Thomas Frank Misses the Point on Populism
"In essentials, unity. In non-essentials, liberty. In all things, charity."
I’m Tereza Coraggio and this is Third Paradigm, a thinktank on community sovereignty and socio-spirituality.
In this episode I respond to Russell Brand's Luminary interview of Thomas Frank, called “What You Know About Populism is Probably Wrong.” Thomas is the author of The People, No! A Brief History of Anti-Populism. I look at what Thomas is missing in the history of populism by looking at The Nonpartisan League in a book called Insurgent Democracy by Michael Lansing, and how bipartisan politics handed money creation to the banks in Ellen Brown's Web of Debt. I end with the hope that we emulate the farmer Grange movement and come to agreement on policies that we support instead of parties.
At the beginning of this interview, Russell quotes Steve Bannon saying, “Populism is the future. All we’re deciding is whether it’s left-wing or right-wing populism.” Thomas retorts that, in his opinion, “there is no such thing as right-wing populism. There are people who mimic it… but it’s a Jeffersonian, democratic, left-wing tradition. It’s about building a transracial working class movement for economic democracy.”
Thomas makes the candid comment that when he used to make fun of right-wingers, he was very popular. Now that he’s criticizing “his team” of Democrats, not so much. My rule of thumb is that our Achilles heel, the way we can be fooled or manipulated, is whenever we think that we and people like us are better than others. So let’s look into whether it’s objectively true that populism is never right-wing.
In other episodes, I’ve said that academics and professionals tend to be Democrats while manual laborers, small business owners or farmers tend to be Republican.
As an example of how Democrats have abandoned working people, Thomas mentions that Hillary Clinton got more money than Trump from high finance. In my episode on Victoria Nuland, I talk about her husband, Robert Kagan, co-founder of the neocon thinktank Project for a New American Century. When Hillary was Secretary of State, he indicated that neocons would back her as more hawkish and investor-friendly than the Republican threat. Who was that? Ron Paul.
Ron Paul represents the Populist traditions of supporting farmers and small business, opposing monopolies, supporting protectionist trade policies, opposing foreign military intervention, supporting local sovereignty, and opposing the Federal Reserve.
Bernie Sanders, who Russell and Thomas call a populist, supports Universal Basic Income, free education, Medicare for all, and social welfare systems. These are more socialist policies than populist, benefiting consumers rather than producers.
What are our values? Can we be a society of consumers without anyone producing? Or do we want an economy that helps us produce and take responsibility for ourselves instead of exploiting people in other countries?
Historically, the most important issue to the populists was the creation of money. Thomas tells the story of William Jennings Bryan, who ran for President twice as the Democratic candidate on a platform of free silver—using silver to augment the gold standard and put more currency in circulation. As a Kansas boy, I’m surprised he didn’t mention that WJB was represented as the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz, which was an allegory for the movement with Dorothy’s slippers as silver, not ruby.
In an excerpt from my book, How to Dismantle an Empire, I talk about this era:
jekyll to hide
The 19th-century was a time of boom-and-bust money cycles that were manipulated by the bankers. Those wild swings culminated in the panic of 1907. In Web of Debt, Ellen Brown writes,
The panic of 1907 was triggered by rumors that the Knickerbocker Bank and The Trust Company of America were about to become insolvent. Later evidence pointed to the House of Morgan as the source of the rumors. The public, believing the rumors, proceeded to make them come true by staging a run on the banks. Morgan then nobly helped to avert the panic by importing $100 million worth of gold from Europe to stop the bank run. The mesmerized public came to believe that the country needed a central banking system to stop future panics.
To exploit the agitation they’d created for a central bank, powerful representatives of the two banking competitors, Morgan and Rockefeller, met at Morgan’s estate on his privately owned Jekyll Island. It was hosted by Rockefeller’s father-in-law and Morgan’s business associate, Senator Nelson Aldrich. The Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury was present, as was Paul Warburg, representative of the Rothschild banking dynasty in England and France, and brother to Max Warburg, head of the banking consortium in Germany and the Netherlands.
They named their proposal the Aldrich Federal Reserve Plan and the Senator introduced the bill in Congress. Its most articulate opponent was William Jennings Bryan, who insisted that allowing private banks to issue public money would give Wall Street control of the government. Only the US Treasury, he stated, should issue currency to be guaranteed and controlled by Congress. The legislature agreed and Congress voted to defeat the bankers’ bill.
hoodwinkle the moose
But even if it had passed, President Taft had been unlikely to sign it. Taft was a Rockefeller man but his predecessor, Teddy Roosevelt, was a Morgan man. Roosevelt had broken up Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, which was known as the shadow government. Taft had retaliated by filing antitrust suits against Morgan’s International Harvester and United States Steel. Competition between the greedy was working to the people’s advantage. Clearly it was time to compromise—for the greater good of the bankers.
In 1912 Taft was a sure bet for reelection. So Morgan created a third party, called the Progressive or Bull Moose Party, and ran Teddy Roosevelt to divert some of Taft’s votes. The divide-and-crumble strategy worked and Morgan’s real candidate, Woodrow Wilson, won the election while the duped and discarded Bull Moose stomped back to the tundra.
Three days before Christmas in 1913, the Aldrich Plan was reintroduced as the Currency Bill or Owen-Glass Act. Congress had been struggling with the need for a sovereign currency since the summer; the Act was seen as a compromise and was worded so confusingly that no representative had time to decipher it. William Jennings Bryan believed that the banks had given in. Triumphantly, he assured the House that control of the money had not been relinquished to the bankers. It passed overwhelmingly the same day, supported by the antibanker Democrats and opposed by the pro-banker Republicans.
On the last day before the Christmas break, Santa Senate approved it and Wilson signed it into law with pomp and circumstance. With one wave of the pen, Wilson gave the bankers the power of the purse strings. It was later renamed The Federal Reserve Act.
war and the expandable purse
William Jennings Bryan ran twice for president on a platform of coining silver and staying out of foreign wars. In 1915 he resigned as Secretary of State because of President Wilson’s headlong rush to enter World War I. Wilson had found that the expandable purse of the Federal Reserve made diplomacy optional. While Bryan responded to the sinking of the Lusitania in a manner designed to avert escalation, Wilson overrode him with a threatening letter... and the rest is history.
In 1919 Ludwig von Mises wrote, “Inflation is an indispensable means of militarism. Without it, the repercussions of war on welfare become obvious much more quickly.” With it, however, the military budget could reach heights that would make a statesman’s head spin. By 1920 the money supply had doubled, allowing WWI to be funded 23% through money creation, 56% by Fed-backed borrowing, and only 21% through taxes.
Had not 79% of the true costs been deferred by printing new money and using the taxpayer’s credit card, the US may never have entered WWI, which set the Versailles stage for WWII. The carnage goes on from there: in the 98 years from 1913 until 2011 there have been 98 foreign interventions, not including actions against native tribes within the United States. There is no end in sight.
I conclude by going back to the central point that Thomas misses—populism has never been right or left-wing, it has always been neither. In Insurgent Democracy, Michael Lansing writes about the original populist movement and the Nonpartisan League that pledged to vote as a block for any candidate who supported their policies, regardless of party.
A central organization within that movement was the Grange, or the Order of the Patrons of Husbandry, of which I’ve been a member for many years. Their voting leadership included 50% women, and they sent lecturers to educate the public throughout the country. To ward off infiltration by the Pinkertons, a new member had to be sponsored before they could learn the passwords and secret handshakes.
The Grange continues to vote on policies in formal discussions that bridge the left-right divide. Their headquarters is still across from the White House, as it was when FDR was a member. I think we should emulate them in talking about policies, not politicians, and following the most beautiful motto I’ve ever heard:
In essentials, unity. In non-essentials, liberty. In all things, charity.
Excellent analysis. Other than the US Civil War and residual neoconfederate "populist" resentment, the left-vs-right narrative is pretty exhausted and mostly meaningless in the real world. The left-vs-right narrative is manipulated by the media/tech oligarch elites and PMC (professional-managerial class) to maintain control over the working class via "controlled opposition" type politics. And of course the PMC is trying to destroy "productive" small family businesses, their employees' jobs, etc., as Joel Kotkin's data shows:
https://joelkotkin.com/the-coming-of-neo-feudalism/
Keep up the good work.
Aside from the vast oversimplification of the urban/rural/suburban divide, the "11 Nations" concept is crucial to understand the deeper divisions and political subcultures in the USA.
https://medium.com/s/balkanized-america/the-11-nations-of-america-as-told-by-dna-f283d4c58483
(all DNA matters)