THE PROCESS OF POPULISTS. I don't know, Mark, I always got the feeling that 1974 represented the zenith of process-oriented, good-government liberalism. My read on 2006 is that we're seeing the opening salvos of a populist turn in the Democratic Party. This obviously isn't true straight across the board, but the Testers, Browns, Webbs, and even Lamonts of the world represent something distinct and resonant, more reminiscent of 1994's class of true believers than 1974's class of hard workers. My understanding is that the Campaign for America's Future and Stan Greenberg (he's everywhere, no?) have reams of polling data backing this up and ready for release on November 9th, but, alas, we'll have to wait till then for hard numbers. Even in their absence, I think various economic trends and forces (inequality, wage stagnation, union decline, death of the corporate welfare state, etc) render a resurgent populism an absolute inevitability in American politics and, fairly or not, I'd guess 2006 will be remembered as the start of that period on the left, while 2008 will see a variant of it emerge on the right. Oh, and welcome to Tapped!
--Ezra Klein
