5
crisis and the imperative to transcend it is a feature of democratic discourse in general. It
is, for example, the great theme of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.
Finally, there is the question of what might be called the general populist
mentalite of anger at elites. While populist movements define elites differently (bankers,
corporate leaders, government officials, intellectuals or some combination), in every case
the opposition to them is expressed in terms of undisguised resentment and anger.
Edward Shils, in fact, contends that populism occurs “wherever there is an ideology of
popular resentment against the order imposed on society by a long-established,
differentiated ruling class ” (1956, 99). Democratic theorists, however, agree that it is
desirable that deference to elites have some limits (Warren 1999, 310-43) and some have
argued that the relative absence of resentment is actually a danger (Mouffle, 1993).
Populism’s contestedness as well can be traced to alternating generational
assessments of the role of mass movements in democratic theory. In the 1930s and 1940s
nineteenth century populist protest in America was treated as a precursor to modern
liberalism. The studies of John D. Hicks, C. Vann Woodward and Chester M. Destler
portrayed populism as a movement of “hard working farmers victimized by bankers,
railroads, and merchants” who attempted to reclaim their rights (Holmes, 1994, xvi). In
1931, Hicks, in fact, noted that since “the old Populist panaceas” now “receive that
enthusiastic support of Hooverian Republicans and Al-smithian Democrats these startling
demands are no longer radical at all” (1931, 422) and Destler in 1946 concluded that
Populism was “but an extreme projection of the Jeffersonian creed” (17).
European fascist movements and the rise of McCarthyism in the United States,
however, produced highly critical assessments of the relationship between mass
Convention