The Wizard of Oz and Herman Cain

Herman Cain announced last Saturday that he would drop out of the U.S. presidential election with a style reminiscent of the populists — politicians who were left-leaning economically, but very conservative socially, who occupied a large portion of the political spectrum in the United States. People like Huey Long of Louisiana (governor, senator and presidential candidate) and William Jennings Bryan (Democratic presidential candidate in 1896 and 1900 and secretary of state), or even the Nonpartisan League, which was a member of the Second International. If someone wants to know about their ideas, they need only read The Wizard of Oz.

The book is, according to many, a parable in defense of populism, with the Scarecrow (the farmer), the Tin Man (the industrial worker), the Cowardly Lion (Bryan), the silver shoes (the use of this metal as a reference, together with gold, to back the issuance of currency to increase the money supply, create inflation and reduce debts) and finally, Dorothy, a girl from Kansas — a state whose farmers were in debt up to their eyeballs to East Coast U.S. banks, represented by the Witch of the East.

Populism always gave rise to glorious phrases, perhaps none better than Bryan’s when he called for a bimetallic standard (gold and silver) to allow the issuance of more money: “You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” Yesterday Herman Cain carried on the same line of thinking. The speech in which he announced that he was leaving the election sounded like a call for class warfare, although that is the exact opposite of what Cain and his supporters want: “Now, when I made the decision to run, I didn’t fit the usual description of somebody that ought to be running for president.” Among the exceptional factors, according to Cain, “I had never held public office before,” and, “… I didn’t have a kajillion dollars” (although, Cain’s personal wealth is somewhere between 2 and 4.7 million euros, according to Cain himself, so he is not exactly poor). The ex-candidate cited as one success of his campaign, “We showed that you didn’t have to have a degree from Harvard in order to run for president.” And he never tired of repeating that, “…we, the people, still rule in this country.”

So the tea party is a legacy of that populism, which a century ago in another age of economic change was made up of leftists, centered in an impoverished middle class that defended a paternalistic state, with some elements that seem to border on fascism (Father Coughlin, a Catholic priest who gained tremendous popularity in the ‘30s, ended up very close to fascism, Nazism and anti-Semitism).

What is curious is that its successors, 100 years later, are economically ultra-conservative. Today the tea party, whose voters are in debt up to their eyeballs, whose salaries have gone down in real terms over the past three decades and who do not have enough jobs, ask for less intervention by the government. They do not know that the main component of spending in the U.S. is not unemployment but pensions, followed by defense and medical care for the elderly. I recall a photo that sums up the situation: a tea party supporter with a sign that says to the government, “Cut your salary, not mine.” It is possible that this woman was retired (and collected a pension) or was paying off a mortgage (and benefited from the tax exemption on interest payments).

The tea party, populism and also the Occupy Wall Street movement (the latter gloriously ignored by the U.S. media and subject to harsh political repression) are nothing but reactions to a society with little social mobility, in which there exists the perception of an economic elite who have stacked the deck in their own favor. They are unconnected movements, and in a country with no political parties at the national level and an enormous cultural diversity, they are at times contradictory. In the end, many of the populists were Protestant fundamentalists, though Coughlin was a Catholic from the Catholic state of Louisiana. And their support rises and falls like foam. In spite of all the attention it gets, the support for the tea party is going down, perhaps because the movement is being co-opted by religious conservatives — people like Herman Cain, who are still looking for their particular Land of Oz, 100 years later.