Definitions of Populism

In my Junior High School (you read that right, my public school system was, in retrospect, very advanced; when I got to college it was like being sent to slooow class) one of our assigned texts was Richard Hofstadter’s The Age of Reform and we spent at least 6 solid weeks studying the Populist and Progressive impulses of United States politics.

It’s kind of an uncomfortable read since it contradicts (with facts) many myths of common wisdom that have been attached to these philosophies. If you happen to find a copy in your price range (text books have become unconscionably expensive) you could do worse on a cold and dark winter night than to give it a quick perusal. I promise it will not be nearly as soul damaging as the same amount of time spent watching MSNBC.

Anyway, that background led me to read this article in The Guardian that I will also reccommend to you. It’s much shorter than the book and nearly as interesting.

Us v Them: the birth of populism
by John B Judis, The Guardian
Thursday 13 October 2016

The kind of populism that runs through American history, and has been transplanted to Europe, cannot be defined exclusively in terms of right, left or centre: it includes both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, the Front National in France and Podemos in Spain. There are rightwing, leftwing and centrist populist parties. It is not an ideology, but a political logic – a way of thinking about politics. In his book on American populism, The Populist Persuasion, the historian Michael Kazin describes populism as “a language whose speakers conceive of ordinary people as a noble assemblage not bounded narrowly by class; view their elite opponents as self-serving and undemocratic; and seek to mobilise the former against the latter.”
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Leftwing populists champion the people against an elite or an establishment. Theirs is a vertical politics of the bottom and middle, arrayed against the top. Rightwing populists champion the people against an elite that they accuse of favouring a third group, which can consist, for instance, of immigrants, Islamists, or African American militants. Rightwing populism is triadic: it looks upward, but also down upon an out group.

Leftwing populism is historically different to socialist or social democratic movements. It is not a politics of class conflict, and it does not necessarily seek the abolition of capitalism. It is also different to a progressive or liberal politics that seeks to reconcile the interests of opposing classes and groups. It assumes a basic antagonism between the people and an elite at the heart of its politics.

Rightwing populism, meanwhile, is different to a conservatism that primarily identifies with the business classes against their critics and antagonists below. In its American and western European versions, it is also different to an authoritarian conservatism that aims to subvert democracy. It operates within a democratic context.

Just as there is no common ideology that defines populism, there is no one constituency that comprises “the people”. They can be blue-collar workers, shopkeepers, or students burdened by debt; they can be the poor or the middle class. Equally, there is no common identification of “the establishment”. The exact referents of “the people” and “the elite” do not define populism, what defines it is the conflict between the two (or, in the case of rightwing populism, the three).

The conflict itself turns on a set of demands that the populists make of the elite – demands that the populists believe the establishment will be unwilling to grant them. Sanders wanted “Medicare for all” and a $15 minimum wage. If he had wanted the Affordable Care Act to cover hearing aids, or to raise the minimum wage from $7.25 to $7.75, that would not have defined a clash between the people and the establishment. If Trump were to demand an increase in guards along the Mexican border, or if Denmark’s rightwing People’s Party campaigned on a mere reduction in asylum-seekers, these demands would not open up a gulf between the people and the elite. But promising a wall that the Mexican government will pay for or the total cessation of immigration – that does establish a frontier.

These kinds of demands define the clash between the people and the establishment. If they are granted in whole or even in part, or if populists abandon them as too ambitious – as Syriza did with its demands for renegotiation of Greece’s debt – then the populist movement is likely to dissipate or to morph into a normal political party or candidacy. In this sense, American and western European populist movements have flourished when they are in opposition, and have suffered identity crises when they have entered government.

Populist campaigns and parties often function as warning signs of a political crisis. In both Europe and the US, populist movements have been most successful at times when people see the prevailing political norms – which are preserved and defended by the existing establishment – as being at odds with their own hopes, fears, and concerns. The populists express these neglected concerns and frame them in a politics that pits the people against an intransigent elite. By doing so, they become catalysts for political change.

Populist campaigns and parties, by nature, point to problems through demands that are unlikely to be realised in the present political circumstances. In the case of some rightwing populists, these demands are laced with bigotry or challenge democratic norms. In other cases, they are clouded with misinformation. But they still point to tears in the fabric of accepted political wisdom.

In recent decades, as the great postwar boom has stalled, the major parties on both sides of the Atlantic, have embraced a neoliberal agenda of free movement of capital and labour to achieve prosperity.
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In continental Europe, the major parties embraced the idea of the single currency only to find that it fell into disfavour during the Great Recession. In the United States, both parties embraced “free trade” deals only to discover that much of the public did not support these treaties.
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The main difference between US and European populists is that while American parties and campaigns come and go quickly, some European populist parties have been around for decades. That is primarily because many European nations have multi-party systems, and many of the countries have proportional representation that allows smaller parties to maintain a foothold even when they are polling in single digits.

Populist movements themselves do not often achieve their own objectives. Their demands may be co-opted by the major parties, or they may be thoroughly rejected. But they do roil the waters. They signal that the prevailing political ideology is not working and the standard worldview is breaking down.
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In the US, in contrast to Europe, these campaigns have burst forth suddenly and unexpectedly. Despite usually being short-lived, they have, nevertheless, had an outsized impact. And while they may seem unusual at the time, they are very much part of the political fabric of the nation.

While the history of American politics is riven with conflicts – over slavery, prohibition, abortion, intervention abroad – it is also dominated for long stretches by an underlying consensus about government’s role in the economy and abroad.

American politics is structured to sustain such 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 centre and to stay away from being branded “extremist”. As a result of this two-party tilt towards the centre, sharp political differences over underlying socioeconomic issues have tended to become blunted or even to be ignored, particularly in presidential elections.

The rise of the People’s Party was the first major salvo against the worldview of laissez-faire capitalism; the Louisiana governor Huey Long’s “Share Our Wealth” movement, which emerged in the wake of Franklin Roosevelt’s election in 1932, helped pressure Roosevelt to address economic inequality. Together, these movements established the framework that Bernie Sanders, who described himself both as a democratic socialist and as a progressive, would adopt during his 2016 campaign. Equally, the populist campaigns of George Wallace in the 1960s and Pat Buchanan in the 1990s foreshadowed the candidacy of Donald Trump.
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The populists were the first to call for government to regulate and even nationalise industries that were integral to the economy, like the railroads; they wanted government to reduce the economic inequality that capitalism, when left to its own devices, was creating, and they wanted to reduce the power of business in determining the outcome of elections. Populism had an immediate impact on the politics of some progressive Democrats, and even on Republicans such as Theodore Roosevelt. Eventually, much of the populist agenda was incorporated into Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal and into the outlook of New Deal liberalism.

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, then the main workers’ organisation in the United States, to form the People’s Party, which, 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 leading Republicans and Democrats in the United States were revelling 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 that the role of government should be minimal. Grover Cleveland, who was president from 1884 to 1888 and then 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.

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% of the land had become owned by banks.

The first populists saw themselves representing the “people”, including farmers and blue-collar workers, against the “money power” or “plutocracy”. That was reflected in their early programmes, which included a demand for the incorporation and recognition of labour 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”.

When their demands – which also included a graduated income tax and political reforms to establish the secret ballot and the direct election of senators – proved too radical and far-reaching for the major parties, the People’s Party was created in 1892, and nominated a candidate for president. “We seek to restore the government of the Republic to the hands of ‘the plain people’, with whose class it originated,” the party’s first platform declared. “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.”

Like many political movements Populism, especially the Right Wing kind, carries within it the seeds of its own destruction. There is a strong political and social base of bigotry, nativism, and intolerance in the United States that Right Wing Populism is not above exploiting. Left Wing Populism tends to die of its own success as the policy positions they advocate become more acceptable to the elite who then co-opt them and use the machinery of politics and organization to marginalize the movements, pretending, of course, that they had supported the reforms from the beginning.

Still, the reforms remain and become the new political landscape for the next wave of revolutionary change.