Social history and the populist moment: contesting the political terrain

Journal of Social History, Mid-Winter, 1995 by George Reid Andrews

Social history in the United States originated in, and still devotes most of its attention to, the study of disfranchised groups: workers, slaves, women, immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities. Our research has made abundantly clear the difficult and often oppressive conditions which members of those groups faced during most of American history: their inequitable participation in the division of national wealth, and their exclusion from the full privileges of citizenship. It thus makes clear the multiple ways in which the central ideals and principles on which the Republic was built were compromised and violated for large portions - in most times and places, the majority - of American society.

One would think that this history would be of at least passing interest to those devoted to the founding principles of our Republic. If one values those principles and wants to see them realized, one wants to know, indeed needs to know, how they have fared historically, on the ground. And interestingly, the conservatives have made little effort to contest the truth or accuracy of social-historical findings. Rather, they argue, we are looking in the wrong places and studying the wrong things. We're not writing the kind of history they want. They prefer a pageant of American triumphalism, of American success and achievement. Not for them social history's relentless catalogue of struggle, conflict, disappointment - and of democratic achievements: emancipation, women's suffrage, universal public education, widespread upward mobility and the rise of a "mass middle class," to mention just a few of the topics addressed by our research.(2)

Could it be that it is the social historians who are the true conservatives, in the sense of conservators of the nation's past, and the conservatives who are the ahistorical revisionists, trampling roughshod over the historical record? Could it be that it is social historians who take more seriously the ideals of citizenship and democracy, recording both the violations and the achievements of those ideals? Why are conservatives so indifferent, indeed actively opposed, to preserving the memory of popular struggles to fulfill the promise of American democracy?

The answer to this last question may be found in the social, economic, and political conditions of the 1980s and 1990s. These have been years of immense stress in American society, caused by a sweeping process of economic restructuring, compounded by the confusions of the end of the Cold War. Previous restructurings of this magnitude have provoked a series of "populist moments" in the United States, as non-elite groups mobilized to defend themselves against economic and social disruption. There have been three such moments: the First Industrial Revolution of the 1820s and 1830s, the Second Industrial Revolution of the late 1800s, and the Great Depression of the 1930s.

We are now in a fourth such moment, as evidenced by the Perot movement, talk radio, citizen militias, Pat Robertson's theories of international Jewish banking conspiracies, and other even less savory manifestations. Both in the past and in the present, American populism is a conflicted and unstable political phenomenon, combining within it powerfully contradictory elements from the political Right and from the Left. Since the rise of Ronald Reagan, it has been the Right that has succeeded in harnessing the energies and anxieties of the current "populist moment" and riding them to power. But the possibility of a populist challenge from the Left can never be completely dismissed. During the Reagan years it was still possible to talk about the "trickle-down" effects of tax cuts and economic restructuring. By the mid-1990s, such talk rings hollow in the face of stagnant or declining real incomes, massive layoffs and decreasing job security, rising levels of poverty, and a redistribution of wealth that has made the United States the most economically unequal society in the industrialized world.(3)

It is the connection between left-wing populism and social history, I believe, that has made the latter such a lightning rod for the conservative movement. Its studies of non-elite groups struggling to defend themselves against exploitation and oppression, or to wrest from elite classes and state institutions an equitable share of power and wealth, trace striking and evocative parallels to the current moment. The studies offer concrete examples of popular mobilization; they also show how those mobilizations expressed themselves and their aspirations through the language and ideology of American liberal democracy.(4) That language and ideology were revolutionary in the 1780s; they are still so today.(5) Far more than socialism or Marxism, they resonate strongly with American audiences, and constitute a highly effective critique of the increasing social and economic inequality promoted by conservative policies, and those policies' antidemocratic character.

This is why it is so important to the resurgent Right to neutralize those ideals by muffling, and if possible terminating (the "end of history" indeed!), historical discussions of how they have fared in practice. Instead, American principles of democracy and equality must be removed to a detached, pristine realm of historical myth, where they can be invoked and glorified but never linked or applied to current conditions of daily life (such as, for example, the legalized corruption of an electoral system entirely dependent on private campaign contributions).