In a recent essay for Bloomberg entitled “Why Populists Lose Elections,” Pankaj Mishra reviews John Judis’s new book The Populist Explosion, identifying Donald Trump as a right-wing populist who has riled up disaffected, working class whites. This is reminiscent of a summer essay for the Wall Street Journal by David Frum, “The Trump Before Trump,” in which the Atlantic writer compares the Republican nominee to the Democratic party’s 1896 candidate for president, William Jennings Bryan.
It may be the case that Donald Trump is a “populist” in a very general sense, but in the concrete, American tradition, he most certainly is not. Contra Frum, Donald Trump bears only a superficial relationship to William Jennings Bryan.
The populist offshoot of constitutional republicanism harkens back to the Jeffersonian reaction to Alexander Hamilton’s political economy, and thus can be identified as early as the first issue of the National Gazette, published in 1791. The basic idea was that an elite faction had seized control of the government, twisting public power toward its private ends, and only by returning authority to the people could the true character of the nation be restored. James Madison, in particular, dilates at length on the importance of “public opinion” to a republic in the pages of theNational Gazette, and he is clearly struggling to find a way to make the public voice a more forceful influence in the councils of government. A similar anxiety is apparent during the Jacksonian period—after the contested election of 1824. There was a widespread belief that the authority of government had been taken from the people, and that the “populist” mandate was to find a way to restore the proper republican balance.
Bryan belongs to this tradition. His main constituency was the farmers of the Great Plains, who, as Frum notes, had to contend with burdensome tariffs, crippling deflation, and overbearing railroad monopolies. In 1892, the Populist Party won 22 electoral votes and eight percent of the national vote, and, four years later, Bryan used the Populist message to seize control of the Democratic party from Grover Cleveland and the eastern establishment.
Trump does not belong to this tradition. It is true that Trump’s constituency has a similar anxiety to Bryan’s voters. Like the yeoman farmer of the late 19th century, today’s white working class used to be the centerpiece of American politics but feels increasingly out of the loop. This sense of disempowerment similarly animated the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian revolutions.
But populism in the American tradition is not simply a matter of why a voter is angry, but what he intends to do about it. The Bryan agenda of 1896 was populist in the sense that it proposed taking power from the elites and returning itto the people.
Consider Bryan’s fight against the gold standard. Congress had previously approved a limited increase of silver coinage in the hopes of generating inflation, but to no effect. The legal exchange ratio of silver to gold coins was 16:1 when the real difference in value was closer to 32:1. Accordingly, Gresham’s Law undermined the government’s halting efforts to introduce silver coinage into the currency, and the pro-gold forces in charge of the Treasury responded by holding a sufficiently large gold reserve to protect the monetary status quo. Thus, Bryan—in calling for the “free coinage” of silver (as opposed to the limited coinage of the Bland-Allison Act)—was trying to democratize monetary policy. The people wanted inflation; their representatives in the government had voted for it; and now it was time for them to receive the relief they had long sought.
In this way, Bryan harkened back to the Jeffersonians and Jacksonians. Jefferson and Madison built the Republican party to mobilize voters to seize control of the government from the Federalists. Jackson and Van Buren built the Democratic party to avenge the “corrupt bargain” of 1824. The underlying thread of this “populism” was that power had to be redistributed from elites to the masses.
Trump has no such view in mind. While he certainly thinks that elites have screwed things up, his main idea is to transfer their authority not to the people but to himself. He thinks the current crop of elites has negotiated “bad deals,” and that he can do better. This is not populism. It is just another version of elitism—albeit one with an outer-borough accent. On what issue has Trump called for a devolution of power? I can think of none. If anything, his goal is to centralize power even further, around himself.
This is closer to European-style authoritarianism than it is to the American tradition of populism. Trumpism does not so much represent an impulse to elevate the people at the expense of the elites, but to replace them with a single leader who claims to speak for the people.
Conservatives do a disservice by mistaking Trump as a populist—not only to the old representatives of this tradition, but to their own goals. Fixing the many problems plaguing the conservative movement requires an honest and accurate appraisal of what those problems are. It is an error to think that the diehard Trump voters are just the next generation of Jeffersonians, Jacksonians, and Bryanesque populists. They are something quite different.
