The Trouble With Populists

Populists have appeared repeatedly throughout human history, and the circumstances of their rise are the same each and every time. Even the Greeks and Romans had them.

The rise of a populist depends on two factors, which must converge: a poorly functioning government that fails to meet the public’s needs and an individual with enough charisma to persuade the public that they can be a change agent if given power. In American history, there have been four notable populists: Andrew Jackson, William Jennings Bryan, George Wallace, and Donald Trump.

The 1824 presidential election saw four candidates competing for the presidency: President John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay, and William Crawford. None of the candidates gained an Electoral College majority, throwing the election to the House of Representatives. The 12th Amendment required that the top three candidates be eligible, so Henry Clay, as the fourth-place candidate, was eliminated.

Clay hated Jackson and formed an alliance with Adams, which secured Adams’s victory. Jackson was furious and said he would run again and, if elected, oppose every program supported by Henry Clay. Clay’s platform was establishment-based and called for the growth of the federal government. Jackson assumed the populist position of opposing the establishment. When he was elected in 1828, Jackson kept his word and worked to reduce the federal government’s power in favor of the states.

William Jennings Bryan became a populist presidential candidate in 1896. Although he was a Democrat, Bryan carried the banner for the rival Populist Party’s major issue: the gold standard. America was in a deep depression that year, and the populist position was to oppose the gold standard, which set a fixed price for gold. People believed that the standard prevented the expansion of the money supply and kept the economy from recovering.

Bryan delivered a speech at the Democratic Convention opposing the gold standard that was so moving that the delegates responded by nominating him to be the Democratic candidate. Oddly, he was also nominated by the Populist Party as their candidate that year. Although Bryan campaigned heavily and gave hundreds of speeches, he lost the 1896 election to William McKinley. Bryan’s popularity endured, however, and he was nominated by the Democrats in 1900 and 1908, losing both times.

George Wallace became governor of Alabama in 1963 and initially built his national reputation on segregation and resistance to federal civil rights enforcement. By 1968, when Wallace began running nationally, he had broadened his message beyond explicitly Southern racial politics.

Wallace’s national populism divided America into two camps. On one side were ordinary working- and middle-class Americans—factory workers, small-business owners, taxpayers, police officers, and people who believed they followed the rules. On the other were Washington bureaucrats, federal judges, intellectuals, liberal politicians, journalists, and other cultural elites whom Wallace portrayed as imposing their values on everyone else.

This allowed Wallace to turn racial resentment into a much broader politics of resentment against social and cultural change. He attacked court-ordered busing, crime, protests, campus radicals, welfare, federal power, and what he saw as permissive elites. His rhetoric often suggested that elites were more sympathetic to criminals, protesters, and minority activists than to ordinary citizens.

That was the key to his appeal outside the Deep South. In the 1968 presidential election, running as the American Independent Party candidate, Wallace won about 13.5% of the popular vote and 46 electoral votes, carrying five Southern states. But he also demonstrated significant appeal among some white working-class voters outside the South. He showed that a politics originating in Southern resistance to civil rights could be transformed into a national populist argument about class, culture, authority, and resentment of government.

Wallace was also an unusually effective populist performer. He spoke in direct, combative language, mocked intellectuals and bureaucrats, attacked protesters, and deliberately violated the conventions of respectable political discourse. Supporters felt that when elites condemned Wallace, they were condemning people like them. That dynamic—the establishment hates me because I represent you—became a key feature of later American populism.

We are now late in the Donald Trump era, with two years left in his presidency. Trump was elected because conservatives and anti-establishment types looked to him as their representative against the establishment do-nothing Congress.

Trump shares many personality traits with Andrew Jackson, so comparisons between them are reasonable. Andrew Jackson was a fiercely proud, honor-driven man who personalized conflict, demanded loyalty, remembered injuries, and saw himself as the embattled champion of ordinary citizens against privileged enemies. Donald Trump is a fiercely competitive, status-driven man who personalizes conflict, demands loyalty, remembers injuries, and sees himself as the embattled champion of his supporters against hostile elites.

Trump also exemplifies the trouble with Populists. Meeting the two criteria I mentioned at the beginning of this article creates political momentum but leaves an individual’s behavior outside the dialogue, as the public’s hope outweighs the candidate’s conduct. Donald Trump is driven by an intense need for dominance, recognition, and victory.

Those needs manifest as arrogance, bullying, irrationality, and rudeness. These traits are jarring to the public, who expect a certain amount of decorum from the President of the United States. Anyone trying to develop real estate in Manhattan must have this type of personality to survive, but never before has an occupant of the White House been like this.

Since Trump’s first election, MAGA has had to hold its collective nose at his impolite behavior, lack of decorum, and bullying style, which quickly wears thin. Many hate him for his style, including establishment politicians on both sides who are jealous and envious.

The establishment’s hubris tells them they are the only intelligent people capable of running the country, and Trump is only a pretender. But he has more motivation than all the Republicans in the Senate put together. He’s working hard, while they tend to their investment portfolios.

What happened to the movements created by the previous populists, Jackson, Bryan, and Wallace?

Jackson was followed by Martin VanBuren, who kept Jackson’s platform but governed differently. Van Buren was organizational, calculating, disciplined, and deeply interested in building durable political institutions. Jackson was the movement’s charismatic warrior; Van Buren was its political engineer.

For William Jennings Bryan, the closest follow-up is Woodrow Wilson. Bryan transformed the Democratic Party in 1896 around anti-plutocracy, popular democracy, and hostility to concentrated economic power. Wilson later incorporated substantial parts of that reform impulse, translating Bryan’s emotional, agrarian populism into Progressive-era technocratic reform. Bryan supplied much of the insurgent political energy; Wilson made portions of it governable. But Wilson was not really a Bryanite in the way Van Buren was a Jacksonian.

For George Wallace, the situation was very different. His successor was arguably the Republican Party’s emerging Sunbelt/conservative coalition, especially through Richard Nixon’s 1968 and 1972 campaigns. Nixon absorbed key elements of Wallace’s appeal, including law and order, resentment of liberal elites, resistance to rapid social change, and an appeal to culturally alienated working- and middle-class voters.

Like third-party candidates, populists generally see their issues copied and incorporated into the two-party platforms. That way, the establishment gets to claim they really care about the people.

The current situation becomes interesting if compared with these historical examples. If Vance or Rubio wins the 2028 election, how would each govern? Neither is Trump, nor do they want to be. Either would have to find a way to be MAGA enough to keep the coalition intact.

The entire Trump impeachment/lawsuit/prosecution/attack engine has to be put in the rearview mirror. When he’s gone, we’ll see how much of the left’s attack was directed at Trump as a person versus Trump the President. As in historical cases, populism will settle down on the Republican side.

The left is late to the game in generating populist energy. Sanders started the ball rolling in 2016 but was sidetracked by Hillary. It took COVID, the Democratic Party’s failure to govern, and Gen Z’s dissatisfaction with government to accelerate the current Progressive/Socialist wave. A failure to win in 2028 will degrade the socialist-populist movement as a major force in Democratic politics and force the left to reinvent itself.

The unfortunate part of this story is that conservatives and liberals have to create separate populist movements rather than working together. The elites love it when the people are divided because it’s easier for them to stay in power.

Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author’s own.