The Populist Persuasion: An American History.

Populism, in Michael Kazin's analysis, is not a movement or a program but a way of speaking, an appeal to "the people"--the generality of decent, working citizens--against variously defined "elites." Kazin has a special reason for this focus: in contemporary politics, Kazin prescribes populism as a rhetoric and a sympathy more than a doctrine. A left-liberal, Kazin admires populism's broadly democratic character, but he worries about its tendency to be cavalier about individual rights. As Kazin is at pains to point out, populist theory speaks to civic universals and communalities; in practice, the more specific a populist idea of "the people," the more others it rules out--elites. of course, but not infrequently, immigrants, minority races, or women--so that populism wavers between vagueness and exclusivity. But Kazin is at least as troubled by the inability or unwillingness of the American Left to speak to or for popular majorities, and he wants it to relearn populism's respect for ordinary citizens and their dignities.

A historian at American University, Kazin does an admirable job of tracing the transformations of the populist "persuasion," ending with its recent "capture" by the Right. Earlier populism--especially the People's party of the 1890s--was identified with the Left, concerned to limit economic inequality, committed to the rights of workers as producers, and inclined to regard political society as a moral community, to be judged by essentially religious standards. Fearful of centralization, it still saw government as potentially the people's ally, more easily controlled than economic power.

When the People's party was absorbed by the Democrats in 1896--a "failure" by some standards, but one that reshaped American party politics--populist rhetoric, in Kazin's account, became associated with labor populism in the AFL, more narrowly economic and inclined to steer clear of religion, and with the Prohibition movement, which preserved populism's religiosity but gradually moved away from its broader agenda toward a single-issue politics. The economic and spiritual were briefly reunited in the early days of Father Coughlin's Social Justice movement, and the CIO (Kazin's personal favorite, I think) carried labor populism to its greatest triumphs. But labor's successes made the unions into establishments allied to the state, while Catholic populism was apt to drift into the anticommunism of the cold-war Right, with its appeal to the majority against left-leaning intellectuals and bureaucrats.

For Kazin, the McCarthy era was a crucial turning point. It inspired a distrust of majorities among intellectuals, visible in Richard Hofstadter's influential critique of populism, encouraging the idea that a healthy democracy is a competition between elites. Reacting against that view, the New Left despised antipopulist liberals--thinkers like Hofstadter, Daniel Bell, and Seymour Martin Lipset were anathema--and it hoped to activate and empower the people. But as Kazin shows, New Left doctrine came to include both a sweeping attack on American institutions and a radically individualistic rejection of the decencies that locked the movement into intellectual enclaves, the only places where it could credibly claim to speak for "the people."

In Kazin's drama, George Wallace is a kind of tragic hero. A voice for the neglected middle and working class who favored a prolabor, active government, Wallace was trapped by the racial politics that made him a national figure. And while he returned to the Democratic party and eventually--and movingly--repented his complicity with racism, it was Wallace, Kazin argues, who taught the Right to speak in populist terms, invoking "normal Americans" against the cultural elite.

Kazin is careful to indicate, however, that conservative populism, so dependent on the rise of the "religious right," comes down to a verbal appeal to "family values" that is almost invariably subordinated to the individualism and relativism of the market. That conservatism has pulled off this farrago is due, in part, to Reagan's charm and Gingrich's energy, but more to liberalism's default. Left-intellectuality has always had its elitist strain, one reflected in the Progressive insistence that majorities need guidance from social scientists and expert administrators, or in any of the more avant claims to constitute a "vanguard." But as Kazin notes, those doctrines presumed that intellectual elites spoke as the servants or champions of "the people." By contrast, the contemporary liberal Left has become wedded to cultural and theoretical relativism and associated with an "identity politics" designed to protect favored constituencies against majorities. Bill Clinton has a populist side, but no gift for drawing political battle lines, and the populist impulse is increasingly expressed in a distrust of all parties and institutions that is a smoldering threat to constitutional democracy.

For all its virtues, Kazin's book only lightly touches the fundamental problem of which populism is a symptom. The United States was framed as a large-scale, complicated, and commercial republic with laws to match, a regime that most people have always found at least a little mysterious and overwhelming. The distinction between "the people" and "the elite" is inherent in the thing, bridged only by institutions, including the parties, that let us feel represented.

Periodically, those institutions get out of whack, inspiring some more-or-less populist movement to set things right. But where earlier populists believed, as Kazin observes, that they could build such movements from the grassroots, our politics has come to demand money, technology, and centralized organization. Unlike the old People's Party, Ross Perot's movement was leader-centered and top-down; as Perot often said, the people "can't do it for themselves." And that fact pushes more and more Americans toward the edge of fury.

Kazin is desperately right in urging the liberal Left to break out of its neo-Nietzschean discounting of "universal identities" and to rediscover public speech and the principle of equality. The "populism" of the Right ignores our mounting economic inequality in favor of old hatreds and new resentments, threatening what remains of civic community: the ultimate logic of its Babel was reflected, unmistakably, in Oklahoma City. We need to do better, and soon.

WILSON CAREY McWILLIAMS teaches political science at Rugers University.

DENNIS O'BRIEN, president emeritus of the University of Rochester, is the author of God and the New Haven Railway (Beacon).