The Original Deplorables

The clear implication was that “the phrase ‘populism’ ” was something of value and that it was being hijacked by certain bad actors on the political stage. The name Donald Trump was not mentioned but it surely did come to mind.

The president went on to suggest that perhaps he should be considered a populist, saying his career in “public service,” his concern for “[kids] in America” and the poor were proof, concluding, “I suppose that makes me a populist.”

He then rambled on: “Somebody else who has never shown any regard for workers, has never fought on behalf of social justice issues or making sure that poor kids are getting a decent shot at life .  .  . they don’t suddenly become a populist because they say something controversial in order to win votes.

“That’s not the measure of populism. That’s nativism or xenophobia or worse. Or it’s just cynicism. So, I would just advise everybody to be careful about suddenly attributing to whoever pops up at a time of economic anxiety the label that they’re populists.”

The surprising thing here wasn’t the display of presidential spleen but the fact that he seemed to think it a desirable thing in politics to be called a populist. It wasn’t that long ago that for someone with Barack Obama’s faculty lounge pedigree, the word would conjure up images of blustering politicians wearing wrinkled shirts with half moons of sweat around the armpits, bellowing angry simplicities at crowds of rubes, rednecks, and racists. The kind of people, in short, you would expect to find clinging to their guns and their religion, to borrow one of the president’s more celebrated locutions.

And that, in fact, is largely the historical character of American populism. If there were a Mount Rushmore of populist heroes, the faces carved into the rock—all looking very angry—would be those of Andrew Jackson, William Jennings Bryan, Huey P. Long, and George Wallace.

Not the sort of fraternity that Barack Obama or just about any good, modern Democrat would want to belong to—and vice versa.

But this election year, the populist cause has been rehabilitated. One reads, for example, in the Wall Street Journal that in the 2016 campaign, “populism’s moment has arrived. After years of tough economic times, candidates are especially focused on ‘the little guy’—or at least the littler guy.”

And the Washington Post discovers a “wave of authoritarian populists whose support has swelled in many Western democracies.”

And NPR notices, “Populism is one of the most important forces in American politics today. Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump have both tapped into widespread frustrations against the elites and the establishment.”

And since inquiring minds want to know, the Economist asks: Is Donald Trump a populist?

You can’t read much about the campaign or the state of American politics without running across some mention—or even an elaborate discussion—of populism and its history and meaning. The history is knowable, but the meaning is a little trickier. Which accounts for why NPR can assign the description to both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, two candidates who would seem to have nothing in common other than bad haircuts. But perhaps this is because populism has historically been more an emotional cause—a crusade, even—than a coherent set of political positions. It has always tested high on passion, while struggling to articulate actual policies and programs. Its moments of maximum influence have occurred when times are hard for a slice of the population, while elites of one sort or another prosper and preen. It is fueled by resentment and a sense that the fix is in. The people at the top have too much power and too much money and didn’t come by it fairly. They are robber barons, perhaps. Or pointy-headed intellectuals. Or, currently, the “1 percent.” They lay up for themselves treasures on Wall Street while people on Main Street struggle and, in the case of the recent economic rout, lose their homes. They close the factories where Main Streeters work and move the jobs to Mexico while earning hefty commissions on the paperwork.

But this is getting ahead of the discussion. Though the president pretended not to know of it, there is a populist tradition. And an appreciation and understanding of American political history suggests we are living through one of those populist moments. It has been building for some time and may have a significant impact on this election and beyond. Or it could fizzle, as others have in the past.

For now, though, American populism seems a topic very much worth considering. The word should not, one thinks, be applied to just any old third-party or renegade seeker of office simply because he calls himself a populist. It doesn’t advance our understanding to argue that, say, Ralph Nader is some kind of populist, even if he put together the semblance of a party by that name and, in 2004, ran for president under its banner in several states. For Nader, it was a flag of convenience. He was a spoiler, no doubt about that. (His contribution to the 2000 election and its disputed aftermath will make him forever one of the great spoilers of American politics.) But Nader could never make the necessary visceral connection with heartland voters boiling over with resentment at the elites out of the exclusive colleges running things to their own benefit. Those voters would more likely consider Nader one of the hated “them” than a leader who would take it to the foe in Washington.

Or what about George McGovern, who was sometimes called the Prairie Populist? It helped that he was, indeed, from the prairie, where the modern version of American populism established its roots. That was in the late 19th century when something called the Farmers’ Alliance was born of frustration over the high prices railroads charged farmers for moving crops and the low prices those crops then fetched. The name changed, and the Alliance became the People’s party. It was also known as the Populist party, and that name stuck around even after the party disappeared when the Democrats found a natural-born leader and orator to champion its causes.

With his “Cross of Gold” speech, William Jennings Bryan became the great mobilizing figure of populism and the presidential nominee of the Democratic party (in 1896, and again in 1900 and 1908). While he lost three presidential elections, his issues and causes survived and, in many cases, triumphed with the election of Woodrow Wilson. Populism in those days was a crusade of farmers and small merchants against the unholy forces of oppression—namely, the banks, the railroads, and hard money and tight credit, in the form of the gold standard. A populist crusader named Mary Lease supposedly rallied farmers to the cause by telling them they should “raise less corn and more hell.”

But if progressives like Theodore Roosevelt and Wilson did rein in the “malefactors of great wealth,” they would have vehemently rejected being called populist. The populist movement was too much a thing of the frontier and too anti-intellectual for them. They had nothing especially against elites, which is understandable, since they were nothing if not from the upper crust themselves. They were progressives who believed that the common man was not especially wise. But his condition could be made better by government run by .  .  . well, by them. It’s hard to imagine either Roosevelt or Wilson getting all sentimental about the virtues and native wisdom of the common folk, who were, after all, just farmers and merchants from forlorn places like South Dakota, where George McGovern came from and where he, no doubt, was exposed to the populist sensibility.

McGovern was certainly not inclined to regard big political men as great and wise leaders. Not when his rise to national prominence was fueled by his hatred of the war in Vietnam, which had been engineered by an elite from the best schools and presided over by the most domineering, forceful president since Teddy Roosevelt. If one looks for a case of the common people suffering at the expense of the elites, then this would be it, in purest form. The sons of the poor drafted in an undeclared war run by men whose own children went off to college to read books, smoke dope, and enjoy the advent of the sexual revolution.

But while McGovern’s visceral and honorable opposition to the war was unquestionably anti-elitist, there were gaps in his populist résumé. He lacked the pervasive sense of anger and the appetite for payback. He was, basically, a decent liberal of generally sunny disposition. He was missing the hate chromosome.

The legendary populists had this. For Huey P. Long, hate served as a kind of adrenaline, driving him to the excesses for which he was famous. He hated the rich, especially those made that way through inheritance. And he hated Standard Oil and all the big corporations who prospered, even through the Depression, while farmers and the working men endured and either lost hope or found some in Long’s “Share the Wealth” vision.

George McGovern would have been uncomfortable in Huey Long’s presence. And Long would have found McGovern’s campaign promise of a thousand-dollar grant to every taxpayer anemic and his personality boring.

And since he was fundamentally a decent and honorable man, George McGovern would have been repelled by the antisemitism that attached to the Share the Wealth program and its lead crusader, Gerald L. K. Smith.

This, in fact, is the great stain on populism, going back to the days of William Jennings Bryan and earlier. It may have been inevitable that the movement would be infected and cursed by the oldest of all the hatreds. The populists of the Midwest and prairie states in the last years of the nineteenth century were white Protestants, hostile to people who weren’t like them. And they believed that foremost among their enemies and oppressors were .  .  . the bankers. And we all know who runs the banks.

Some of the early populists went gladly down this ugly road. As, for instance, when E. Z. Ernst, a Kansas populist, made the case that “English capitalists” had somehow gained financial control over America, whose citizens were unaware they now had “Shylock’s rope about their necks in preparation for the final execution.”

This was pretty common fare in populist circles, which accounts for the popularity and influence of a tract called Seven Financial Conspiracies Which Have Enslaved the American People, first published in 1887. The author, Sarah Emery, employed a lot of crackpot numerology, conspiracy theorizing, and not-so-thinly veiled antisemitism (she, too, had a fondness for the name “Shylock”) to account for the woes that were catalysts of populism. The book may have sold as many as 400,000 copies.

There was antisemitism attached to the early populist movement, and racism as well. Bryan himself had given a speech in defense of the KKK at the 1924 Democratic convention.

But as progressivism prospered, populism declined and, with Long’s assassination, seemed a spent and marginal force. Without the kind of emotional—not to say “charismatic”—leaders that Long and Bryan had been, there was no populist movement. The movement depended on emotion more than reason and, thus, lost vitality and influence during the New Deal and the Second World War. Populism might depend on the passions of the common man and his resentment of elites, but it needed leaders and did not seem to breed them. They sprang up and seized on the anger of people who eventually fell in behind them. Both Bryan and Long blazed onto the political stage at relatively young ages, and both rose very quickly. But while they had many followers, there weren’t any understudies to take their places. And this was, according to enlightened thought, a good thing. The widespread prosperity following World War II also took the edge off the anger that had been populism’s rocket fuel. Times were good—or good enough—and people had money. Presumably, the bankers had been defeated along with the fascists.

By the fifties, populism had been reduced to material for academic study. It was a crucial element in Richard Hofstadter’s exceedingly influential take on American political history. Hofstadter won two Pulitzers, and his essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” never seems to go out of style. Perhaps because it explains that the dark night of fascism is always descending on America (though, as Tom Wolfe’s rejoinder had it, seems always to fall on Europe).

Hofstadter made the populists intellectually relevant by arguing that their antisemitism and conspiratorial view of the world had somehow made Joe McCarthy possible. He laid the foundation of this argument on what he called the “agrarian myth,” explaining, “The utopia of the Populists was in the past, not in the future. According to the agrarian myth, the health of the state was proportionate to the degree to which it was dominated by the agricultural class, and this assumption pointed to the superiority of an earlier age.”

So, “The agrarian myth encouraged farmers to believe that they were not themselves an organic part of the whole order of business enterprise and speculation that flourished in the city .  .  . but rather the innocent pastoral victims of a conspiracy hatched in the distance.” This “notion of an innocent and victimized populace colors the whole history of agrarian controversy, and indeed the whole history of the populistic mind.”

Suspicion of city boys morphed into hatred of them and the “paranoid style,” so you could draw a line from William Jennings Bryan and Sarah Emery straight to McCarthy and what intellectuals like Hofstadter and those who read and quoted him believed was a climate of fear.

The argument was exceedingly influential and would seem to have driven a stake through the heart of populism as a plausible political movement. What politician would want to run as leader of the nation’s paranoids? Populism was a term of opprobrium, and when it was attached to any living American political figure, he would most likely be from the South and a raging racist, the prototype of whom was Tom Watson of Georgia, who had been an early leader in the Farmers’ Alliance. In those days, he was something of a liberal on matters of race; he had even, in one of his campaigns, personally stood up to a mob intent on lynching a black man. He ran for president in the 1904 and 1908 elections, as candidate of the Populist party. But by then, he was an out-and-out white supremacist who would celebrate—in a newspaper he published—the lynching of a man named Leo Frank who “happened” to be a Jew.

He was also fiercely opposed to immigration. When he wrote, “We have become the world’s melting pot,” it was not to celebrate the fact. “The scum of creation has been dumped on us,” he continued. “Some of our principal cities are more foreign than American.”

There were other Southern politicians to whom the populist label was attached. Not all of them racists—at least not of the Watson temperament. George Wallace, after all, began his political odyssey as something of a moderate on race. And then there was the man who preceded him, Jim Folsom. “Big Jim” or “Kissing Jim,” as he was known by his followers in Alabama.

Folsom was a sort of big-hearted rube who knew how to touch all the right buttons with the common folk. Folsom was moderate enough on race that he had Harlem congressman Adam Clayton Powell over for a drink at the governor’s mansion in Montgomery. He was also against the poll tax and generally for the things a good populist should be. He drank like a fish and loved the ladies, which accounted for many of the “colorful” anecdotes about him. Like the one about how he was warned that his political enemies were trying to snare him in a scandal by getting him drunk and then sending a temptress to seduce him. “Boys,” Folsom is supposed to have replied, “let me tell you something. If you’re fishing for Big Jim with that kind of bait, you’re going to catch him every time.”

He was populism’s best face in those times but was too crude and corrupt to be taken seriously. He couldn’t supply much juice to the paranoid streak in American life that Hofstadter and other intellectuals and academics saw as the great American menace. Coming, of course, from the right.

But as populism was being marginalized by events and scholars, the conditions for its resurrection were germinating, and they would flower on both the left and right.

The landslide election of Lyndon Johnson seemed to have settled it. The right—paranoid and otherwise—had its chosen candidate in Barry Goldwater, and he had been humiliated. The only speck on an otherwise clear horizon for the left were the showings that George Wallace had made in a few primaries. But this could be written off as racism.

Four years later, Johnson was done. Wallace was again winning primaries, and Richard Nixon was putting together what he would come to call a “silent majority.” Populism was making a comeback, even if no notable politician was actually calling himself a populist.

In 1972, Wallace again rolled up impressive scores in primaries outside the South in a campaign fueled more by resentment of elites than by straight-up racism. He was the man to fight the common man’s battles. But his campaign ended when he was shot and crippled.

McGovern became the Democratic candidate. And when Time put him on the cover and called him “the Prairie Populist,” it was not meant as a putdown. He was crusading against the war, as William Jennings Bryan had against America’s entry into World War I. And he was the candidate of the common man, the foe of the powerful and unaccountable.

Nixon, whom none would ever call a populist, was politically crafty enough to realize that resentments are fine fuel for a campaign. He couldn’t plausibly run against Washington so he stood for that “silent majority” of his against the elites in the media, the arts, the academy, and similar enclaves. One of Nixon’s close advisers, Pat Buchanan, understood these resentments and how to play them. They were at the center of his political thinking and his world view, and he did not come by his understanding of this version of populist anger and his facility in playing on it by diligent study. It was in his blood.

With the economic dislocations of the 1970s—the OPEC oil shocks, the inflation, the recessions—the conditions for a new populist moment in America looked ripe. But it took a while to bear fruit. There was the Carter presidency, which came as reaction to Nixon and Watergate and left no lasting political imprint. Then there was Reagan, whose political grasp and wide appeal conquered all. He made populism irrelevant, much as Theodore Roosevelt had in his day. But the spirit was there, and it became flesh in 1992.

If there has ever been an ideal oppositional figure for a populist crusade, it would have to be George H. W. Bush. He was, as we have learned and begun to acknowledge, a good president and a good man. But he was to the manor born and not especially adroit with the common touch. He looked and talked like an American aristocrat, to the extent there is such a thing. Perhaps this is because he is one. But he came across as fussy. Even prissy. The kind of fellow who, as they said in Texas, “would step out of the shower to pee.” There was even talk of a “wimp factor,” which was especially absurd. He was flying torpedo planes in the Pacific when he wasn’t old enough to vote and had to be pulled from the sea on one occasion when his Avenger was shot down.

Still, he was a perfect foil for two candidates running campaigns that were routinely described as “populist.” One of them credibly; the other not. More noise was made, and attention garnered, by the less plausible populist. That would be H. Ross Perot.

The main objective of Perot’s campaign was, plainly, to deny Bush a second term. And the motive for this was part ambition and part pure bile. Perot had a very high opinion of his own abilities. He’d made a fortune after all, and there wasn’t anything anyone could teach him or anything he needed to learn. He also seems to have hated Bush for reasons that were never made clear.

Perot was talked of and written about as an “outsider,” and he made this the crux of his campaign. The people in Washington were all connected and motivated by self-interest. It would take an “outsider” like him to fix things. That was the extent of his appeal to the spirit of populism. Still, he was treated as such by many in the media.

Perot got 19 percent of the vote. The most of any third-party candidate since Theodore Roosevelt’s 27 percent running on the Bull Moose ticket in 1912. He may, or may not, have cost Bush reelection, just as Roosevelt torpedoed Taft.

But it was another candidate who was the true populist running that year. He didn’t get the votes or the degree of attention that went Perot’s way, but unlike Perot, he didn’t drift slowly from the political arena, leaving no footprints.

Pat Buchanan also ran against Bush that year. But not in the general election. He challenged Bush in the Republican primaries and not from personal pique or vanity (well, maybe a little) but from pure conviction. He was the populist alternative to the establishment. The blue-collar challenger to the Brooks Brothers set. He had worked to exploit the cultural fault line between elites and the common people when he was with Nixon. He had worked for Reagan. He had written books and newspaper columns arguing for a Republican party that understood and exploited the divide, a party that would secure the loyalty of the working-class Reagan Democrats.

This was not happening, and wouldn’t happen, with Bush in the White House and mainstream figures like Bob Dole and Bob Michel in the party’s congressional leadership. Buchanan didn’t come up with the line about how Bob Dole served as the “tax collector for the welfare state.” That was Newt Gingrich. But Buchanan would certainly have agreed with it.

He put a scare into Bush in New Hampshire and exposed the incumbent’s vulnerability, which Bill Clinton and Perot would go on to exploit in the general election. But Buchanan remained a loyal Republican and was given the opportunity to make a prime-time speech at the convention that renominated Bush. It became known as the “culture war” speech.

“There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America,” Buchanan said. “It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself.”

Bush lost, of course. And Buchanan would probably now say, almost 25 years later, that the cultural war was lost as well. But not because Buchanan didn’t fight.

He was back in New Hampshire for the 1996 primary. The speech he gave announcing his candidacy was pure populism and, as political speeches go, a thing of beauty, with phrasing as arresting as anything that came from the mouth of William Jennings Bryan:

That is one-hundred-proof populism, and if Buchanan never got to the White House, he left a big footprint on the political landscape traveled by those who still might, including Donald Trump, who has appropriated Buchanan’s anti-free-trade, anti-immigrant, America first themes even as he is tone deaf to the music.

Buchanan, the candidate, was the real populist deal, right down to an antisemitic taint noted by, among others, William F. Buckley Jr. and, writing in this magazine, Norman Podhoretz. But it wasn’t the source of his passion, which was for an older, better time of stable families, orderly neighborhoods, factory jobs that paid so well that a man could raise a family and his wife could stay at home. In short, the America of the 1950s, back before NAFTA and feminism and .  .  . well, just about everything.

Populism is a kind of nostalgic longing for what, perhaps, never really was and fury at what is. For it to thrive, it isn’t necessary that times should be especially awful. We are not in a depression now. Or even a recession, for that matter. What does seem essential is a widespread belief that things are not likely to get better, except for a few who don’t especially deserve it and might even be responsible for the malaise.

President Obama’s pique, then, was misplaced. He isn’t a populist, but he has done a lot to make the revival of populism an undeniable and troubling reality. What George H. W. Bush was to Pat Buchanan, he is to Donald Trump. And that has to hurt.

Geoffrey Norman, a writer in Vermont, is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard.