I have argued the following on populism and governance:

A few weeks ago in my post What Obama Needs To Learn, I wrote:

[T]hat is FDR's lesson for Obama. Politics is not a battle for the middle. It is a battle for defining the terms of the political debate. It is a battle to be able to say what is the middle. . . . FDR governed as a liberal but politicked like a populist. When LBJ rightly and to his everlasting credit removed one of the Dem pillars of paranoia - racism, the GOP co-opted populist racism, added the Jeffersonian notion of government and institutional hatred, throw in a dash of paranoid Red scare, now terrorism scare, and you get political victories. The lesson of Hofstadter is to embrace liberal governance and understand populist politics. It may sound cynical, but you must get through the door to govern. Lincoln knew this. FDR knew this. Hofstadter knew this. I hope Obama can learn this.

A debate about populism has been ongoing among some very smart folks. Brad DeLong has been in the middle of it, in particular in debate with Paul Krugman:

. . . DeLong describes one of his disagreements with Krugman as follows:

Right now Paul Krugman and I seem to have two disagreements. . . . Second, while I am profoundly, profoundly disappointed and disgusted by the surrender of the reality-based wing of the Republican policy community to the gang of Republican political spivs who currently hold the levers of power, I do think that there is hope that they will come to their senses and that building pragmatic technocratic policy coalitions from the center outward will be possible and is our best chance.

Paul, I think, believes otherwise: The events of the past decade and a half have convinced him, I think, that people like me are hopelessly naive, and that the Democratic coalition is the only place where reality-based discourse is possible. Thus, in his view, the best road forward to (a) make the Democratic coalition politically dominant through aggressive populism, and then (b) to argue for pragmatic reality-based technocratic rather than idealistic fantasy-based ideological policies within the Democratic coalition.

He may well be right.

It is not clear to me that the idea that the Republican Party may return to its senses is incompatible with the political prescription Krugman advances. Indeed, as I described earlier, the political prescription Krugman advances is, in my view, FDR liberalism, both as to policy and politics.

I have previously argued that Richard Hofstadter has provided us a roadmap for the political psyche of our nation. With this insight, like Digby, I argue for a politics of contrast that not only highlights what Dems are about, but also highlights what Republicans are about. This view has placed me in conflict with the Lakoffian view of outreach to conservatives, as I advocate an agressive negative branding of conservatism and Republicanism - to wit, to an attempt to redefine the political middle.

Democrats are reclaiming their common man populist brand. But governance, as Stirling points out, can not be pure populism. Because "populism desires, even demands, that actions taken be consonant with the emotional logic of the public at large." But that does not lead to the right policies. The values of populism we must embrace but not necessarily the kneejerk policy prescription that populism, in its emotional logic, leads to. Populism identifies the goals, not the prescriptions.

I point to FDR's political use of populism coupled with his pragmatic problem solving approach to reaching the goals and values of populism without the kneejerk embrace of its emotional logic:

[O]ne overlooked insight of Hofstadter that is highlighted and yet curiously devalued by Professor Wilentz. To me it holds one of the central principles of a triumphant liberalism, one that even today's conservatives can not challenge:

The Age of Reform's greatest achievement, often overlooked, is in its reappraisal of the New Deal, reviving and reinforcing the more positive passages in The American Political Tradition. Whereas most historians (and many New Dealers) saw Roosevelt's reforms as a continuation of Populism and Progressivism, Hofstadter affirmed the New Deal as a sharp break with the past. The old sentimental, quixotic, and self-deluding forays against capitalism gave way to Keynesian policy and the provision of social welfare. Nineteenth-century individualism and anti-monopolism fell before a fuller appreciation of the inevitable size and scope of American business. Cities and urban life, including the party political machines, which had been the bane of Jeffersonian liberalism, became an accepted, even vaunted element in the New Deal coalition. Under FDR, in short, American liberalism came of age.

Following the long-term abandonment, at least philosophically, of New Deal liberalism by both major political parties, Hofstadter's account of the New Deal's spirit repays a new look--not as an exercise in nostalgia but in order to help recover and refurbish a suppressed but still essential American political tradition. . . . Hofstadter called the New Deal's "chaos of experimentation" as a sign of vibrancy, not weakness . . . For that, apart from everything else, Hofstadter's book retains some of its old luster--and has even acquired a new urgency.

Wilentz is both incisive and dull in this passage. Incisive in recognizing the sharp break that the New Deal represented and dull in misunderstanding that while the ideals of the progressive movements that predated The New Deal nourished it, the fundamental rethinking of the role of government, particularly the federal government was, in many ways, revolutionary. . . .

How did FDR do it and can Democrats defend FDR liberalism today? Maybe not by calling it FDR liberalism but they surely can and do when they have the courage of their convictions. The most prominent of these instances was the fight to save Social Security Faced with Media hostility, Republican demagogy and flat out lies, Democrats rallied to the FDR liberalism banner and crushed the Republican attempts to roll back the clock. FDR would have been proud of Democrats in that fight. No triangulation. Good old fashioned political populism won the day.

Yglesias views populism as a bargaining chip. This is completely wrong. Populism is the political device by which Democrats proclaim their values, their brand. It can not be the basis of the mechanics of policymaking - rather it tells us what we are, what we believe in and what we want. Hardheaded pragmatism and fact based analysis then lead us to the policies that best forward those values. Max Sawicky invests populism with an intellectual vigor that it does not possess in my view. I think they are both wrong and that FDR got it right. I think Stirling gets it right too.