{"id":151,"date":"2021-08-21T16:51:48","date_gmt":"2021-08-21T20:51:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/world-politics-2021\/?page_id=151"},"modified":"2021-08-21T16:51:48","modified_gmt":"2021-08-21T20:51:48","slug":"how-can-donald-trump-and-bernie-sanders-both-be-populist","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/world-politics-2021\/how-can-donald-trump-and-bernie-sanders-both-be-populist\/","title":{"rendered":"How Can Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders Both Be \u2018Populist\u2019?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Credit<\/span>Credit<\/span>Illustration by Pablo Delcan Photograph by George Baier IV<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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By\u00a0Michael Kazin<\/span><\/p>\n

New York Times<\/em>,\u00a0March 22, 2016<\/p>\n

Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders share an upbringing in New York\u2019s outer boroughs and a repugnance for trade deals, but the similarities pretty much end there. Sanders routinely inveighs against \u201ccorporate America<\/a>\u201d; Trump is an executive of almost 500 business entities, more than 200 of which are named after himself. Trump lends his name to a line of power ties and cuff links; the adjective most often applied to Sanders\u2019s wardrobe is \u201crumpled.\u201d Yet journalists routinely refer to both men as \u201cpopulists.\u201d How can a word that purports to describe both a proud socialist and an arrogant billionaire have any meaning?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n

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For half a century, most presidential campaigns have featured one or more \u201cpopulists\u201d from the right, the left or somewhere in between. In 1968, reporters and academics pasted the label on George Wallace, whose campaign literature asked, \u201cCan a former truck driver married to a dime-store clerk and son of a dirt farmer be elected president?\u201d In 1972, Time dubbed George McGovern a \u201cprairie populist<\/a>\u201d because he had a modest plan to redistribute wealth and hailed from the rural heartland. In 1996,\u00a0The Atlantic observed<\/a>\u00a0that Pat Buchanan\u2019s \u201chard-right-wing populism \u2026 may be the shape of politics to come.\u201d In 2012,\u00a0The Hill announced<\/a>, \u201cObama cranks up populist pitch\u201d after the president, who previously shied away from us-versus-them talk, called for higher taxes on the rich.<\/p>\n

There was a time when \u201cpopulist\u201d meant something more specific. The word originated with the decidedly left-wing People\u2019s Party that emerged in the Midwest and the South amid the economic turmoil and rampant inequality of the 1890s. Journalists who knew some Latin started calling them \u201cPopulists\u201d as a shorthand, and the name stuck. Those uppercase Populists championed small farmers and wage-earners who thought \u201cthe money power\u201d \u2014 banks and industrial corporations \u2014 had seized control of both America\u2019s economy and its government. The party called for nationalizing the railroads, breaking up the trusts and strengthening labor unions. At times, their leftism toppled over into paranoia; to explain society\u2019s ills, they invoked \u201ca vast conspiracy against mankind,\u201d engineered by a plutocratic cabal.<\/p>\n

The Populists joined forces with the Democrats for the 1896 election and collapsed soon afterward. The word \u201cpopulist\u201d mostly disappeared into academic studies until the 1950s, when Joseph McCarthy, a previously obscure Republican senator from Wisconsin, rose to promi\u00adnence with his claims that Communists had infiltrated positions of power in the American government and military. Many targets of his rants were members of the East Coast liberal intelligentsia.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Millions of Americans cheered on McCarthy\u2019s crusade \u2014 horrifying liberal intellectuals like the historian Richard Hofstadter and the sociologist Daniel Bell, who reached back to the precedent of the Populists to understand the roots of the new anti-elitist fervor. In McCarthy, they heard echoes of the original Populists\u2019 conspiracy theorizing \u2014 only this time, the perpetrators were well-born \u201cpinkos\u201d or \u201creds.\u201d<\/p>\n

Other scholars dismissed the comparison as deeply unfair, but Hofstadter\u2019s effort to link the Populists to what he called \u201cthe paranoid style\u201d of the new right resonated. And so \u201cpopulism\u201d began to morph into a handy tool of journalistic discourse.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n