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If Trump and Sanders Are Both Populists, What Does Populist Mean?

Charles Postel

The headlines tell us that the political campaigns of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders have opened a new chapter of populist politics. A reporter at the Los Angeles Times writes on "the populist sentiment fueling both the Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump campaigns." A pundit at the National Review asks if Sanders and Trump are "two populist peas in a pod?" and answers in the affirmative. His counterpart at the New Yorker analyzes the Sanders and Trump campaigns under the simple heading "The Populists." [1] These headlines defy ordinary political sense given just how different these two candidates are from each other. Bernie Sanders is one of the longest serving and consistently progressive politicians in the U.S. Congress, and Donald Trump is a reality TV show host and conservative existent estate tycoon whose temperamental political compass points towards antagonism against immigrants and women. Whether it is policy, style, or temperament, these two candidates make for foreign peas in a pod.

Photograph by Jamelle Bouie under a Creative Commons two.0 license.

Pairing Sanders and Trump indicates just how flexible the term populist has go and poses the question equally to whether populist has whatsoever useful meaning and if then, what it might exist. A skilful starting bespeak to answer this question would be to trace back to the historical origins of the term. In the early 1890s the People's party—whose members were known by the quirky nickname Populists, or but Pops—represented a powerful movement against corporate power that demanded solutions to the Gilded Age crisis of inequality. By the measure of this historical legacy, Bernie Sanders looks very much similar a populist for the "Second Gilded Age," both in his diagnosis of and solutions to lodge's ills. By the same historical measure, Donald Trump, with his aureate-plated jets and mansions, looks very much like the type of plutocrat the Populists held responsible for the injustices and inequities of their time. This suggests that to empathise today's headlines virtually a populist Trump nosotros need a dissimilar historical measure and to examine how some contemporary political commentators have separated the term populist from its origins.

Like Sanders, the Populists called for a political revolution—that is, using the electoral process to create a more humane and equitable society. The Populists believed that corporations held undue influence over elections, the halls of authorities, and the courts. The resulting injustice meant the devastation of the livelihoods of working people and a rendering of order into a nation of "tramps and millionaires." As for solutions, much of the Sanders' campaign webpage reads from the Populist playbook. The Populists proposed electoral reforms to squeeze corruption out of the organisation and to make regime more transparent. They pushed for a progressive income tax to brand the wealthy shoulder more of the tax brunt. They demanded public command and regulation of cyberbanking, railroads, and other key industries. They advocated for government investment and currency expansion to stimulate the economy, create jobs, build infrastructure, and provide relief to debtors. They wanted more public colleges and universities and to have them amend serve the needs of working people. The Populists pushed all these bug onto the political agenda more a century ago—Sanders currently has them at the center of his campaign. And he has even endorsed a Populist archetype: turning post offices into banks to make cheap and equitable financial services available to those with too little greenbacks to be considered worthy customers by the commercial banks. [2]

In cartoon a parallel between Sanders and the Populists it should exist kept in mind that the People'southward party represented a coalition. Grain and cotton farmers, coal miners, and railroad workers made upward its biggest constituencies. The party also attracted a spectrum of middle course activists, from Frances Willard to Clarence Darrow, involved in women's rights, currency and revenue enhancement reform, and clean government. Some of these activists called themselves "democratic socialists" much in the same way that Bernie Sanders does today. Henry Demarest Lloyd was such an activist and the similarities between Lloyd and Sanders are striking. Built-in in New York City and educated at Columbia University, Lloyd became a announcer dedicated to the ethics of social justice. In 1894, the same year he ran as a Populist candidate for Congress, Lloyd published Wealth against Republic, a deeply researched report of how the wealth of Standard Oil and other giant corporations undermined democratic government. Lloyd's volume inspired a generation of "trust busting" reformers who believed that the very size of the corporate giants constituted a threat to the common good. [3] With his refrain almost banks being "likewise big to exist," Sanders echoes the ethical arguments of Wealth confronting Commonwealth. But here it should be noted that subcontract and labor Populists did not fully share Lloyd'due south concerns most corporate size. Instead, they ofttimes accepted the principle of the economic system of scale and focused on building up big institutions—cooperatives, unions, governmental agencies—capable of matching or surpassing the size and power of corporations.

Not everything about the Sanders campaign is a Populist echo. Sanders discusses saving American jobs in means that suggest a type of protectionism that almost Populists viewed as a corporate handout paid for past farmers and consumers. Or consider ceremonious rights. Sanders speaks forcefully nearly overcoming the country's history of racial oppression. Past contrast, the Populists were silent nearly this history and complicit in the oppression. At the same fourth dimension, the People's party did non rely on white supremacist fervor in the fashion the Autonomous party did in the days of Jim Crow, nor did it traffic in the xenophobic passions that were alive in the Republican party. Much equally Sanders has washed in his political career, the Populists argued that economical reform was the way to solve racial, ethnic, and sectional friction.

Photograph past Phil Roeder under a Artistic Commons 2.0 license.

If the Populists of the 1890s shed historical light on the democratic socialism of Bernie Sanders, how practice we brand sense of the claim that Donald Trump is the other populist in the campaign? Hither nosotros need to look at the history of a journalistic practice. In recent years, pundits have promiscuously applied the populist tag to political phenomena that escape easy labels and used populist to describe political appeals that are simply pop. In this regard, Trump can exist difficult to pivot down. His policy positions focus on revenue enhancement cuts favoring the wealthy and draconic measures against undocumented immigrants and Muslims. Beyond that, he seems to advertising lib whatever might prove pop and drive up his poll numbers among Republican chief voters. He trades in racial and ethnic stereotypes, insults against women and the disabled, and opportunistic sniping at various elites among Television set personalities, hedge fund managers, and politicians. His targets tin seem capricious and random. From a historical perspective, however, Trump is standing a long tradition in American politics—a tradition of highly-seasoned for the votes of the "common homo" by combining tough talk against malevolent elites with ugly scapegoating of marginalized groups. Andrew Jackson rose to political heights equally the slayer of both the "monster bank" and "cruel Indians." Ronald Reagan demonized both "Hollywood liberals" and "welfare queens." Trump employs the aforementioned political arts to proceeds popularity and he does so in the scattershot mode of the reality Television set show host that he is.

Trump'due south campaign has drawn comparisons with anti-immigrant and nationalist parties in Europe. Much like Marine Le Pen's French National Forepart and Nigel Farage's U.One thousand. Independence Party, Trump gives vox to xenophobia, anti-Muslim prejudice, and aggrieved nationalism. Such politicians acquit the moniker of "correct-wing populists" in the European media. Le Pen and Farage are called right-wing because they claim the conservative heritage of the ideological and political right as information technology has been understood since the days of the French Revolution. And the European media uses the term populist to describe, among other features, how such politicians appeal to the "people" in the face of perceived threats to the nation. By comparing, Trump usually does non speak in the name of the "people" in the aforementioned way. He flaunts his billions, sneers at the people who are "losers" and whose wages are "too high," and promises to make the land "cracking again" by the sheer ability of his wealth and business acumen. Moreover, somewhat ironically, unlike Le Pen and Farage, Trump does not have deep roots in right-fly or conservative politics. Only that is irresolute. [4]

In the course of his campaign, Trump has been steadily moving towards the conservative orthodoxy demanded by many of today'southward Republicans. By seeking the Republican nomination, he has had to adhere to virtually of the conservative principles with which most voters in Republican primaries align. This points to another journalistic exercise. In recent years, even when politicians declare themselves conservatives and that easy label fits all-time, commentators often prefer to use the describing word populist instead. They may exercise this because the current ambiguity of the term provides a bit of protection from charges of ideological bias. Or the term may have cachet that attracts clicks and sells papers. Whatever the rationale, the pundits who insist that today'due south self-described conservatives are really populists are reprising an statement that the historian Richard Hofstadter made 60 years ago. Their probable betoken of reference is Hofstadter's The Age of Reform (1955), in which he speculated that the conservative paranoia and witch-hunts of Joseph McCarthy had their roots in the Populist movement of the 1890s. Co-ordinate to Hofstadter, the Populists embraced irrational myths of the past and unreasoned grievances nigh the nowadays. Every bit a effect, he explained, the Populist tradition was unstable, hands shifting from left to right, and thereby "soured" into the intolerance and "cranky pseudo-conservatism" of the 1950s. [v]

In the American context, Hofstadter's thesis of an unstable Populism of the 1890s going "sour" continues to inform journalistic do. In a 2015 effect of the New Yorker, George Packer writes that Sanders and Trump fit the pattern of "the volatile nature of populism" that "can ignite reform or reaction, idealism or scapegoating." He cites equally evidence that the Populist Tom Watson of Georgia ended his political career as a racial demagogue. Only what if Watson was more of the exception than the rule? [half-dozen] What if—as more half a century of historical scholarship has confirmed and reconfirmed—the great majority of former Populist leaders, activists, and supporters went to their graves committed to their ethics of social justice? Clarence Darrow, like many former Populists, establish a political home in the farmer-labor wing of the Democratic party. Others, similar Mary Elizabeth Lease, the "Queen of Kansas Populism," did the aforementioned in the progressive wing of the Republican party. Still others took the path of Henry Demarest Lloyd and joined the Socialist movement led by the former labor Populist Eugene V. Debs, the same Debs whose picture hangs on the wall of Bernie Sanders's Washington function.

As the decades curl along, the journalistic claims nearly populist volatility and shape-shifting sound increasingly strange. The political thought that motivated the original Populists has proven to be at least equally abiding as whatsoever other school of political ideas. In its proposals for making a more just and equitable order and under a variety of names—antimonopolist, farmer-labor, populist, autonomous socialist, nonpartisan, progressive— populism has remained a steady, deep, and broad stream in American political thought. As of this writing, this stream shows no sign of jumping its banks and turning to the far right, any more Bernie Sanders is virtually to sport an orangish comb-over and campaign for a new circular of tax cuts for the "winners" and billionaires.

Author

Charles Postel is an associate professor of history at San Francisco Country University, where he teaches classes on social movements and political idea. He is the author ofThe Populist Vision (2007).

Notes

[1]Kathleen Hennessey, "The Populist Sentiment Fueling Both the Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump Campaigns," Los Angeles Times, August 14, 2015; Johan Goldberg, "Sanders and Trump: Two Populist Peas in a Pod?" National Review, Baronial xix, 2015; George Packer, "The Populists," New Yorker, September 7, 2015.

[ii]Joe Pinsker, "Bernie Sanders's Highly Sensible Programme to Turn Mail service Offices into Banks," The Atlantic, Oct xx, 2015.

[iii]Chester McArthur Destler, "Wealth against Republic, 1894 and 1944," American Historical Review, l (October 1944), 49–72.

[4]Cas Mudde, "The Trump Phenomenon and the European Populist Radical Right," The Washington Post, August 26, 2015.

[5]Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (1955), xx.

[vi]Walter T. Chiliad. Nugent, The Tolerant Populists: Kansas Populism and Nativism (1963); Michael P. Rogin, The Intellectuals and McCarthy: The Radical Specter (1967); James R. Dark-green, Grass-Roots Socialism: Radical Movements in the Southwest, 1895–1943 (1978).

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Source: https://www.oah.org/tah/issues/2016/february/if-trump-and-sanders-are-both-populists-what-does-populist-mean/

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