Us
v Them: the birth of populism
It’s
not about left or right: populism is a style of politics that pits
‘the people’ against ‘the establishment’. Its rise is a
warning sign that the status quo is failing
by John B Judis
Thursday 13 October
2016 06.00 BST
When political
scientists write about populism, they often begin by trying to define
it, as if it were a scientific term, like entropy or photosynthesis.
To do so is a mistake. There is no set of features that exclusively
defines movements, parties, and people that are called “populist”:
the different people and parties that are placed in this category
enjoy family resemblances of one to the other, but there is not a
universal set of traits that is common to all of them.
There is, however, a
particular kind of populist politics that originated in the United
States in the 19th century, which has recurred there in the 20th and
21st centuries – and which began to appear in western Europe in the
1970s. In the past few decades, these campaigns and parties have
converged in their concerns, and in the wake of the Great Recession,
they have surged.
The kind of populism
that runs through American history, and has been transplanted to
Europe, cannot be defined exclusively in terms of right, left or
centre: it includes both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, the Front
National in France and Podemos in Spain. There are rightwing,
leftwing and centrist populist parties. It is not an ideology, but a
political logic – a way of thinking about politics. In his book on
American populism, The Populist Persuasion, the historian Michael
Kazin describes populism as “a language whose speakers conceive of
ordinary people as a noble assemblage not bounded narrowly by class;
view their elite opponents as self-serving and undemocratic; and seek
to mobilise the former against the latter.”
That’s a good
start. It doesn’t describe people like Ronald Reagan or Vladimir
Putin, both of whom have sometimes been called “populist”, but it
does describe the logic of the parties, movements, and candidates,
from the US’s People’s Party of 1892 to Marine Le Pen’s Front
National of 2016. I would, however, take Kazin’s characterisation
one step further and distinguish between leftwing populists such as
Bernie Sanders and Podemos’s Pablo Iglesias, and rightwing
populists such as Trump and Le Pen.
Leftwing populists
champion the people against an elite or an establishment. Theirs is a
vertical politics of the bottom and middle, arrayed against the top.
Rightwing populists champion the people against an elite that they
accuse of favouring a third group, which can consist, for instance,
of immigrants, Islamists, or African American militants. Rightwing
populism is triadic: it looks upward, but also down upon an out
group.
Leftwing populism is
historically different to socialist or social democratic movements.
It is not a politics of class conflict, and it does not necessarily
seek the abolition of capitalism. It is also different to a
progressive or liberal politics that seeks to reconcile the interests
of opposing classes and groups. It assumes a basic antagonism between
the people and an elite at the heart of its politics.
Rightwing populism,
meanwhile, is different to a conservatism that primarily identifies
with the business classes against their critics and antagonists
below. In its American and western European versions, it is also
different to an authoritarian conservatism that aims to subvert
democracy. It operates within a democratic context.
Just as there is no
common ideology that defines populism, there is no one constituency
that comprises “the people”. They can be blue-collar workers,
shopkeepers, or students burdened by debt; they can be the poor or
the middle class. Equally, there is no common identification of “the
establishment”. The exact referents of “the people” and “the
elite” do not define populism, what defines it is the conflict
between the two (or, in the case of rightwing populism, the three).
The conflict itself
turns on a set of demands that the populists make of the elite –
demands that the populists believe the establishment will be
unwilling to grant them. Sanders wanted “Medicare for all” and a
$15 minimum wage. If he had wanted the Affordable Care Act to cover
hearing aids, or to raise the minimum wage from $7.25 to $7.75, that
would not have defined a clash between the people and the
establishment. If Trump were to demand an increase in guards along
the Mexican border, or if Denmark’s rightwing People’s Party
campaigned on a mere reduction in asylum-seekers, these demands would
not open up a gulf between the people and the elite. But promising a
wall that the Mexican government will pay for or the total cessation
of immigration – that does establish a frontier.
These kinds of
demands define the clash between the people and the establishment. If
they are granted in whole or even in part, or if populists abandon
them as too ambitious – as Syriza did with its demands for
renegotiation of Greece’s debt – then the populist movement is
likely to dissipate or to morph into a normal political party or
candidacy. In this sense, American and western European populist
movements have flourished when they are in opposition, and have
suffered identity crises when they have entered government.
Populist campaigns
and parties often function as warning signs of a political crisis. In
both Europe and the US, populist movements have been most successful
at times when people see the prevailing political norms – which are
preserved and defended by the existing establishment – as being at
odds with their own hopes, fears, and concerns. The populists express
these neglected concerns and frame them in a politics that pits the
people against an intransigent elite. By doing so, they become
catalysts for political change.
Populist campaigns
and parties, by nature, point to problems through demands that are
unlikely to be realised in the present political circumstances. In
the case of some rightwing populists, these demands are laced with
bigotry or challenge democratic norms. In other cases, they are
clouded with misinformation. But they still point to tears in the
fabric of accepted political wisdom.
In recent decades,
as the great postwar boom has stalled, the major parties on both
sides of the Atlantic, have embraced a neoliberal agenda of free
movement of capital and labour to achieve prosperity. Leaders have
favoured increased immigration, only to find that American voters
were up in arms about illegal immigration, and European voters were
up in arms about immigrant communities they regarded as seedbeds of
crime and, later, terrorism. In continental Europe, the major parties
embraced the idea of the single currency only to find that it fell
into disfavour during the Great Recession. In the United States, both
parties embraced “free trade” deals only to discover that much of
the public did not support these treaties.
In the last decades
of the 19th century, as the People’s Party was erupting on the
American scene, Europe was seeing the emergence of social democratic
parties inspired by Karl Marx’s theory of socialism. Over the next
70 years, Europe would become home to an array of parties on the
left, centre and right, but it would not witness anything resembling
American populism until the 1970s.
Like the original
People’s Party in the US, the European parties operated within the
electoral arena and championed the “people” against an
“establishment” or “elite”. The French Front National says
that it represents the “little people” and the “forgotten
members” against the “caste”. In Finland, the Finns Party says
that it wants “a democracy that rests on the consent of the people
and does not emanate from elites or bureaucrats”. In Spain, Podemos
champions the “gente” against the “casta”. In Italy, Beppe
Grillo of the Five Star Movement rails against what he calls the
“three destroyers” – journalists, industrialists, and
politicians. In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom
represents “Henk and Ingrid” against “the political elite”.
The first European
populist parties were rightwing. They accused the elites of coddling
communists, welfare recipients, or immigrants. As a result, the term
“populist” in Europe became used pejoratively by leftwing and
centrist politicians and academics. In the last decade, however,
leftwing populist parties have arisen in Spain and Greece that direct
their ire against the establishment in their country or against the
EU headquarters in Brussels.
The main difference
between US and European populists is that while American parties and
campaigns come and go quickly, some European populist parties have
been around for decades. That is primarily because many European
nations have multi-party systems, and many of the countries have
proportional representation that allows smaller parties to maintain a
foothold even when they are polling in single digits.
Populist movements
themselves do not often achieve their own objectives. Their demands
may be co-opted by the major parties, or they may be thoroughly
rejected. But they do roil the waters. They signal that the
prevailing political ideology is not working and the standard
worldview is breaking down.
No one, not even the
man himself, expected Donald Trump to get the Republican presidential
nomination in 2016. Similarly, no one, including Bernie Sanders,
expected that through the California primary in June, the Vermont
senator would still be challenging Hillary Clinton for the Democratic
nomination.
Trump’s success
was initially attributed to his showmanship and celebrity. But as he
won primary after primary, political experts observed him playing on
racist opposition to Barack Obama’s presidency or exploiting a
latent sympathy for fascism among working-class white Americans.
Sanders’s success invited less speculation, but commentators tended
to dismiss him as a utopian and point to the airy idealism of
millennial voters. If that were not sufficient explanation for his
success, they also emphasised Hillary Clinton’s weakness as a
frontrunner.
It makes more sense,
however, to understand Trump and Sanders’s success as the latest
chapter in the history of American populism. While strands of
populism go back to the American revolution, it really begins with
the People’s Party of the 1890s, which set the precedent for
movements that have popped up periodically ever since. In the US, in
contrast to Europe, these campaigns have burst forth suddenly and
unexpectedly. Despite usually being short-lived, they have,
nevertheless, had an outsized impact. And while they may seem unusual
at the time, they are very much part of the political fabric of the
nation.
While the history of
American politics is riven with conflicts – over slavery,
prohibition, abortion, intervention abroad – it is also dominated
for long stretches by an underlying consensus about government’s
role in the economy and abroad.
American politics is
structured to sustain such prevailing worldviews. Its characteristics
of winner-takes-all, first-past-the-post, single-member districts
have encouraged a two‑party system. Third-party candidates are
often dismissed as “spoilers”. Moreover, in deciding on whom to
nominate in party primaries, voters and party bigwigs have generally
taken electability into account, and in the general election,
candidates have generally tried to capture the centre and to stay
away from being branded “extremist”. As a result of this
two-party tilt towards the centre, sharp political differences over
underlying socioeconomic issues have tended to become blunted or even
to be ignored, particularly in presidential elections.
But there are times,
when, in the face of dramatic changes in society and the economy, or
in America’s place in the world, voters have suddenly become
responsive to politicians or movements that raise issues that major
parties have either downplayed or overlooked completely.
The rise of the
People’s Party was the first major salvo against the worldview of
laissez-faire capitalism; the Louisiana governor Huey Long’s “Share
Our Wealth” movement, which emerged in the wake of Franklin
Roosevelt’s election in 1932, helped pressure Roosevelt to address
economic inequality. Together, these movements established the
framework that Bernie Sanders, who described himself both as a
democratic socialist and as a progressive, would adopt during his
2016 campaign. Equally, the populist campaigns of George Wallace in
the 1960s and Pat Buchanan in the 1990s foreshadowed the candidacy of
Donald Trump.
During their heyday
in the late 19th century, the populists of the People’s Party had a
profound effect on American and – as it turned out – Latin
American and European politics. It developed the logic of populism:
the concept of a “people” arrayed against an elite that refused
to grant necessary reforms. In American politics, the organisation
was an early sign of the inadequacy of the two major parties’ views
of government and the economy.
The populists were
the first to call for government to regulate and even nationalise
industries that were integral to the economy, like the railroads;
they wanted government to reduce the economic inequality that
capitalism, when left to its own devices, was creating, and they
wanted to reduce the power of business in determining the outcome of
elections. Populism had an immediate impact on the politics of some
progressive Democrats, and even on Republicans such as Theodore
Roosevelt. Eventually, much of the populist agenda was incorporated
into Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal and into the outlook of
New Deal liberalism.
In May 1891, the
legend goes, some members of the Kansas Farmers Alliance, riding back
home from a national convention in Cincinnati, came up with the term
“populist” to describe the political views that they and other
alliance groups in the west and south were developing. The next year,
the alliance groups joined hands with the Knights of Labor, then the
main workers’ organisation in the United States, to form the
People’s Party, which, over the next two years, challenged the most
basic assumptions that guided Republicans and Democrats in
Washington. The party would be short-lived, but its example would
establish the basis for populism in the United States and Europe.
A political cartoon
from 1900. Photograph: Rights Managed/Mary Evans / Library of
Congress
At the time, the
leading Republicans and Democrats in the United States were revelling
in the progress of American industry and finance. They believed in
the self-regulating market as an instrument of prosperity and
individual opportunity, and thought that the role of government
should be minimal. Grover Cleveland, who was president from 1884 to
1888 and then from 1892 to 1896, railed against government
“paternalism”. Public sector intervention, he declared in his
second inaugural address, “stifles the spirit of true Americanism”;
its “functions,” he stated, “do not include the support of the
people”. Government’s principal role was to maintain a “sound
and stable currency” through upholding the gold standard.
But during these
years, farmers in the south and the plains suffered from a sharp drop
in agricultural prices. Farm prices fell two-thirds in the midwest
and south from 1870 to 1890. The plains, which prospered in the early
1880s, were hit by a ruinous drought in the late 1880s. But
unsympathetic railroads, which enjoyed monopoly status, raised the
cost of transporting farm produce. Many farmers in the south and the
plains states could barely break even. The small family farm gave way
to the large “bonanza” farm, often owned by companies based in
the east. Salaries were threatened by low-wage immigrants from China,
Japan, Portugal and Italy. Farmers who retained their land were
burdened by debt. In Kansas, 45% of the land had become owned by
banks.
The first populists
saw themselves representing the “people”, including farmers and
blue-collar workers, against the “money power” or “plutocracy”.
That was reflected in their early programmes, which included a demand
for the incorporation and recognition of labour unions alongside
demands for railroad regulation, an end to land speculation, and easy
money (through the replacement or supplementing of the gold standard)
to ease the burden of debt that the farmers suffered from. Except for
a few scattered leaders, the populists were not socialists. They
wanted to reform rather than abolish capitalism, and their agent of
reform was not the socialist working class, but the loosely conceived
idea of “the people”.
When their demands –
which also included a graduated income tax and political reforms to
establish the secret ballot and the direct election of senators –
proved too radical and far-reaching for the major parties, the
People’s Party was created in 1892, and nominated a candidate for
president. “We seek to restore the government of the Republic to
the hands of ‘the plain people’, with whose class it originated,”
the party’s first platform declared. “We believe that the powers
of government – in other words, of the people – should be
expanded … as rapidly and as far as the good sense of an
intelligent people and the teachings of experience shall justify, to
the end that oppression, injustice, and poverty shall eventually
cease in the land.”
But in the 1880s and
early 1890s, populist politics was primarily directed upward at the
plutocrats
There was always a
more conservative strain within the populist movement. In the south,
some groups cooperated with the parallel national alliance of black
farmers, but others did not. Populists also favoured the expulsion of
Chinese immigrants, whom businesses had imported to provide cheap
labour on western farms and railroads, and their support for that
policy was often accompanied by racist rhetoric. But in the 1880s and
early 1890s, populist politics was primarily directed upward at the
plutocrats.
In the 1892
election, the People’s Party did remarkably well. Its woefully
underfunded presidential candidate received 8% of the vote and
carried five states. In the 1894 election, the People’s Party’s
candidates for the House of Representatives won 10% of the vote. The
party elected four congressmen, four senators, 21 state executives
and 465 state legislators. With its base in the south and the west,
and with Grover Cleveland wildly unpopular, the People’s Party
looked to be on its way to challenging the Democrats as the second
party. However, the election of 1894 turned out to be the party’s
swansong.
In the end, the
populists were done in by the dynamics of the two-party system. In
the plains states, anger against Cleveland turned voters back to the
more electable Republicans. In the south, Democrats subdued the
People’s Party by a combination of co-option and, in response to
the willingness of some populists to court the black vote, vicious
race-baiting.
As liberal critics
would later point out, the People’s Party had within it strains of
antisemitism, racism, and nativism, particularly towards Chinese
people, but these were at best secondary elements. Until the movement
began to disintegrate, the original People’s Party was primarily a
movement of the left. The first major instances of rightwing populism
would come in the 1930s – from the Catholic priest and radio host
Father Charles Coughlin – and then, in the 1960s, with George
Wallace’s presidential campaigns.
Wallace, the
Democratic governor of Alabama, helped to doom the New Deal majority
and lay the foundations for the Reagan realignment of 1980. He
created a new rightwing variety of populism – what the sociologist
Donald Warren called “middle American radicalism” – which would
migrate into the Republican party and become the basis of Donald
Trump’s challenge to Republican orthodoxy in 2016.
To populist
politician George Wallace campaigning in Boston, in 1968.
To populist
politician George Wallace, campaigning in Boston in 1968. Photograph:
AP
The New Deal had
rested on a tacit alliance between liberals and conservative southern
Democrats, the latter of which resisted any legislation that might
challenge white supremacy. As the party of Abraham Lincoln, the
Republicans had traditionally been receptive to black civil rights,
and the Republican leadership in Congress supported the Democratic
president Lyndon Johnson’s Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of
1964 and 1965. The Arizona Republican senator Barry Goldwater was an
early dissenter, but in the 1964 presidential election, Johnson
easily defeated him. Johnson’s victory did not, however, signal
widespread support for his civil rights initiatives, and after he
passed the Voting Rights Act and introduced legislation known as the
“War on Poverty”, a popular backlash grew. Wallace turned the
backlash into a populist crusade.
Wallace would
eventually make his name as an arch-segregationist, but he was
initially a populist Democrat for whom race was strictly a secondary
consideration. He initially ran for governor in 1958 as a New Deal
Democrat and lost against a candidate backed by the Ku Klux Klan.
After that, he pledged: “I will never be outniggered again.”
In 1962, Wallace ran
again and this time he won as a proponent of “segregation now,
segregation tomorrow, segregation forever”. In 1963, he gained
notoriety when he attempted to block two black students from
registering at the University of Alabama. In 1964, he ran in the
Democratic primaries in Wisconsin, Indiana and Maryland, winning
about a third of the vote – as high as 43% in Maryland, where he
carried 15 of 23 counties. In 1968, he ran as an independent against
the Republican Richard Nixon and the Democrat Hubert Humphrey. In
early October, Wallace was ahead of Humphrey in the polls – in the
end, he got 13.5% of the vote and carried five states in the south.
In 1972, he ran as a Democrat, and stood a chance of taking the
nomination when, in May, an assassin shot and crippled him while he
was campaigning for the Maryland primary.
Wallace emphasised
his opposition to racial integration, but he framed it as a defence
of the average (white) American against the tyranny of Washington
bureaucrats. Big government was imposing its will on the average
person. Appearing on Meet the Press in 1967, Wallace summed up his
candidacy:
There’s a backlash
against big government in this country. This is a movement of the
people … And I think that if the politicians get in the way, a lot
of them are going to get run over by this average man in the street –
this man in the textile mill, this man in the steel mill, this
barber, this beautician, the policeman on the beat … the little
businessman.
Wallace opposed
busing – the practice of assigning children to particular state
schools in order to redress racial segregation – because it was
breaking up working-class neighbourhoods, and he attacked the white
liberals who promoted it as hypocrites who refused to subject their
children to what they insisted that the children of less affluent
families must endure. “They are building a bridge over the Potomac
for all the white liberals fleeing to Virginia,” he declared.
Wallace was not,
however, a political conservative. On domestic issues that did not
directly touch on race, he ran as a New Deal Democrat. In his 1968
campaign brochure, he boasted that in Alabama, he had increased
spending on education, welfare, roads and agriculture.
In 1976, the Donald
Warren published a study of “middle American radicals” (MARs). On
the basis of extensive surveys conducted between 1971 and 72 and in
1975, Warren defined a distinct political group that was neither left
nor right, liberal nor conservative. MARs “feel the middle class
has been seriously neglected,” Warren wrote. They see “government
as favouring both the rich and poor simultaneously”.
Warren’s MARs held
conservative positions on poverty and racial issues. They rejected
busing and welfare agencies as examples of “the rich [giving] in to
the demands of the poor, and the middle-income people have to pay the
bill”. They disliked the national government, but they also thought
corporations “have too much power” and were “too big”. They
favoured many liberal programmes. They wanted government to guarantee
jobs to everyone. They supported price (but not wage) control,
Medicare, some kind of national health insurance, federal aid to
education and social security.
Warren found that
MARs represented about a quarter of the electorate. They were on
average more male than female; they had a high-school but not a
college education; their income fell in the middle, or slightly below
it; they had skilled or semi-skilled blue-collar occupations, or
clerical or sales jobs – and they were the most likely demographic
group to vote for George Wallace.
In other words,
Wallace’s base was among voters who saw themselves as middle class
– the American equivalent of “the people” – and who believed
themselves to be locked in conflict with those below and above.
Forty years later,
Trump portrays himself as an enemy of free trade treaties, runaway
shops, and illegal immigration and as the champion of the “silent
majority” – a term borrowed from Nixon – against the “special
interests” and the “establishment” of both parties. “The
silent majority is back, and it’s not silent. It’s aggressive,”
Trump declared last year. At rallies, his campaign has given out
signs that read: “The silent majority stands with Trump.”
In January, just
before the Iowa caucuses, Trump’s campaign ran a television
advertisement titled The Establishment. Seated behind a desk, Trump
looked into the camera and said: “The establishment, the media, the
special interest, the lobbyists, the donors, they’re all against
me. I’m self-funding my campaign. I don’t owe anybody anything. I
only owe it to the American people to do a great job. They are really
trying to stop me.”
This essay is
adapted from The Populist Explosion by John B Judis, published by
Columbia Global Reports. To order a copy, go to
bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846.
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