with courage, a group of people with dignity—and that makes them very different from you. But you don’t have to accept your weakness, you don’t have to spend your days bowing to power. The example of the populist offers you inspiration. You are a group of people who need inspiration a lot more than you need comfortable paychecks and big homes and big cars and vacations to help you forget that you have sold your souls to the highest bidders. The populists may have been poor, but they had riches in spirit that you would envy if you had even that much spirit left in you.

Now Larry Goodwin has gone, and I’m back, … back for the third part of my presentation in which I explore a few, actually the round number of ten—I have never in my life watched David Letterman, but I guess you can’t avoid his influence so you end up with your top ten one way or another—ten reasons why I’m reluctant to join Goodwin and see the 1890s populism as a model for 1990s protest politics. The biggest problem, first of all, in transferring nineteenth century populism to the twenty-first century, comes from the rural and agricultural foundation of 1890s populism. Yes, populists tried to build a coalition with urban workers, but the failures and frustrations of farmers were always front and center in the movement. But, in the center, there, of course, were questions about how much a populist Bryan was. When you listen to this brief passage from his "Cross of Gold" speech, you can see a difficult coalition in the making here. In fact, this is not what I would call coalition-building language. Here he is speaking at the convention that nominated him in 1896:

You come to us and tell us that the great cities are in favor of the gold standard; we reply that the great cities rest upon our broad and fertile prairies. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.

I don’t think that’s called an olive branch, what you have got there.

The rural and cultural focus is of such consequence because it was key to giving the movement a focus and an agreement on who were the enemies and what were the remedies to the enemies’ abuse of power. The enemy, for the farmers, was clearly railroads, grain elevators, banks, mortgage lenders. The solution, the remedy, was to regulate, even nationalize, transport and storage of farm products, inflate the currency and thereby loosen the control of mortgage holders and lenders and widen access to capital. Now, how do you get any comparable sharpness and aim for a twenty-first century American population?

Second, and closely matched, is the issue of the size of the community taking up activism. 1890s populism had its roots in face-to-face communities, neighbors with common issues finding other units of neighbors and building a network—maybe most important, neighbors in the same occupation and neighbors experiencing the same market frustrations. Do we have anything comparable to that now? Maybe the fact I live across the street from the Ramsey house is what makes me particularly troubled about the question of neighborhoods and their potential. Maybe the Internet can come to our rescue and create a new set of community loyalties, if not face-to-face then maybe, at least, keyboard-to-keyboard, but it seems to me challenging and questionable about whether we have anything that would work in those kinds of community units.

Third, regional identifications. 1890s populism had a clear regional past: the South and the interior West in opposition to the Northeast. Is regionalism a necessary component of populism? Is the unit of the nation, that is the people of the United States, a workable unit of identification and loyalty, especially without the evil empire of Communism to inspire a sense of opposition and of kinship out of that opposition?

Fourth, there is the matter of Christianity. 1890s populism received much of its energy and conviction from an explicitly religious framework with plentiful implications of God’s support and involvement in the cause. Obviously, this approach still works for the religious right, though often on behalf of causes that would have surprised many 1890s populists, and, for that very reason, it seems likely that the religious framework now would do more to fragment a broad and inclusive popular movement than to unite it.

Fifth, there is the problem posed by social class. In his stimulating book, Beyond Left and Right: Insurgency and the Establishment, David Horowitz discusses the efforts of current thinkers like E. J. Dionne, Thomas Edsall, and Kevin Phillips to seek remedies, as he puts it, for the political gridlock and stalemate of our times. Using the familiar populist language of hostility to privilege as the central premise of an American democracy, Dionne, Edsall, and Phillips, in Horowitz’s words, seek the re-creation of populist coalitions to fulfill the common interests of the poor, the working class, and the middle class. But there sits the unasked question: Do the poor, the working class, and the middle class have common interests? How often do measures that benefit the middle class also benefit the poor? With its agrarian focus, nineteenth century populism could fudge the issue of social class. Farmers were in some sense small businessmen, but they were also people who felt that they worked hard for an insufficient reward and who could, therefore, characterize themselves as workers in some settings. But, take away the agrarian focus, and the question of common interest, matched grievances, commitments that cross social classes, becomes a much more vexing matter.

Sixth, there is the problem of expertise. In the celebration of ordinary people, experts take a beating. Experts become an irritating component—I guess not "become," they probably always were—an irritating component of the elite, handmaidens to the elite, and powerful, if not exactly elite themselves, in terms of wealth. And yet, we live in times of such complexity in technology alone that spurning expertise can be very dangerous. The dilemma presented by small p populism in terms of expertise is reminiscent of Kurt Vonnegut’s memorable portrait of life in a future society, a society entirely committed to equality, to the full enforcement of equality, where a principle figure is a person named Diana Moon Glampers, who was the Handicapper General. Diana Moon Glampers is charged with assessing talent and then leveling that talent so that all will be perfectly equal. If you were a smart person, you had white noise jetted into your brain by electrodes just as you were about to think something worth thinking. If you are graceful and beautiful, you have to dance with cement bags on your arms. So, there’s Diana Moon Glampers, enforcing equality and in many ways restricting the riches of society by that. When you need a neurosurgeon or a computer technician or a designer of a transportation system, do you want a populist at that moment?

Seventh, there is the issue of forms of communication, which is to say the exuberant and energizing state of oratory in 1890s populism and the dismal and dreary state of the spoken word in late twentieth century politics. William Jennings Bryan comes to mind again: how rarely—and how grateful we are on the occasions when—we get to hear oratory like this. I just have another snippet from "Cross of Gold" to remind us of what he could do:

We do not come as aggressors. Our war is not a war of conquest; we are fighting in the defense of our homes, our families, and posterity. We have petitioned, and our petitions have been scorned; we have entreated, and our entreaties have been disregarded; we have begged, and they have mocked when our calamity came. We beg no longer; we entreat no more; we petition no more. We defy them.

Don’t look for a house manager now, is what I’d say after that! Can you have populism if you don’t have lots of people who speak with energy, fervor, and commitment? It strikes me how often we give it all to Jesse Jackson in this line of discussion. It’s always Reverend Jackson who comes in, who is a fine speaker, but we need hundreds like that as well as an understanding of audiences as active, responsive, and audible—and not passively enduring.

Eighth, populism presents the problem of a very ambivalent opinion on the value, usefulness, and viability of a strong, centralized state. 1890s populists did ask for a much more active and interventionist federal government, but how this was to fit with their distrust of centralized power and the celebration of local self-governance wasn’t very clear in the 1890s—and it certainly isn’t clear now.

Ninth, there is the problem of time and our impatience with time. Populist movements take a lot of time. Building community movements, forming units of neighbors who then form larger networks with other such units, requires an enormous amount of time spent sitting, talking, listening—time that can seem to drag by at endless length before anything happens. Americans are a notoriously busy group, rushing from work to transport kids to soccer games and dance lessons, working two jobs, caring for aging parents, running errands, and just generally running. Do Americans have time for populist movements?

Tenth, and finally, there is the problem of race and ethnicity. In the 1890s, white populists did try to build coalitions with black populists, but this was a tenuous and difficult undertaking. And, of course, some populists made unfortunate references—and repeated references—to Jews as manipulators of business and finance. Even though some historians have made a good case for the proposition that 1890s populism was, in fact, an unusually open and tolerant movement in a nation that was intensely divided and fragmented by race and ethnicity, still populism was in large part, as Linda Chavez-Thompson has said, a white peoples’ movement. 1890s populism, in David Horowitz’s terms, launched "an insurgent tradition that is infused with the democratic spirit but is frequently defined by narrow economic interests, anxieties over change, and limits of ethnicity, race, and gender." Neo-populist Horowitz concludes, "We’ll need to abandon exclusionary tactics to unify a fragmented society behind common goals." But that returns us to the problem. If small p populists abandon exclusionary tactics, does that leave them with a unit of loyalty, the American people, that is just too broad and ill-defined to draw any sustained engagement?

And now, with one quick stop at the question of the partisan ownership with the language of populism, we approach my conclusion. Historians, particularly Michael Kazin, have trapped the pattern of populist political language in the twentieth century. The pattern, in brief, is that the right wing has taken possession of this powerful, political tool with references to the people against the elite, while the left wing has been prissy and fussy and particular and refused to use this well-established medium and method of persuasion. To quote Kazin:

In the late 1940s, populism began a migration from left to right. The rhetoric, once spoken primarily by reformers and radicals, debt-ridden farmers, craft and industrial unionists, socialists attempting to make their purposes sound American, that rhetoric was creatively altered by conservative groups and politicians, zealous anti-Communists, George Wallace, the Christian right, and the campaigns and presidential administrations of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.

Still quoting Kazin:

The vocabulary of grassroots rebellion now served to thwart social and cultural change rather than promote it, or as we observed at the beginning, it proved to be perfectly possible to denounce elites while being an elite and advocating elite interests.

What happened? You could say that anti-Communism and the cold war made leftists and liberals reluctant to use the currency of patriotism and nationalism, reluctant to invoke the spirit of that group known as the American people, after the American people had supported the war in Vietnam, taken part in a backlash against civil rights, and elected Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Power to the People was a difficult slogan to keep chanting when men in hard hats were beating up antiwar protestors. But you could also say that left wing sorts possibly made the mistake of paying at least a little attention to historians. Pat Buchanan, in 1996, did not take an historian to lunch, he did not trouble himself with any version of my ten reasons to be cautious about borrowing the heritage of populism for the late twentieth century—he just went ahead and used the language. And yet, Michael Kazin reminds us that, "Historically there is good reason for the left wing to reconsider this refusal to use and deploy populist language, historically complex or even tainted as it might be." As Kazin says, "It is only when leftists and liberals themselves talked in populist ways, hopeful, expansive even romantic, that they were able to help markedly to improve the common welfare."

Which brings me to my conclusion [that considers] the future of populist politics as they might unroll in the next twenty-five years and then be reflected on by an historian speaking at Colorado College’s 150th anniversary. The presumption here is that historians, too, have a chance to dream. We may not speak with any more authority—when we speak in the future tense—than anyone else, but we, too, have first amendment rights to dream. Is that in the first amendment? Probably not. To express our dreams, you have to have them before you express them. The presumption is also, in this little fantasy, that liberals might get over their prissiness about populist language and recognize that populist rhetoric’s implications of the people is a useful, maybe necessary, and certainly long-lived American tradition, and to get even more imaginative, this is premised on the possibility that the liberals might recapture optimism, instead of that kind of whipped dog, tail between the legs mode of the liberals in the last fifteen or twenty years. Remember Bill Clinton couldn’t say that he was a liberal? He had to be, what was he, he wasn’t a populist, we know that, he was a centrist or something like that. Liberals might actually get their spines back and come back to a standing position. Of course, that does require optimism to stand. They might recapture that conviction that, in order to bring out the best in the American people, you have to believe that they have the best in them.

Join me in a visit to 2024, where we have just heard an inspirational address from former, two-term U.S. President, Linda Chavez-Thompson, whose vigor, in her 80s, has enriched us all. … In February of 1999, as the impeachment trial groaned to a halt, Americans little recognized how beneficial this whole exercise would prove to be. As we know now, the impeachment of William Jefferson Clinton proved to be a turning point, forcing the American people to the recognition that American politics simply had to change. The first sign of change was not a particularly encouraging or inspiring auspicious one: the emergence of the "Grown Up" movement, an activist group with never thoroughly documented ties to the History Department at the University of Colorado-Boulder, which began mass producing attractive, rainbow colored signs declaring in big letters "GROWN UP." When old style politicians appeared before public audiences and returned to the tired old rhetoric of familiar political discourse, hundreds of members of these audiences would hold up the sign saying GROWN UP. Declaring that they would only vote for grown ups for public office, voters succeeded in changing the cast of characters in Washington, D.C. and in state houses, city houses, and county court houses. It’s important to say it wasn’t just a completely new group of people, that some of the current office holders were so pleased with this opportunity that they became redeemed and reinvigorated and reoriented. It is important to note that a crucial part of this transformation was the passage of the Active Verb Laws, which you will recall redefined high crimes and misdemeanors as including the use of more than five passive voice verbs in the course of a public address. Without the ability to say, "Mistakes were made" or "Responsibility will have to be taken," public office holders became dramatically more trustworthy.

The achievements of this era are too immense and varied to know in detail. Crucial to many of these changes was the recognition that self interest required the middle class to attend to the needs of the poor, [who lived in] social conditions that caused significant numbers of children, white as well as Mexican-American, African-American, and Indian and Asian-American, to grow up with weak educations and poor prospects for their futures. That situation threatened everyone’s well being, as the new group of Grown Up politicians now recognized. This, of course, had a tremendous and empowering effect on unions, as they were more and more recognized as being in the common good. An illuminating moment in this process occurred when the politicians and the public came to the agreement that the word "niggardly" is an ugly word, not because it sounds like another ugly word but because to be "niggardly" in matters of the common good is indeed ugly and dangerous. Another important change came in the recognition that squabbles over local government versus national government were pointless. Just as every school child has traced and tracked her or his place through concentric circles of house, neighborhood, home town, state, nation, continent, planet, solar system, universe, and so on, so all the levels of human community have meaning for different occasions and different purposes. With all these recognitions came the ability to tell when the labels "right" and "left" had meanings that deserved serious consideration and when they exaggerated and created differences in divisions that required nothing but dismissal. Movements of forgiveness and reconciliation occurred in many locales as white Americans agreed to stop denying the racially based injuries of the American past and as whites admitted and acknowledged the persistent ways in which they had benefited from white privilege. With these admissions, many people of color were able to transcend their own sense of injury and to initiate and to lead in partnerships and coalitions with whites.

Another key cultural development was the willingness of fundamentalist Christians to admit that an omnipotent God could not be subject to and hemmed in by the interpretations and understandings of his creatures, of human beings. Since it is 2024, we take all this for granted, but we have to remember what it was like before this happened. The one area or literal interpretation of the Bible that would not yield was that instruction, that powerful instruction in Scripture, the one place that remained unchanging and, in fact, was adopted by many secular people as well: "Judge not that ye be not judged," as well as the reminder that "the meek shall inherit the earth." In secular terms, the slogan "I’m not OK, you’re not OK, and that’s OK" became the anchor for a new tolerance.

Could this really be the future of populist politics? Why not?

© 1999 by Patricia Nelson Limerick