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POPULISM WITHOUT XENOPHOBIA? Peter Beinart has a smart column this week on the downsides of Democratic populism:
For writers like [Thomas] Frank, the tragedy of that era was that the free-trading, Wall Street-friendly Bill Clinton did not use economic populism to permanently lure these angry white males into the Democratic fold. Now Democrats have another chance. But renouncing future naftas won't be enough. Many liberals would like to pick and choose their anti-globalization politics--arguing for more regulation of international trade and investment, but resisting punitive measures to regulate the flow of international labor. Morally, that's perfectly defensible. But, politically, it is likely to fail. There is a reason that the late nineteenth-century populists Frank admires were nativists: While low-skilled immigration may benefit the United States as a whole, it rarely benefits low-skilled Americans. And, for many blue-collar Americans today, Mexican immigration--whether legal or not--is not just linked to broader anxieties about globalization; it has become the prime symbol of those anxieties. In the coming years, unless Democrats take a hard line on immigration, their hard line on trade is unlikely to do them much electoral good.Squaring this circle really does strike me as hard. A century ago, populism had anti-Semitic and anti-intellectual overtones. In a strange inversion, the current strain focuses on the weaker element (illegal immigrants) rather than (assumedly) more powerful elite forces. Doesn't mean such sentiments are easier to overcome, though. The best bet would be focusing on the corporations that hire illegal workers and create the demand, not the workers themselves. Among the truly pernicious effects of illegal immigration is the ability of corporations to use these unprotected and unknown laborers to evade labor regulations entirely, dropping the floor far below the minimum wage, and making it definitionally impossible for any American to compete. Attacking that practice may go some of the way towards focusing that anger on a more deserving target. On the other hand, it may not. Labor, which has done a remarkable job integrating unionized Hispanics into their coalition when, somewhat recently, the movement was still antagonistic toward immigrants, may prove able to show some leadership here also.
--Ezra Klein