People, No

Entertaining tour through a 140 year history of “populism” and the panics that its few surges in power have instigated. The prairie populists of the end of the 19th-century represented a new class-based political movement in the United States that has been largely forgotten. Frank gives an effective and concise overview of their history as a political movement (including their foibles, most notably being investing too much into William Jennings Bryan the man, as well as emphasizing the Free Silver movement as the end-all be-all) but more importantly, presents a survey of the absurdly frenzied panic that the movement promoted from those who represented the interests of capital.

Frank offers the term “Democracy Scare” (stemming from “red scares”) as a way of understanding the panics that emerged first in the 1890s, then the 1930s, then, 1960s, and finally again in the 2010s. The elites, coalescing around their preferred politicians, organizations, academic posts, magazines, and news outlets, Frank demonstrates, have consistently managed to present an all-encompassing response to the ebbs and flows of populist movements by painting their leaders and ideas as retrograde, insane, idiotic, and doomed to fail. Frank provides an excellent overview of the emergence of anti-populism as an academic movement among professors and researchers of political science, history, and sociology in the 1950s. The ideas and attitudes formed then have since been absorbed into the liberal worldview, centered around a belief in “meritocracy”, code for rule by elites over the ignorant masses of peons.

Frank's work is frustrating and hilarious, but ultimately hopeful, offering those sympathetic to the aims of American history's various populist movements some refreshing context, and a welcome reminder of one's own sanity in the face of repeated admonishment from the elite establishment who wishes to suppress the ideas hostile to capital at any cost.