7
Republicans--Eisenhower included--mobilized citizens with appeals to fear of
communism and the Korean War. These elites “engaged in antidemocratic activity out of
a fear of mass movements” (280).
In the 1890s, 1930s, and now the 1960s, mass
movements struggled to overcome the “political conservatism of the leadership stratum.”
More assessments of McCarthyism in the Sixties expanded upon Rogin’s “political”
thesis by tracing elite manipulated anti-communism to the period before Eisenhower and
the Fifties to the Truman years (Theoharis 1971; Freeman 1971).Others attempted to
separate the nineteenth century People’s Party from its preceding movement (Goodwyn
1976; Lasch 1991). In the 1990s populism once again has been portrayed as a threat that
was now “firmly in place in the conservative-reactionary spectrum of political ideology
and action, sometimes taking quite radical and extreme positions” (Mazzoleni, 2003, 4).
v
Some analysts have revived Rogin’s political thesis of McCarthyism by contending that
recent populist movements were instigated and directed by political elites (Reider 1989;
Frank 2003).
If we assume then that populism represents a major flash point in democratic
theory in part due to differing conceptions and historical experiences, are there any
common elements in these analyses? One point of agreement among all students of
populism is that, the American populist movement in the nineteenth century itself,
whatever its legacy, ended in failure. Also later movements that often receive the
designation “populist,” ended in failure as well. Populist third parties dissipate, populist
organizations disband, populist leaders retreat from the public arena, populist voters
revert to conventional loyalties, populist programs are co-opted or ignored. In fact,
despite their intensity, populist movements in America are rarely viable for more than ten
Convention