In Praise of Populism

One of the most useful electronic sources of information on Ukraine is “The Ukrainian Letter” at http://www.ArtUkraine.com, which is essentially a compendium of English language publications on Ukraine. This time it offered its readers the March 13 statement of US Assistant Secretary of State Beth Jones before the House of Representatives International Relations Committee’s Subcommittee on Europe. As head of the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs at the State Department, her statement on US relations with Europe puts American policy toward Ukraine within the overall context of US policy, and here it is clear that Ukraine is simply not a high priority. Russia’s “graduation” from the restrictions of the Jackson-Vannik Amendment (interesting word — does it mean that measure intended to punish Brezhnev’s Soviet Union over Jewish emigration was a school that the pupil has now finished?) is a priority, but nothing about this was mentioned for Ukraine. The already hoary phrases about “continuing to engage a new generation of leaders committed to a democratic Ukraine with a market economy” are almost meaningless. No amount of outside disappointment with what has not happened in Ukraine can justify replacing serious analysis with what looks like a retreat to the late Abbie Hoffman’s call of “don’t trust anybody over thirty” and can produce no more lasting results than did his Yippie movement of the 1970s. Politics is governed not by generations but by the forces within a given society that can make things happen, let things to happen, or keep things from happening. In other words, it is about the structures of power and influence in society and not about how old is the guy sitting in the director’s chair.

What Ukraine really needs, I would argue, is a healthy dose of populism. Of course, here most people use the word populism to mean what Americans call pie-in-the-sky and not in its proper meaning, the ideology of the People’s Party, which at the turn of the previous century became perhaps the most successful third party in American history. A sort of coalition of farmers and workers, Populists sought — ideas considered dangerously radical at the time — to help indebted farmers by means of inflation, to replicate their cooperative system on a national scale (it is often overlooked that the US has the most developed system of agricultural cooperatives the world); to lower transportation costs by nationalizing the railroads; to achieve a more equitable distribution of the costs of government by means of a graduated income tax; to institute direct popular elections of U.S. senators; and to inaugurate the 8-hour workday. In its broadest sense, populism meant bringing government closer to the people to defend the “little guy” from the “fat cats” (Ukrainians nowadays call them oligarchs) and “vested interests” that use their clout to strangle potential competition. Interestingly, although the party itself passed into oblivion in the early twentieth century, almost all its ideas in one way or another became the law of the land. And in this sense, Ukraine could use a healthy dose of populism not in terms of slogans but in terms of real progress in creating new structures capable of opposing the big ones inherited from the Soviet period, structures whose interests conflict with the steps needed to promote new business, especially small business, making the same rules apply to all the players, promoting independent farming against the Soviet feudal system, making the whole process more transparent and accessible to all, and thereby bringing the Ukrainian people closer to the realities of Western-style representative self-government. Explaining how one does that is not just waiting for those who are old and in the way to get out, but something far deeper and more thorough.