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<\/h1>\n\n\n\n<\/h1>\n\n\n\nCreditCreditIllustration by Pablo Delcan Photograph by George Baier IV<\/p>\n\n\n\n
By Michael Kazin<\/p>\n\n\n\n
New York Times<\/em>, March 22, 2016<\/p>\n\n\n\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\n\n\n 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, The Atlantic observed<\/a> that Pat Buchanan\u2019s \u201chard-right-wing populism \u2026 may be the shape of politics to come.\u201d In 2012, The 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\n\n\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\n\n\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\n\n\n 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\n\n\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\n\n\n In the 1960s, the streets and airwaves were crowded with protesters of all ide\u00adolo\u00adgical persuasions who claimed to be fighting for the interests and values of a virtuous, exploited people against an immoral, grasping elite. \u201cPopulist\u201d became a handle applied to anyone who fought the powers that be, however they were defined. Wallace protested a federal order to integrate the University of Alabama by stating, \u201cThere can be no submission to the theory that the central government is anything but a servant of the people.\u201d On the left, young radicals vowed that with \u201cparticipatory democracy,\u201d they could topple racists like Wallace, along with the rest of \u201cthe power elite.\u201d Ralph Nader, then a liberal lawyer, stoked a revolt by consumers enraged at auto companies that increased their profits by concealing design flaws in their vehicles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Like Trump and Sanders today, \u201960s \u201cpopulists\u201d chose to blame elites for what ailed the nation. For Nader, it was greedy corporations and enabling politicians. For Wallace and Ronald Reagan, it was the federal state. These habits live on today. From the Tea Party to the fight for a $15-an-hour minimum wage, Americans keep turning their ire against institutions that appear to betray the promise of fair and equitable treatment of ordinary workers, homeowners or taxpayers. Sometimes, it seems, \u201cpopulism\u201d is just a synonym for widespread unhappiness with the status quo.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yet differences of language matter; they suggest what a candidate will seek to accomplish if he or she takes power. The 19th-century antecedent that Trump evokes in his nativist appeals to white working- and middle-class Americans is not the populism of the People\u2019s Party but rather that of the Know-Nothing Party of the 1850s, which similarly argued that immigrants were taking Americans\u2019 jobs and breaking the nation\u2019s laws. Trump\u2019s \u201cpopulism\u201d is a brilliant specimen of performance art but one that bears little resemblance, even in style, to the capital-P kind. The earnest activists from the People\u2019s Party of old brandished a lengthy blueprint for reform; Trump\u2019s personality overshadows his program. His canny lack of finesse finesses us all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The original Populists would probably warm up to Sanders, even if their constituents in places like rural Kansas and Georgia might be puzzled to hear familiar rhetoric spoken by an elderly Jew with a Brooklyn accent. The Populists\u2019 1892 platform thundered: \u201cThe fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few.\u201d Sanders similarly attacks \u201cthe billionaire class<\/a>,\u201d whose supposed grip on the state has led to \u201can enormous transfer of wealth from the middle class and the poor to the wealthiest people in this country.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Critics of Sanders and Trump often condemn them with the same pejorative. The conservative National Review, for instance, recently scorned both as \u201cdemagogues<\/a>\u201d who exploit public alarm and peddle impossible solutions to difficult problems. But as that word has been applied to everyone from Andrew Jackson to Joe McCarthy to President Obama, it has lost much of its sting. The \u201cpopulist\u201d whose politics you abhor is always a demagogue disguised as a hero of the masses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And those who disparage \u201cpopulism\u201d in general neglect its salutary function. When populist talkers direct their outrage at elites, in government or business, who neglect the needs and betray the trust of ordinary citizens, they can perform a service to the nation. They train their language of discontent on those accused of betraying the core ideal of American democracy \u2014 one that is no less powerful because it can never be fully realized.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In their own fashion, Sanders and Trump are protesting inequalities and the corruption of public life without calling the entire system into question. (Sanders may speak of \u201crevolution<\/a>,\u201d but he still chose to run for president within the two-party system.) You may love such upheavals or loathe them. Trump\u2019s hostility toward undocumented immigrants and Muslims is certainly reprehensible. But every major \u201cpopulist\u201d insurgency is a warning about serious problems festering in our politics. To simply blame the messenger is an exercise in denial.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Michael Kazin teaches history at Georgetown University and is co-editor of\u00a0Dissent<\/a>. He is the author of \u201cWar Against War: The American Fight for Peace, 1914-1918,\u201d which will be published in January 2017 by Simon & Schuster.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" CreditCreditIllustration by Pablo Delcan Photograph by George Baier IV By Michael Kazin New York Times, March 22, 2016 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\u201d; Trump is an executive of almost 500 … Continue reading “How Can Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders Both Be \u2018Populist\u2019?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":114,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-512","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/world-politics-spring-2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/512","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/world-politics-spring-2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/world-politics-spring-2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/world-politics-spring-2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/114"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/world-politics-spring-2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=512"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/world-politics-spring-2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/512\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":513,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/world-politics-spring-2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/512\/revisions\/513"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/world-politics-spring-2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=512"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}