The Radical Fictions of Third Way

The Political Establishment’s Dangerous Gambit to Make Populism a Dirty Word

This week Politico published news that the group Third Way — “a centrist think tank” that lobbies for conservative economic plans along with liberal social policies—launched a $20 million effort to better understand the Democratic Party’s abysmal election results, and what can be done to improve them.

Their recommendations won’t include any elements of economic populism. Third Way President Jonathan Cowan ruled out any consideration of the politics of Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren from the outset, and added: “Populism is inherently anti-government.” “That works if you’re a right-wing conservative, like Donald Trump,” he told Politico, but it “doesn’t work if you’re the party of government.”

If any assertion could be said to be historically obscene, Cowan’s characterization of populism as “anti-government” would definitely qualify. In fact, it runs counter to so much history that a retraction is in order — or, at a minimum, a lot of embarrassment running up and down the hallways of a self-described “think tank.”

Definitely the history of populism is an unwieldy one. Like other momentous and complex phenomena, it’s difficult to advance robust generalizations about the populist movement in the United States. Historians still argue about the nature of its most formal phase, during the turn of the twentieth century, as well as the degree it was shaped by what came before, and how much it influenced what came after.

But one of the few things beyond dispute is the pro-government inclination of populism.

Throughout history, its adherents most basic ambition was to place government in service of the people rather than the financial elite. Supporters facilitated mechanisms of direct democracy — whether it was leaders who campaigned directly to the people, the enactment of electoral devices like ballot initiatives, or a constitutional amendment to allow voters, not state legislatures, to elect Senators.

Proponents of populism denounce a government devoted to making the “rich richer, and the potent more powerful,” in words spoken long ago by Andrew Jackson that still bear meaning for us today. For this reason, populists press for agencies, like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, that insist on fairness, and ensure that the extravagantly rich follow laws just the same as ordinary people.

The New Deal, a consummation of cresting industrial populism and a receding but still powerful agrarian one, gave birth to programs and institutions that form the predicate of the modern welfare state and survive to this day. To list Depression-era legislative accomplishments of populism would be to recite an alphabet soup of agencies and policies that Americans continue to count on and embrace. Townsendites marching for pensions, or agrarian populists like Gerald Nye, who advocated for the Tennessee Valley Authority, would have been shocked to discover that they were “inherently anti-government” as they went about the business of forging some of its most cherished instruments.

But Cowan’s description of populism is more than just ludicrous or incorrect. It is alarming. By declaring that a government that works for the people is, by necessity, a threat to governance, I can only conclude that Cowan and Third Way are the real danger, intent on replicating the same establishment indifference that paved the way for the election of Donald Trump.