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ABSTRACT
Debates about “populism” in recent years have used thin understandings of the term, which conceal theoretically richer possibilities. This essay explores the thicker understanding of populism developed in Christopher Lasch’s The True and Only Heaven and bell hooks’s belonging. In so doing, the essay suggests other roads forward for arguments about populism in America.
Notes
1 Though see Roberts 2013.
2 Though see Berry Citation2017.
3 The New York Times, Washington Post, Atlantic, New Yorker, New York Review of Books, Commentary, National Review, Human Events, Claremont Review of Books, Nation, The American Conservative, and Jacobin. The thin ideational approach was especially prevalent.
4 The two exceptions: Elizabeth Dole and Rudy Giulani. Skelley Citation2019 provides the count of serious candidates. I discerned the New York Times datum by searching for “populist” as a modifier of each candidate’s name in that newspaper’s online archive.
5 For other insightful analyses of Lasch, see Beiner Citation1997; Lawler Citation1999; Beer Citation2007; Miller Citation2010; Kramer Citation2013; Becker Citation2014; McWilliams Citation2016.
6 My notion of an “ideal” here draws on Berry 2001, 72-73.
7 “The political morality of producerism, it might be argued, is still another expression of the folk wisdom that condemns every attempt to get something for nothing” (Lasch Citation1991, 270).
8 For Lasch (Citation1991, 530), “It is their recognition of limits alone that justifies consideration of such a great variety of political movements and schools of thought as in any sense part of a single [populist] tradition or sensibility.” One ambition of this essay is to suggest how other, contemporary “schools of thought” may also be quilted into this tradition.
9 Note that Lasch’s terminology is not fully coincident with popular usage today. It is in some ways akin to the “degrowth” perspective in ecological economics of late (see, e.g., Kallis Citation2011).
10 Hooks also devotes two chapters of belonging to underscoring the importance in her intellectual journey of Wendell Berry, another prolific living American contributor to populist thought. One of those chapters consists of a transcribed dialogue between the two of them at Berry’s home, in which their common ground becomes extraordinarily clear, centered on the good life of the American petit bourgeoisie, competence, proprietorship, limits, democratic possibility. Recognizing that hooks is not only in explicit dialogue with Berry, but also in implicit dialogue with Lasch, opens a way to see the broad contours of a late twentieth- and early twenty-first century populist canon in America, a point to which I return in the conclusion.
11 It is worth noting that hooks (Citation2000) might object to the seemingly non-intersectional understanding of class here.
12 Hooks describes her own progressive assumptions at this point: “When I left the Kentucky hills, I thought that I would be leaving behind a harsh world of white supremacy, racial hatred and prejudice, for a more enlightened environment” (ibid., 58).
13 Potential parallels with Front Porch Republic are noted below.
14 For a partly contrary view, see Miller Citation2010, 348-52.
15 See McKean Citation2016 for a related argument from a different definitional perspective on populism.