For whom does America exist? Its billionaires? Its celebrities? Its tech companies? Are we the people just a laboring, sweating instrument for the bonanza paydays of our betters? Are we just glorified security guards, obeying orders to protect their holdings? Are we nothing more than a vast test market to be tracked and probed and hopefully sold on airline tickets, fast food, or Hollywood movies featuring some awesome new animation technology?
Or is it the other way around—are they supposed to serve us?
Let us resolve to ask that far-reaching question again: For whom does America exist? This time around, there can be only one possible answer.
1896: The people are a “great beast,” someone once supposedly said, and here is that beast in the flesh, advancing murderously in a French revolution liberty cap while the respectable tremble before him. His name is “Populism,” and he has “Capital” on the run.
The noble lady Miss Gold Standard and her escort William McKinley are menaced by the down-and-outers of “Populist Alley.” Good thing the cops are here to make sure the lower orders know their place.
The horror of reform: This time the noble lady didn’t escape. William Jennings Bryan as a ragged, immigrant, anarchist “assassin.” An extreme case of antipopulist xenophobia.
The horror of reform, continued: What could be worse than an anarchist assassin? How about Satan?
1936: The circumstantial evidence is overwhelming. Naughty Franklin Roosevelt has been dallying with the Russians. Now he is going to get a spanking.
The beast is back, bearing Russian Revolution symbols this time, advancing to the polls with a cartload of sinister-looking New Dealers trailing behind.
Election Day 1936 and authoritarianism is at hand as sunny Franklin Roosevelt urges poor Uncle Sam to his doom.
2016: The beast returns.
2016: “Team Crazy Wins the Sane State” reads the headline in The Daily Beast . Pitchforks, torches, and “populist protest candidacies” can be seen on both sides now.
2017: The menace of “populism” appears in The New York Times . The mob loves the passionate demagogue; they have left responsible, fact-based politicians sad and forlorn.
The folly of democracy, 2017. Governing must be left to professionals.
NOTES
INTRODUCTION: THE CURE FOR THE COMMON MAN
1. As far as I can tell, the term “Democracy Scare” was first used by Noam Chomsky in 1998 to describe the U.S. reaction to events in Haiti and Central America. See Chomsky, “Power in the Global Arena,” New Left Review, July/August 1998, p. 8. Jonathan Rauch: “How American Politics Went Insane,” Atlantic , July/August 2016.
2. The report was signed by Kenneth Roth, the organization’s executive director. Read it at https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2017/country-chapters/dangerous-rise-of-populism .
3. Barry Eichengreen, The Populist Temptation: Economic Grievance and Political Reaction in the Modern Era (Oxford University Press, 2018), p. x.
4. Jan-Werner Müller, What Is Populism? (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), pp. 36, 77, 81.
5. Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, Cultural Backlash and the Rise of Populism: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism (Cambridge University Press, 2019), p. 5.
6. “Asking everyone to vote is like asking everyone to litter,” Brennan writes. He calls his alternative system an “epistocracy,” or “rule of the knowers.” He suggests a number of ways such a system might be constructed, some more subtle than others, but always with the ideal of getting voters to reflect professional academic economics and/or political science. See Jason Brennan, Against Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2016), chapter 8. The “dance of the dunces” comes up on p. viii.
7. “Because of the intimate relevance that populist themes have for intellectuals,” wrote Margaret Canovan in 1981, “scholarly interpretations of populism have often been controversial to the point where one can hardly recognize the same movement in different accounts.” Their understanding of populism has “been deeply influenced by the fears of some intellectuals who have dreaded the grass roots and the appalling things that might crawl out of them, and by the idealism of others who have exalted the common man and his simple virtues.” Canovan, Populism (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), p. 11.
8. It is generally agreed that the individual who actually made up the word was one David Overmyer, a Kansas Democratic politician, who happened to be on the Topeka train and who had some familiarity with Latin. Overmyer suggested it in the course of a conversation with one or more People’s Party leaders. It was immediately accepted and it quickly took off.
Accounts of the word’s invention are not entirely consistent. The version of the story I am relying on here comes from Robert C. McMath, American Populism: A Social History, 1877–1898 (Hill & Wang, 1993), p. 146. A slightly different version appears in an article by W. P. Harrington called “The Populist Party in Kansas” in the 1925 volume of Collections of the Kansas State Historical Society , p. 418.
A detailed telling of the story appeared in the Kansas City Times in 1936. This account doesn’t mention the Cincinnati gathering but gives the names of the five individuals who were privy to the conversation on the train: Overmyer, the Democrat; one Populist; one Republican; and two reporters, one of whom was still alive in 1936 to provide the details.
“It is seldom that a popular pseudonym sticks so well that many believe it to be the real name,” the paper recalled. “That is exactly what happened in one of the tremendous political upheavals in the United States. There are probably a great many people who called themselves Populists in the early ’90s who do not to this day know that Populist was never the real or official name for the party.”
Cecil Howes, “Group of Kansans Traveling Together Gave the Populists Their Title,” Kansas City Times , February 4, 1936 (clipping in the collections of the Kansas State Historical Society).
Interestingly, the Kansas City Times story also reports that Tom Watson, the once-idealistic Georgia politician whose later career as a vicious racist cemented Populism’s association with bigotry in the public mind, disliked the word. He reportedly wanted the new party’s adherents to be called “Populites.”
9. The American Nonconformist and Kansas Industrial Liberator , to give its full name, was written, edited, and published by Henry and Leo Vincent, sons of an abolitionist from Iowa named James Vincent. The brothers advocated various other pro-labor causes in the course of their long careers, thus providing a link between the abolitionist tradition and Populism and the twentieth-century radicalism that lay ahead.
There is no way to know with finality whether this was the very first use of the word in print, although it was the earliest instance I was able to find. The Kansas City Star , which is thought to have been a pioneer on the subject, actually got the word wrong when introducing it. In an item published on July 1, 1891, the paper declared that “the Rank and File of the People’s Party” were to be called “Publicists.”
10. All of these quotations are from the American Nonconformist for May 28, 1891, the same issue that announced the coining of the word “Populist.” Yes, emphasis in original.
11. For example, see the Emporia Daily Republican , June 22, 1891, p. 2. After laughing at the reformers’ new word, a neighboring Republican paper sneered: “When the calamity howlers cry that the rich are growing richer and the poor poorer, don’t you believe it. The great men of the nation were poor boys and the future great men are poor boys now.” Chase County (Kansas) Republican , June 25, 1891.
12. “The Third Party,” Kansas City Star , May 21, 1891, p. 4.
13. “Third Party!,” Topeka Daily Capital , May 19, 1891, p. 1.
14. Neville’s speech came to my attention via Gene Clanton’s book Populism: The Humane Preference in America, 1890–1900 (Twayne, 1991). It can be found in the Congressional R
ecord , 56th Congress, 1st Session, Volume XXXIII, p. 1589.
15. I am relying for my description on the famous essay by Jack Walker, “A Critique of the Elitist Theory of Democracy,” American Political Science Review 60, no. 2 (June 1966): 285–95.
16. The example presented by William Galston in Anti-Pluralism is perhaps most egregious. The crumbling of the American dream over the last few decades, the political scientist tells us, was simply the result of impersonal forces, of “globalization” and “technological change” adjusting “the balance between labor and capital, setting in motion the slow erosion of the postwar middle class” (Anti-Pluralism: The Populist Threat to Liberal Democracy [Yale University Press, 2018], p. 84). Shit happens, you might say. Galston acknowledges that things did get a little hairy during the Great Recession, which leads him to pen this remarkable, passive-voice excuse for the failures of the Bush and Obama administrations: “established parties and institutions found it difficult to respond to rising public discontent.”
1. WHAT WAS POPULISM?
1. John D. Hicks, The Populist Revolt: A History of the Farmers’ Alliance and the People’s Party (University of Nebraska Press, 1959 [1931]), pp. 56–57. On the price of corn in 1890 see The Annals of Kansas: 1886–1925 , vol. 1, ed. Daniel W. Wilder (Kansas State Historical Society, 1954–56), p. 92.
2. Hicks, The Populist Revolt , p. 130; Charles Postel, The Populist Vision (Oxford University Press, 2007), chapter 2.
3. The quotation is from Elizabeth Higgins, Out of the West (Harper & Brothers, 1902), pp. 133, 136. As quoted in Hicks, The Populist Revolt , p. 132.
4. This is a quotation from the Omaha Platform of the People’s Party, approved July 4, 1892, as reprinted in Hicks, p. 440.
5. Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America (Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 33.
6. Roscoe C. Martin, The People’s Party in Texas: A Study in Third Party Politics (University of Texas, 1933), quoted in C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 (Louisiana State University Press, 1951), p. 274.
7. British Labour Party: According to the historian Chester McArthur Destler, the remarkable effort to bring the squabbling labor unions of Illinois together under the Populist banner in 1894 involved writing a state platform that imitated the “political program of British labor.” Chester McArthur Destler, American Radicalism, 1865–1901 (Quadrangle, 1966 [1946]), p. 176. Australian Labor Party: David McKnight, Populism Now!: The Case for Progressive Populism (Newsouth, 2018), p. 15.
8. 1891: From a statement issued by the Kansas People’s Party in 1891 and quoted in Hicks, p. 221. T. C. Jory, What Is Populism? (Ross E. Moores & Co., 1895).
9. The Populists made a bid for the votes of urban, industrial America that year, bringing together Chicago’s squabbling labor unions under the People’s Party banner for a local electoral campaign. But the strategy didn’t work. Despite impressive public displays of solidarity, including a rally featuring Debs, his lawyer Clarence Darrow, and the old-time abolitionist Lyman Trumbull, the Populist-Labor coalition fizzled at the polls. See Destler, American Radicalism , chapters 8 and 9.
10. Postel, The Populist Vision , pp. 271–75.
11. “The Populist Contribution” is the final chapter of John D. Hicks’s 1931 book, The Populist Revolt .
12. Parrington, The Beginnings of Critical Realism in America , vol. 3 of Main Currents in American Thought (Harcourt Brace, 1930), p. xxiv.
13. “Threat to liberal”: This is, again, a quotation from the “About” page of the Stanford Global Populisms Project. “Almost inherently antidemocratic”: Anna Grzymala-Busse, director of the Global Populisms Project, on a Stanford radio program on June 30, 2018, available at https://soundcloud.com/user-458541487/the-future-of-populism-political-movements-w-guest-anna-grzymala-busse . “All people of goodwill”: Max Boot, a columnist for the Washington Post , in his 2018 book, The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right (Liveright, 2018), p. 212.
14. Obama, “The Way Ahead,” The Economist , October 8, 2016.
15. The Populists’ attitude toward progress is the subject of Charles Postel’s important 2008 study of Populism, The Populist Vision . For an example of Populist optimism, see the 1893 inaugural address of Kansas governor Lorenzo Lewelling, in which he hails “the dawn of a new era in which the people shall reign.” The speech is reprinted in Norman Pollack, ed., The Populist Mind (Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), pp. 51–54.
16. Niall Ferguson, “Populism: Content and Form,” a paper dated October 31, 2017, and presented at the Stanford “Global Populisms” conference (quoted with permission). Ferguson explicitly states that he is describing populism of the “late nineteenth century.” Ferguson has made the same argument in other venues, such as a 2016 issue of Horizons , a magazine published by the Center for International Relations and Sustainable Development. William Galston, Anti-Pluralism: The Populist Threat to Liberal Democracy (Yale University Press, 2018), p. 126.
17. The remarks about the “existing heavy tariff tax” appeared in the Ocala Demands, approved by the Farmers’ Alliance in December 1890 and reprinted in Hicks, The Populist Revolt , appendix B. The railroad to the Texas coast is described in R. Alton Lee, “The Populist Dream of a ‘Wrong Way’ Transcontinental,” Kansas History , Summer 2012. Here is how the historian C. Vann Woodward describes the southern farmer’s attitude toward the protective tariff on page 186 of Origins of the New South :
“Everywhere it was the pattern for poverty. As a producer and seller the farmer was subject to all the penalties of free trade, while as a consumer he was deprived of virtually all its benefits. It did not soften his resentment to reflect that out of his meager returns was extracted the tribute that built up the monopolies he hated.”
18. The quotation is from Eichengreen, The Populist Temptation , p. 2. See also Mounk, pp. 63–66.
19. Frank Basil Tracy, “Rise and Doom of the Populist Party,” The Forum 16, no. 2 (1893), p. 246.
20. Populists “weaken” democracies: See Levitsky’s paper “Populism and Competitive Authoritarianism,” which he presented at the Stanford “Global Populisms” conference (quoted with permission). “When populists win”: This is from Levitsky’s best-selling 2018 book, How Democracies Die , which he co-authored with Daniel Ziblatt, p. 22. In the latter we read: “What kind of candidates tend to test positive on a litmus test for authoritarianism? Very often, populist outsiders do.… Populists tend to deny the legitimacy of established parties, attacking them as undemocratic and even unpatriotic. They tell voters that the existing system is not really a democracy but instead has been hijacked, corrupted, or rigged by the elite. And they promise to bury that elite and return power to ‘the people’ ” (p. 22). See also Levitsky and James Loxton, “Populism and Competitive Authoritarianism in the Andes,” Democratization, 20:1 (2013).
21. Cf. Seymour M. Lipset’s famous 1959 paper, “Democracy and Working-Class Authoritarianism,” which was included in his book Political Man and which I discuss further in chapter 5.
22. “Brutal demonstrations of machine politics”: I am following the vivid description of Matthew Josephson, The Politicos: 1865–1896 (Harcourt, Brace, 1938), chapter 19. Josephson estimates twenty or thirty to one on page 706. When we compare electoral price tags as a percentage of gross domestic product rather than in dollar amounts (even adjusted for inflation), it becomes apparent that the 1896 campaign absorbed a greater share of the country’s net worth than any other, before or since. See Matthew O’Brien, “The Most Expensive Election Ever … 1896?,” Atlantic , November 6, 2012, https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/11/the-most-expensive-election-ever-1896/264649/ .
23. Niall Ferguson tells us that “populism is a backlash against multiculturalism.” �
��When populists invoke the people,” writes Yascha Mounk, “they are positing an in-group—united around a shared ethnicity, religion, social class, or political conviction—against an out-group whose interests can rightfully be disregarded.” The economist Eichengreen insists that “the hostility of populist politicians to not just concentrated economic power but also immigrants and racial and religious minorities is intrinsic to the movement.” For a comprehensive summary of this viewpoint, see Uri Friedman, “What Is a Populist?,” Atlantic , February 27, 2017.
24. C. Vann Woodward, Thinking Back: The Perils of Writing History (Louisiana State University Press, 1986), p. 31.
25. Woodward, Origins of the New South, pp. 244, 252. This narrative was to become one of the themes of Woodward’s career as a historian.
26. Ibid., p. 249.
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