After Tuesday night's win for Hillary in West Virginia, exit polls suggested that both race/Wright (i.e., racism) and jobs/the economy/a gas price rebate (i.e., populism) were factors. While an interesting, and I believe insightful, diary here, which uses exit polling data so as to rank order states in terms of their racism, there may be more to the story than simply race; when racism and populism intersect, it is often hard to know how to sort things out.
Firstly, a definition of racism, courtesy of the author bell hooks. Note how this definition refutes the notion of a "reverse racism" by non whites.
"Why is it so difficult for many white folks to understand that racism is oppressive not because white folks have prejudicial feelings about blacks, but because it is a system that promotes domination and subjugation? The prejudicial feelings some blacks may express about whites are in no way linked to a system of domination the affords us any power to coercively control the lives and well-being of white folks. That needs to be understood" (bell hooks 1995: 154).
This from her 1995 book, Killing Rage: Ending Racism.
As hooks points out, racism is a system. To call it is a system is to require that we deal with it systematically, that is, to look at how domination and subjugation work. For example, the fact that blacks may have lower rates of illegal drug use than whites but are more likely to be poor compared to whites and are more likely to be arrested, prosecuted and punished for illegal drugs suggests that the law and criminal justice system, and the political, economic, and cultural arrangements in society that enable these systems to work as they do, demonstrate systematic racism.
Then, some comments on the term "populism," taken from a lecture entitled Populism and John Dewey: Convergences and Contradictions by Harry C. Boyte, at the 2007 University of Michigan Dewey Lecture. Boyte - who has written extensively on populist politics, including such works as The New Populism: The Politics of Empowerment, and Everyday Politics: Reconnecting Citizens and Public Life, notes the following:
Populism’s themes reflect a different way of looking at the world than structures and blueprints, as Marie Ström conveys in her quote above, a language of what Mary Dietz calls "roots," that nourish popular agency and power. Sheldon Wolin argued that populism is the "culture of democracy" itself:
Historically [populism] has stood for the efforts of ordinary citizens and would-be citizens to survive in a society dominated by those whose control over the main concentrations of wealth and power has enabled them to command the forms of technical knowledge and skilled labor that have steadily become the hallmark of so-called modernizing societies. A culture of survival is very different from a... market-culture littered by the disposable remains of yesterday and shaped by manipulation of attitudes and desires...
A culture of survival is conditioned by the experiences of hard times in a changing world...of drought, depressed markets, high railroad and grain storage rates, and manipulated currencies... Its practices issued from taking care of living beings and mundane artifacts, from keeping them in the world by use and memory. To sustain the institutions of family, community, church, school and local economy demanded innovation as well as conservation...
The reason why democracy should be grounded in a populist culture is not because those who live it are pure, unprejudiced, and unfailingly altruistic. Rather, it is because it is a culture that has not been defined by the urge to dominate and that has learned that existence is a cooperative venture over time.
The values of community and equality that Wolin observes as central to populism are not unique to groups struggling for survival. They can be sustained by the anchoring institutions of civic life in middle class communities, such as family, congregation, cultural groups, schools, or local businesses with community roots. And these values can be articulated at every level of society, as in the case of the cultural workers of the Great Depression, later discussed. But Wolin is right in his intuition that egalitarian communal values often find sustenance in communities "struggling for survival," like nineteenth century farming communities, or African American communities that resisted the brutalities of segregation by forming networks of self-help and mutual aid, or today’s new immigrant communities trying to preserve some sense of heritage in the cultural maelstrom of a hyper-competitive, consumerist and individualist society. The insights from cultures of survival sharply challenge the condescension of elites.
On the overlap of populism and racism/reactionary conservatism, Wikipedia notes that
The strategy of right-wing populism relies on a combination of ethno-nationalism with anti-elitist (populist) rhetoric and a radical critique of existing political institutions.
In the United States, radical right wing populism traces back to roots in the Jacksonian period and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the mid-19th century following the Civil War. In the U.S. it has often incorporated an agrarian impulse.
A "combination of ethno-nationalism with anti-elitist (populist) rhetoric" is thus what defines right wing populism, and can be seen as the dynamic in examples ranging from Pat Buchanan's "peasants with pitchforks" to today's draconian anti-immigrant politics, such as this example from the state of Georgia.
Right wing populism also typically employs scapegoating, that is, the constant use of someone who is blamed for misfortunes, generally as a way of distracting attention from the real causes. Media, particularly right wing propaganda platforms, such as Rush Limbaugh's and Fox News's broadcasts and the columns of propagandists like Michelle Malkin, - as well as right wing fundamentalist churches - then are used to echo and to reinforce these practices of scapegoating; we saw this all too well in the nationwide skewering of Reverend Wright, and in the guilt-by-association attacks on Obama through Wright. In any event, scapegoating links populism to racism whenever popular, anti-elitist messages get distorted by racially divisive images and claims. Sometimes, as in the resistance by Dixiecrats in the 1960s to integerationist politics, it is done explicitly; at other times, it is done with much more subtlety; Sister Souljah, anyone? Or, for that matter, this quote.
"You know, there was just an AP article posted that found how Senator Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans is weakening again and how the whites in both states (Indiana and North Carolina) who had not completed college were supporting me and in independents, I was running even with him and doing even better with Democratic-leaning independents. I have a much broader base to build a winning coaltion on."
The very notion, implied in this quote, of a "liberal elit(e/ist)," tossed like a bomb at the Kerry campaign in 2004 and at Obama now is itself an anti-intellectualizing skapegoat practice, one which distorts the true meaning of an elitist class.
So, as to such questions as - Is Hillary's campaign racist? Are here supporters - in making Barack Obama's race an issue - racist? Is linking Obama to Rev. Wright racist? Is the largely white, socially conservative, blue collar Appalachian region, in its support for Hillary over and against the likely nominee, racist? - we are, inevitably, grappling with several dynamics, and with certain contradictory attitudes we may hold, including seeing populism as potentially progressive and democratic (as, certainly, does Harry C. Boyte), rejecting/disavowing racism but perhaps being hesitant to accuse potential allies of it, and having some uncertainly of the meaning of the term "elite." In fact, for such activities as liking free jazz and modern art, studying the liberal arts in college, living in a cosmopolitan coastal city, engaging in high culture, getting the humor of the Onion, etc., while these might suggest elite taste, these types of activities are, in and of themselves, not things that ought to be scorned as "elitist." The actual elites are what the sociologist C. Wright Mills once termed the power elite, namely those with disproportionate concentrations of economic and political resources. To the extent that populism acts as a check on such concentrations, that is, it seems to me, a good thing.
And, of course, populism need not be racist, as Boyte points out, giving even a possibly surprising example from the American past.
In the US in the nineteenth century, the Populist Party grew from two decades of movement-building in the rural South and Midwest after the Civil War, beginning in 1866 with the National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry, continuing with a huge network of cooperatives in the 1880s across the South and Midwest in the farmers’ alliances, black and white. The alliances shared with the Grange an emphasis on civic development. They organized neighborhood gatherings, newspapers, lecture circuits, and reading circles. Alliance economic efforts aimed at freeing farmers from the domination of banks and railroads through cooperative purchasing and marketing and produced policy ideas like progressive income taxes and easier credit. Organizing generated what the Lawrence Goodwyn has called a "movement culture," based on an ethos of respect, cooperation, self-help and a vision of a "cooperative commonwealth" to replace the dog eat dog capitalism of the late 19th century. The farmers’ movement included tentative interracial alliances, always in tension with the ancient legacy of racial bigotry that was a defining element of southern culture. The black historian Manning Marable recounts his family’s oral history about his great-grandfather:
During the 1880s, many black and white farmers in Alabama joined the Alliance, a radical agrarian movement against the conservative business and planter elite. Morris was attracted to the movement because of its racial egalitarianism. Throughout Georgia and Alabama, black and white Populist Party members held joint picnics, rallies, and speeches. Populist candidate Reuben F. Kalb actually won the state gubernatorial contest in 1894 [though electoral fraud prevented his taking office]. On the periphery of this activity, in his small rural town, Morris Marable became sheriff with the support of blacks and whites. He was intensely proud of his office, and completed his duties with special dispatch...Morris carried a small Bible in one coat pocket at all times and a revolver under his coat. In either case, he always planned to be prepared.
Populism has many ripples. Thus, for instance, David Mathews, a formative voice in the Kettering Foundation for which he serves as president and the broader deliberative democracy movement, proudly traces his family’s political lineage to the same movement as Marable. His ancestors were leaders in the Alabama and Texas branches of the Populist Party. In the 1898-1899 session of the Alabama legislature, his grandfather's father, James Waldrum Mathews, opposed the planter-sponsored constitution that effectively disenfranchised poor black and white farmers.
This lengthy quote has, among its insights, the realization that much of the pitting of races against each other in the South came from wealthy, conservative property owners, acting on the basis of narrow self-interest. Similarly today, the framing of our politics as "racially divided" is one that emerges from corporate media; it creates a self-fullfilling prophecy in a way, as enough campaigns and voters then act upon a 'reality' that has been 'defined' in such a way as to represent a kind of conventional wisdom.
And yet, conventional wisdom - which was predicting that Hillary Clinton would be the Democratic nominee this year - has been wrong. Barack Obama - who has time and again shown a couragous defiance of conventional wisdom - has instead been the most successful. Obama's politics are, when one examines them, a principled populism, one which cannot allow for racism, whereas Hillary's pandering version of populism is much fuzzier, more poll driven and unprincipled; her's swings from left to center to right and then back again, whichever way the wind blows.
Believing, though, along with the likes of Harry Boyte and those whom he cites, that populism is the culture of democracy and part, also of a culture of survival, we can, of course, choose to have some faith in an enlightened, antiracist form of populism. One way to do this is to acknowledge the harm done to whites and to nonwhites at the same time - by morally reprehensible figures, such as those named George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. And in doing this, it would help to set differences aside for the time being so as to focus on common ground.