Ambition in America: Political Power and the Collapse of Citizenship

3. The Ambition of Popular Control

3 TheAmbitionofPopularControl Jacksonian Democracy and American Populism The thing to remember about the historic connection between nineteenthcentury populism and modern politics is that populism can be understood asanattempttocreatepopulardemocracy,anattempttoenrichthepopular democratic input into the American system of governance. —Lawrence Goodwyn, Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America We still rest our faith on some kind of populism, an inner sense of the rightness of individual choice over scientific knowledge and community self-control over even a benevolent management by the state. Politics, by which we mean our right to run government, not simply to comment on it, is still our only protection against tyranny. —Barry Karl, The Uneasy State: The United States from 1915 to 1945 Jacksonian democracy and the Populism that ended at the national political level with William Jennings Bryan’s candidacy for U.S. president mark two periods in American political history that exposed a growing divergence between the oligarchic political forms of association established under the Constitution and the plebiscitary ambitions of mass populations. As American political power became increasingly consolidated and centralized under the Constitution, Jacksonian democrats believed the values that defined their way of life were under attack. And after the Civil War, when the railroads and corporate trusts turned public policy to private ends, the Populist movement revived the belief that people collectively controlling their destiny was the rightful inheritance of the common person, rather than the province of an economic elite. In their own ways, the Jacksonians and the Populists each 61 62 Ambition in America saw plebiscitary political ambitions thwarted by the growth and expansion of industrial capitalism—and fought against the idea that the people needed someone to command them, someone to bow down to, someone to relieve them of the burdens and responsibilities of democratic government. While dissatisfactions with the inequities of the status quo provide ample fuel for the Jacksonians’ and Populists’ democratic aspirations, channeling those into lasting political change requires changing the incentives for people ambitious for political power. But formerly marginalized and powerless groups of citizens cannot be moved into positions of equal or, at a minimum, approximate political standing without reconfiguring the incentives and disincentives for seeking political power. The democratic reforms sought by the Jacksonians and the Populists, to the extent they shared a common approach, depended on people not only having an ambition for a life better than the one they currently have but also institutionally curtailing the ambitions of currently powerful elites to dominate the less powerful by suppressing or co-opting popular aspirations . Jacksonian Democrats and Populists both argued for democratic norms and practices that could restore values of equality (mostly meant as equality of opportunity) and individual self-worth. In this respect, the Jacksonians and the Populists shared a plebiscitary ambition that sought to challenge the ambitions and commitments of political leaders being shaped by industrial capitalism. Fighting against Two Sets of Rules for Two Different Kinds of People Part of the origin of plebiscitary ambitions for democratic reform is the desire to reassert common principles of democratic justice. People need to believe that the country follows ideals shared by all, that there are not two sets of rules: one for the rich and well connected and a second for the rest of us. What drives people to live virtuous lives, politically, is the sense that following common rules and a shared commitment to equality of political power will produce a feeling of mutual responsibility among citizens. But if citizens regard the language of shared responsibility as a facade disguising the unapologetic pursuit of wealth and opportunity of the few at the expense of the many, then the language of democracy will appear as little more than window dressing for oligarchy or plutocracy. One of the enduring tensions of democratic politics is that in every human formation beyond the lowest levels, the few command and the many The Ambition of Popular Control 63 obey. That a numerical minority rules most citizens in democratic societies is nothing new, but the conditions under which most citizens accept being ruled by a numerical minority mark the difference between republican democracy and tyranny. Gaetano Mosca remarked that though the formation and consolidation of an elite ruling class is inescapable in advanced societies, because of the expanding economic opportunities in America, democratic ambitions had taken on a mythic quality. For him, “In the United States, where the colonizing of new lands continued through the...