John Richards
Populism:
A Qualified Defence
Because it allows for such imprecise and seemingly contradictory use,
"populism"
is among the more exasperating expressions of political
discourse. But its refusal to disappear, despite cycles of intellectual fashion,
suggests it refers to a set of political phenomena inadequately encompassed
by other concepts. I have two goals in this essay: first, to discuss some of
the issues surrounding the concept by means of exploration of these cycles
of favourable and critical assessment and second, to argue, as the title
states, a case for the populist political style.
Although analytic definitions of complex political phenomena have
limited usefulness, let me specify what I take to be the three necessary
ingredients for any movement to be labelled populist:
I) the movement defines its base of support extremely broadly, implying
that a specified collectivity of people can act politically in harmony
despite potentially significant internal class, racial or geographic lines of
demarcation,
and furthermore,
voluntary mass support must be a
major, as opposed to perfunctory,
determinant of the power of the
political movement;
2) the political dialogue undertaken between leaders and led within the
movement must be couched in terms of a subset of the ideas of the
indigenous popular culture; elements of formal political ideologies enter
the dialogue only to the extent the ideologies have thoroughly mingled
Studies in Political Economy,
No.5,
Spring 1981
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Studies in Political Economy
with the popular
culture; and
3) central to the movement's ideology must be the evocation of a network
of concentrated
political and / or economic
institutions
allegedly
wielding unwarranted power, and as a corollary the movement's goal is
wide disbursement of that power to the "people".
Many "populist"
movements might better be identified as carriers of other
ideologies - Marxism, liberalism, anarchism, social democracy, and (with
respect to some of the more extreme cases of mass manipulation by elites
using populist themes) fascism. But to seek to disperse populism under a
variety of labels prevents exploration of that which may be common among
otherwise dissimilar movements. This preliminary definition probably errs
in the direction of overextension of the concept of populism but, rather
than attempting a tedious delineation of the idea from other overlapping,
and equally nebulous concepts, let us proceed.
Unfortunately
there exist different bases of definition for the concept.
Some, for example those inspired by Lenin's critique of narodism, define
populism as the political expression in an age of industrial capitalism of
marginal classes - usually, but not always, petit bourgeois - caught
between the working class and bourgeoisie. Here attention is upon a
presumed similarity in class situation among the adherents to populism;
similarity of ideology and of organizational
form from case to case is
secondary. An alternative has been to define populist movements by an
alleged similarity, at an appropriate
level of abstraction,
of ideological
content. This second basis is that used by, among others, Ernesto Laclau.!
The basis of my own definition is ideology plus organizational form. It is
clearly closer to Laclau's than that used by most Marxists, but it differs in
emphasizing the nature of the organizational vehicle carrying the ideology.
If a one-to-one
relationship
existed among marginal social classes,
"populist"
ideology and "populist" organizational forms, then each basis
would nonetheless serve to identify the same phenomena, differing only in
that component selected as criterion for definition. But such a relationship
does not exist.
The ultimate test of any definition is how closely it corresponds to
ordinary language usage. Although, for reasons we shall elaborate later,
populism is more likely to emerge from a petite bourgeoisie than from most
other classes and thus a concern with the petit bourgeois origins of many
populist movements is not misplaced, the first basis of definition identifies
a process that may underlie populist movements, but not the constellation
of shared characteristics
which prompts both political participants and
observers to refer to populism. These characteristics refer essentially to
certain political movements that emphasize in both ideology and practice
the role of the "people" as opposed to elites. Unless we intend seriously to
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John Richards/POPULISM
violate common use of the term, we must define populism in a manner
permitting inclusion of movements whose dominant class elements differ
dramatically - for example the People's Party which rose to prominence
in the South and West of the United States at the culmination of the late
19th century agrarian revolt, and Peronism in post-World
War II
Argentina. In the former case the dominant class represented was the
homesteader and sharecropper, a rural petite bourgeoisie. In the latter case
a nationalist military / bourgeois alliance employed populist ideological
themes to draw the simultaneous support of rural peasantry and urban
worker in its struggle against a conservative oligarchy. In each case the
dominant class differed, but the similarity of the ideological discourses
undertaken has prompted application to both of the populist etiquette.
Mutatis mutandis, the political organizations and ideologies espoused by
the petite bourgeoisie have varied so extensively throughout the industrial
world that it is dubious to label them all populist.
The trouble with the second basis of definition is that it encompasses
too much. By defining populism solely in terms of ideology (e.g. Laclau's
sweeping definition of populism as any ideology posing a conflict between
the people and a "power bloc") one fails to provide adequate criteria to
distinguish populist from other political movements, which, from Jacobins
to Burkian parliamentarians,
clearly possessed a theory of democracy, a
concept of the "people" and mistrust of certain forms of concentrated
power, but which we would never want to call populist. Virtually all
modern governments - from the People's Democracies of eastern Europe
to military juntas in Latin America, and the opposition to these regimes seek legitimacy by claiming to represent the will of the majority of the
people. Should we then refer to populist elements within all political
organizations? To do so trivializes the concept to a generalization about
one component of contemporary
public political discourse. It is for the
observer to determine whether populist ideology and organization is central
or marginal to the case at hand; only if central does it become potentially
relevant to talk of populism.
With regard to the organisational
dimension, a distinction should be
made between "pure"
and "hybrid"
variants.
The first refers to
"populism from below", with a leadership that in terms of its education,
class and ethnic origins is not far removed from the base it purports to
represent. The People's Party is the classic example of the pure populist
movement.
(Incidentally
the term "populist"
first came into use to
describe its ideas and supporters.) Party leaders were typically farmers,
small businessmen, or provincial "intellectuals"
(rural newspaper editors,
teachers, preachers, plus the occasional small-town lawyer). In the case of
hybrid movements the adoption of a populist ideology and mass organization, while central to the support of the movement, is a conscious strategy
pursued by the leadership, at least a majority of whom is more professional
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Studies in Political Economy
and cosmopolitan than, and hence somewhat socially removed from, the
base. Examples of hybrid populism could include the contemporary Italian
Communist Party which, having consciously abandoned major tenets of
orthodox Marxism such as the dictatorship of the proletariat and anticlericalism, is pursuing its "historic compromise" against "monopoly capital".
Obviously the Italian Communist Party, with its working class supporters
and entrenched bureaucratic apparatus, remains the core and it is possible
that it may abandon its "populist"
strategy in a manner analogous to the
French Communist Party's 1978 rupture of its coalition with the French
Socialist Party. Peronism is another example of hybrid populism.
There is a contradiction within populism that foredooms pure populist
movements to fail if they remain loyal to their goals of direct democracy
and oppose all Weberian processes of bureaucratic rationalization:
hierarchical division of responsibility and power within large scale organizations,
the codification of rules for the making of decisions (e.g. parliamentary
procedure and use of legal precedent), and meritocratic professionalism.
Although in its defence it can be stated that in no state did the People's
Party ever exercise unambiguous
control over both the legislative and
executive branches, Hicks' conclusions on the organizational competence
of the original pure populist movement remains unfortunately
valid for
more recent cases:
Generally speaking, the experiments with Populism in the West had done
little to engender confidence in the ability of the new party to rule. Some
legislation favored by the Populists had reached the statute books, but
usually such of this as stood the test of the courts was as much the work of
the other parties as of the Populists. Purely Populist legislation was all too
frequently found defective and unconstitutional.
In administrative
matters
the Populists were even less successful. Evidently their genius lay in protest
rather than in performance.
The third-party
men who took office were
almost invariably inexperienced as administrators,
and it is not surprising
that they were bafl1ed by the difficulties that confronted them, difficulties
that, incidentally, were made just as bafl1ing as the opponents of Populism
knew how to make them. Members of the new party, moreover, showed
small charity for one another's blunders. From the men they had elected to
office the Populists expected more than was humanly possible: and when the
millenium failed to arrive they turned promptly from ardent supporters to
disappointed critics.?
Large scale bureaucracy can be contained, not dismissed. To exercise
power successfully the populist base must either develop indigenous
bureaucrats or ally themselves with elites already possessing such skills. The
alliance may be with a caudillo and his entourage as in many Latin
American examples; the large successful agricultural
co-operatives
in
western Canada transformed their farm leaders into professional entrepreneurs and managers; the Saskatchewan CCF, once in office, attracted a
contingent of highly competent professional civil servants whom I have
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John Richards/POPULISM
elsewhere characterized
as Fabians.' The tension inherent in populist
politics is simultaneously to pursue the populist project of decentralization
and direct democracy, and administrative competence. Beyond some range
there is obviously a trade-off between the two, and any satisfactory equilibrium must be short run, capable of shifting with new circumstances.
Populism without bureaucrats becomes anarchy (viz. the experience of
legislative occupations, countervailing sieges, legal wranglings and internal
party squabbling that characterized the populist administration
of Kansas
from 1892 to 1894). But if the bureaucratic imperative predominates to the
extent populist ideology becomes a facade, then it becomes inappropriate
to speak of populism (viz. the transformation
of Social Credit in Alberta
from a right populist movement
under Aberhart
into an efficient
conservative
administration
amenable to the interests of major oil
companies under Manning).
The Post-War Reaction
Having provided the reader with a sketchy introduction to the concept,
let me turn to the core of this article: the cycles of intellectual assessment of
populism, primarily populism within North America.
Prior to 1950 most academics were favourably disposed, seeing in North
America agrarian populism a significant source feeding the broad river of
historical progress that, via an admittedly tortuous route, was carrying
civilization towards greater democracy and economic equality. Such was,
for example, the stance of Hicks in his classic history of the Farmer's
Alliance and the People's party, of Lipset in his doctoral thesis dealing with
the CCF in Saskatchewan,
of Morton writing about the Progressives in
western Canada, and of Sharp describing the interrelations of American
and Canadian farm movements in the northern plains."
After 1950 intellectual fashion changed, and from divergent ideological
positions populism received a far more sceptical scrutiny. Inevitably, in an
age traumatized by the legacy of mass politics bequeathed by Stalin and
Hitler, the idea of progress wilted. Liberal and conservative academics
emphasized the role played by certain populist movements and leaders as
vehicles of political intolerance. Defenders of populism remonstrated that
political elites have manifested as much if not more intolerance, including
anti-semitism, as have populist masses, and that the whole should not bear
the sins of the few, but undeniably earlier academics had glossed over "Ie
potentiel du mal" in the populist tradition. An important exception was
Vann Woodward, whose biography of Tom Watson, originally published
in 1938, had fully examined the complex radical idealist to reactionary
demagogue career of this major populist politician.'
In the virulence of certain populist attacks upon lawyers, corporate and
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Studies in Political Economy
financial leaders, conventional
parliamentarians
and academics,
was
perceived a threat to the fragile complex of values allegedly necessary for
survival of a liberal pluralist society. The populist attempt to impose the
raw will of the "people",
to exercise direct popular control of political
leaders prevented, it was argued, the latter from performing the required
brokerage
function,
arranging
compromises
among the constituent
elements of a pluralist society. Such direct democracy was bad enough;
worse were examples of hybrid populism - demagogic manipulation of
gullible masses to support ambitious political elites who, draped in the
rhetoric of serving the popular will, crushed political opponents and any
institution capable of wielding countervailing power. Populism became
identified as an instance of the modern disease labelled by Talmon as
"totalitarian
democracy".
Admittedly the North American strain was
relatively mild compared to more virulent variants in Latin America and
European fascism; nonetheless there were significant common elements
among them all. Among the best-argued indictments of populist intolerance in America was Hofstadter's." After Hofstadter,
populist oratory
could no longer be unambiguously admired; its practitioners were seen by
many not as rural Ciceros disseminating
progressive ideas, but as
demagogues frequently abusing their verbal skills to inculcate in their illeducated audiences class hatreds, xenophobia and simplistic economic
nostrums.
A brief digression on a populist institution. Populist oratory, a vehicle
for religious as much as political ideas, was an integral institution in rural
North America and in a society which read little, orators were significant
agents in transmitting ideas. It is as difficult to think of pre-World War II
rural America without its orators as it is to imagine contemporary urban
society without television. The most skilled could, at least for the night of
the meeting, sway an audience to accept their message by technique alone.
But it is doubtful that populist rhetoric entailed any more manipulation
than that employed by all varieties of democratic politicians who, in our
age of mass politics, resort to potted simplistic media advertisements
designed by professional advertising agencies. In fact I would argue the
converse. The bantering and heckling characteristic of a populist rally
implied less audience manipulation by leaders than impersonal contemporary media campaigning that permits no "feedback"
at all.
Although he did not level the accusation of totalitarian democracy
against it, Upset, when he came to reassess the CCF in the 1960's, was far
more sceptical. As explanation of its rise he de-emphasized both opposition
by farmers as a class to contemporary social conditions and continuity with
American populist movements. Instead he turned to an explanation in
terms of the parliamentary system inherited from Britain and the allegedly
more conservative,
hierarchical-elitist,
and traditional
Canadian value
system relative to that of the United States. In summary his revised
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John Richards/POPULISM
argument employs a traditional/modern
dichotomy.
The existence in
Canada of single-seat constituencies and a British parliamentary system, by
which the executive comprises members of, and is responsible to, the
legislature, allegedly permits a degree of success to small third parties that
can elect at least a few candidates provided their support is sufficiently
concentrated. In the United States, by contrast, executive positions, at both
the state and national level, are in general more significant than those of
legislators. Since elections for executive positions are determined
by
aggregating votes over the entire relevant jurisdiction, state or nation, an
American third party must secure a majority of electors within, at a
minimum, an entire state before enjoying any meaningful political power.
Furthermore
the American value system comprises more "universalist"
egalitarian values than Canada's. Canada's "particularist"
values repose
not only on the counterrevolutionary
traditions of Loyalist Tories and
Ancien Regime Catholics, but also on the "particularist"
adherence to
ethnic and class group identifications
on the part of later European
immigrants. In explaining the success of the CCF, the most significant particularism was the strong working class identification of many British and
Scandinavian immigrants. These factors, Upset now argued, explained the
greater willingness of Canadians, relative to Americans, to support "particularist third parties". "(A)grarian socialism in Saskatchewan ... was a
consequence,"
he concluded, "of anachronistic forces within the society,
rather than a wave of the future."?
In general I find Upset's revisionism less attractive than the repudiated
explanations which concluded the CCF's agrarian socialism to be a logical
evolution of North American populism. Notwithstanding
the success of
J.S. Woodsworth in negotiating the first old age pensions in a minority
parliament, Upset's constitutional argument is largely nonsense. It grossly
overestimates the significance of individual legislators within 20th century
British parliamentary practice. Unless they have assumed majority electoral
status within at least one province, third parties in Canada have had no
more impact than their American counterparts. The CCF government was
a case of hybrid populism because of the extensive power exercised within it
by a cosmopolitan administrative elite among which British Fabian socialist
ideology predominated.
To that extent the CCF was a "particularist"
cultural fragment. But one should not assume any neat coincidence of
ideology throughout a political movement. The ideology of many within
the Saskatchewan CCF caucus and a majority of rank-and-file supporters
corresponded closely to the left populist tradition of support for the family
farm and for extensive co-operative ventures, and opposition to concentrated corporate and political power symbolized by eastern banks, railroads
and the "old line" political parties. Given the obvious ideological continuity from the Nonpartisan
League through
the People's
Party,
Greenbackers,
Jacksonian Democrats to the egalitarian Protestant nonconformist wing of the American Revolution - Thomas Jefferson was
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Studies in Political Economy
invariably the preferred revolutionary hero in the populist pantheon agrarian
populism
has quite rightly been used to illustrate
the
"universalist"
democratic dimension of American political culture. Once
one admits the profound links of the CCF, of the United Farmers of
Alberta (UF A) and, in its early stages, of Social Credit, to the populist
tradition one must severely qualify the argument of Canada as conservative
cultural fragment.
One must also, however, qualify the analogous
argument of Canada as a radical cultural fragment that has, allegedly more
than the United States, preserved European traditions of working class
identification and socialist political institutions. Much of what passes for
socialists politics, particularly in western Canada, has its roots not in
European Marxism or social democracy, but in the "populist" ideology of
the left wing of the American Revolution.
Canadian academics, as usual copying international fashion, joined in
the critical post-war reappraisal of populism. The "Social Credit in
Alberta" series edited by S.D. Clark provides several good examples. We
have Irving's treatment of Social Credit as a case study in mass or collective
behaviour." In fairness we should note his claim to have avoided any moral
condemnation,
but the very choice of methodology implies the critique that
Social Credit is the product of emotion not reason. On the left,
Macpherson's Democracy in Alberta is a sophisticated Marxist critique of
"quasi-colonial"
politics in that province, first under the left populist UFA
and subsequently under the right populist Social Credit. 9
Macpherson's treatment of prairie populism is sufficiently important to
require a measured response, and before attempting that response it is
probably useful to summarize for the reader Macpherson's own argument.
He starts from the conclusion that internally Alberta society was relatively
homogeneous, dominated by a single class - the petit bourgeois farmer.
Such a class generates a political ideology that extols a competitive market
of small scale producers each owning his means of production and as a
consequence allegedly exercising an independence unknown to the wage
employee subject to the direct authority of an employer. This independence
is illusory, Macpherson insists, because the farmer is still subject to power
exercised by external corporate concerns over the terms of trade at which
he buys inputs and sells outputs. This internal petit bourgeois homogeneity
and dependence upon external capital Macpherson labels "quasi-colonialism". Farmers intermittently realize their dependence but the strength of
the illusion of independence
does not permit a "positive
class
consciousness".
"It gives rise, rather, to a common outlook better
described as the absence of class consciousness and the presence of a false
consciousness
of society and of themselves". 10 The farmers' politics
oscillate between radical and conservative but never transcend a critique of
the terms of trade to a fundamental critique of capitalist property relations.
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John Richards/POPULISM
Macpherson
next proceeds to a classic dichotomy in theories of
democracy - between the Rousseauian view of it as attempts by the
"common
people" (Macpherson's
expression) to effect their will in
government and, alternatively, pluralist-liberals
for whom the essence of
democracy is the existence of representative
institutions providing the
political equivalent of a marketplace within which to accommodate the
multitude of interest groups competing for society's limited public goods.
Necessary and sufficient conditions for democracy in the liberal-pluralist
view are a functioning multi-party system to assure alternate sets of rulers
and popular elections to determine the ins and outs. The populist critique
of "old line" parties as agents of obfuscation of the people's will places
populist theoreticians (if such is not too presumptuous an etiquette) firmly
in the first tradition, a tradition which has been, in theory, ambiguous
about the necessity of a multi-party system, and even when accepting it as
necessary has been sceptical of the removal of democratic decision-making
from the "people"
and its limitation to geographically
and socially
removed parliamentary institutions.
Because the Alberta petite bourgeoisie was marginal to and dependent
upon external power, its attempts to exercise direct democracy had
inevitably, Macpherson concluded, to fail. Such was the fate of Woods'
left populist scheme for group government in the 1920's. Alberta populists
still had, however, an illusory faith in the ability of the general will of the
people to assert itself, and thereafter abandoned the checks-and-balances
concept intrinsic to the left populism of the UFA in favour of the plebiscitary democracy proffered by Aberhart as a right populist. The anti-party
bias of populism and the institutions it generates, Macpherson labels a
"quasi-party"
system - de facto one party rule with only rudimentary
opposition by alternative parties. The degeneration of populism into plebiscitarianism is the inevitable consequence of petit bourgeois radicalism in
the quasi-colonial context.
Finally Macpherson turns to a discussion of a mature class-divided capitalist society and takes the traditional Marxist position of an inevitable
tendency for one class to dominate the state. In the absence of a socialist
revolution to remove fundamental class divisions he evokes a pluralistliberal argument that the multi-party system - in which a pair of left and
right wing parties respectively represent labour and capital, or two or more
parties jointly vie for the support of labour and capital - is essential to
prevent the abuse of state power: "We may conclude that the (multi-)party
system, or something like it, is essential to the maintenance of democracy in
a class-divided society". II
How to respond to Macpherson? I shall pursue two arguments. First,
Macpherson seriously overestimates the homogeneity both in terms of class
composition and in terms of support for anyone political organization
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Studies in Political Economy
within Alberta and, by implication, in other jurisdictions where populist
movements have thrived. The second might be summarized as Macpherson's marriage of convenience between Lenin and liberal-pluralist theory.
Were populist movements solely representative of farmers, it would be
inappropriate
to refer to populism. Obviously farmers predominated but,
as Jackson has cogently argued, 12 Alberta, even prior to the discovery of oil
at Leduc, comprised a more complex class structure than the image presented by Macpherson. Macpherson's
essentially Leninist conception of
populism leads him to underestimate the extent to which both the UFA and
Social Credit effected interclass and interethnic alliances - securing the
support not only of petit bourgeois farmers (a category comprising
potentially antagonistic subgroups of ranchers, farm labourers and grain
farmers), but coal miners in the foothills, urban workers in Calgary and
Edmonton
and, particularly in the case of Social Credit, small-town
merchants. In addition to class distinctions, ethnic differences were substantial barriers to collective political action. Slavic settlers in the
parklands, for example, were initially reluctant (with good reason, given
the racism periodically visited upon them) to make common cause with the
earlier WASP settlers of the open plains. (Of course the one group
systematically excluded from all populist alliances was the indigenous
native population.) Nor should one forget that, prior to the depression of
the 1930' s, Alberta generated a significant urban bourgeoisie engaged in
large land holdings, mining and petroleum, and utilities. This urban
bourgeoisie never succumbed to populist blandishments,
and at times of
major populist-inspired
conflict with external interests, it typically allied
itself with the latter, viz. the 1940 provincial election when, in the wake of
Social Credit's conflicts with the federal government and major financial
institutions over its unsuccessful attempt to legislate social credit, this
urban bourgeoisie led an electoral coalition to the right of Social Credit.
Successful populist movements, when first arriving in power and prior
to the ravages of time which tended to transform them into representative
parties with which a liberal-pluralist could be at ease, usually generated
much class-based opposition, both within and beyond their state or provincial jurisdiction. Any period of plebiscitarian authority was usually shortlived as conservative alliances of adversely affected local and external
interest groups formed in opposition. This was true not only of Social
Credit by 1940, but of the CCF in 1948 and 1962-64, of the Nonpartisan
League in 1920, and of the Populist state administrations
in the 1890's.
Thus, whatever the anti-democratic
strands of populist thought (from a
liberal-pluralist perspective), the practice of populism was constrained by
much indigenous as well as external opposition.
In his economic and class analysis Marx concentrated upon England,
the society in which industrialization
and capitalist class relations were the
14
John Richards/POPULISM
most fully developed by the mid-19th century. But after the Chartist revolts
of the 1840's the British failed to fulfil Marx' revolutionary
political
predictions, and he turned his political analysis increasingly to continental
Europe where revolutions did occur. In a somewhat analogous fashion
Macpherson's stereotype of a one-class society of independent commodity
producers corresponded,
at the time he wrote, far better to Saskatchewan
than to Alberta, but perhaps because the former province has generated
more internally based political conflict than its western neighbour, and
more than most provinces in the 20th century, he used Alberta to illustrate
his thesis.
Turning to the second argument, we find Macpherson raising Weberian
themes, themes that emanate from a sophisticated conservative philosophy,
and which are only integrated with difficulty into any left wing perspective.
We have here a case of kettles calling pots black - Macpherson,
the
Marxist, applying conservative arguments to the populists but exculpating
other radical movements. Consider his conclusion that states in which a
petit bourgeois class predominates lack the prerequisites for democratic
politics and tend towards a degenerative
"quasi-party"
system and
plebiscitarian
dictatorship.
Admittedly Aberhart was an example of a
charismatic leader enjoying a degree of plebiscitary authority from the
people and exercising during his first term largely unchecked political
power over them, at least within provincial jurisdiction. But in general I
doubt that populist movements have been more guilty of yielding excessive
power to charismatic leaders than social democratic or Marxist organizations. Probably
the reverse is true. The rank-and-file
of populist
organizations
have typically been sufficiently
sceptical of political
organization, including their own, that their support has been contingent,
and thus condemned these organizations to brief periods of hegemony. 13
The fragility of support may be explained. by the traditional populist
mistrust that differentiation
within mass organizations,
while potentially
conducive to efficiency, transforms
leaders into privileged elites with
discretionary power. Alternatively, some within a populist alliance may
fear that one subgroup is unduly dominating. The explanation may even be
that farmers' political activism varies inversely with the price of the
principal crops, as might argue a conservative for whom direct political
participation by the average citizen is neither a natural nor desirable occurrence. In summary, there are many telling arguments that conservatives
could level against the essentially "naive" optimism of populism in direct
democracy, but they are arguments that challenge all variants of radical
democratic philosophy since the 18th century, not populism alone.
Macpherson willingly acknowledges the democratic advances, relative
to its orthodox political competitors, of the UFA. But, he insists quite
correctly, the advances of the UF A in government were modest relative to
the ambitions of the UFA as a mass movement. By the end of Democracy
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Studies in Political Economy
in Alberta he evinces a profound pessimism: the "quasi-party"
system is
the best that not only Albertans but perhaps all Canadians can hope for.
The explanation for the sickly state of Canadian democracy allegedly lies in
the overwhelming American presence, which puts all Canada into a "quasicolonial" shadow, and the survival among Canadians of "independent
producer assumptions about the nature of society". 14 Alberta politics may
illustrate the essence of all Canadian politics; they most certainly do so for
the remainder of the prairies: "Close analysis of the political history of the
other prairie provinces would probably show that the same system has been
in effect there for some time already" .15 Macpherson is in general an astute
philosopher, but such a statement - written only a few years after the dramatic democratic experiments undertaken by the Saskatchewan CCF - is
utter nonsense. Like Upset and others he partook too uncritically of the
1950's intellectual fashion that denigrated the populist experience, found in
it obstacles to democracy and even the roots of fascism.
Populism and the New Left
Undoubtedly aided by the U.S. civil rights movement (who could deny,
or condemn, the populist style of Martin Luther King?) and the New Left
(the anarchistic critique of concentrated
power, private and public, by
leaders such as Tom Hayden was firmly in the populist tradition), attitudes
towards populism have further evolved since the mid-1960's. This cycle is
less pronounced than that post-1950 but it has produced some valuable
attempts to integrate earlier critiques into syntheses that yet insist upon the
value of the populist experience.
An early attempt, only partially successful, was Pollack's challenge to
the image of populism as emotional mass politics. 16 He argued that 19th
century American populists, far from being romantically attached to a
technologically simple society, understood well the nature of contemporary
industrialization and, in particular, the potential gains in productivity from
the application of industrial technology to farming, but that they also saw
more clearly than most the loss of liberty entailed in the transition from
farm to factory: "Thus, [populism] accepted industrialism but opposed its
capitalist form, seeking instead a more equitable distribution of wealth.
But Populism went further in its criticism: Industrial capitalism not only
impoverished the individual, it alienated and degraded him ....
According
to Populism, there was an inverse relation between industrialism and
freedom, because the machine was being made to exploit rather than serve
man" .17
Pollack's contribution
was to have emphasized that it is not mere
illusion - as the Marxist would describe it, the independence of the small
farmer relative to the urban worker. Relative to most available wage
employment, farming afforded far more discretion over work schedule and
less monotony to the actual work. It is because of the reality, not the
16
John Richards/POPULISM
illusion, of liberty in the petit bourgeois life style that this class tends
towards a populist ideology, that the farmer seeks to preserve the family
farm within a competitive market structure, and resists transition to the
status of wage employee within a modern corporation.
Pollack parallels
this libertarian component
of populism with the Marxist critique of
alienation under capitalism. One could just as well trace it to Jefferson
who, in the early years of his life, viewed the independence
of the
"husbandman"
as the basic garantor of republican values, and the
dependence
of those engaged in "manufactures"
as conducive to
"subservience and venality":
Dependance begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue,
and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition ....
generally speaking, the
proportion which the aggregate of the other classes of citizens bears in any
state to that of its husbandmen, is the proportion of its unsound to its healthy
parts, and is a good-enough
barometer whereby to measure its degree of
corruption. While we have land to labour then, let us never wish to see our
citizens occupied at a work-bench, or twirling a distaff.!"
The productivity gains from large scale industry are massive and it is
foolish to persist in Jefferson's dream of a society dominated by independent yeomanry. Nonetheless net productivity gains should not lead us to
ignore the costs of foregone liberty. Evidence of this cost is readily found in
the typically lower net per capita income of farmers compared to adjacent
urban workers in jobs of comparable skill. Is this difference due to failure
of markets to equalize price? Perhaps, but an alternative hypothesis is that
equalization of total remuneration, including both material and subjective
components, does take place. To transfer voluntarily to wage employment
farmers require an increased money income to compensate for the loss of
"psychic" income attendant upon abandoning farming as occupation.
Pollack stresses that the North American farmer has never been
traditional in the Weberian sense of pursuing behaviour out of habit and
custom, but has been rational in the application of new technology and the
pursuit of strategies of income maximization.
Pollack does not however
analyze the destructive implications for populist ideology of technological
change and the pursuit of individual income maximization in the context of
competitive capitalism within the agricultural sector. North American
agriculture remained subject to acute booms and busts until the 1930's
depression led to the implementation of various price support and supply
control programs. Much as collective bargaining agreements have raised
the mean and lowered the variance of wages for union members, mutatis
mutandis, these populist-inspired
programs have improved farm incomes.
But by increasing the certainty of positive returns on capital invested, such
programs accelerated the adoption of technological innovations embodied
in expensive machinery and equipment requiring long payback periods to
justify acquisition.
A general feature of nearly all new agricultural
17
Studies in Political Economy
technology has been its labour saving bias. Its adoption has increased
average farm size, decreased the agricultural labour force and contributed
to rural depopulation.
However the nature of the technology militated
against creation of a rural consensus on policies to regulate in order to limit
growing inequality of rural wealth. Political institutions come under great
stress when required consciously to jettison some in order that the rest
prosper, and for the rural economy that has been precisely the decision
posed by the labour saving bias of new technology. Those farmers in a
position to benefit from technological innovation have naturally opposed
any government restriction on its adoption. Accompanying
the shift to
farming as "agribusiness"
has been a corresponding
shift in political
ideology among farmers. Most well-capitalized farmers have abandoned
the left populist heritage in favour of a somewhat contradictory ethos that
simultaneously
extols private capital accumulation
while favouring
considerable government regulation to avoid the rigours of competitive
markets with their low margins and unstable prices.
A more significant attempt than Pollack's to resuscitate the American
populist heritage is Goodwyn's
massive new history of the Farmers
Alliance and the People's Party. 19 Goodwyn essentially reworks material
treated by Hicks, but from a far less optimistic perspective.
Hicks
conceived history to be unfolding as it should: populist ideas initially
rejected as radical had later become integrated into the "mainstream"
of
American political life. Goodwyn, by contrast, is equally critical of both
20th century liberalism, for its acceptance of concentrated corporate and
political power, and of the American socialist tradition, in both its Marxist
and social democratic guises, for its obsession with European ideologies
and institutional precedents for social change. Goodwyn's populists are the
last manifestation
of the Jeffersonian
ideal of a democratic American
society with a decentralized polity and co-operatively organized economy:
"{T[he National Farmers Alliance and the People's Party were sequential
expressions of the same popular movement and the same democratic culture,
[and] the gradual evolution of the co-operative crusade that generated both
was the central component of the agrarian revolt. ... [The] third party
movement of the Populists became within mainstream politics, the last
substantial effort at structural alteration of organic democratic forms in
modern America. The point here, of course, is that the socialist alternative.
. . . was culturally isolated, and outside the mainstream of American
political dialogue .... The narrowed boundaries of modern politics that date
from the 1896 [presidential) campaign encircle such influential areas of
American life as the relationship of corporate power to civil prerogative, the
political language legitimized to define and settle public issues within a mass
society yoked to mass communications and to privately financed elections,
and even the style through which the reality of the American experience the culture itself - is conveyed to each new generation in the public and
private school systems of the nation. In the aggregate, these boundaries
outline a clear retreat from the democratic vistas of either the 18th century
Jeffersonians or the 19th century Populists.r"
18
John Richards/POPULISM
Goodwyn defends the People's Party and Farmers Alliance as the
organizational core of the agrarian revolt, and diverts all pluralist-liberal
criticism onto what he calls a "shadow movement":
William Jennings
Bryan and his Democratic supporters, monetary cranks, silver interests,
etc. This is too easy. Goodwyn is arbitrary and historically unjustified in
restricting the term populist to the People's Party, and exempting it from
all criticisms directed against mass politics.
While Goodwyn's
refusal to admit the "shadow
movement"
as
legitimately populist appears a ploy to deflect criticism, the implied
distinction is important because it repeatedly reappears in the history of
North American populism. Rather than "real" and "shadow",
however,
let us respectively substitute the more heuristically appropriate and morally
neutral prefixes of "left" and "right". Relying on the reader's forbearance
to accept it as meaningful, I have already employed this distinction. It is
worth a more specific analysis.
No populist organization
was consistently left or right in the sense
defined below, but it is important to understand that this distinction
defines functionally equivalent strategies, each with a degree of internal
consistency and a set of arguments against the other, and therefore populist
organizations, or factions within them, tended to one side or the other. One
should not conclude that left populists were naive radical romantics, while
their right wing counterparts
were pragmatic opportunists.
Among the
radical left wing founders of large agricultural co-operatives were shrewd
entrepreneurs, and the quixotic 1937 revolt of the insurgence back bench of
the Alberta Social Credit caucus demonstrated the seriousness of intent of
right populists to realize their reforms despite overwhelming opposition.
From the conflict between midroaders
and fusionists within the
People's Party to the more prosaic Social Credit v. CCF struggles for
political hegemony in the Canadian prairies during the 1930's, populist
organization
and ideology polarized in four important domains: I) the
nature of the electoral alliance sought, 2) the extent of the critique of
contemporary
capitalist society, 3) the scope of reforms advocated, and
4) organizational
form. While for both variants the idea of the local
community, of the state or province, of the region predominated over that
of nation or class, left populists usually attempted to organize on the basis
of an explicit farm-labour
alliance; right populists minimized conflict
among groups within the prairies and attempted a regional alliance of all
classes indigenous to the plains against eastern interests. Second, left
populism erected a relatively general critique of all sectors of corporate
capitalism - the railroads, mining companies, manufacturing
trusts, as
well as financial institutions; right populists concentrated their critique, to
the point of obsession, upon the power of banks to limit the money supply
and control the cost of credit. Populists have traditionally
made the
19
Studies in Political Economy
anarchists' case against concentrated power, but here too left and right
populists differed. The anarchism
of the left populist was directed
primarily towards corporate abuse of power; that of the right populist
concentrated
upon the abuse of state power, and attacks upon "big
government"
as an exogenous malevolent force. With respect to the third
domain,
all populists consistently
supported
the institution
of the
individual family-owned farm, and advocated legislation for its protection.
Beyond agriculture,
left populists often spoke in terms of increased
competition
(of "breaking
up the trusts") as a solution to farmers'
problems, but here competition was a tactic to use against corporate
power; it was not posed as a goal in itself. In addition to a regulatory role to
promote competition,
left populism also demanded
that government
generate countervailing power, by nationalization if necessary, on farmers'
behalf, and undertake extensive welfare state reforms. Conversely, beyond
the use of the state to break the stranglehold of banks over credit, right
populism did view the achievement
of well-functioning
competitive
markets as a sufficient goal for government. The fourth and final domain
of distinction refers to organization. Left populist organizations typically
emerged from the extensive rural co-operatives of the plains and their
members tended to a chiliastic belief in their significance as the morally just
way to organize economic and political activity. Right populism had fewer
links to the co-operative movement, less interest in the mechanics of
democracy as a participatory
process, and a greater tendency towards
plebiscitarianism.
Goodwyn deals with two more general arguments recurrent among current defenders of populism.
Modern political parties subscribing to
alternative ideological traditions of social transformation
- here Goodwyn
means essentially liberalism and Marxism - have, in the United States as
elsewhere, revealed two fundamental flaws. First, they have restricted the
concept of democracy. Communist sins in this regard are blatant. But, as
Worsley argues in an analytic dissection of the meaning of populism,
pluralist liberalism (and social democracy) is also guilty. 21 In defining the
essence of democracy to be the existence of institutionalized
mechanisms
for change of government according to the results of national elections,
modern liberalism retains only a subset of the vast complex of ideals and
institutions that democracy may comprise. 22 The second flaw that concerns
Goodwyn is the failure of imported ideologies to respect popular domestic
political dialogue. Here socialists are particularly guilty, particularly in the
Western Hemisphere where the extent of the land base assured that, for
centuries, the majority of people would be farmers not urban workers, and
that popular political traditions would inevitably have a strong rural
component. Marxist historicism has tended to dismiss rural based political
movements as emotional Canute-like attempts to resist objective historical
forces that will transform
agricultural-commercial
capitalism
into
industrial capitalism, and thereby create the urban proletariat who alone
20
John Richards/POPULISM
has the historical role of ushering in the final stage of history.
We have primarily been concerned with interpretations
of populism in
North America, but in conclusion let us turn to a simultaneous attempt,
within the context of European structuralist
Marxism, to rehabilitate
populism. Laclau, whom we briefly mentioned at the outset, has been
strongly influenced by, first, French structuralism, with its insistence upon
the interrelation of social objects into (potentially antagonistic) systems
within which ideology has a significant function. Structuralism
poses
problems for Marxists: as the structural relationships of classes, ideologies
and the state come to the fore, the theoretical possibility of a class
exercising autonomous social power recedes. Many Marxists feel acutely
uncomfortable
with the extent to which structuralism frees ideology from
class, denies the possibility of finding one-to-one relationships between
classes and ideologies, and grants ideology a significance within the social
system nearly as prominent as class itself. But these are problems for
another essay.P A second influence upon Laclau is Gramsci, for whom a
central component of politics was the conflict to establish ideological hegemony over nations, regions, and classes.
To understand Laclau it helps to begin with his critique of the Argentinian Socialist and Communist
parties during the decade preceding
Peron's rise to power. Like Canada and the United States, Argentina is a
large continental country and, at that time, employment in agriculture far
outweighed that in urban industry. Most of the relatively small working
class of the coastal cities was recruited from European immigrants. Laclau
accuses Argentinian socialists, of all persuasions, of couching their campaigns in ethnocentric
European
terms: advocating
the progressive
Europeanization
of the country by means of immigration,
accelerated
industrialization
and acceptance of a liberal parliamentary
state. Such
measures, they hoped, would create the prerequisite for socialism, an urban
proletariat. The democratic aspirations of rural masses, articulated in terms
of a national Argentinian culture that knew little of, and cared less for,
European socialist theory, they dismissed as a pre-capitalist anachronism.
Laclau concludes that the socialist failure to integrate the domestic popular
culture of protest into their ideologies facilitated Peron's successful
appropriation
of it.
As opposed to Marxists who, following Lenin, identify populism as a
uniquely rural petit bourgeois ideology, Laclau argues in the structuralist
tradition that the association of particular ideological content with specific
classes is "reductionist",
that "classes as the poles of antagonistic production relations ... have no necessary form of existence at the ideological
and political levels" . 24 Laclau proceeds to identify populism as an ideology
based on conflict between the "people",
one of two poles of a
"people/power
bloc contradiction":
"the 'people' /power bloc contradic21
Studies in Political Economy
tion is an antagonism whose intelligibility depends not on the relations of
production but the complex of political and ideological relations of domination constituting a determinate social formation". 25 Although this contradiction is not among classes, it will only exist in "articulation"
with class
projects. Populism may equally be articulated into the discourse of the
dominant class and that of the dominated. A newly ascendant class seeking
hegemony will, for example, utilize a populist ideology to secure mass
support; the working class must do likewise: "there is no socialism without
populism, and the highest forms of populism can only be socialist". 26 Why
is socialist populism the highest form? Because only the working class has,
as its class interest, the suppression of the state as an antagonistic force.
For Laclau populism is the recurrent tendency of man at all stages of
economic development to oppose flagrant concentrations
of wealth and
political power and, in reaction, to advocate, whether economically efficient or not, the division of wealth and power among a larger number of
smaller units. "Populism consists," concludes Laclau, "in the presentation
of popular-democratic
interpellations as a synthetic-antagonistic
complex
with respect to the dominant ideology". 27 (Whatever else divides French
structuralism from American structural-functionalism,
they both share an
affinity for jargon!) Populism is not to be dismissed as an inchoate preindustrial form of rural protest, but is democratic ideology couched in the
immediately
accessible culture of the "people".
Without
populism
socialism risks degeneration into an ideology of state power to legitimize
Djilas' "new class", or of one particular class in complex class-divided
industrial societies.
Conclusion
The populist debates of the last decade have, at a minimum, established
that populism is a complex political phenomenon. It cannot be analyzed as
simply a case of the traditional
resisting the inevitable rational/
bureaucratic, to use Weber's terms, or of commercial small scale capital
resisting the historically inevitable movement to industrial capital, to use
Marx'. Second, the democratic credentials of populism, at least in North
America, have been partially refurbished. The most important question is
not, however, the historical significance of populism, but whether it retains
significance for the organizational and intellectual development of the left
within industrial society. I answer with a qualified "yes".
A corollary of the left's traditional emphasis upon rational planning by
the state has been to minimize (this is an understatement!)
the problem of
bureaucratic
power, of excessive discretionary scope in the making of
decisions among those occupying the senior positions of large scale
bureaucracies
- corporate,
political and military. The more creative
strands of contemporary
left wing thought within industrially advanced
22
John Richards/POPULISM
societies are centrally concerned with this lacuna. The response has been
varied: interest in industrial democracy within corporations (both state and
privately owned), in the extent to which the market can more efficiently
and democratically
substitute for central planning, in "devolution"
of
political authority onto local and regional political bodies as a necessary
although insufficient condition for a participatory political culture and for
the accommodation of nationalist differences. All these ideas appear within
contemporary
European socialist currents: syndicalism, market socialists
among eastern European Marxists, "federalists"
attempting to reconcile
multiple national loyalties within nation states.
Within English Canadian
institutions
of the left - here I refer
principally to the major trade unions and to the NOP - these ideas are not
central. As evidence I cite one topical example. Having disingenuously
interpreted the May 1980 Quebec referendum results as a mandate to
strengthen the role of the federal government and of the judiciary, relative
to that of the provinces, the federal Liberals have undertaken two related
sets of initiatives - with respect to the constitution and energy policy. In
both cases the intellectual and organizational
traditions of the "nonpopulist" left are overwhelmingly on the side of the federal government.
The federal NOP leadership has contained the inchoate scepticism of its
western-based
MP's (four fifths of the caucus) and stated that, with
disagreement
on detail, it approves this assertion of central political
authority. There are good arguments to raise on behalf of Ottawa: nobody
favours the British government's retention of any power, however residual,
with respect to the Canadian constitution; the entrenchment of a bill of
rights that purports to protect citizens against the arbitrary exercise of state
power cannot, however ill-drafted, be altogether a bad thing; ceteris
paribus, any policy that potentially decreases the relative power of the
major foreign oil companies is desirable; a great deal of redistribution of
resource rents (from oil and gas of course), but also from resources such as
hydroelectricity) should take place.
After all that has been said, the absence of a well-articulated left populist perspective gives to NOP pronouncements a stale and dated aura of the
1940's. Whereas the NOP tends to present the federal government as the
prime agent for the realization of "peace, order and good government"
subject to the constraints of section 92, the populist case would invert the
goal and the constraint: democracy within a nation of continental dimensions and ethnic diversity can only thrive if there exists the maximum
possible devolution
of political authority
onto regional levels of
government, subject to obvious constraints such as the need for income
redistribution.
The constraints are important in both versions, but the
order even more so. The issues involved are all complex, and here I shall
but superficially jab at them. The provincial premiers are not populists (if
pressed I could argue the case for Levesque and the Parti Quebecois; with
23
Studies in Political Economy
Blakeney and the Saskatchewan
NDP it would be harder) but their
vociferous opposition to the constitutional and energy policy proposals is
more than a parochial defence of their own power and wealth, even though
it is that too. They are reflecting the widespread mistrust by most
Canadians of concentrated political power. Sterling Lyon has argued that
the proposed bill of rights reduces collective popular sovereignty because it
transfers jurisdiction
over certain matters (not coincidentally
matters
largely within provincial jurisdiction) from elected legislators to appointed
judges. This argument derives from the British tradition of parliamentary
supremacy,
but it has nonetheless
been favourably
received by
francophones
in Quebec who fear erosion of the Quebec assembly's
jurisdiction to promote francisation and by many in the Saskatchewan
NDP who fear that, as has recently occurred in the United States, a bill of
rights may prevent acts of positive discrimination on behalf of women,
Indians and others. Jacques Parizeau and Allan Blakeney have both
opposed the elevation of the common market principle into a constitutional
absolute because hostile courts could use it to interpret any new provincial
economic initiative as a barrier to the free interprovincial
movement of
labour and capital. Our hypothetical populist constitutional
brief would
anxiously note that federal initiatives on resource policy imply that Ottawa
alone can initiate creative policy, and that the provinces serve merely as
agents of political balkanization, consorting with foreign capital to prevent
interprovincial redistribution of resource rents. That charge is, of course,
partly true. However both levels of government have a more-or-less equally
shabby past record in respect to rent collection, and most of the interesting
Canadian initiatives in resource policy during the last decade have been
regional in nature, resulting from regionally based frustrations with the
performance
of external
resource
corporations.
Examples
include
establishment of the British Columbia Petroleum Corporation by the NDP
in Victoria, Alberta Gas Trunk (Nova) successfully fighting Imperial Oil on
the Arctic gas pipeline, nationalization of potash in Saskatchewan and of
asbestos in Quebec.
In summary there is in the federal initiatives a continuity with John A.
Macdonald's
thoroughly
paternalistic,
anti-democratic
conception
of
Confederation
and of the National Policy. The one democratic consultation prior to Confederation was the New Brunswick election of 1866 which
produced a government opposed to the project. By dint of intrigue in
Fredericton, Ottawa and London Macdonald succeeded in replacing the
New Brunswick governor with another who actively favoured Confederation and who succeeded in forcing a new election that, with ample graft
from Upper Canada, restored to power Macdonald's ally, Samuel Tilley.
The Quebec Liberals and the Parti Quebecois at least had the democratic
integrity to publish their constitutional
ideas in detail in advance of the
referendum; not so the federal Liberals who revealed nothing in either the
referendum debates or the immediately preceding federal election. The
24
John Richards/POPULISM
Liberals are currently appealing to London to enact post haste their constitutional amendments,
to ignore the protests of the majority of the
provinces, (thereby denying the essence of a federation, that neither level of
government can unilaterally change the basic rules of the game) of women's
groups, Indians, etc. Plus ca change ....
In the absence of a left populist response, there is in Canada a growing
right populist reaction, one illustration of which is popular support for
western separatism. Resurgent right populism in Canada is inspired by
American precedents, organizations in opposition to "big government"
and in defence of traditional family virtues and evangelical Christianity.
This New Right is undeniably populist in organizational style and ideology.
Take, for example, Howard Jarvis, curmudgeonly leader of the successful
"Proposition
13" movement in California:
People can collectively effect change in their public interest, if only they get
mad enough, and if their anger is rational and justified. People who want to
do something don't have to wait for somebody else to lead them. I hope
that's one message that will come loud and clear out of 13: Americans can do
things for themselves ....
If there is something about government you don't
like, get together and do something about it. Get as many people as you know
to put their names on a petition. Even if the petition has no legal effect, it will
impress and scare the hell out of the elected officials.
. . . ours is a
government of the people, by the people, and for the people - instead of,
by, and for the politicians. The brains and capacities of the citizens of the
United States are invariably greater than the brains and the capabilities of the
bureaucracy - now misnamed government.P
Jarvis denounces corporate tax evasion in a manner analogous to David
Lewis' 1972 campaign against corporate welfare bums (as a State Tax
Commissioner he proudly claims to have raised taxes on the big copper
producers in his native state of Utah); he criticizes waste in welfare state
programs with the gusto of Ernest Manning in his prime; he defends
neighbourhood
control in terms not unlike Toronto's
ex-mayor John
Sewell; his support of states rights against erosion by federal politicians in
Washington
merely reiterates Thomas Jefferson's
debates with the
Hamiltonians.
The Laclauian question of the articulation of the New Right to various
class projects is an interesting and complex one; it cannot be resolved by ad
hominem left wing attacks that dismiss leaders such as Jarvis as tools of
real estate interests desirous of lower taxes. In the United States a major
reason for popular support of the New Right is the failure of most leaders
of the AFL-CIO and the liberal wing of the Democratic Party to reexamine their faith, dating back to the New Deal, in the primacy of welfare
state solutions organized and administered by the national government. A
separate reason for the New Right's success is mass reaction against "elite
liberal" morality - a reaction against homosexuals, abortion, feminists
25
Studies in Political Economy
perceived as upwardly mobile career women, and "bleeding
favouring blacks.
heart"
liberals
The intolerance of much of this New Right morality augurs ill for North
American politics, but the appropriate
response is not an automatic
defence of all that the New Right attacks. Such will serve merely to
continue the present quasi-marginal status of the left. Difficult as it will be,
the left must take up the indigenous populist strands and weave them into
alternative designs.
NOTES:
I would like to thank David Laycock, Rianne Mahon and Reg Whitaker, who
invested time in criticizing an earlier draft. I also profited from access to a
significant,
as yet unpublished,
essay by David Laycock,
"Populism
and
Democratic thought in the Prairies, 1910 to 1945".
I E. Laclau, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory, London, 1977.
2 J.D. Hicks, The Populist Revolt, Lincoln, 1961,299-300.
3 See J .G. Richards and L.R. Pratt, Prairie Capitalism: Power and Influence in
the New West, Toronto, 1979, Chap. 6.
4 Hicks, The Populist Revolt; S.M. Lipset, Agrarian Socialism, New York; W.L.
Morton, The Progressive Party in Canada, 1957; P.F. Sharp, The Agrarian
Revolt in Western Canada, New York, 1971.
5 C. Vann Woodward,
Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel, New York, 1963.
6 R. Hofstadter,
The Age of Reform, New York, 1955.
7 Lipset, Agrarian Socialism, XVII.
8 J.A. Irving, The Social Credit Movement in Alberta, Toronto, 1959.
9 C.B. Macpherson, Democracy in Alberta: Social Credit and the Party System,
Toronto, 1962.
10 Macpherson,
Democracy in Alberta, 225.
11 Macpherson, Democracy in Alberta, 244.
12 A. Jackson, "Patterns of Hinterland Revolt: Alberta and Saskatchewan in the
Inter-War
Period",
unpublished
paper presented at the Canadian
Political
Science Association annual meetings, London, Ontario, 1977.
13 Social Credit is a complex case in this respect. I would argue that the arrival of
the major oil companies after Leduc in 1947 completely transformed the movement into a conservative political party whose remaining populism was residual.
The survival in office of Social Credit for another two decades is a discomforting
fact for anyone on the left to explain. It obviously owes much to the ability of the
government to provide public goods out of oil royalties and the replacement of
populist mistrust of large scale external capital with an ideology of corporate
benevolence. The break with this passive rentier ideology came, ironically, not
from the left, whether via farm or labour, but from an arriviste urban
bourgeoisie desirous of a greater entrepreneurial
role in the provincial economy.
14 Macpherson, Democracy in Alberta, 249.
15 Macpherson, Democracy in Alberta, 248.
16 N. Pollack, The Populist Response to Industrial America, New York, 1966.
17 Pollack, The Populist Response, 12.
18 Thomas Jefferson,
Notes on the State of Virginia. The Portable Thomas
Jefferson, M.D. Peterson, New York, 1975,217.
19 Lawrence Goodwyn, Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America,
New York, 1966.
20 Goodwyn, Democratic Promise, 600, 515.
26
John Richards/POPULISM
21 P. Worsley, "The Concept of Populism",
G. lonescu and E. Gellner, eds.,
Populism: Its Meanings and National Characteristics,
London, 1970.
22 An eloquent example is afforded by George Cadbury, English Fabian, economist
and head of the Planning Board of the Saskatchewan
CCF during its first two
terms in office. Expressing his frustration
with populist influences among
employees of crown corporations,
he wrote to Premier Douglas in 1947:
"Another problem with which we are faced is the pressure for some measure of
control by the workers over the management of our plants. This pressure does
not originate so much with trade unionist representatives
as with rank-and-file
employees of CCF leanings who have been exposed in CCF circles to much loose
thinking on this subject."
Quoted in Richards and Pratt, Prairie Capitalism,
141.
23 See N. Mouzelis, "Ideology and Class Politics: A Critique of Ernesto Laclau,"
New Left Review, 112, (December 1978), for a Marxist critique of Laclau's
approach.
24 Laclau, Politics and Ideology, 159.
25 Laclau, Politics and Ideology, 166.
26 Laclau, Politics and Ideology, 196-7.
27 Laclau, Politics and Ideology, 172-3.
28 H. Jarvis with R. Pack, I'm Mad as Hell, 1980, 9.
27