Responsible populism
From Banyan Project
Responsible populism is a political ethic grounded in the economic and life interests of the broad public and in people's inborn conscience and power. It respects the Banyan public and presumes that their intellectual and ethical abilities are no less than those of the rural Populists whose movement came so close to transforming the U.S. economy and politics in the late 19th century.
Responsible populism is We the People. It is the grounding for what Frances Moore Lappé calls thick democracy. In an era when our democracy has been stretched dangerously thin and antidemocratic forces like transnational corporations so often overpower the people, responsible populism needs a voice. In responsible populism, the needs of the people and their communities come before the needs of capital and its corporations -- markets matter a lot, but people matter more. Pursuit of responsible populism is not a revolution, just a much-needed a rebalancing of capital and people, of the individual and the community, of the educated elite and everybody else, in pursuit of common ground.
Politicians and institutions that engage in responsible populism, like Banyan, serve the broad public and engage its best instincts. They welcome the broad public into the political discourse and respect their voices. This is a populism quite distinct from the progressivism of the elites who run the institutions that often ignore or exploit the Banyan public, but Responsible populism may ally itself with these progressive forces on many issues. Responsible populism has no room for demagogic populists of the right and left who, through inflammation of fears and appeals to base instincts, get people to put their consciences aside and delegate their consciences and inborn power to the demagogue. These demagogues have given populism an undeserved bad name -- and are on the rise again as they strive to rally the Tea Party and Patriot movements.
The Banyan Project aspires to be both a seedbed for and creator of original journalism grounded in responsible populism. In the national and foreign coverage Banyan envisions, for example, business will be covered from the people up rather than the institutions down; transnational corporations will be covered as the life-affecting world powers that they are, not merely as stories of interest to investors. The focus will be their dealings with national governments, their role in political campaigns, and their impact on regular people around the globe, positive as well as negative.
And Banyan envisions a Monday-Friday editorial page commenting on issues from a responsible populist viewpoint, in consonance with an editorial platform with deep intellectual grounding.
Some History
Populism reached its apogee in the U.S. in the closing years of the 19th Century, and never has the percentage of voting adults been greater. Michael Schudson, in The Good Citizen, says that among populists politics was a social activity -- they came together to talk politics and decide on action, and they voted as an organized bloc. The U.S. was largely rural and agrarian then, and despite their lack of elite educations the rural people of the Midwest organized a movement with significant intellectual and ethical grounding that engaged millions in trying to radically change the nation's economic and political systems. They came amazingly close to succeeding, and their all-but-forgotten story is wonderfully told by Lawrence Goodwyn in The Populist Moment.
There are also unfortunate sides to the populist era -- racism was it's undoing, and despite the great organized power of the people themselves, demagogues used their charisma to manipulate populists for their own purposes. But the best of the Populist Era was one of the great chapters of American history. The Banyan Project hopes to be part of reintroducing the best of populism into the 21st century discourse both locally and nationally.
