We the People
How Populism Defines the Decade and Shapes the Century
The year was 1896 and the people had finally found the perfect middleman to dually oppose federalist endeavors and defend the commoner- William Jennings Bryan. The “boy orator” from Nebraska presented his campaign as a full-blown crusade against the elitists, who were strangling the common man by limiting the money supply. The people, believing the artificial current of contemporary life had stifled their voices, trusted Bryan to restore balance in the political tides and set history on a new course.
Populism, or rule by the people has always been deeply rooted in the foothold of American society, stretching as far back to the Mayflower Compact in 1620. Far less defined than a historical event or a political agenda, populism is an impulse carried by Jeffersonian democracy and a conviction that something inexplicably important is under siege by the current of the wider world.
Bryan’s mission- to protect individuals from government exploitation- was not unique to his campaign, as the war between state and government had been waged since the inception of the Constitution. Following the election of 1800, American presidential contests had been run on a referendum of whether the country should be governed by agrarian interests or industrial interests. Despite this, the election of 1896 should be duly noted because it projected the Populist Party onto a national platform, armed with a viable candidate and a wide-ranging reform agenda. With an unprecedented voter turnout of eighty percent, the 1896 election demonstrated a movement in American society away from extreme concentration on agriculture and toward a society that embraced industrialism. Despite Bryan’s loss to William McKinley, the unmistakable cry of the Populist Party on the horizon of the twentieth century foreshadowed a disturbing change of events in the years to come.
In the wake of the Great Recession, populist movements have surged in the United States and Western Europe. The kind of populism characterized by American history and swept up by Europe cannot be defined exclusively in the terms of left, right, or center. In his book “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 mobilize the former against the latter.” This kind of definition describes the basic logic behind movements, parties, and candidates such as in the US People’s Party of 1892 or Marine le Pen’s Front de Nationale. Populism’s polymorphous nature can be observed in both sides of the political spectrum where left wing populists champion the people against the elite and right wing populists champion the people against the elite for favoring a minority group. Left wing populism’s vertical politics can be directly observed in Bernie Sanders and Pablo Iglesias and right wing populism’s triadic politics can be demonstrated by Donald Trump and the aforementioned le Pen. Regardless of political orientation, populist movements surge when given a common cause for opposition but morph into normal political parties when the issue is rectified or completely dissipate when integrated into the government (i.e. Greece’s failed populist movement, Syriza). Such a predictable pattern yields troubling revelations- a rise in populism is a warning sign the status quo is failing.
Inspired by Karl Marx’s socialism, Europe observed the emergence of social democratic parties in the last decades of the nineteenth century. In classic right wing fashion, the Front de Nationale pitted the “little people” against the “caste” and the Poblemos defended the “gente” from the “casta,” all the while accusing the elite and establishment of favoring welfare recipients, communists, and immigrants. Recently, left wing populists groups in Greece and Spain have risen to channel their grievances towards their individual governments and the European Union headquarters in Brussels. Europe is home to countries of multi-party systems and proportional representation that allow smaller parties to maintain a foothold in the political area even when they poll low numbers. Thus, populist campaigns have a continuous presence in European politics but do not direct the course of democracy.
In contrast to Europe, America’s two-party, winner-takes-all system has designed an environment where the third party candidates are dismissed as intrusive and issues raised by the opposing party are nearly neglected altogether. When dramatic changes in America’s place in the world occur, voters become incredibly responsive swarm to politicians and movements that advertise the necessary corrections.
Agrarian activism began in the late nineteenth century when America’s farmers began to organize to defend their interests against what they perceived to be the interests of the Eastern establishment and the banking elite. In 1876, the Farmer’s Alliance was formally introduced in Texas with the goal of ending the crop lien system that thew farmers into debt and stole their crops. Around the same time, the Grange was founded in 1868 in New York to advocate on behalf of rural communities and membership skyrocketed following the Panic of 1873. In May 1891, the members of the Kansas Farmers Alliance coined the term “populist” to describe the political views of alliance groups developing in the west and south.The next year, the Kansas Farmers Alliance joined hands with the Knights of Labor and the People’s Party was born.
At the time, the rest of the United States was revelling in the progress of American industry and finance. Grover Cleveland, who was president from 1893 to 1897, stated that public sector intervention “stifles the spirit of true Americanism” and its functions “do not include the support of the people.” In his first term, he vetoed a bill that would have given drought-stricken Texas farmers $10,000 for seeds with the excuse that federal aid “weakens the sturdiness of our national character.” During those years, farmers in the south and the plains suffered from a sharp drop in agricultural prices and railroads raised the cost of transporting goods. Fed up with the plutocracy, the People’s Party assembled themselves against the government and demanded a reduction in economic inequality, a graduated income tax, and political reforms for the direct election of senators. While the People’s Party was short lived and their candidate William Jennings Bryan ultimately lost in 1896, it left the basis for populists movements in Europe and America in years to come.
The rise of the People’s Party was the first major opposition to laissez faire capitalism, the system that so much emphasized the separation between government and economy. 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 income inequality. These two movements paved the way for Bernie Sanders, the self-declared democratic socialist and progressive, to cement himself in the 2016 election. Equally, the right wing populist campaigns of George Wallace in the 1960s and Pat Buchanan in the 1990s foreshadowing the candidacy of Donald Trump.
While Sanders and Trump may choose to use populist rhetoric to rally their voters, it is not an identity that many would embrace because it stems from crisis, understood by those who choose it as a state of urgency. Populism stands for the perseverance of a single idea, message, or solution when all others have decided to jettison it. The proper response to populism is not to dismiss it as bigoted anti-intellectuals or ignorant racists but to acknowledge that a threat to the democracy will be only be noticed by the democracy- the people. Populism is the canary in the political coal mine and those concerned about their freedoms should pay attention to it.