Populism

From TPM Cafe's Book Club discussion of David Sirota's The Uprising, this is from a helpful post by Jefferson Smith on the intersection between populism and progressivism:

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Populism and Progressivism: Sirota aptly defines populism as politics that have popular support but get short shrift from elites. For purposes here, I'll define progressivism as forward-eyed championing of the public interest through common action (with a healthy recognition of the marginal utility of wealth—that is, a dollar for someone without is worth more than another person's millionth dollar). We can quibble on definitions; hopefully these'll work for now.

My hypothesis here—lacking sufficient data to call it a full-blown theory—and a theme for my posts this week, is that a new progressive era will arrive when populism and progressivism meet. (Whether to call this "crossing the streams" ala Ghostbusters or "the perfect storm" a la Clooney I haven't decided yet.) I read yesterday's comments suggesting that those twain shan't meet. But my own sense is that they can, perhaps must, and even have.

Some History of Populists and Progressives: At the end of the 1800's, a battle between the populists and progressives waged. The populists grew from working farm communities and "tended to hate Wall Street and bank interests." "Progressivism was a movement of the college-educated urban middle class, which valued expertise and efficiency and favored government regulation and foreign affairs." For people who like names: Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson were progressives; William Jennings Bryan (earlier) and Huey Long (later) were populists.

Historical precedent: My own historical interpretation is that the Progressive Movement (~1900-1917) can be defined as an era where populism and progressivism merged—particularly around economic fairness, such as progressive taxation, trust-busting regulation (Sherman Act), and the estate tax. Progressive movements became popular movements; Women's Suffrage failed, failed, failed, then swept the nation. The anger of the working farmer and factory worker met the legal tinkering of Learned Hand. The voice for much of this became the sickly-patrician-turned-robust-rabble-rouser Teddy Roosevelt, who included environmentalism in this platform of popular progressivism.

Current government: My critique of the system now is not merely that elites aren't sufficiently paying attention to the will of the people, but that too many elites aren't paying sufficient attention to the best interests of the people either. Our current government is neither progressive nor populist. Not only are our betters not of the people, nor are they for the people. Either might be better. Both might be necessary.

This seems right to me. A weakness of many interest/issue groups and think tanks on the left and center is that they're all progressivism and no populism. The resurgence of a positive populism could be a helpful corrective.

Michael Kazin and Julian Zelizer, argue in today's WaPo that "the party faithful agree on the basic outlines of a new social contract" for a post-industrial society:

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The new agenda focuses on protecting middle-class families from the insecurities of the global economy. In their primary campaigns, both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton advocated proposals to help citizens whose economic welfare has been threatened by the rising costs of health care and education, the slide in the housing and stock markets, the challenges of retirement, and global warming.

Obama speaks of strengthening families by putting "the rungs back on that ladder to the middle class," giving "every family the chance that so many of our parents and grandparents had." He calls for a tax credit to offset the Social Security tax and expanding the earned-income tax credit and the Family and Medical Leave Act. Obama also favors two big programs that no Democrat before him could realize: a national health plan that would cut costs and cover every citizen; and a sizable tuition grant to college students who sign up for national service.

The emphasis on protecting middle-class families reflects a major historical shift. During the 1930s and '40s, liberals struggled to create a vibrant middle class out of the industrial wage-earners who had immigrated to the United States and rural people of all races who lacked electricity and jobs. New Deal programs focused on workingmen and depressed regions. The National Labor Relations Act legitimized unions and boosted the purchasing power of the working class. The Rural Electrification Administration and the Tennessee Valley Authority enabled Southern communities to participate fully in the modern manufacturing economy. Social Security gave support to the elderly, lessening the burden on their children. The GI Bill gave a generation the ability to purchase a home and get a college education.

In the 1960s, Democrats turned to expanding the middle class. John F. Kennedy and LBJ sought to increase the number of Americans who could enjoy the economic and social benefits of a booming economy. The rights revolution made it possible for African Americans, Latinos and women from all backgrounds to compete for most of the same jobs as white men. Medicare and Medicaid provided new health benefits for the elderly and the poor.

Now, Democrats are grappling with insecurities faced by entire families, that institution conservatives always claim to represent. The past three decades have produced growing economic inequality and a shrinking middle class. Younger Americans no longer expect to enjoy as good a life as their parents did. Wage-earners fear for the future of their jobs and incomes. No family is secure.

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Kazin, a historian at Georgetown, wrote a great history of the language of populism, The Populist Persuasion, back in the 1990s. His nuanced conclusion in that book is worth revisiting:

.... [Populism's] assertion of resentments based on class and status may be a barrier to constructing a new type of universalism—what the eco-anarchist Murray Bookchin calls "the ability to voice broadly human concerns." .... Yet the desire to transcend populism is also shortsighted. It ignores the very persistence of the language, rooted in the gap between American ideals and those institutions and authorities whose performance betrays them. That continuity occurs for a good reason. At the core of the populist tradition is an insight of great democratic and moral significance. No major problem can be seriously addressed, much less nudged on a path toward solution, unless what an antebellum politician called the "productive and burden-bearing classes"—Americans of all races who work for a living, knit neighborhoods together, and cherish what the nation is supposed to stand for—participate in the task ....

To move any closer toward redistributing wealth and revitalizing mass democracy, intellectuals have to take part in social movements that knit such people together. Without silencing the spirited voices of gender and racial community that emerged from the 1960s, we have to help chisel away the hardened self-righteousness that has grown up around such identities. Otherwise we risk spending the future as spectators to the endless competition between spindoctors and copywriters, captives to anyone who seems to make the old rhetoric sing again, if only for one acceptance speech or third-second spot. Such passivity is a cultural disease, and some form of populism is needed to cure it.

When a new breed of inclusive grassroots movements does arise, intellectuals should contribute their time, their money, and their passion for justice. They should work to stress the harmonious, hopeful, and pragmatic aspects of populist language and to disparage the meaner ones—without forgetting that evangelical zeal cannot be expunged from our culture. Like the American dream itself, populism lives too deeply in the fears and expectations of American citizens to be trivialized or replaced. We should not speak solely within its terms, but, without it, we are lost.

The difference between "character" and "issue" populism raised by Shawn's recent post was on display this weekend in North Carolina.

In the run-up to the May 6th presidential primary, Sen. Hillary Clinton aggressively has voiced such populist positions as providing health care for all Americans, providing benefits to veterans, revising trade agreements, cracking down on China and standing up to oil companies.

Ironically, despite having the "right" populist positions on key issues, Clinton has failed to convince many Tar Heels that she actually means what she says. As The Charlotte Observer wrote in a recent editorial:

Her [Clinton] tendency to tell voters what they want to hear is disturbing. Her proposal to suspend the federal tax on gasoline this summer is campaign gimmickry, not leadership. Her assertion that she was a critic of NAFTA from the beginning is simply unbelievable. The record shows she was an ardent advocate of the trade deal.

Additionally, it is interesting to contrast the populist positions taken by Clinton, and to a lesser extent Sen. Barack Obama, with those of former candidate Sen. John Edwards, who ran an explicitly populist campaign.

Although much of the current political rhetoric seems lifted entirely from the Edwards' playbook, the reception has been quite different.
National elites often portrayed Edwards as an inauthentic man, but people who heard him speak in person often came away impressed by his character. Yet when Clinton and Obama say the same thing as Edwards, neither of them is criticized in the same way that Edwards was.

Perhaps that is because, when push comes to show, opinion leaders know that neither candidate is ultimately going to rock the boat and make good on the populist issues being raised late in the campaign.

Howard Metzenbaum who served almost 20 years as US Senator from Ohio, died Wednesday at the age of 90. It's fitting that another populist, Sherrod Brown, now holds Metzenbaum's Senate seat. Here's part of what Brown had to say after hearing of Metzenbaum's death:

Last night, a great son of Ohio, Senator Howard Metzenbaum, passed away. Personally inspirational to so many, Senator Metzenbaum fought tirelessly – and passionately – on behalf of working families in Ohio and across the nation.

Never afraid to challenge his Senate colleagues, he fought for people who had less privilege. And he always fought for opportunity for people of all races and both genders.

He courageously battled for workers’ rights – including his landmark plant-closing legislation requiring a 60-day notice to workers – who, too often saw their jobs and pensions disappear.

In light of the FDR mentions in recent posts, I'd be remiss if I failed to mention that today is the 75th anniversary of FDR's first Presidential inauguration. In her blog, Katherine Vanden Heuvel reflects on the anniversary and the continued relevance of what FDR said on this day in 1933:

Here are a few words, from that first Inaugural Address, I'd like to hear 2008 variations on this evening: "The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths, The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit....This Nation asks for action, and action now...Our greatest primary task is to put people to work..."

E.J. Dionne has a nice TNR piece on how both Clinton and Obama are sounding more and more like the late Sen. Paul Wellstone, and why that's a good thing:

If you want to talk about candidates borrowing from each other, consider how much Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are taking on loan from the late Sen. Paul Wellstone, the affable populist killed in a plane crash shortly before the 2002 election.

"I don't represent the big oil companies. I don't represent the big pharmaceutical companies," Wellstone said in the final television ad of his last campaign. "I don't represent the Enrons of this world. But you know what? They already have great representation in Washington. It's the rest of the people that need it. I represent the people of Minnesota."

And here's Hillary Clinton in a television ad run during the Wisconsin primary campaign: "The oil companies, the drug companies have had seven years of a president who stands up for them. It's time we had a president who stands up for all of you."

As for Obama, he noted in Ohio this week that "year after year, politicians in Washington sign trade agreements that are riddled with perks for big corporations but have absolutely no protections for American workers. It's bad for our economy; it's bad for our country."

Wellstone called for a trade policy that "doesn't just work for the multinationals, but also works for the environment, for safe food, for living wages; a trade policy that promotes democracy and the right to organize and bargain collectively."

No, this is not a column about "plagiarism." On the contrary, it's good news that both Clinton and Obama are echoing one of their party's most effective practitioners of egalitarian, grass-roots politics. As the Democratic presidential primary campaign enters its climactic stage, both candidates are focusing like a laser on white blue-collar voters. The language of choice is populist.

This is salutary for Democrats. Middle- and lower-middle-income white voters will be among the most important target groups for both parties this fall, crucial in such swing states as Ohio, Wisconsin and Iowa. The economic interests of blue-collar whites largely coincide with those of African-Americans and Latinos, yet these groups often move in different directions. When they vote together, they can make their candidates invincible. By competing fiercely for blue-collar ballots now, Obama and Clinton are beginning a coalition-building process that Democrats typically embark on too late.

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Dionne's column reminded me of another Wellstone quote, from his 2001 Conscience of a Liberal (this title, also used recently by Paul Krugman, comes from Barry Goldwater's 1963 restatement of conservativism, Conscience of a Conservative), in which he talked about "a forgotten American majority."

It is precisely this America that our politics today fails to serve fully and fairly. This America faces major challenges: low wages, insufficient health care, nonexistent pension coverage, daunting child care expenses, and exorbitant housing costs. These Americans can't hire lobbyists. They can't fly senators and congressmen to resorts. They don't fill the campaign coffers of political candidates. Only when these Americans are given a proportional voice in politics can we claim to live in a truly representative democracy.

This is "big-tent", majoritarian populism, a populism that ties the interests of the many into a single argument for progressive change. Let's hope we hear more of it this election season.

Club for Growth, the enforcers of far-right economics orthodoxy, on Mike Huckabee:

Over the past ten months, it has become abundantly clear which path Governor Huckabee has chosen, and it looks more like the path of John Edwards than it does a limited-government, economic conservative. Huckabee himself admits that he is a "different kind of Republican," a code word for more government involvement, less personal freedom, and greater dependence on government bureaucrats. Huckabee is proud of his tax hikes, his spending increases, and his regulatory expansions as governor, and he has not indicated that he would govern any differently as President. Nominating Mike Huckabee for president or vice-president, would constitute an abject rejection of the free-market, limited-government, economic conservatism that has been the unifying theme of the Republican Party for decades.

I wish. If Huckabee were that good, I'd be sending him money (although I may start just to help the conservative crack-up along). Snatches of populist rhetoric aside, when it comes to Huckabee's stated positions on issues, it's hard to find any evidence, other than a mention of supporting "fair trade," that he would do populist things if elected to office.

EJ Dionne reports from Iowa on how populist themes are shaping the race:

.... in the closing days of a very tight race, Edwards has his opponents, particularly Barack Obama, scrambling to make sure a trial lawyer from North Carolina does not corner the market on populism.

Obama is vying with Edwards for the non-Clinton vote, and the Illinois senator was on the air Sunday with an Edwards-like television ad assailing the flow of American jobs abroad. Obama spoke last week of "Maytag workers who labored all their lives only to see their jobs shipped overseas; who now compete with their teenagers for $7-an-hour jobs at Wal-Mart." He had heard from seniors "who were betrayed by CEOs who dumped their pensions while pocketing bonuses, and from those who still can't afford their prescriptions because Congress refused to negotiate with the drug companies for the cheapest available price."

Even Hillary Clinton, whose discourse is typically longer on policy details than egalitarian wrath, told an appreciative crowd in Story City last week that the "interests of working middle-class families" had been "subordinated to the interests of the wealthy and well-connected" and that the Bush administration acted on the mortgage crisis "only after Wall Street began to feel the credit crunch." She promised to "end the student loan industry's scams, which have ripped off families," and condemned "no-bid contracts," "cronyism" and "corruption."

Since the Reagan era, the heroes of the nation's economic story have been valiant entrepreneurs who "took risks" and "created wealth." This narrative advanced the Republican cause and seeped deeply into the Democratic Party. If Iowa is any indication, there is a new narrative in which the old heroes are cast as the goats of the story and the new heroes are people like "the guy in Orange City." There is a thunder out of Iowa, and it is shaking both parties.

John Edwards has gotten even more populist (and more interesting in my book) in recent weeks. In addition to a Newsweek cover story, Mother Jones has a great piece on Edwards' populism:

Campaigning in Iowa, John Edwards spends a great deal of time talking about the extremely poor. He talks about veterans who live under bridges and parents who choose between food for their kids and heat in their homes. Eradicating poverty, he says, "is the cause of my life." But, a voter can ask, has it always been so? Or has he only become an anti-poverty crusader as a presidential candidate? Sincere or not—and he sure seems sincere—is his help-the-poor message the best way to connect with Iowa Democrats? In fact, Edwards' campaign events in Iowa, heavy with union workers and members of the middle class, contain few people without a roof over their heads or food on the table.

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And then there's Edwards' palpable dislike for corporations. "There are very powerful forces, well-financed forces, standing between you and the future your children should have," the candidate proclaimed at a campaign event in Des Moines. "That's what this election is about. Unless and until you have a president of the United States who's willing to stand up with some backbone and some guts and fight and stand up to these corporate interests," there will never be real change.

The Des Moines Register, in its recent endorsement of Hillary Clinton, said that it found Edwards' "harsh anti-corporate rhetoric" distasteful. Getting things done would be difficult for such a one-sided crusader, it implied. I asked Edwards about this before a rally in Cedar Rapids. "I just have a fundamental disagreement with the Register," he replied. "I respect their views; they're just very different from mine. I think most Americans see that corporate power and corporate greed are keeping the American dream from getting to their children. We have a fight on our hands."

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This is an interesting and somewhat definitional debate—one that has often bubbled within Democratic circles: How confrontational should Democrats be with corporate power? But in Iowa the fight is being waged on a campaign trail where other factors are at play. Nevertheless, Edwards' message is rather clear and stark. There's no misunderstanding it. Caucus night will show how many Democrats in Iowa are concerned about the poor, angry about corporations, and yearning to have Edwards be their fighter in Washington.

New America's Michael Lind argues in the FT that the center is shifting (back) to the left:

Whether a Democrat or a Republican is inaugurated in January 2009, the centre of political gravity in the US is well to the left of where it was a decade ago. President George W. Bush's own contribution to the shift has been negligible. It is the result of long-term, tectonic shifts in political and economic ideology that are affecting all developed countries.

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It was during this period, in the 1980s and 1990s, that many of the parties of the left, trying to move towards the centre, adopted moderate economic conservatism, now called neoliberalism. "Clintonomics" resembled Rockefeller Republicanism more than New Deal liberalism. President Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, then the UK prime minister, collaborated on a project they called "the third way" - a term that had once been used for the welfare-state liberalism that was now redefined as the extreme left position.

That era has come to an end. The two great trends now are the collapse of libertarianism as a political force and the rise of economic populism.

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What formerly was the left - welfare-state liberalism - is once again the -centre. To its left (in economic, not social, terms) is protectionist -populism; to its right, neoliberalism.

This comes as a disorienting shock to Clinton-Blair third-way neoliberals. Having positioned themselves as the reasonable mean between the welfare-state left and the economic libertarian right, they have awakened to find that they are now the extreme right. The clever ones are inching their way, ever more carefully, towards today's new centre.

You can hear the change in what prominent would-be centrists are saying. In the 1990s, when neoliberalism was the centre, the line was: we must slash middle-class entitlements in order to be more competitive in the global free market. Now the line is: in order to save free-market globalism from populists preying on middle-class economic anxieties, we must expand the middle-class welfare state.

The winners - at least for now - are welfare state liberals such as oldfashioned New Dealers in the US and their equivalents in other countries. The position of the original "third way" of 1932-68 always made sense. Middle-class social insurance programmes, by guaranteeing economic security, reduce the appeal of populism, socialism and other kinds of -radical statism, and make possible broad political support for open and competitive national and global markets. You will hear much more of this line as politicians rush to occupy the new centre in the years ahead.

E.J. Dionne's recent piece on the implications of the Australian election stressed leader Kevin Rudd's moderation and framing of the election as a debate between the old and the new by emphasizing issues like global warming, education, and broadband technology. All of which is true, but even more important was Rudd's focus on workers' rights, an issue too often derided by conservatives and neo-liberals as old-school despite economic shifts that increase its relevance. As David Ritter explains in a great piece in the Prospect (UK): "Labor was elected because it opposed the government’s industrial relations laws through a prism of debate that avoided divisive cultural politics and reframed a class-based division as a question of national identity." Here's more:

.... Rudd's Labor party managed to move the struggle over national identity away from cultural concerns and reframe it in economic terms—specifically workers’ rights. Equality was married to fraternity in a single phrase that came to dominate the campaign: "Australian working families." Facing a government that had presided over high growth and employment, Labor retook the political heights of Australian nationalism through an emphasis on rights at work.

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The turning point came in 2005. Taking advantage of an electoral triumph the previous year in which his coalition gained control over both houses of parliament, Howard introduced the euphemistically named WorkChoices industrial relations legislation, which abolished the previous system of part-centralised fixing of wages and working conditions, while destroying collective bargaining and seeking to entrench individual contracting with few guarantees. The reforms were never popular. Although the flourishing economy softened the immediate impact on workers, deep-seated fears arose among parts of the electorate about what would happen when things were less rosy.

WorkChoices created a divide in the electoral alliance that had brought Howard to power. Those workers who had supported Howard because of antagonism towards Keating’s preoccupation with cultural politics were faced with a government that had legislated against their economic interests. Howard’s team attempted to refocus the debate on "cultural values." At last weekend's election, the Liberals continued to hope right up to the last minute that Australian workers might vote against their own economic interests. Crucially, Rudd refused to fight on cultural grounds, having warned even before he became opposition leader that it was "critical that social democrats recognise that the culture war is not just a diversion," but "a fraud." The gift of WorkChoices was that it gave the opposition a clear point of differentiation from the government that was not only consistent with historic Labor values, but was of broad-ranging appeal. Ironically, it was now Howard who was seen to be preoccupied with elite concerns.

WorkChoices drove blue-collar voters back to Labor for economic reasons, despite the fact that the country as a whole continued to prosper. The contest came down to two different visions of Australian national identity, framed around workplace issues. The government’s vision was an Australia of the individual, bereft of collective support. On the other hand, Labor’s opposition to WorkChoices represented an explicitly socially democratic view of society, in which the government has a role in moderating the labour market. Labor was elected because it opposed the government’s industrial relations laws through a prism of debate that avoided divisive cultural politics and reframed a class-based division as a question of national identity. The unpopularity of WorkChoices allowed Kevin Rudd’s Labor to make the better case that it spoke for the nation.

Over at the Budget Blog, OMB Watch's Matt Lewis has a great summary of Matthew Nisbet's new report. So if, following Pierre Bayard's advice to talk about things you haven't read, you're not going to read the report (which you absolutely should), but you still want to talk about it, you can read Lewis's post.

Lewis concludes:

Well, what works? Apparently a message about "responsible economic planning" that goes like this:

The nation is relying too heavily on low-wage service sector jobs from national companies without insisting that they pay workers good wages and benefits… Creating prosperity tomorrow requires responsible planning today. Too many companies and decision-makers focus on short-term profits and short-term thinking to the detriment of our workforce. And when we allow one part of the workforce to weaken and struggle, it weighs down the economy for us all, resulting in a lower standard of living. Our nation needs to change its short-term thinking and start building good-paying jobs with benefits, and a strong economy for the long term. With better planning we can repair the nation's economic engine and create a future with a strong economy and good-paying jobs for our workers.

Not a bad vision, isn't it? An "economic planning" message could come with a comprehensive and bold agenda. Just because it sounds a little more moderate, more individualistic, doesn't mean it has to be part of a Third Way-ish policy proposal.

Lewis is absolutely right about how the responsibile economic planning framework fits well with a bold agenda. One of the elements of the frame that distinguishes it from the more Third Way-ish stuff is that it talks about the economy as something we directly and positively affect through policy—for example, "good jobs" are something we "build" together"—rather than as some "force of nature" or a set of "free markets" that are somehow distinct from government. This in my view makes it a progressive (in the original John Dewey and Jane Addams sense of progressivism) and even populist framework (in the modern Wellstonian sense), rather than a neo-liberal one.

Above and beyond the question of how to grow the economy there is a legitimate concern about how to grow the quality of our lives.

Paul Wellstone

It was five years ago today that a plane crash in northern Minnesota took the lives of Paul and Sheila Wellstone, their daughter Marcia, and campaign aides Tom Lapic, Mary McEvoy, and Will McLaughlin. I was in law school in Minneapolis when Paul first ran for the Senate and remember taping a Wellstone lawn sign on the side of my '81 Celica during the last few weeks of the campaign.

To remember Paul and Sheila, you can visit the Paul and Sheila Wellstone Online Archive, and read the original Conscience of a Liberal, a book he once called his "best 5:00 AM to 6:00 AM writing effort."

Wellstone took many brave votes in his years in the Senate, but two in particular, both made in years when he was up for reelection, are worth noting: he was one of only 21 Senators to vote against final passage of the 1996 welfare reform law, and he was one of only 24 Senators to vote against the 2002 Iraq War resolution (in fact, he was one of only 11 Senators to vote against both the 1991 and 2002 Iraq War resolutions).

Ezra Klein—who like me, is a fan of the populist rhetoric of John Edwards—notes this troubling discrepancy:

... when the Bankruptcy Bill—which Edwards voted for—came up in 2001, then-Senator Paul Wellstone offered an amendment to "create an exemption for certain debtors that can demonstrate to the satisfaction of the court that the reason for the filing was a result of debts incurred through medical expenses." In other words, to prevent medical bankruptcies. The amendment failed, 65-34. Edwards was one of the 65 voting against it (as was Biden—Clinton and Dodd both voted for, and Obama wasn't yet in the Senate). In doing, he broke with just about every liberal in the Senate. At times, votes like this can be out-of-context, as Senators kill good liberal amendments to get an important progressive bill to the floor. But the Bankruptcy Bill was hardly that. It's a hard vote to explain. But I'd still like to hear what the Edwards camp has to say.

Policy-wise, Edwards is certainly in a better place now on the need for bankruptcy reform, than he was in 2001. But 2001 wasn't all that long ago, and voting both against an amendment like this one and for the bill itself doesn't provide much reassurance of the sincerity of Edwards' populism.

In his piece taking les inclusionists to task for our argument that the broader concept of social inclusion would be a more useful frame for a progressive economic agenda to improve living standard for those in the bottom (eightieth to tenth, depending on one's focus) of the income distribution, CAPs John Halpin notes "the thousands of years of moral meaning" associated with poverty.

One of the arguments that I've made in response is that the terms "poverty" and "the poor" have been defined over the last 40 years or so in a way that is actually quite inconsistent with those thousands of years of moral meaning, and that the anti-poverty goal proposed by CAP (which relies on the official US poverty measure, instead of an inequality-based measure that would be more consistent with those thousands of years of moral meaning) reinforces that misdefinition.

When I made this argument, I didn't lay out much of the historical evidence for my position that before the last 40 years or so the poor have tended to be a majority or near majority of the population. Let's review some of that evidence.

In 1939, some two-thirds of the U.S. population was poor.

Going further back, in 16th Century England, "'the poor' coincided with the idea of 'common people'", as Columbia's Steven Marcus (in the 1978 book Doing Good: The Limits of Benevolence) makes clear:

... in late medieval England almost everyone was thought "poor" who had to work, who did not command income sufficient to keep him in leisure, or who did not belong to the landed classes. Hence the term "poor" tended to coincide with the idea of "common people." ... It follows that the majority of freeborn Englishmen were also members of "the poor," ....

And, going back even further, according to Doug Massey, in his important new book Categorically Unequal: The American Stratification System:

The typical member of a pre-industrial agrarian society [roughly 8000 B.C. to around 1800 A.D.] was an illiterate peasant whose access to resources was the same as that of most of the rest of the population.

If we want to recapture what Halpin calls the "moral meaning associated with poverty", we're going to need new concepts that cast a wider net than our current understanding of poverty does, an understanding that essentially portrays the poor as an exception and a special interest group to be pitied, rather than part and parcel of the "common people" who deserve a fairer share of the wealth they create.