It is a commonplace of Trump theory to depict the forty-fifth president as utterly without precedent, a man whose every word is a falsehood and whose every move is a constitutional crisis. But as these gross betrayals of his base remind us, Trump is far more a culmination of long-term right-wing trends than he is a divergence from them. The ridiculous nickname his supporters applied to him in 2016, the “blue-collar billionaire,” summarized perfectly the Reagan-era idea that tycoons are regular guys just like workers. Trump’s war on the media is just an old melody from the Nixon era that he has chosen to play in a pounding fortissimo. Trump’s broad, careless bigotry is just a slightly more open expression of the prejudice that has tickled the right-wing mind ever since George Wallace. Trump’s fascination with tariffs—he is a “tariff man,” he announced in 2018—is merely a return to the habits of William McKinley, who was known as the “Napoleon of Protection.”
Nor is Steve Bannon’s populism much more genuine. Listen to this brassy, assertive man talk for more than a few minutes and you start to realize that there’s nothing beneath the surface froth. The whole right-wing populist revolt of 2016, you start to suspect, was little more than a clever conservative outreach program, an effort to gin up the fury of the disinherited without actually doing anything for them. Winning was not even necessarily Trump’s goal. He and his Republicans prevailed by accident, and by the most un-populist of means: by the Electoral College; by gerrymandering; by vote-suppressing.
And, once again, by the dazzling folly of the other side. In 2016, Trump defeated a better-funded and far more competent opponent, a Democrat who was advised by the best consultants in the business and behind whom the nation’s financial and cultural and media elites stood united. But in their revulsion against Trump’s ugly rhetoric, the Democrats committed an elementary mistake, dismissing the anti-elitist impulse itself because the man who was thought to embody it was so manifestly a blowhard.
What they failed to understand is what centrist Democrats have persistently failed to understand since the 1970s: technocratic competence isn’t enough, especially when that competence somehow never means improving the lives of working people. Just because the imbecile Trump denounced elites doesn’t mean those elites are a legitimate ruling class. Just because the hypocrite Trump pretended to care about deindustrialization doesn’t mean deindustrialization is of no concern. Just because the brute Trump mimicked the language of proletarian discontent doesn’t mean working people are “deplorables.”
8
Let Us Now Scold Uncouth Men
The long debate over populism that I have traced in this book has been, in part, a debate over image and rhetoric. But it has also been about something more solid: how liberals are to understand their relationship to the country they want to reform and the people they wish to lead. One liberal model—the elite paradigm—admires expertise and looks to highly educated professionals to make the right decisions on our behalf. The other—the populist model—looks to ordinary people as the ultimate repository of the democratic genius.
For many years, the Democratic Party followed the populist model; that’s what many of its leaders thought democracy was all about. But beginning in the 1970s, liberalism began to change. Over the course of countless intra-party debates, the Democrats came to think of themselves not as the voice of working-class people at all but as a sort of coming together of the learned and the virtuous.
They came to this understanding, ironically, at the historical moment when populism, as a generalized hostility to the establishment, was sweeping the country. From Madison Avenue to the classic rock radio station in your sad hometown, Americans were imagining themselves to be rebels against rules and tradition and authority. Even conservatives were posturing as insurgents. The only group that seemed to have trouble embracing this new mood was the Democratic Party.
And so we come at last to the shabby synthesis to which this book’s many competing strands have been leading us all along: As conservatives trumpeted their uprising, liberals turned against it all. They became anti-populists.
The dominant faction of the Democratic Party decided they wanted no part of any systematic criticism of big business or monopoly or the financial industry. They shied away from building or supporting mass movements. The idea of putting together a coalition of working-class people was one they came to regard with deep distaste.
Scorning ideology and passion, insisting that our problems were technical in nature—this was the shorthand version of what became the Democratic philosophy. The answer to the class-based onslaught of the Right, Democrats began to believe, was to surrender their own claims to the populist tradition and to get past ideology altogether.
When compared to the party’s record in the New Deal era, this was not a particularly successful electoral strategy. Until very recently, however, none of the party’s setbacks over the years caused their thought leaders to reconsider the decision to become the party of the white-collar elite. Instead they used what power they had to encourage investment banking and to secure trade agreements that were designed not to grow but to hollow out American industry. When challenged by constituents who found themselves on the receiving end of such policies, Democrats would roll out economists and political scientists to inform working people that what had happened to them was the consequence of inevitability, of economic progress itself.
“Populism” became a term of anathema for the party’s thinkers. In a celebrated book from 1992, the fledgling pundit Mickey Kaus advised Democrats to abandon their traditional concern for economic equality and to resist the people he called “Money Liberal populists”; Dems had to stop listening to labor unions, he said, and visibly sever their ties with the black “underclass.” Similar denunciations were a common thread in the publications of the Democratic Leadership Council, where you could see populists defined as those who “resist the changes stemming from a New Economy” and who longed pointlessly for “the glory days” when Americans had “stable jobs at big corporations.” 1
The “big corporations” line was an interesting twist, but the essence of the argument was the same as ever. Once again, populists were defined as people who foolishly refused the future, crying about their beloved toilers when everyone could see that the only ones that mattered were white-collar professionals—the “Learning Class,” to use the name co-invented for them by political scientist William Galston. What the innovative dynamism of the Learning Class represented, declared a 1998 manifesto co-authored by Galston, was the power of higher ed and the way that “millions of Americans are surging into the ranks of the upper middle class and wealthy.” Americans were getting smart, Americans were getting rich, and therefore the Democratic Party had to become the party of the smart and the rich, of the “better-educated upscale voters” who wanted private retirement accounts but weren’t so keen on public schools. 2
Post-ideological ideas like these soon became the common sense of the party’s dominant faction. Democrats had put the New Deal behind them and remade themselves as leaders for an age of innovation and flexibility, affluence and sophistication, investment bankers and tech billionaires. When their turn in power came in 2008, new-style Democratic leaders declined to break up Wall Street banks. They delivered a version of national health insurance that, amazingly, did not inconvenience Big Pharma or private insurance companies. Silicon Valley executives, radiating futurific exuberance, swarmed through the Barack Obama White House and its would-be successor organization, the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, helping usher the nation into a new golden age of cyber-transformation.
Right until the end, this post-ideological, Learning Class fantasy ambled high-mindedly along. A month before the 2016 election, President Obama hosted “South by South Lawn,” a White House–specific version of the famous Texas innovation festival. Under a perfect October sky, Hollywood stars rubbed elbows with climate scientists while audience members (chosen in a merit-based admissions process) gazed at colorful conceptual
art and heard about creative solutions for poverty and disease. The president expressed confidence, in that low-key way of his, that we would overcome global warming “because we happen to be the most innovative and dynamic business and entrepreneurial sector in the world.” It was consensus liberalism’s last moment of supreme self-assurance, and so unruffled was the performance that one journalistic fan was moved to dub Obama our “commander in cool.” 3
The Democratic presidential campaign, which expected to rotate Hillary Clinton smoothly into Obama’s office a few months after that golden afternoon, exemplified this air of unflappable complacency. If “affinity among the elites” was the ultimate objective of modern politics, as Edward Shils said back in 1956, the Democrats achieved a state of nirvana that fall. Clinton’s campaign not only promised consensus; it was itself an act of consensus, with seats at the table for representatives from Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and the national security apparatus. Every orthodoxy was included. For once the Democrat outraised and outspent her Republican rival. In the nation’s college towns and affluent, Learning Class suburbs she was acclaimed as the embodiment of inevitability.
Just as in 1936, “affinity among the elites” included professional economists, 370 of whom signed an open letter urging people not to vote for Donald Trump. It also included the press, with journalists taking Clinton’s side as a matter of Learning Class solidarity. In the newspaper endorsement race, she defeated Trump overwhelmingly, winning the editorial support of fifty-seven of the country’s largest papers to Trump’s two. Of the money donated by journalists to a presidential campaign, 96 percent of it went to Clinton. Nearly every media polling operation asserted that Clinton would win the election easily; in October 2016, the New York Times reported that Clinton was pushing her campaign into Republican states in order to enlarge her certain landslide over the racist Trump. 4
And then on November 8 the unthinkable happened. The blowhard billionaire managed to win much of the declining industrial Midwest and with it the presidency. Shocked by the disaster, white-collar America descended into a full-blown Democracy Scare similar to the ones I have described in this book. Once again populism was identified as the culprit; it was the evil political spirit that made Trump possible and that haunted the nightmares of the affluent. That Trump had not, in fact, won the popular vote didn’t slow this accelerating narrative; that his populism was a fraud was also unimportant: for the well-educated and the well-heeled, the old, familiar anti-populist tune became the inspirational anthem of the era.
* * *
LAWRENCE GOODWYN, THE great historian of mass democratic uprisings, once wrote that to build a movement like the People’s Party of the 1890s or the labor movement of the 1930s, one must “connect with people as they are in society , that is to say, in a state that sophisticated modern observers are inclined to regard as one of ‘inadequate consciousness.’ ” 5
Goodwyn also warned against a politics of “individual righteousness,” a tendency toward “celebrating the purity” of one’s so-called radicalism. If you wish to democratize the country’s economic structure, he argued, you must practice “ideological patience,” a suspension of moral judgment of ordinary Americans. 6 Only then can you start to build a movement that is hopeful and powerful and that changes society forever.
If you’re not interested in democratizing the country’s economic structure, however, individual righteousness might be just the thing for you. This model deals with ordinary citizens by judging and purging; by canceling and scolding. It’s not about building; it’s about purity, about stainless moral virtue. Its favorite math is subtraction; its most cherished rhetorical form is denunciation; its goal is to bring the corps of the righteous into a tight orbit around the most righteous one of all.
What swept over huge parts of American liberalism after the disaster of November 8, 2016, was the opposite of Goodwyn’s “ideological patience.” It was a paroxysm of scolding, a furor for informing Trump voters what inadequate and indeed rotten people they were. The elitist trend that had been building among liberals for decades hurried to its loud, carping consummation.
Where populism is optimistic about rank-and-file voters, the variety of liberalism I have in mind regards them with a combination of suspicion and disgust. It dreams not of organizing humanity but of policing it. It is a geyser of moral rebuke, erupting against teenagers who have committed some act of cultural appropriation, against the hiring of an actor for an inappropriate role, against a public speech by someone with unpopular views, against the wrongful dumping of household trash, against inappropriate tree-pruning techniques spotted in a nearby suburb. Its characteristic goal is not to get banks and monopolies under control, as populism typically does, but to set up a nonprofit, attract funding from banks and monopolies, and then … to scold the world for its sins.
The Populists used to dream of what they called a “Cooperative Commonwealth,” but today it’s a vindictive commonwealth that inspires the reformer, a utopia of scolding in which court is always in session and the righteous constantly hand down the harshest of judgments on their economic and moral inferiors.
* * *
WHY THE RULING class must continue to rule is always the great theme of Democracy Scares, voiced by eminent economist and newspaper editor alike. In our own time, even comedians have a role to play in the operation. In Defense of Elitism , a 2019 account of the Trump era by Time magazine humorist Joel Stein, describes the essential divide between liberals and Trump supporters like this: “Elites are people who think; populists are people who believe.” Populists are creatures of intuition and childlike impulse, people who think that facts “are indistinguishable from lies.” Elites accept the expertise of experts; populism, however, is little more than “a primal scream for primordial masculinity.” Just as in 1896, populism is supposed to represent the appetites and vulgar urges of the body, in revolt against the higher faculties of thought and reason. 7
The idea of ordinary people having a say in matters of state is strictly a joke. In a precise replay of conservative humorists of 1896, the liberal humorist of 2019 laughs off the suggestion that farmers be represented on the sophisticated body that decides U.S. monetary policy: “Imagine if farmers” were involved in such decisions, Joel Stein guffaws, “trying to figure out how to establish central bank liquidity swap lines during a financial crisis.” What our age urgently requires, he announces, is the opposite of that: a wide-ranging acknowledgment that elites are legitimate; that meritocracy is fair; that domination is rightful when the dominant group is made up of people who, like Stein and his friends, went to name-brand colleges. If ordinary people want things to change, I suppose, they must implore the brainy to change them. After all, democracy is, as he puts it, “a government of the nerds, by the nerds, and for the nerds.” 8
What is especially disheartening about this “defense of elitism” is the author’s apparent unfamiliarity with liberalism’s non-elitist past, of a time when liberalism was an expression of the democratic hopes of ordinary people. Disheartening … and yet utterly typical of the resistance culture of our time, where more and more one notices a frank acknowledgment of liberalism as the politics of a highly educated upper class. 9 After all, as Hillary Clinton herself put it a year after the election was over, “I won the places that represent two-thirds of America’s gross domestic product … the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward.”
What is missing from this vision of exuberant, future-minded liberalism is labor, the driving force of so many reform movements since the 1890s.
* * *
ONE STORY OF the Trump years that sticks with me was related to me by a high school student who went to a discussion of political issues with a group of progressive teenagers in an affluent part of the Washington, D.C., metro area. The group’s leader went around the room asking the students what issues they considered significant and then getting a show of hands on the importance of each one. Racism was mentioned, and sexism,
and LGBTQ issues, and gun control, and the environment. The student raised her hand and said, “Labor.” It was, she told me, the only suggestion that drew no support at all.
That’s a brief incident in a tiny corner of this country, and yet it brings us to a revealing political fact of our time: the disappearance of class from the mainstream liberal agenda. All genuine populist movements have aimed to bring working people together across barriers of race, religion, and ethnicity in order to reform capitalism. This is what defines the species; indeed, this has been one of the traditional objectives of left-wing movements since the nineteenth century.
The prophets of reproach who make up the modern Left aren’t particularly interested in that, however. And once you start looking for this erasure—for this peculiar lacuna in the worldview of a certain type of liberal—you notice it everywhere. Social class is the glaring, zillion-watt absence, for example, in those anti-Trump yard signs that have become so popular in nice suburban neighborhoods and that strain for inclusiveness—
In this house, we believe:
Black lives matter
Women’s rights are human rights
No human is illegal
Science is real
Love is love
And kindness is everything
—but that say nothing about the right to organize or to earn a living wage.
Cataloging the history of American protest or disobedience has become something of a cultural set piece of the Trump era, only with one branch of that history always conspicuously left out. 10 Charles Blow, a solidly anti-Trump columnist for the New York Times , spent much of 2017 and ’18 remembering different forms of historical resistance that modern-day liberals might look to for inspiration but almost never mentioned labor unions or strikes. He name-checked Selma, Stonewall, ACT UP, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and the 2016 protests at Standing Rock—but largely failed to notice the one form of resistance that is an ordinary element of economic life, that happens in cities and towns across America all the time. 11
The People, No Page 20