Political Science Marco Deramos article: Populism and the new oligarchy. In the 1950s, a major exercise in historical revisionism was undertaken in the United States by the so-called Cold War liberals, who began to describe nineteenth-century American populism as a proto-fascist movement and, over time, fixed the pejorative denotation of populism (the one accepted today), disseminating it first in the quality press, then in the mass press, and finally in the jargon of political life. The bibliography of this operation is enormous. Arthur Schlesinger may be regarded as its precursor, with The Vital Centre: The Politics of Freedom in 1949, in the early days of the Cold War. Here, the theory that fascism and communism are opposed but similar, inasmuch as both are ‘totalitarian’, was expounded for the first time. This idea was developed by liberal historians who advanced the theses that the 1950s radical right was populist and, vice versa, that nineteenth-century populism contained fascist elements. Paradigmatic of the first was a book edited by Daniel Bell in 1955, The Radical Right, derived from a 1954 Columbia University seminar on McCarthyism, of which a populist interpretation was offered. [18] Alongside Bell’s, the key essays in The Radical Right were by Seymour Martin Lipset and Richard Hofstadter. The move that allows Hofstadter to associate the progressivist populism of the nineteenth century with the Cold War right involves an inversion of perspectives: ‘The utopia of the Populists was in the past, not the future.’ Hence it was not only a utopia—and thus unrealizable—but a reactionary one, although Hofstadter concedes that ‘they did not express themselves in such terms’. [20] The second move consists in reducing the class struggle to a conspiracy theory: if the vast majority have to suffer, it is because of a conspiracy by the 1 per cent. Hence a charge that will pursue all those accused of populism down to the present—that of over-simplifying reality: ‘The problems that faced the Populists assumed a delusive simplicity: the victory over injustice, the solution for all social ills, was concentrated in the crusade against a single, relatively small but immensely strong interest, the money power.’ [21] newleftreview.org/II/82/marco-d-eramo-populism-and-the-new-oligarchy
Posted on: Sun, 20 Oct 2013 23:08:53 +0000
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