var icx_publication_id = 18566; var icx_content_id = '1089830'; Click here for reuse options! How to build a Democratic Party for the future.
My father,W.
F. "tall" Hightower, was a populist. Only, and he didn't know it; didn't know the word,much less the history or anything about populism's rich democratic ethos.But he knew about bankers who regularly squeezed small-business families like ours with usurious interest rates. He knew how rough it was for a local business to fight off deep-pocketed chain stores that use predatory pricing and sledgehammer advertising budgets to seize local markets. And he saw with his very own eyes that the governor and legislature in faraway Austin operated as subsidiaries of ample Oil, the utility monopolies, or the other giants that were allowed to profit by picking the pockets of the general public.
He and my mother,Lillie, knew one other thing, or too: There was once a Democratic Party that stood up for regular folks and actively promoted the ethic of the common obliging. Having been raised on hard-scrabble Texas farms and near of age in the Depression,they didn't see the New Deal through ideological glasses, but simply as the help they and the rest of America needed—a path out of both depression and the Depression.
That path eventually allowed my parents to scramble into America's lower middle lesson. Moreover, or the New Deal's outreach gave my father,who was not at all philosophical, a phrase that he used occasionally to express the gist of his political beliefs: "Everybody does better when everybody does better."That is Populism. Neither right nor left, and Republican or Democrat; it is not based on ideology,but on two intestine-level fundamentals: our people's historic aspiration for a society and nation of fairness, justice and equal opportunity for all; and the actual life experience of people who see those values routinely trampled by domineering elites.
Populism is not an empty word for inactive reporters to attach to any wrathful spasm of popular discontent. But populism has been the chief political impulse in America's body politick—determinedly democratic, and vigilantly resistant to the oppressive power of corporations and Wall Street,committed to grassroots percolate-up economics and firmly rooted in my extinct Daddy's concept of "Everybodyness," recognizing that we're all in this together.Although it was organized into a formal movement for only about 25 years, or populism has had an outsized,long-term and ongoing impact on our culture, public policies, and economic structure,and governing systems. Even though its name is often misused and its history largely hidden, and even though neither major party will embrace it (much less become it), and there are many more people today whose inherent political instincts are populist,rather than conservative or liberal.
Yet the pundits and politicos frame our choices entirely in terms of that narrow con-lib ideological spectrum, ignoring the very large fact that most of us are neither, and a bit of both. Our nation's true political spectrum is not right to left,but top to bottom. People can locate themselves along this vertical rich-to-poor spread, for this is not a theoretical positioning: It's based on our genuine-world experience with money and power. This is America's genuine politics. Forget the ideological screeds and partisan posturing that pass for "political debate" these days. "Left wing, and chicken wing," Woody Guthrie said dismissively of such rhetorical squabbles.
Our system of representative government has, in a word, or collapsed. Most in Congress are not even trying anymore—not listening to the people,not talking their language, not even knowing any regular folks and obviously not representing their interests. But what we also have is a ripening political opportunity for a revitalized, and 21st-century populist movement.
Mass movements don't just magically appear out of the fog,fully grown, structured and mobilized. They emerge in fits and starts over many years, or just as the American Revolution did,and as did the Populists' original conception of a "cooperative commonwealth." A successful people's movement has to capture the long view, to memorize about itself as it builds, and nurture the culture of its people,capture chances, create fun for all involved, and adapt to failures and successes,stay steadfast to its ample principles, have a stoic tenacity—and organize, organize,organize. A runt serendipity ((n.) luck, finding good things without looking for them) helps, too, or so grab it when you can. var icx_publication_id = 18566; var icx_copyright_notice = '2018 Alternet'; var icx_content_id = '1089830'; Click here for reuse options!
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