The Populist Explosion

How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics

John B. Judis

• Publisher: Columbia Global Reports
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780997126457
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

One of The New York Times' 6 Books to Help Understand Trump's Win A Fareed Zakaria GPS Book of the Week: "An intelligent guide to a phenomenon by no means over." - Fareed Zakaria, CNN "Well-written and well-researched, powerfully argued and perfectly timed." — The Economist Named one of the Best Books of 2016 by Bloomberg "Far and away the most incisive examination of the central development in contemporary politics: the rise of populism on both the right and the left. Superb." -- Thomas Edsall, New York Times columnistWhat's happening in global politics? As if overnight, many Democrats revolted and passionately backed a socialist named Bernie Sanders; the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union; the vituperative billionaire Donald Trump became the presidential nominee of the Republican party; and a slew of rebellious parties continued to win elections in Switzerland, Norway, Italy, Austria, and Greece.John B. Judis, one of America's most respected political analysts, tells us why we need to learn about the populist movement that began in the United States in the 1890s, the politics of which have recurred on both sides of the Atlantic ever since. Populism, on both the right and the left, champions the people against an establishment, based on issues--globalization, free trade, immigration--on which there has been a strong elite consensus, but also a strong mass discontent that is now breaking out into the open. The Populist Explosion is essential reading for our times as we grapple to understand the political forces at work here and in Europe.

The Logic of American Populism From the People’s Party to George Wallace

No one, not even Donald Trump, expected him to get the Republican presidential nomination in 2016. Similarly, no one, including Bernie Sanders, expected that up 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 saw him playing on racist opposition to Barack Obama’s presidency or exploiting a latent sympathy for fascism among downscale white Americans. Sanders’s success invited less speculation, but commentators tended to dismiss him as a utopian and to focus on the airy idealism of millennial voters. If that were not sufficient explanation for his success, they emphasized 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.

Populism is an American creation that spread later to Latin America and Europe. While strands of American populism go back to the Revolution and the Jacksonian War on the Bank of the United States, it really begins with the People’s Party of the 1890s, which set the precedent for movements that have popped up periodically. In the United States, in contrast to Europe, these campaigns have burst forth suddenly and unexpectedly. Usually short-lived, nevertheless they have had an outsized impact. While they seem unusual at the time, they are very much part of the American political fabric.

Two Kinds of Political Events

While the history of American politics is riven with conflicts—over slavery, prohibition, the trusts, tariffs, abortion, intervention abroad—it is also dominated for long stretches by an underlying consensus about government’s role in the economy and abroad. If that consensus doesn’t always unite the parties, it determines the ultimate outcome of political conflict. Thus, from 1935 to the 1970s, there were occasional debates about the virtues of a progressive income tax, but American policy reflected an underlying consensus in favor of it. Progressive taxation was itself part of a broader worldview sometimes described as New Deal liberalism. It had replaced a worldview that stressed a far more limited role for government in the economy.

The role of underlying worldviews is characteristic of politics in the United States and Europe, and of all countries that are governed primarily by consent rather than by force and terror. In Great Britain, for instance, laissez-faire capitalism, associated with Adam Smith’s invisible hand, prevailed for much of the nineteenth century, but after World War II it was superseded by Keynesian economics.

American politics is structured to sustain 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 center and to stay away from being branded as an “extremist.” American political history is littered with candidates who proved too extreme for the prevailing consensus of one or the other major parties—think of Fred Harris or Jesse Jackson among Democrats and Tom Tancredo or Pat Robertson among Republicans.

As a result of this two-party tilt toward the center, sharp political differences over underlying socioeconomic issues have tended to get blunted or even ignored, particularly in presidential elections. Campaigns are often fought over fleeting social issues such as temperance or abortion or subsidiary economic issues such as the minimum wage or the deficit. But there are times, when, in the face of dramatic changes in the society and 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 ignored. There are two kinds of such events.

The first are what political scientists call realigning elections. In these, a party or a presidential candidate’s challenge to the prevailing worldview causes an upheaval that reorders the existing coalitions and leads to a new majority party. Franklin Roosevelt’s campaigns in 1932 and, even more so, 1936 did this, and so did Ronald Reagan’s campaign in 1980. Such elections are rare. They are usually precipitated by economic depression or war, and by a succession of political outbursts that challenge, but do not replace, the prevailing worldview. In American politics, these outbursts often take the form of populist candidacies and movements.

These catalytic populists have defined politics in “us vs. them” terms—as struggles of the people against the establishment based on issues and demands that the latter had been sidestepping. The rise of the People’s Party was the first major salvo against the worldview of laissez-faire capitalism. Huey Long’s Share Our Wealth coincided with Franklin Roosevelt’s election in 1932 and helped drive the Roosevelt administration to develop a new politics to sustain its majority. Together, these movements established the populist framework that Bernie Sanders, who described himself both as a democratic socialist and as a progressive, would adopt during his 2016 campaign.

As liberal critics would point out during the 1950s, the People’s Party had within it strains of anti-Semitism, racism, and nativism, particularly toward the Chinese, 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 with Father Charles Coughlin, and then in the 1960s with George Wallace’s presidential campaigns. Wallace helped doom the New Deal majority and helped lay the basis for the Reagan realignment of 1980. He created a constituency and a rightwing variety of populism—what sociologist Donald Warren called “middle American radicalism”—that would migrate into the Republican Party and become the basis of Donald Trump’s challenge to Republican orthodoxy in 2016.

The People’s Party

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 to form the People’s Party that 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.

At the time the populists were meeting in Cincinnati, the leading Republicans and Democrats in the United States were reveling 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 government’s role should be minimal. Grover Cleveland, who was president from 1884 to 1888 and 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. Cleveland and his rivals quarreled over the tariff and whether the Democrats were the party of “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion,” but they agreed on the fundamental relationship between government and the economy.

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 percent of the land had become owned by banks.

The farm revolt began in the 1870s with the Farmer Alliances in the North and South. These were originally fraternal societies, modeled on the Masons, with secret handshakes that bonded the members together. The Southern Alliance began in Texas and spread eastward over the South. In the North, it began in New York, died out, and then was revived in the 1880s in the Plains states. The alliances organized cooperatives to try to control prices, which were increasingly set in distant markets, and they began to pressure legislators to regulate railroad rates. As they became more deeply involved in politics, they began to join forces with the Knights of Labor, the workingman’s organization that had been founded in 1869 and that by the early 1880s was the main labor group in the United States. In 1885, the Texas alliance declared in a resolution that it sought a “perfect unity of action” between itself and the Knights of Labor.

While the Grange, a farm advocacy group that started just after the Civil War, foreshadowed later interest groups like the National Farmers Union, the alliances saw themselves representing the “people,” including farmers and blue-collar workers, against the “money power” or “plutocracy.” That was reflected in their early programs, which included a demand for the incorporation and recognition of labor 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.” Daniel DeLeon, the head of what was then the country’s main socialist party, the Socialist Labor Party, criticized them as “bourgeois.”

Some of the alliance members backed the Greenback Party’s presidential slate in 1880 and 1884, but most sought to influence the dominant parties in their region. The Southern Alliance wanted to transform the Democratic Party, and the alliance in the Great Plains wanted to change the Republicans. In December 1889, the alliances began a series of meetings to develop a national program. Besides the demands on currency and land, the program now also included the nationalization of railroads, a graduated income tax, political reform (including the secret ballot and direct election of senators), and a “sub-treasury” plan that would allow farmers to borrow money from the federal government to store their crops until prices rose high enough for them to be profitable.

When the alliance pressured candidates from the Democrats and Republicans to endorse this platform, the demands proved to be too radical and far-reaching for the major parties. In the Plains, Republicans scorned the alliance proposals as utopian moralism. “The Decalogue and the golden rule have no place in a political campaign,” Kansas Republican Senator John J. Ingalls wrote. In the South, some Democratic statehouse candidates endorsed the alliance proposals, but once in office they rebuffed them. Alliance leaders concluded the Democrats and Republicans were in the grip of the plutocracy and that the populists would have to organize their own party. Kansas alliance members organized in 1890 a state People’s Party that did well in that year’s elections. Then in 1892, the alliances, along with the Knights of Labor and other groups, formed a national People’s Party and nominated James K. Weaver, a former Greenback Party presidential candidate, to run for president.

The party held its convention in February in St. Louis, where Minnesota populist Ignatius Donnelly penned a preamble to the platform that won widespread acclaim and became the group’s manifesto—what the populists called the nation’s “second Declaration of Independence.” Donnelly was a former Republican congressman and railroad lobbyist who in the mid-1870s had begun moving leftward and had won acclaim as an author and an orator. In the preamble, Donnelly charged that “the fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up the colossal fortunes of a few.” Government and the major parties were complicit in this theft. “We charge that the controlling influences dominating both these parties have permitted the existing dreadful conditions to develop without serious effort to prevent or restrain them,” Donnelly wrote.

Donnelly’s preamble echoed the themes of Jacksonian democracy. “We seek to restore the government of the Republic to the hands of ‘the plain people,’ with whose class it originated,” he wrote. But while the Jackson Democrats wanted to restore popular democracy by eliminating the role of government in the economy, Donnelly and the populists—in a challenge to the prevailing laissez-faire worldview—wanted government to actively combat economic injustice. “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.”

At the St. Louis convention, Donnelly’s platform was enthusiastically endorsed by Georgia’s Tom Watson, who had been elected to Congress in 1890 as a Democrat backing the alliance platform. “Never before in the history of the world was there arrayed at the ballot box the contending forces of Democracy and Plutocracy,” Watson declared. “Will you stand with the people . . . by the side of the other wealth producers of the nation . . . or will you stand facing them, and from the plutocratic ranks fire a ballot in support of the old parties and their policies of disorganization, despotism, and death?”

There was always a more conservative strain within the populist movement. In the South, some alliance members cooperated with the parallel Colored Farmers’ Alliance, but others did not, and racial issues often divided populists from the Plains and the South. Populists also favored the expulsion of Chinese immigrants, whom businesses had imported to provide cheap labor on western farms and railroads. That was understandable, but their support for exclusion was often colored by racist rhetoric. Kansas populist leader Mary E. Lease warned of a “tide of Mongols.” And Watson’s People’s Party Paper denounced the Chinese as “moral and social lepers.” But in the 1880s and early 1890s, populist politics was primarily directed upward at the plutocrats. As historian Robert McMath recounts, they were repeatedly accused of being “Molly Maguires, Anarchists, and Communists.”

In the 1892 election, the People’s Party did remarkably well. Their woefully underfunded presidential candidate received 8 percent of the vote and carried five states. Then in 1893, as Cleveland was taking office, an economic depression took hold, leaving a quarter of Americans unemployed and thousands of farmers bankrupt. Cleveland reaffirmed the gold standard, and to pleas for government aid from farmers, Cleveland’s Secretary of Agriculture, Julius Sterling Morton, responded, “The intelligent, practical, and successful farmer needs no aid from the government. The ignorant, impractical, and indolent farmer deserves none.”

In the 1894 election, the People’s Party’s candidates for the House of Representatives won 10 percent of the vote. The party elected 4 congressmen, 4 senators, 21 state executives, and 465 state legislators. With their base in the South and the West, and with Cleveland wildly unpopular, they looked to be on their way to challenging the Democrats as the second party, but the election of 1894 turned out to be the party’s swan song.

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 cooptation and, in response to the willingness of some populists to court the negro vote, vicious race-baiting. Watson said of the opposition to the People’s Party, “The argument against the independent political movement in the South may be boiled down ...