Lessons for Left Populism: Organizing Revolt in Babylon

• In Event: Politics Under Captivity and Tragedy

Abstract

Can people on the Left create a “we” that would challenge the status quo political, economic, and social institutions in a way that does not replicate the racism and nativism exhibited by right leaning populist movements such as the Tea Party in the U.S. and Le Pen’s National Front? The example of the original Rainbow Coalition suggests the answer to this question is yes.

Fred Hampton, chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party (ILBPP) spearheaded the founding of the original Rainbow Coalition to fight the corruption and brutality of the Daley Democratic machine. ILBPP used grassroots organizing to forge an anti-racist, anti-class coalition “at a time when racial conflict in the city had reached new heights” and it “crossed both racial and class lines and even included marginalized groups and gangs that had little or no political consciousness” (Williams 2013, 13). The coalition—ILBPP, Rising Up Angry, the Young Lords, and the Young Patriots—was a loose but supportive confederation that agreed to give each other space and independence while simultaneously banding together in protest against the Daley regime.

Using textual analysis of The Black Panther newspaper, Fred Hampton’s speeches, and the court-ordered sealed Chicago Police Department Red Squad files at the Chicago History Museum, I argue that Fred Hampton’s original Rainbow Coalition provides a useful case study to provide a few correctives to the scholarship on populism. First, contrary to what Müller (2017) argues, the Rainbow Coalition shows that populism can be pluralistic. Second, while the example largely exemplifies Rogers Smith’s (2003) tripartite theory of political peoplehood as being an interlocked story of political, economic, and ethically constitutive peoplehood, the Rainbow Coalition also shows how a moderate story of peoplehood can simultaneously embrace and use a common enemy to mobilize this ethically constitutive story of peoplehood (something that Smith does not build into his theory). Third, the Rainbow Coalition also challenges the aesthetic turn in populism as seeing populism only through the lens of the aesthetics leaves out features that are crucial to whether a populist movement will succeed or fail. The Illinois Black Panther Party’s survival programs—breakfast for children program and free medical clinics—provided a clear material demonstration of their commitment to the people, which was crucially important in recruiting partner organizations. While aesthetics might be crucially important to definitions of populism, other factors determine how much success such movements encounter.

In the first section of this article, I show how the Rainbow coalition fit the criteria of populism. Rather than create yet another definition of populism, I turn to Rogers Brubaker for a way out of populism’s definition morass. Brubaker (2017) sees turning to the “well-established discursive and stylistic turn in the study of populism” as a necessary way to defend populism from the charge that it is so amorphous as to mean nothing (6). Using Brubaker’s distinction, I argue that the Rainbow coalition adopted this stylistic repertoire. In the second section of the paper I turn to the most contentious question regarding populism—is it possible to form a moderate “us” without oppressing a “them.” The most theoretically rich account of peoplehood has been provided by the scholarship of Rogers Smith (1999, 2003, 2015). Smith has faulted theorizing on the left for not recognizing the theoretical and practical importance of advocating for the construction of a strong “us” or what he calls “community building narratives” or simply “stories of peoplehood.” The Rainbow Coalition’s tactics both support Smith’s contention of the importance of constructing this community-building narrative, but also suggest that Smith’s theory of peoplehood misses something important in not connecting this to a common enemy or “them.” In the third section, I argue that while I follow Brubaker’s turn to aesthetics to ground a coherent description of populism, there is a concomitant danger. Viewing populism as a discursive style risks removing what might be the most important features of a particular form of populism from view simply because these features make the analytic category too messy. In the case of the Rainbow Coalition, it would be impossible to understand it without bringing into view how the fledgling coalition institutionalized its actions to demonstrate tangible improvements that could serve as models for sympathetic potential members.

Author

• Michael J. Illuzzi, Lesley University