ABSTRACT
By addressing the Rainbow Coalition as a loose confederation of white, black, and Latino groups united to fight the corruption and brutality of Chicago Mayor Daley’s Democratic machine, this chapter explores whether political actors on the Left could mount a pluralistic and moderate populist challenge to the status quo political, economic, and social institutions. The example of the original Rainbow Coalition provides a few correctives to the scholarship on populism, demonstrating first that populism can be pluralistic. Second, while the example largely exemplifies Rogers Smith’s interlocked story of political, economic, and ethically constitutive peoplehood, the Rainbow Coalition also shows how a moderate story of peoplehood can simultaneously embrace and use a common enemy to mobilize an ethically constitutive identification story. Third, the Rainbow Coalition also challenges the aesthetic turn in populism.
