Populism, Frank writes in the closing pages of The People, No, “is an idea whose time has obviously come, and the place it must come first is the Democratic Party.” Consistent with his historical theory of change, stretching back to his account of the New Deal, Frank’s goal is not to prompt more organizing at the populist grassroots but to convince political elites to change their attitudes. The way forward is for the Democratic Party to adopt a rhetorical posture and policy platform that can tap into the reservoir of authentic populist sentiment lodged in the hearts of the American people.
It is because his theory of change operates entirely from above that Frank must maintain that “ordinary people” have never really been conservative on economics. Frank insists that the grassroots have been ready for the last fifty years to vote for sweeping social-democratic economic reform—the only problem is that such a prospect was never presented to them. If the Democratic Party builds it, the people will come. “Populism wins,” Frank asserts. It is an “incurable itch,” the “classic, all-American response to hierarchy and plutocracy”—indeed, the “supreme rhetorical weapon in the arsenal of American politics.” This is Bernie-would-have-won as political ontology. There is, always has been, and always will be a ready-made majority that is conservative on social issues but leftist on economics, content to vote for Republicans as long as the economics are a wash but ready to come over to the Democratic side if the party’s leaders ever stop fighting the culture war and present a sufficiently robust vision of economic reform.
But the lesson of the past fifty years of grassroots American conservatism is that there’s more than one way to promise economic prosperity. What people take to be an attractive vision of economic well-being simply cannot be separated from ideology and cultural values—and those values can’t be taken for granted. Of course it’s true, as Frank writes, that ordinary people “want their mortgaged farm or their postindustrial town or their crumbling neighborhood to be made ‘great again.’” Clintonian “It’s the Economy, Stupid” neoliberalism never disagreed. The question is what counts as “great again.” The New Deal–style social democracy that Frank prefers is not the self-evident answer for many “ordinary people.” Citizens do not sprout from the American soil with an innate thirst for economic democracy and worker power; their economic aspirations are shaped by their experience of the making and unmaking of class. Even the traditions of generations past—such as populism—that have been deployed to radical ends in particular contexts can animate a conservative economic vision in periods of working-class decomposition. When institutions of class struggle are dissolving, as they have over the past fifty odd years, reaching out for the lost possibilities of the past comes more naturally than embracing the uncertainties of the future. This is the lesson we must draw from the emergence of the powerful working-class conservative movements Frank dismisses as “pseudo-populism.” Political nostalgia, an uncritical turn to an unusable past, is among the greatest dangers for the left today.