Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (Flickr: Tom LeGro, NewsHour)

The populist hero was born on a small farm not far from the Canadian border. As a boy, he scraped together money by raising chickens and managing a grocery store. He then worked his way through an unprestigious law school, and enlisted in the Marines to fight for his country.

My doctrine, the young Republican senator liked to say, “is Americanism with its sleeves rolled up.” Given his background, he said he identified with “real people” from rural areas and small towns “who are the heart and soul and soil of America.” He vowed to defend them against “the bright young men who are born with silver spoons in their mouth” who were “selling this nation out.”

The senator regularly presented himself as a man of strong faith. “Today,” he declared in 1950, “we are engaged in a final, all-out battle between Communistic atheism and Christianity…the chips are down – they are truly down.” His name was Joseph R. McCarthy.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Populism in America is nearly as old as the republic itself. Since President Andrew Jackson’s epic battle to shut down the “money power” symbolized by the Second Bank of the United States in 1833, politicians and citizen-activists have voiced their outrage about the “elites” who ignored, corrupted or betrayed the common people.

Right-wing populists typically drum up resentments based on differences of religion and cultural style. Their progressive counterparts focus on economic grievances. But the common language is promiscuous — useful to anyone who asserts that virtue resides in ordinary people and has the skills and platform to bring their would-be superiors down to earth

During the half-century since McCarthy’s remarkable rise and ignominious fall, his fellow conservatives have rarely stopped singing from the same populist hymnal.

“I had the privilege of living most of my life in my small town,” beamed Sarah Palin in her bravura speech to accept the GOP vice presidential nomination Wednesday night. It was, she explained, the kind of place inhabited by the people “who do some of the hardest work in America…who grow our food, run our factories, and fight our wars.” She defiantly contrasted her plain-folks view of the world to that of “the permanent political establishment” and “the Washington elite.”

Joseph McCarthy (Library of Congress)

It may be the same old song, but cultural populism has helped Republicans win many an election and has consistently put their opponents on the defensive. Richard M. Nixon championed the values of “Middle America;” Ronald Reagan damned a tax policy that took “from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned,” and George W. Bush mocked “liberal elites” for being soft on terrorism and warm towards gay marriage.

Conservatism would never have become a large and influential movement without such language; and liberals have yet to find a way to counter it. Why?

The answer has much to do with the anxieties of a racially divided consumer culture and the absence of a social movement grounded in the workplace. After World War II, most Americans, for the first time in U.S. history, considered themselves “middle class.”

But that homogeneous identity obscured big differences between a minority of “cosmopolitan” Americans — who could afford a four-year college, who lived in cities with large non-white populations, who had a professional job — and those who were not. The bitter conflicts of the 1960s and 1970s added in resentments over sexuality, religious faith and affirmative action.

President Andrew Jackson

Meanwhile, the labor movement that had done so much to build support for liberal Democrats, from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Lyndon B. Johnson, gradually lost both its numbers and its aggressive, populist spirit. Blue-collar workers had once flocked to unions and voted for politicians who bashed their opponents as “economic royalists.”

But by the 1970s, a rigorous labor movement that had helped lift incomes and gain job security for millions of wage-earners seemed to be resting on its laurels. Fast-growing unions of government workers were the exception — but as unruly public “servants,” they were unable to brighten the image of labor. With the stagflation of the Ford and Carter years, corporations were able to brand unions a fetter on productivity and growth. New movements that focused on race and gender gained the headlines and the attention of prominent liberals.

As a result, no one on the left seemed able to speak to ordinary white men and women who earned a decent income. but resented their diminished status in society.

Contrary to nostalgic mythology, Americans have never been a united people free of rancorous divisions. As Kevin Phillips once wrote, accurately if cynically, “knowing who hates who” and acting accordingly has usually been the key to electoral success.

With a dynamic labor movement behind them, liberals had been able to exploit antipathy against wealthy employers and the Republicans they bankrolled. But when conservatives began attacking liberals as an elite that was unpatriotic, condescending, ungodly and licentious, they had no rebuttal to offer.

This election will, in part, be a test of whether right-wing populism still works. Sen. Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee, will try to use the rise in foreclosures and joblessness to stir up anger at Republican policies, from which Sen. John McCain, the GOP nominee and the owner of multiple luxury dwellings, may not be able to separate himself.

McCain clearly hopes to refresh the conservative mantra of tax-eating bureaucrats and effete liberals — a charge that Palin’s small-town origins and tough demeanor may help drive home.

Conservatives have dominated the battle over populist rhetoric so long that even Americans who mistrust it bring up “elitism” and the “common-sense values” of “ordinary people” — as if they were objective realities instead of partisan talking points.

If liberals hope to win the White House again, they could think about engaging with gusto in the battle to define these terms. For better or worse, populism lives too deeply in America’s fears and expectations to be trivialized or replaced. Without it, both sides in the nation’s long-running political conflict are lost.

Michael Kazin is an American history professor at Georgetown University. He is the author of “The Populist Persuasion: An American History” and, most recently, of “A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan.”

Photo Credit: Nebraskastudies.org

The established forces in his conservative party fear and denounce him. They cringe whenever he attacks Wall Street, vows to use government to help the poor or castigates the failed policies of the incumbent president of his own party. A devout Christian, he mixes Scripture into nearly every speech he gives. But the insurgent candidate’s homespun wit and eloquence disarms his critics and have gained him many admirers.

This describes the presidential campaign Mike Huckabee has run in 2008 – and the one William Jennings Bryan ran in 1896. That was the year “The Great Commoner” delivered his famous “Cross of Gold Speech” — a stirring attack on plutocrats and corporations — and was the Democratic nominee for president, only to lose to William McKinley. who outspent him by a margin of 10-to-1. Indeed, Bryan was an evangelical populist who emerged from near-obscurity as a former congressman from Nebraska to become a serious contender for the White House. So it’s not surprising that some journalists have taken to calling the erstwhile governor of Arkansas, “William Jennings Huckabee.”

However, the differences between the two men are significant — and reveal how radically the fault-lines of religion and politics changed over the last century. In Bryan’s heyday, most Americans were evangelical Protestants, and split their votes about evenly between the two major parties. But now they are about a quarter of the population, and have been the GOP’s most reliable constituency since Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980. Huckabee, whatever his rhetoric of the moment, is a loyal member of that right-wing flock.

The former Baptist preacher, like Reagan, does have a knack for coining one-liners that Bryan, the most popular orator of his time, would have admired. “In many ways,” Huckabee mused recently, “I’m like a lot of people in the United States: I’m a guy over 50 looking for a job.” But the policies he advocates have almost nothing in common with those of the Great Commoner.

Bryan helped initiate the progressive income tax; Huckabee wants to abolish it in favor of a national sales tax that would fall most heavily on the working and middle class. Bryan tried to expand federal power to aid working people; Huckabee opposes universal health care “mandated by federal edict.” Bryan was the first major-party nominee to receive the official backing of organized labor; most unions shun Huckabee, who governed a right-to-work state where Wal-Mart has its headquarters. Bryan hated war and resigned as secretary of state in 1915, when he thought President Woodrow Wilson was leading the U.S. into the hell of World War I; Huckabee strenuously supports the war in Iraq.

How to apply one’s faith to public life has always been a controversial matter. In 1896, Bryan’s Republican opponents lambasted him for using the Crucifixion as a metaphor for his monetary policy. But neither in that campaign, nor during his two other races for president (1900 and 1908), did he ever, like Huckabee, advertise himself as “a Christian leader,” give sermons in churches or call for amending the Constitution to fit “God’s standards.”

For Bryan, who idolized Thomas Jefferson, the separation between church and state was absolute. As an exponent of the Social Gospel, he used the Bible to justify aid to the poor and scorn for the rich – not to install his faith into law. What’s more, he needed the votes of Catholics and Jews, and so avoided taking positions that would alienate them.

Only during the 1925 Scopes Trial – his last public act, long after he’d run for office – did Bryan make a religious question a political priority. He helped prosecute a high-school instructor in Tennessee who had broken a state law that forbid teaching the theory of evolution. Scopes was found guilty and paid a small fine. But Bryan’s image as a dogmatic foe of science damaged his reputation among non-fundamentalists from then until now.

Still, Bryan’s political legacy dwarfs whatever significance Huckabee is likely to achieve.

The Democrats nominated Bryan for president three times because they endorsed his progressive populist stands on the issues. His religion was not a factor. Though he never won the presidency, he transformed his party. Before the 1896 campaign, the Democrats were a bastion of merchants and bankers who cringed at corporate regulation and viewed labor unions as a threat to their profits. Bryan paved the way for Wilson’s New Freedom and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s’s New Deal. He may have been the most successful loser in American political history.

But Huckabee, as the results of the first contests in the 2008 race demonstrated, is popular mainly among his fellow conservative evangelicals – and has struggled even to win a majority of their votes. His affable style and sympathy for those bruised by the economy can’t conceal the fact that he represents just one slice of a GOP coalition that is in danger of breaking into its various parts – economic libertarians, security hawks and conservative Christians. These days, most evangelicals care more about a moral politics of the body than the Social Gospel — perhaps one reason why Huckabee favors amendments to ban gay marriage and outlaw abortion. But such opinions make millions of Americans uneasy, and could actually help prevent him from being the GOP’s standard-bearer this fall.

So, sorry, Mike Huckabee, you’re no William Jennings Bryan.

Michael Kazin, a history professor at Georgetown University, is the author of “A Godly Hero: the Life of William Jennings Bryan.” His other books include “The Populist Persuasion: An American History.”