Walter Shapiro has a piece in The New Republic about a potential populist backlash. It’s fine as far as these things go. But this bit grates:
This time around, demagoguery does not have to be particularly creative in concocting economic villains, since Central Casting has obligingly provided a rogue’s gallery from the executive suites at Citigroup, AIG, Merrill Lynch and Bank of America. The kindling is there for a bonfire (or is it a bond fire?) of Wall Street’s vanities. All it takes is a match. As Bob Borosage, the co-director of the left-of-center Campaign for America’s Future, points out, “If the Roosevelt era is any parallel, you’ll get both a left-wing populism and a right-wing populism. It was not just Huey Long, it was also Father Coughlin. There is an anger out there that is populist and will take right-wing and left-wing forms. And politicians on each end of the political parties–aided by populist rabble-rousers–will start to stoke this anger and move it.”
It’s nice to see that Shapiro openly admits that Long was a left-winger — that’s a sign of progress. But Shapiro tries in other ways to suggest that Coughlin wasn’t identifiable as a left-wing figure. The Borosage quote makes it sound like Long came from the Left and Coughlin from the Right. But the truth is they basically came from the same place. Coughlin supported FDR from the populist Left. The Left defended Coughlin for as long as he defended Roosevelt. He then broke with FDR — from the left. And then the establishment left suddenly cared about his anti-Semitism. The fact that Coughlin was anti-Semitic didn’t make him a right-winger any more than Joe Kennedy’s anti-Semitism made him a right-winger (ditto, since we’re on the subject, Stalin’s anti-semitism or Hitler’s or Hugo Chavez’s). Anti-semitism isn’t inherently right-wing at all (nor is it inherently left-wing either, even though I think some kinds of anti-Semitism manifest themselves more on the left and other kinds on the right).
You can read this bit from my book on the subject of Coughlin. Or, you can read from the first page of the definitive book on Coughlin and Long — Voices of Protest — by frequent New Republic contributor Alan Brinkley. He writes of the two men:
their political movements were closely – in fact, inextricably – linked. Long and Coughlin drew from similar political traditions and espoused similar ideologies. And as time went on, their constituencies increasingly overlapped and merged. Politicians and journalists in the 1930s saw nothing inconsistent about discussing these two movements as part of a common phenomenon; they did so constantly. There is good reason to do so again.