Thomas Frank: Populism Is Democracy at Work

The president is merely speaking for the people.

By THOMAS FRANK

Late last month, the success of an idea made newspaper headlines. "Populism" was on the march. After the surprise victory of a Republican in the Massachusetts Senate race, a number of Democrats in the U.S. Senate swerved abruptly to the left, momentarily casting into doubt Ben Bernanke's second term as Federal Reserve chairman.

"Populist Backlash Puts Bernanke Under Siege," screamed a page-one headline in the Washington Post; those who read further would also have discovered that the "populist brushfire" was also responsible for the declining value of stocks. In a New York Times column published a few days later, David Brooks deplored "The Populist Addiction." The possibility that President Barack Obama would also fall to this advancing idea struck Washington Post columnist George Will as so cosmically wrong that he likened it to "Fred Astaire donning coveralls and clodhoppers."

What is populism? To judge by this coverage, populism is a trick that politicians perform—a clumsy disguise they adopt or a fake-folksy rhetorical line they try to put over. Populism is a species of demagogy, a backwoods form of class war, a sinister cross of Lenin with Li'l Abner.