Here comes neo-populism

Yesterday we talked here about the prospects for a third party, and the revival of American populism. There's a tremendously important op-ed in today's NYTimes that strongly suggests we are on the verge of a populist revival. Its author, Charles Morris, compares the current moment to 1870:

Before the Civil War, America was perhaps the most egalitarian society in the world. But the unbridled entrepreneurialism of the 1870's gave rise to the robber barons. Even if ordinary people were doing better in the 1870's, the yawning gap between the very rich and everybody else fanned resentments. Interestingly, wealth inequality in today's America is roughly the same as in the Gilded Age.

The sharply increased social and geographic mobility of the 1870's set people adrift from traditional sources of security in families and villages. In our own day, the destruction of employer-employee relationships, the erosion of pension protection and employee health insurance may be creating a similar loss of moorings.

If one counts only the size of houses and cars, and the numbers of electronic gadgets stuffed into rec rooms, Americans are probably better off than ever before. But as the 1870's suggest, economic well-being doesn't come just from piling up toys. An economy has psychological or, if you will, spiritual, dimensions. A conviction of fairness, a feeling of not being totally on one's own, a sense of reasonable stability and predictability are all essential components of good economic performance. When they were missing in the 1870's, in the midst of a boom, the populace was brought to the brink of revolt.

This is, of course, the main theme of "Crunchy Cons": how to live lives of spirit, virtue and community in an era of prosperity, mobility and fragmentation. The populist idea doesn't come up in the book, though it will in the new chapter I'm now preparing for the paperback. The difficulty in any populist movement, though, is how to encourage its best aspects -- promoting a renewed sense of the common good, over the interest of the few -- while keeping nativists and violent bigots out.