8
years and often survive for much less. To critics, this short-life span is further evidence of
the instability of populism; to defenders it is illustrative of the continuing power of elites.
Students of populism also agree that despite these patterns of failure populist
movements are an endemic and periodic feature of modern democracies. Indeed, analyses
of populism invariably focus upon narratives of “populist moments.” The Coughlin and
Long movements in the Depression, McCarthyism in the 1950s, the Wallace protest in
the 1960s and 1970s, the Jackson and Robertson candidacies in the 1980s, the Perot
movement in the 1990s have all been cited as descendants of the original movement
(McCrath 1993; Canovan 1999; Hertzke 1993; Kazin 1993).
Although writers frequently note differences among these various populist
moments, particularly the rise of conservative forms in the past fifty years, each
continues to be troubled by the persistent inability of populists to acknowledge
difference. Thus Lawrence Goodwyn, one of the most sympathetic students of populism,
denies that intolerance is a core feature of its protest. Yet he writes: “”Populism in
America was not an equalitarian achievement. Rather it was an equalitarian attempt, a
beginning. If it stimulated human generosity, it did not, before the movement itself was
destroyed, create a settled culture of generosity. Though Populists attempted to break out
of the received heritage of white supremacy, they necessarily, as white Americans, did so
within the very ethos of white supremacy. At both a psychological and political level,
some Populists were more successful than others in coping with the inherited caste
system. Many were not successful at all” (1978, 295). These “notable silences” in
populist discourse have raised the question, emphasized by critics, of whether intolerance
is, in fact, an essential feature of populism rather than an unfortunate failing shared by all
Convention