It has become common to liken Donald Trump to Bernie Sanders. They’re both “outsiders” who have seemingly bucked the system and have struck a nerve with the base of their respective parties. For Sanders, a self-described social democrat from the most liberal state in the union, his anti-Wall Street, big government message has earned him plenty of huzzahs from the callow voters who want “free” college, while Hollywood celebrities and other well-heeled donors have jumped so far behind the wild-haired man from Vermont (by way of Brooklyn) that he’s currently on pace to match Hillary Clinton’s far more professional and slick campaign. As for Trump, the billionaire’s rakish charm, his unwillingness to apologize for any gaffe or seemingly ugly phrase, and his loud denunciations of illegal immigration have netted him a consistent spot at the top of the GOP’s presidential race. Currently, CNN has Trump holding fast to his “commanding lead.”
So what’s the secret ingredient?
Despite Nate Silver’s breathless protest that we should all “Stop Comparing Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders,” and despite Sanders’s own claim that Trump ‘s rhetoric is “an embarrassment for our country,” the truth is that both men, while representing some of the farthest reaches of the left/right divide, have tapped into a common element. Namely, they appeal to the “Forgotten Man,” that usually white working individual who has always been skeptical of big money and the interventionist spirit begat by Woodrow Wilson. The difference here is between Sanders’s “Forgotten Man,” who is more akin to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Depression-era unemployed worker needing a lift up from the New Deal’s alphabet soup, and Trump’s own “Forgotten Man,” who shares an affinity with the William Graham Sumner original: a hard-working middle class individual forced to pay for needlessly burdensome economic policies.
We can call this populism. In order to separate the heart from the guts, it’s best to define our primary concern (populism) before describing the people who follow Sanders and Trump.
While, logically speaking, “populism” simply refers to things that are popular or that appeal to a wide audience, the term itself has taken on a more nuanced meaning ever since appearing on the American political scene in the 19th century. The original populists were members of the Grange, a pre-Civil War movement made up of western and southern farmers riled up by debt, droughts, and railroad barons. The later Populist party effectively split the Democrats in the 1880s and 1890s, when the populist faction made economic inequality a major concern, along with a preference for agrarianism and a push for bimetallism, or the use of gold and silver money as legal tender. While the latter crusade inspired L. Frank Baum to write a childish allegory in the form of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the populists saw their apex in 1896 when William Jennings Bryan, a populist Democrat from Nebraska, won the party nomination. Despite Bryan’s well-known eloquence, William McKinley and the Republicans took the day with 51.02 percent of the popular vote and 60.6 percent of the electoral vote.
In many U.S. history books, this is where the story of populism stops. Rather than members of an explicit Populist party, post-1896 populists have become an amorphous, mostly faceless bunch who have somehow managed to support both FDR’s socialistic New Deal programs and Richard Nixon’s socially conservative “silent majority” agenda within living memory. Populists can be found on the left and right, of course, often on the fringes of both parties. In the current coinage, MSNBC blowhard Ed Schultz is as much of a populist as any member of the Tea Party. The disparity is rarely called into question. Maybe it’s the indeterminate meaning of the word itself, or maybe it’s the fact that populism really is a set of ideas or ideals that have managed to appeal to the left and the right.
For instance, even though Sanders is the darling of the academic left and has always maintained a steadfast following among Americans who believe that we’d be better off emulating Sweden (or rather a false image of Sweden as a socialist utopia), his appeal can also be found among a certain segment of the working class. In particular, Sanders, who has made a habit of speaking in union halls, likes to single out China and Mexico as malefactors in cahoots with Wall Street fat cats who have a unquenchable thirst for cheap labor. As National Review’s Kevin Williamson’s has shown, Sanders likes to sprinkle in nationalism with his democratic socialism, thereby creating a classic us vs. them scenario, with the “us” being the put-upon American worker facing stagnating wages and underemployment and the “them” being a cabal of the nefarious (the Koch brothers) and nebulous (foreign companies). Even though Sanders is as much beholden to the racial identity crowd as any modern-day leftist, he’s blunt in decrying that an open border with Mexico is a proposal undergirded by big corporations.
While Sanders has a whiff of old school populism, with the erratic hair of “fighting Bob” La Follette and a devotion to prelapsarian socialism, Trump represents a new type of populist. A celebrity and a media darling since the 1980s, Trump has cashed in on name recognition and a truly masterful understanding of the press and publicity in order to create a cult of personality that has connected with a large portion of the Republican base. But Trump, like Sanders, is no political novice. He knows exactly how angry the average American is; angry about illegal immigration and economic immigration more generally, angry about the perceived weakness of the Republican establishment in the House and Senate, angry about both America’s decline on the world stage and our recent experiences with interventionist policies in the Middle East. More importantly, Trump has shown that the Republican base isn’t in lock-step with what the GOP establishment consider to be conservative doctrine. Trump’s supporters are more apt to curse NAFTA and pan the Trans-Pacific Partnership. They’re the type to cheer a proposed tax on hedge fund managers and boo loudly when a politician speaks too warmly about bankers, especially the ones that got away with financial murder in 2008. Still the biggest distinction may be this: most conservatives simply want less government; Trump’s supporters want government to work better.
In other words, Sanders represents the soul of the modern Democratic party, while Trump is nothing less than a minor revolution. Sanders’s increasing success is Democratic puritanism rejecting the opportunism of Hillary Clinton. When Sanders speaks, even Clinton supporters nod their heads in agreement. Trump, on the other hand, is the head of a broad right-wing coalition that is beyond dissatisfied with the Republican party and establishment favorites like Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, whom they see as incapable of going on the offensive in terms of the ongoing culture war. Whereas Sanders preaches to the already converted, Trump’s tactics have actually expanded the base.
Benjamin Welton is a writer in Boston.
