Marx informed the liberal critique of populism. Marx admired capitalism because of its dynamism, its destruction of traditional ways of life, and the technical progress it made possible; but neither he nor his followers admired the heterogeneous class of small proprietors, shopkeepers, artisans, and farmers—a class happily destined to "disappear in the face of modern industry," according to the Communist Manifesto. In the Marxian scheme of things, many features of which liberals like Hofstadter retained long after they ceased to be Marxists in their politics, the lower middle class shared the capitalists's love of money without his daring. It clung to outworn folkways—conventional religiosity, hearth and home, the sentimental cult of motherhood—and obsolete modes of production. It looked back to a mythical golden age in the past. It resented social classes more highly placed but internalized their standards, lording it over the poor instead of joining them in a common struggle against oppression. It was haunted by the fear of slipping farther down the social scale and clutched the shreds of respectability that distinguished it from the class of manual workers. Fiercely committed to the work ethic, it believed that anyone who wanted a job could find one and that those who refused to work should starve. Lacking liberal culture, it fell easy prey to all sorts of nostrums and political fads—paper money, vague schemes for sharing the wealth, anarchism, utopian (as opposed to scientific) socialism. ^*

An essay by Victor Ferkiss, "Populist Influences on American Fascism" (1957), illustrated the liberal critique of petty-bourgeois populism in its crudest form. Ferkiss understood populism as a "generic" configuration embracing the People's party of the I890s and "such closely allied movements as the Greenback party, the Bryan free silver crusades, LaFollette Progressivism," the Non-Partisan League, distributism, and other expressions of "agrarian revolt against domination by Eastern financial and industrial interests." It represented the "American equiva-

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According to Lenin, the petty bourgeoisie "suffers constant oppression" under capitalism and "easily becomes revolutionary, but is incapable of displaying perseverance, ability to organize, discipline, and firmness." It is above all its resistance to revolutionary discipline that has made the lower middle class the despair of Marxists. Together with its stubborn refusal to disappear, this political unreliability makes the lower middle class a "historical problem," in the words of the historian Arno Mayer.

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