Of Scribes and Tribes: Progressive Politics and the Populist Challenge

ABSTRACT

What has made progressives—self-styled champions of the people—the principal targets of populist resentment in contemporary politics? Perhaps it is progressives’ ambivalence about democracy, not merely the racist, sexist and nationalist passions that progressives prefer to blame. Indeed, one of the reasons that progressives find themselves under attack as out-of-touch elitists may be that they are out of touch with the nature and extent of their elitism. So long as progressives remain committed to enlightening the people as well as empowering them, to bringing about social improvement as well as social justice, they are bound to express some discomfort with democracy, no matter how sincerely they may praise it. If they want to mount a more effective response to the populist challenge to progressive politics, then, they need first to acknowledge and address the sources of their ambivalence about democracy.

Keywords:

• democracy
• democratic theory
• empowerment
• Enlightenment
• populism
• progressivism

Notes

1 See, for example, the Lonesome Rhodes character in Elia Kazan’s 1957 film, “A Face in the Crowd,” one of the most insightful accounts of populism’s pathologies in any medium.