The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics
By John B. Judis, Columbia Global Reports, 184 pages, $13
In November, the fate of the United States will turn on one question: how popular is the populism of Donald Trump? If aggrieved and motivated Trumpists turn out heavily, the US could yet have its own Brexit moment. But before knowing whether a big white wave will break over the electorate, it helps to understand what “populism” means, where it comes from and why it is advancing on both sides of the Atlantic.
These are the questions John B. Judis tackles in “The Populist Explosion”, his cogent and exceptionally clarifying guide to a political phenomenon that is at once elusive and, yes, explosive. Judis is personally sympathetic to leftwing populism, but he keeps his analysis free of axe-grinding.
In “The Populist Persuasion”, published in 1995, the historian Michael Kazin described populism as “a language” that ordinary people — and the often-wealthy politicians who claim to speak for them — use to organise themselves against elites they see as “self-serving and undemocratic”. The fevered logic of this worldview frequently transcends the usual categories of left, right and centre, as the sociologist Donald I. Warren argued in his 1976 study, “The Radical Center: Middle Americans and the Politics of Alienation”, an obscure but important examination of George Wallace voters, many of whom went on to be known as Reagan Democrats.
Judis extends this unified theory of populism to the present day, when stagnant wages, corporate desertions and widespread fear of being cast adrift in the global economy have brought Bernie Sanders and Trump together in their contempt for trade deals. But he is eager to distinguish the leftwing economic populism of Sanders and the anti-elite Podemos Party in Spain, which champion “the people” against the 1 per cent, from the rightwing cultural populism of Trump and the anti-Muslim Danish People’s Party. The difference is that rightwing populists accuse the elite of coddling an ever-shifting third group — immigrants, blacks, terrorists, welfare recipients or all of the above. This demagoguing of the scapegoat du jour is what gives rightwing populism its current potency, especially in Europe, which is facing more severe economic, immigration and terrorism problems than the United States.
Populism, Judis explains, is an American creation, with roots in the American Revolution and Andrew Jackson’s fight against the Bank of the United States in the 1830s. The name dates back to the early 1890s, when Farmers Alliances across the West and South linked up with the Knights of Labor to form the short-lived People’s Party. The goal was radical democratic reform, not class revolution. In 1896, the Democrats nominated the fiery William Jennings Bryan on a “free silver” platform in opposition to Wall Street, the beginning of a long tradition of major parties co-opting populist ideas.
With the help of middle-class progressives in both parties, much of the People’s Party platform (monetisation of silver, a graduated income tax, regulation of railroads, direct election of senators) became law. Similarly, the threat posed to Franklin Roosevelt’s re-election by Huey Long and his “Share Our Wealth” movement may have ended in 1935 with Long’s assassination, but Roosevelt had already moved left in response to populist fervour by ramming through Social Security and other legislation. Long’s base, like Trump’s, was not the poor, but middle-class voters who feared slipping lower amid economic dislocation.
When Barack Obama took office in 2009, many expected he would forge a new and enduring Democratic majority out of the wreckage left by an irresponsible financial elite. But instead of being pushed from the left, as Roosevelt was, Obama looked behind him and saw no one there. Even the auto bailouts, which the White House hoped would be popular with working people, were resented. Instead, within days of taking office, Obama felt pressure from a new populist movement on the right — soon to be called the Tea Party — that drew strength from voters who had once flocked to Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan in the 1990s.
In his abbreviated account, Judis underplays how often leftwing economic populism has curdled into rightwing racist populism. Though he mentions Tom Watson, he ignores C. Vann Woodward’s “Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel” (1938), which chronicles how the brilliant Georgia reformer — the foremost turn-of-the-century populist — became a bitter bigot. And while citing Alan Brinkley’s “Voices of Protest” (1982) in his discussion of Father Charles Coughlin, the anti-Semitic “Radio Priest”, he ignores the fact that Coughlin was at first a strong supporter of the New Deal.
Judis does better with Wallace, who railed against integration and “pointy-headed intellectuals” when he was governor of Alabama but was far less strident and racist in his presidential campaigns. Many of Trump’s non-college-educated white supporters are the direct political descendants of Wallace voters (just as Sanders’s voters are connected to George McGovern’s).
In 1968, Wallace, running as a third-party candidate, led the Democratic nominee, Hubert Humphrey, in the polls until October, the last time any viable populist candidate lasted that far into the campaign season. After Richard Nixon won, he absorbed the Wallace base into the Republican Party by moving right on “law and order”, busing and other issues Wallace had stressed.
Parliamentary systems offer a different role for populists. Judis offers a fresh survey of the 10 European countries where, after the Great Recession, populist candidates have either won elections or become part of governing coalitions. Northern tier nations, besieged by immigrants who are allowed freedom of movement by the EU, have shifted right. The United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) led Britain’s exit from Europe with an older, less educated constituency that looks a lot like Trump’s. But southern European nations such as Spain, Italy and Greece, with economies mired in depressions every bit as bad as the one the United States experienced during the 1930s, went left, which nowadays means resistance to EU elites, not socialism.
One quibble: Judis echoes leftwing political scientists who have twisted the word “neoliberal”. In the United States, it refers to Clintonian Democrats who believe in the old goals of liberalism but question some of the means of achieving them. In Europe, neoliberals are free-market capitalists who impose rigid and — judging by the sluggish European economy — unsuccessful austerity measures on debtor nations. Using the word almost interchangeably is confusing, not to mention unfair to American neoliberals, who may have gone overboard on financial deregulation in the 1990s but have staunchly opposed Republican austerity measures.
In the end, Judis has a surprisingly benign attitude towards even rightwing populism. He thinks Trump and the European rightwing populists are nasty nationalists, but not fascists, insisting that even those with authoritarian streaks believe in working within the democratic system and lack the territorial ambitions that were central to German and Italian fascism. Instead, Judis writes, Trump resembles the former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, the buffoonish media baron.
While careful not to make predictions, Judis suggests that Brexit might be contagious on the Continent. And his description of how the presentable Marine Le Pen has sidelined the haters in the National Front (including the founder of the party, her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who described the gas chambers of the Holocaust as a “detail”) indicates that she may be elected the first populist president of France next year.
In America, Sanders’s success showed that some leftwing populist ideas — incubated in the failed but symbolically important Occupy Wall Street movement — are in ascendancy inside the Democratic Party. That means a President Hillary Clinton — like Roosevelt and Nixon — would most likely try to co-opt a few of them. But neither Clinton nor Trump wants to nationalise banks or greatly redistribute wealth (unless one includes Trump’s plan to slash taxes again for the wealthy, further enriching the top 1 per cent). So we won’t see much classic economic populism in the White House next year, even as trans-Atlantic populist scapegoating continues apace.
–New York Times News Service
Jonathan Alter, the author of two books on Barack Obama and one on Franklin D. Roosevelt, is now working on a biography of Jimmy Carter.
