* * *
WHAT MAKES POPULISM truly dangerous, our modern-day anti-populist experts concur, is that it refuses to acknowledge the hierarchy of meritocratic achievement. In its deep regard for the wisdom of the common person, it rejects more qualified leaders … which is to say, it rejects them, the expert class.
The election of Trump, with its implicit rebuff of the Ivy League approach of the Obama years, inflated this particular fear into a kind of national nightmare. A man of remarkable ignorance about our system of government had been placed in charge of that system. A cartoon in the New Yorker captured the absurdity with a scene of airline passengers in a populist mutiny of their own: “These smug pilots have lost touch with regular passengers like us,” bellows one of them. “Who thinks I should fly the plane?”
“If the elites go down, we’re all in trouble,” warned a 2017 headline in the Boston Globe . David Brooks informed readers of the New York Times that “populism” is the word we use to describe the hatred of “excellence” by the mediocre. Tom Nichols, a professor at the Naval War College, announced in Foreign Affairs that “America lost faith in expertise” due to a psychological syndrome in which stupid people are unaware of their own limitations while fine, scholarly people are peer-reviewed and know how to avoid confirmation bias. For good measure, he equated populism with “the celebration of ignorance.” 39
Understanding recent history as a showdown between peer-reviewed expertise and mass ignorance is at the core of the anti-populist tradition. “Voters are very ignorant, and always have been,” write the political scientists Jonathan Rauch and Benjamin Wittes in a 2017 paper, “More Professionalism, Less Populism.” Therefore, the two argue, the populist goal of increasing public participation is inherently wrongheaded; experts are the ones we should be empowering. “Like it or not,” the two experts write, “most of what government does simply must be decided by specialists and professionals.” Quoting one of their professional peers, they conclude that we must have a “new professional class to set the agenda.” 40
This is the recurring nightmare we will encounter throughout this book: the horror of populist anti-intellectualism. In its hyper-democratic folly, experts agree, populism believes that one person’s ideas are just as good as another’s, and hence it refuses to recognize learning or accomplishment. As a British politician put it just before the Brexit vote: “People in this country have had enough of experts.”
Populism is the mob running wild in the streets of Washington, bellowing for beer and cheap gasoline. Meritocracy, meanwhile, is populism’s diametric opposite: the mind that must rule the corpulent political body of America. Meritocracy is rule by well-graduated people who have dutifully climbed every ladder, rung every bell, and been rewarded for their excellence with their present high stations. Yes, meritocracy is an elitist system. But the only alternative to it is to place the fragile bureaucracy of, say, the State Department in the hands of a blundering dunce who can’t find Pakistan on a map.
This harkens back to one of the essential philosophical problems of democracy: that the people will always be too ignorant to rule themselves. It’s a question that vexed Jefferson and Madison, and now it vexes us, under the name of populism.
But does this archetypal dilemma really describe the Populist ideal? Was 1890s Populism a “celebration of ignorance” or a species of human stupidity?
No. The real problem with Populism—with all genuine populisms over the years—was the opposite: that ordinary people had come to understand their interests all too well and were now acting upon that knowledge.
Populism was a movement of books and newspapers, of reformers who believed in what the historian Postel calls “progress through education” with the earnest faith of the nineteenth-century uplifter. Think of the vast encampments of rural families listening to lecturers from the Farmers’ Alliance, or of the lending libraries the Alliance set up all over the place, or of the universities that leading Populists helped to establish. 41 There were Populist newspapers, hundreds of them, started in order to contest the mainstream media of the day and to spread the gospel of reform. In their pages the reader would find cheap left-wing books for sale; the editor of the famous Appeal to Reason newspaper, for example, dispensed political tracts under the headline, “Books Laboring People Should Read: To Remain Ignorant Is to Remain a Slave.” 42
But neither did Populism call for rule by experts. Populism was about mass enlightenment, not the empowerment of a clique of foundation favorites or Ivy League grads. On the money question, Charles Postel tells us, the Pops thought it “could and must be understood by the people whose business interests and livelihoods were affected by it.” Experts were regarded as helpful guides to the issue. But the Populists also understood that, in a democracy, ordinary working-class people were the ones who had to make the decisions, and so they educated themselves and prepared to “wrest the levers of monetary power from the corporate elite.” 43
In short, Populists both loved knowledge and rejected professional elites. The reason was because the economic establishment of that age of crisis was overwhelmingly concerned with serving business, not the people. The Populists mistrusted professional elites, in other words, because from their perspective those elites had failed.
A good illustration of what I am describing can be found in the 1895 pamphlet What Is Populism? , in which the author recounts all the different measures urged by “the financial doctors” upon “the plain people” as cures for their distress. Farmers and the government, we are told, followed the advice of these physicians, and “our illness continued and our suffering increased.” In response, professional economists prescribed different, even sharper rounds of austerity, and still the economic disaster of the 1890s mounted.
“Let me tell you a secret,” the Populist author confides. “The people have lost confidence in the professional skill of these physicians; they are reading up their own case; they reason that … a wrong financial policy must be the cause of financial distress; that a reversal of that wrong financial policy is the only rational and certain remedy.” 44
Does losing faith in professional economics mean that “the people” rejected learning across the board? Does it mean they celebrated ignorance? No: the author of What Is Populism? was in fact a professor of mathematics at Willamette University in Oregon. What he was criticizing was what we might call expert failure. The problem was not knowledge, it was orthodoxy: “financial doctors” who trusted blindly in the gold standard and in one another.
Proving that the experts had failed was a favorite set piece among reformers of the period. They loved to imagine leading financiers and academics—the stuffed-shirt, consensus crowd of their day—laid low by the steel-trap reasoning of some ordinary person. The outstanding example of this device is Coin’s Financial School , William Harvey’s best seller of 1894, in which bankers, economists, and newspapermen are humiliated by the overwhelming logic of a small boy who somehow happens to be an expert on free silver.
In the course of his story, Harvey mocks the mental processes of his exalted antagonists, depicting the minds of businessmen as tools of leading financiers. “On all such questions as a National finance policy their ‘thinkers’ run automatically,” repeating whatever they have heard some banker say. And yet, as with other favorite Populist documents, Coin’s Financial School was packed with tables and numbers: its point was not to discredit learning but to challenge conventional wisdom—to encourage people to figure out their predicament for themselves.
Mass enlightenment largely disappeared from the reform tradition in the decades after Populism was defeated. Instead of “self-education and self-mobilization,” Postel reminds us, “the initiative passed to expert women and men, with professional training and administrative posts.” 45
And so it is today. Liberalism as we know it now is a movement led by prosperous, highly educated professionals who see government by prosperous, highly educated professionals as the highest goal of prote
st and political action. Where once it was democratic, liberalism is today a politics of an elite.
What makes this particularly poignant is that we are living through a period of elite failure every bit as spectacular as that of the 1890s. I refer not merely to the opioid crisis, the bank bailouts, and the failure to prosecute any bankers after their last fraud-frenzy; but also to disastrous trade agreements, stupid wars, and deindustrialization … basically, to the whole grand policy vision of the last few decades, as it has been imagined by a tiny clique of norm-worshipping D.C. professionals and think-tankers.
In this moment of maximum populist possibility, our commentariat proceeds as though the true populist alternative is simply invisible or impossible. You can either have meritocracy or you can have Trumpism. Those are the choices, the punditburo proclaims: You must either be ruled by gracious, enlightened experts or by racist, authoritarian dunces. Between them there is no middle ground and no possible alternative.
2
“Because Right Is Right and God Is God”
One thing we know for sure about the Democracy Scare—the global revulsion against populism—is that it is a contemporary mode of thinking, as up-to-date as this morning’s Twitter feed. How can it be otherwise? The horrors of populism only really registered in the pundit consciousness after the disastrous elections of 2016 delivered Brexit to the U.K. and Trump to the White House.
The argument of this book, however, is that anti-populism is in fact an old and surprisingly persistent habit of mind. No matter the guise or cast in which populism appears, each new generation of outraged critics thinks to describe it using the same stereotypes and the same images, as though they were reading from some long-lost script, lightly modified for current conditions.
We catch our first glimpse of the durable script to which the American elite persistently reverts when we look at the effort by elites of the 1890s to defeat the reform movement of the period. Today we absorb our anti-populism from TV and social media, but the genre itself is a living fossil, a nineteenth-century smear campaign that is somehow still going.
* * *
LET US SET the stage. In the later decades of that century, the wealthy and the well-educated and the high-born—and they were all pretty much one group back then—saw their way of life come under threat by rising working-class movements: by strikes and boycotts; by anarchists and trade unionists. The fear of class war haunted the journalism and literature of the period; in the minds of the elite it was an ever-present peril.
The apocalypse seemed more imminent than ever as the U.S. economy sank into depression in the 1890s, as industrial conflict subsumed Chicago, and as the burgeoning Populist movement made its demands for currency reform and railroad nationalization. The country’s respectables had laughed at Populism earlier in the decade, regarding it as a sideshow. Forced eventually to take it seriously, they came to see it instead as a sort of social earthquake, a peasant uprising right out of the French Revolution.
“The present assault on capital is but the beginning,” moaned Supreme Court justice Stephen J. Field in 1895 as he struck down an early income-tax law, which had been pushed through Congress by Populists and reform-minded Democrats. “It will be but the stepping-stone to others, larger and more sweeping, till our political contests will become a war of the poor against the rich—a war constantly growing in intensity and bitterness.”
Field had the aggressor and the victim mixed up, but the class war was most definitely on. At the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1896, working-class unrest appeared to triumph with the surprise nomination of a young former congressman from Nebraska, William Jennings Bryan, who had won the honor on the strength of his oratory against the gold standard.
To the establishment, there could be no doubt about what Bryan signified. One of the nation’s main political parties had been captured by radicalism, and the shock was as great as that of a stock market crash. In the years before 1896, the differences between Democrats and Republicans on economic questions had been small; the two parties orbited each other in a tight system of limited government, gold-backed money, and friendliness toward big business. Bryan’s nomination was the break that marked the system’s collapse. The candidate himself was refreshingly direct about this. “We are fighting in the defense of our homes, our families, and posterity,” he said in his sensational speech to the Chicago convention. “We have petitioned, and our petitions have been scorned; we have entreated, and our entreaties have been disregarded; we have begged, and they have mocked when our calamity came.”
We beg no longer; we entreat no more; we petition no more. We defy them.
The Nebraskan then proceeded to draw the distinction between the old philosophy and the new. “There are those who believe that, if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through on those below.” But he proposed an alternative: “if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up through every class which rests upon them.”
Bryan’s chances appeared excellent in that summer of 1896, as he set off on a whistle-stop tour of America. The youngest major-party presidential candidate ever, Bryan seemed at first to be a man of destiny. His life story paralleled Lincoln’s; his personal morality was without blemish; his oratorical ability was astonishing. To many ordinary people in the West and the South he was clearly the man of the hour, the answer to what ailed the depressed country. They became intoxicated with the pious Nebraska teetotaler.
But thanks to his attacks on gold and the wealthy, Bryan had virtually no funding and could afford none of the usual campaign accoutrements. For much of that year, the campaign consisted almost entirely of the Democratic presidential candidate riding around the country in a day coach, often carrying his own suitcases. 1
Hard times was the inescapable campaign issue of 1896, but the way the candidates addressed it was via the proxy issue of the currency. Democrats and Populists blamed the country’s deflationary gold standard for the unhappy fate of its farmers. William McKinley and the Republicans, meanwhile, saw gold as the rightful ingredient of “sound money” or “an honest dollar”; it was the metal of integrity.
Our concern in this chapter is with the latter group—the people who spoke for the economic consensus of the day. These men believed the gold standard to be the central pillar of civilization itself, and regarded the threat to dismantle it as a deadly peril. They may have been wrong on this issue and on many of the others as well, but nevertheless they prevailed. They contrived to crush Bryan’s challenge and, in so doing, to build a lasting stereotype of reform-as-folly. The word with which they expressed that stereotype: Populism.
* * *
LET US OPEN a copy of Judge magazine for August 8, 1896, to get a glimpse of how respectable Americans the regarded the Populist threat. Judge was one of the premier humor magazines of the era, with several large, beautifully drawn political cartoons in each issue. The rest of its pages typically featured grotesque caricatures of blacks, Irish, Jews, immigrants, and farmers. Between the jokes at the expense of these subordinate people, you could also catch glimpses of the demographic for whose amusement the chuckles were collected: refined upper-class whites, people of manners and education and bank accounts, saying witty things about the burden of good taste. For them the magazine ran ads promoting Veuve Clicquot champagne and Golden Sceptre pipe tobacco; for them there was Prudential life insurance and high white collars.
With this particular 1896 issue of Judge , however, something has happened: the usual tone of genial amusement has given way to panic. At the magazine’s center is a foldout illustration of stark American disaster, brought on by a gigantic figure labeled “Populism.” This colossus is rustic and tattered but we are not meant to laugh at him: he glares with predatory eyes, he is armed with a brace of pistols and knives, he wears a French Revolution liberty cap marked “anarchy,” he wields the torch of “ruin,” and he towers terrifyingly over his fellow American
s. Before this monster flee the sort of tidy white people who made up Judge magazine’s demographic: “Banker,” “Capitalist,” “Honest Citizen,” “Respectable Democrat.” One of them cowers on the ground beneath Populism’s onslaught; another clutches his head in disbelief. “Has It Come to This!” blubbers the caption.
This was the Democracy Scare, 1896 version: our system was coming unraveled, with society’s worst elements lining up against its best. Similarly frightful images appeared that year wherever people were dignified and accomplished together, always annotated with hysteria and hyperbole. Populism didn’t merely threaten “norms”; it was bringing the country face-to-face with “anarchy” and “repudiation.” *
On July 10, the New York Sun declared that the Democratic Party had been given over to “Jefferson’s diametric opposite, the Socialist, or Communist, or, as he is now known here, the Populist.” A few columns over from this pronouncement the reader was invited to savor this bit of doggerel, supposedly the chant of the radicalized Democratic Party:
Pile the load on plutocrats’ backs, sock it to ’em with the income tax. Of goldbug law we make a sport; when the time comes we’ll pack the court. On with the programme without a hitch: skin the East and skin the rich. Lift the heart and lift the fist; swear to be an Anarchist. Our creed is ruin, our flag is red. On, brother Anarchists, and raise NED . 2
This was the horror of democracy, live and in your face. A lead editorial that ran in the Sun a few days thereafter declared that there really was no Democratic candidate that year. Instead, “there are Populist-Anarchist candidates nominated on a Populistic-Anarchist platform.” Similarly, in a pamphlet distributed by the Republican Party that fall, the novelist and statesman John Hay claimed that the Democrats no longer really existed: “The enemy which confronts us is the Populist party,” which had swallowed the Democrats “as a python might swallow an ox.” 3
The People, No Page 5