As a democratic movement and philosophy, populism has three elements.

As a democratic movement and philosophy, populism has three elements. It is a movement building popular power to break up unjust concentrations of wealth and power. It is a culture-making movement, sustaining and advancing values of community, liberty, and equality. And it is a civic learning movement, developing people’s civic identities, imaginations, and skills. The freedom movement had strong populist aspects, in ways that are neglected.

Thus, SCLC sponsored citizenship schools across the South, directed by Dorothy Cotton, in which people learned skills of community organizing. Andrew Young once called these “the invisible foundation of the whole movement.” The silence about populism’s meaning indicates a larger crisis. Populism highlights the feelings of pervasive powerlessness that today feed the disengagement of citizens from public life and isolation from each other.

Powerlessness generates hopelessness and the substitution of personal solutions for public approaches. Powerlessness, with its cynicism and fatalism, is a problem behind the problems of our age. Feelings of powerlessness are widespread not only on “the Arab street” but also in suburbs, inner cities, and the University of Michigan.

Redressing powerlessness is essential to meet other challenges facing humanity, from global warming and sectarian warfare to growing divisions between rich and poor, from pandemics like AIDS to erosion of communities.

Populism’s focus on culture-change and culture-making -- wedding popular power with egalitarian communal values and civic development -- makes it the alternative to the political projects that shape the world: state-centered democracy, on the one hand, and market-oriented politics -- the “Washington consensus” or “neo-liberalism” - on the other.[^3] It also highlights their core similarity: a deracinated view of the human person, whether “new man” or homo economicus.

[^4] Populism as a tradition and political philosophy can ground today’s civic ferment in the US. Putting populism and John Dewey in conversation illuminates this potential. John Dewey, a pivotal figure in educational reform and pragmatic scientific inquiry, is a foundational theorist for today’s civic engagement movement in higher education and elsewhere. Dewey sought to counteract trends that remove the human being from living communities. He had a decidedly populist bent.