2016’s populist moment
Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump
This commentary is part a series presented in conjunction with the Center’s feature exhibition, Headed to the White House.
The insurgent candidacies of billionaire businessman Donald Trump and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders for the Republican and Democratic presidential nominations typify populist uprisings launched in the name of the people going back at least to the American Revolution. They express, however, very different populist impulses: Trump’s mostly reactionary and partly progressive, Sanders’ thoroughly progressive.
Trump’s reactionary populism imitates campaigns that have mixed both illiberal and progressive elements in an amalgam that defies traditional left-right categories. The surprising success of the grandfatherly, quirky Sanders’ in seeking the Democratic nomination follows in the footsteps of protest movements of the past that have challenged political and economic system perceived as tilted in favor of corrupt elites.
Populist rhetoric has flourished in our political culture because the Revolutionary generation appealed to the people’s sovereignty as their source of authority. Although the Founders framed a constitution in the name of “We the People,” and invited citizens to regard themselves as rulers, in reality the document distanced ordinary people from government, as did most state constitutions. While the people always have been encouraged to believe the government is theirs, they were not, nor would they be, the rulers. Thus the rhetoric and ideology of the Revolution and Founding made inevitable episodic outbursts of populist passion “for the people” recurrent events throughout our history.
Populist insurgencies typically have been driven by anger with political parties and politics as usual, appealing to voters “mad as hell” with the “establishment.” The two “outsiders” have attracted votes heavily from groups that have experienced economic decline for years, while income has been diverted from the middle- and working-classes to the One Percent.
At the core of Donald Trump’s populism is nativist nationalism, drawing on cultural, racial and religious hostilities, a feature of earlier reactionary populisms. His anti-immigrant diatribes find parallels in rising right-wing neo-populist parties in Europe reacting to a growing tide of refugees.
Trump launched his campaign with racist stereotypes of undocumented immigrants, promising to build a wall on the Mexican border, then exploited terrorist attacks to mine anti-Muslim sentiment, vaulting him into the lead for the Republican presidential nomination. His crude, macho language, and calculated political incorrectness, recalls Alabama’s segregationist governor George Wallace’s campaigns in the 1960s. Surveys show that Trump’s supporters hold strongly negative attitudes to African Americans and Muslims.
He offers himself as an authoritarian leader who will protect Americans from job-taking immigrants and murderous jihadists. But his often-shifting policy proposals have included measures of economic liberalism that clash with Republican orthodoxy. These include promising help to those who cannot afford health insurance, having the government negotiate drug prices, protecting Social Security retirement benefits; he has even defended Planned Parenthood. In debates, he criticized the “broken system” of campaign financing, describing how he used donations to politicians in his interest, and accusing his rivals as being “puppets” of big donors, pointing to his own wealth as insuring his independence. He favors closing the carried interest tax boondoggle for hedge-fund and private equity managers.
On other issues, such as abortion and gun control, he has avoided offending conservative Republicans. But he joins Sanders in staunch opposition to free trade that has exported manufacturing jobs to Asia. Both are rejecting several decades of agreements by Republicans and Democrats echoing populist predecessors who have traditionally emphasized that fairness for American workers comes first.
If Trump reminds readers of the character Willie Stark in Robert Penn Warren’s 1946 novel All the King’s Men, who promises the masses that he will make deals with or “break” anyone who stands in his way, Sanders echoes the 1892 People’s Party Platform, offered by the party that gave us the word “populist.” It declared: “Corruption dominates the ballot-box, the Legislatures, the Congress, and touches even the ermine of the bench. … The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few, unprecedented in the history of mankind; and the possessors of these, in turn, despise the Republic, and endanger liberty. From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed the two great classes—tramps and millionaires.” For the last phrase, substitute “poverty and billionaires,” and Sanders’ rhetoric is approximated.
The centerpieces of Sanders’ campaign are to address extreme inequality of income and wealth, and to reduce poverty. To create an equitable distribution of rewards, he proposes a long list of progressive measures to address economic and racial injustice. Some are favored by large majorities of Americans, including raising the minimum wage, equal pay for women, a fair tax system, paid parental and medical leave, and universal childhood education.
Sanders has denounced an unfair criminal justice system as much as a rigged economy, and drawn support from citizens frustrated with financial regulators’ failure to investigate and prosecute Wall Street executives responsible for the economic collapse of 2007-08. In excoriating banks “too big to fail” and financial felons “too big to jail,” he has pushed the more centrist Hillary Clinton to echo his call for sterner justice. The Populists of the 1890s succeeded while failing by having much of their progressive platform enacted during the early 20th century, often the case with populist reform movements. Trump’s progressive postures, however, have not influenced his rivals; rather, his hard-right stance on immigration has driven them to repudiate immigration reform until recently favored by Republican leaders.
Sanders has stressed the immorality of economic unfairness, but his rhetoric lacks the religious content that energized many earlier populist movements in the 19th century and recently in the 1980s in Jesse Jackson’s campaigns in the Democratic primaries.
Both Trump and Sanders echo populist insurgencies reaching back even earlier into the 1800s by distinguishing between producers and non-producers, a distinction implicit in Trump’s attacks on undocumented immigrants and recently in the Tea Party’s hostility to “freeloaders.” Reactionary populists often have demonized groups at the bottom of society, while Sanders, a progressive populist, has taken on wealthy and powerful “non-producers,” namely under-taxed Wall Street financiers and non-taxpaying corporations.
The history of populist insurgencies teaches us that populists usually raise hopes among Americans that cannot be fulfilled, and thus can sow frustration and anger. But they can also move the political class to address festering problems.
Populist rhetoric has permeated American politics from the 1780s to the present; it has been employed by a wide diversity of groups and political leaders. While the democratic ideal that “the people rule here” remains a fiction, it will continue to constitute a powerful force in American political culture.
Ronald P. Formisano is the William T. Bryan Chair of American History and Professor of History emeritus at the University of Kentucky. He is the author of Plutocracy in America: How Increasing Inequality Destroys the Middle Class and Exploits the Poor (Hopkins, 2015), The Tea Party: A Brief History (Hopkins, 2012), and For the People: American Populist Movements From the Revolution to the 1850s (North Carolina, 2008).
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