Challenges of the day framed in daunting language: The Democratic class of 2006, armed with "a distinct world view," tells the Fourth Estate it is determined "to deal with long-festering problems like access to affordable health care and the loss of manufacturing jobs, and to find a bipartisan consensus for an exit strategy in Iraq ... also, somehow, find a way to address the growing anxiety among voters about a global economy that no longer seems to work for them....
"In general, they set themselves an extraordinary ... task: to avoid the ideological wars that have so dominated Congress in recent years, to be pragmatists, and to change the tone in Washington after a sharply partisan campaign."
To reduce the complex to the comprehensible, the Democratic Big Picture solutions -- a minimum-wage uptick; college-tuition deductibility; renewal of a children's (only) health care program; trade-treaty revisions; an agonizing, drip-drip-drip Iraq withdrawal -- are dubbed as having "a strong populist tinge."
But is this really populism? Does the tinkering advanced by Democrats justify the monumental "populist" tag? Has the shibboleth of "populism" been so overused that its meaning has devolved into the meaningless?
Well, here's a strong opinion for you: I don't know. I'm not sure, although my less than laudatory attitude likely indicates my inclination. At any rate the questions' broader implications are deserving of a book-length, not column-length, examination. So that lets me off the hook.
To simply touch on these questions, however, brings to mind the excellent work of Michael Kazin in The Populist Persuasion. His analysis spans the history of populism in America (as its subtitle, An American History, would aptly suggest), from Jefferson's populist vision in building "the republic," to Jackson's efforts to save it, to Lincoln's fidelity to his plebeian roots, and so on and so on, right through to the 1990s, its era of publication.
Yet Kazin's history was principally a vehicle to examine contemporary conservatism's use of the populist tag and whether it succeeded in creating a new populist, political order. His answer was, in short, no. Conservatives, from the postwar to Clinton eras, mostly succeeded in defining only what they hated -- not what they wanted to change -- and populism is all about vigorously promoting the human condition.
Whether consciously or not, Newsweek's Jonathan Alter insightfully picks up on Kazin's theme for the modern era, writing that the "GOP's big tent [of neocons, nativists, libertarians and theocons] contained none of the hope and optimism essential to success in American politics."
Concludes Alter: "So the Conservative Era is over, a cautionary tale for Democrats who might be tempted to impose a liberal one."
But this begs a large question. If recent conservatism's ideologically framed, bold negativity was indeed some sort of transmogrified populism, can Democrats' new order of what might be called "timid pragmatism" also legitimately be classified as populism?
You may find this only a matter of semantic hairsplitting. I disagree. "Populism" holds a powerful punch in the lexicon of political appeals. Its use should be reserved for powerful ideas.