Michael Kazin’s The Populist Persuasion has a conclusion that speaks directly to questions I’ve recently been turning over in my mind. Kazin confronts openly the problem progressives have with populism – considering how it has been co-opted by the Right in the last forty years, many progressives distrust “the people” as such. Intellectuals and scholars, Kazin writes, are “usually guarding a not-so-secret wish that other Americans were as rational and tolerant as we imagine ourselves to be.”[1] He is certainly writing about me.
He is also writing about me when he confronts the other intellectual problem I run up against – I could be open to listening to a defense of “the people,” the whole arc-of-history-leans-towards-justice idea, but I have a problem with the concept of “the people” itself. What does that mean, after all? I wince at rhetorical flourishes about the character or dreams of “the American people,” as though such an entity had any holistic integrity. It also seems like rhetorical and ideological tyranny; if we go ahead and try to define “the American dream,” too narrowly, does that leave everyone else who rejects said dream as un-American? And if we define it too broadly– as the dream of basically a decent life with happiness and fulfillment – then we can’t possibly be talking about anything specifically “American” anymore, since obviously the whole planet is populated with people looking for a decent and fulfilling life. And thus the concept seems empty, silly, and as Kazin writes, even “offensive in its assumption that ‘the American people’ share anything beyond a geographical space.”[2]
But Kazin advises me not to give up on said concept. Populism “lives too deeply in our fears and expectations to be trivialized or replaced,” and rather than disabusing Americans of their myths entirely, progressives ought to “argue within the bounds of national traditions instead of railing against them and dreaming of a leap from history.”[3] But then George Lakoff, who wrote a nice little pamphlet about how progressives need to learn to reframe the debates the conservatives are currently in control of framing, seems to tell me I also need to believe in the frames I present, that I cannot and should not be dishonest about what I am arguing for in order to earn adherents.[4]
So here I am at a bit of an impasse. I completely agree with Kazin that the reluctance of intellectuals and scholars to be aggressively political is “a cultural disease,” and I agree that “intellectuals should contribute their time, their money, and their passion for justice.”[5] But I don’t know how to go about doing so while always respecting “the bounds of national traditions,” because I simply don’t believe in a lot of those traditions. I don’t believe that America is exceptional, insofar as every country is exceptional for a host of different reasons. I don’t believe that America has actually been a particular agent of bringing justice and freedom to the world (although we have certainly aspired to be, and that counts for something); not any more so than Britain or France, at least. I don’t believe in a unified “American people,” and am acutely annoyed when even the likes of Obama depend on such hallow concepts to garner political support. At the same time, I find the reverse narrative of some of the 1960s radicals to be equally silly, that America has been particularly evil or impressively tyrannical. While the dynamics of all countries are unique, I see America as an end product of what all other countries are – entities run and crafted by human beings, plain and simple, with all the good and the bad that this implies.
I do have a positive vision, of course. I’d like to see an America united only in its appreciation of diversity. I’d like to see freedom of religion flourish without the devoutly religious believing that such freedom includes the right to penetrate into the public sphere in a manner that actually reduces the freedom of everyone else. I’d like to see an America which values humanity and justice more than patriotism or particularity; I’d like to see an America where there would not be any political creed or opinion clearly “out of bounds” of some mystical “American tradition.” It seems, after reviewing Lakoff’s several “types” of progressives, that I am mostly a civil libertarian progressive.[6] My ultimate values are openness and pluralism.
So how can you take such a message to the public and possibly sell it, no matter how you frame it? I’d be arguing for an abandonment of nationalism, after all, in favor of a general universalism and tolerance. America is not solely responsible for our modern doctrines of freedom and liberty, I’d point out, although she certainly deserves credit for some of it – but we ought to give equal credit to the British, the Dutch, the French. It would be a Western creed, for sure, but not particularly American. Because to me, the real story of America is one of contradiction, of conflict. Perhaps the title to Edmund Morgan’s book says it best: American Slavery, American Freedom. It has always been that way, has it not? Idealism coupled with brute oppression, and the second concept strangely dependent on the first for its definition. Who shares in this American freedom has expanded, for sure, and I do think people can be responsive to an argument for expanding it even further – but there’s just the thing. Is it really “American” freedom, or just freedom, plain and simple?
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Thoughts and suggestions welcomed – no, desired.
[1] Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 289.
[2] Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion, 287.
[3] Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion, 290, 289.
[4] George Lakoff, Don’t Think of an Elephant (White River Junction: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2004), 100-101.
[5] Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion, 289, 290.
[6] George Lakoff, Don’t Think of an Elephant, 14.
