Justin Amash made headlines recently when he left the Republican Party.
“I’ve become disenchanted with party politics and frightened by what I see from it,” the Michigan representative said. “The two-party system has evolved into an existential threat to American principles and institutions.”
Like Amash, many blame our current hyper-partisan political environment at least in part on President Trump’s populism. But interestingly, the late Ross Perot’s big populist moment in 1992 was driven by something closer to Amash’s anti-partisanship.
Perot’s campaign message that year was that neither Republican nominee George H.W. Bush or Democratic challenger Bill Clinton were worthy of the presidency. He believed the two-party system was broken and that an eccentric billionaire like himself was needed to solve the country’s problems. Perot even called himself “Mr. Fix It” who would “take out the trash and clean out the barn.”
Many Americans agreed with him. Perot went on to get almost 20 million votes in 1992 as an independent (his 1996 Reform Party showing garnered 8 million). It was the most votes for an independent candidate since Theodore Roosevelt got 27% in 1912.
When Perot passed away Tuesday, the predictable comparisons to Trump began. And it’s a fair enough comparison. Perot had inspired the last major, figure-based populist moment in the U.S., attracting throngs of white, working-class voters. Both men also accomplished this through their colorful and eccentric personalities that endeared them to supporters. Saturday Night Live’s Dana Carvey once had as much fun portraying Perot as Alec Baldwin has playing our current president.
But if a concern of Amash and others is that Republicans under Trump don’t seem to care about fiscal conservatism and small government anymore, well, Perot believed that the national debt posed the greatest existential threat to our country.
Along with his opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement — Perot and Trump were both trade protectionists — Perot made runaway government spending a defining issue of his campaign.
“The debt is like a crazy aunt we keep down in the basement,” Perot said in 1992. “All the neighbors know she’s there, but nobody wants to talk about her.”
Fifteen years later, the next big populist wave on the Right, the Tea Party movement, would also make government spending and debt public enemy number one.
In the current environment, many fall into the trap of believing that populism is inherently anti-immigrant, despite the fact that the Tea Party movement, and to an even lesser degree, the Perot moment, did not make that issue a primary focus. Nor are populist movements inherently right-wing or exclusively appeals to white working class voters, as Bernie Sanders reminded us in 2016 and Jesse Jackson did in 1988.
Populism also isn’t necessarily tied to a social-issues-based culture war. The Washington Post observed in Perot’s obituary:
Today, Justin Amash and others believe our two-party system is an “existential threat” to the country. Ross Perot, as populist as he was, completely agreed.
Jack Hunter (@jackhunter74) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is the former political editor of Rare.us and co-authored the 2011 book The Tea Party Goes to Washington with Sen. Rand Paul.
