That’s a good start. It doesn’t describe someone like Ronald Reagan or Vladimir Putin, both of whom have sometimes been called “populist,” but it does describe the logic of the parties, movements, and candidates from America’s People’s Party of 1892 to Marine Le Pen’s National Front of 2016. I would, however, take Kazin’s characterization one step further and distinguish between leftwing populists like Sanders or Podemos’s Pablo Iglesias and rightwing populists like Trump and the National Front’s Le Pen. 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 coddling a third group, which can consist, for instance, of immigrants, Islamists, or African American militants. Leftwing populism is dyadic. Rightwing populism is triadic. It looks upward, but also down upon an out group.
Leftwing populism is historically different from socialist or social democratic movements. It is not a politics of class conflict, and it doesn’t necessarily seek the abolition of capitalism. It is also different from 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, on the other hand, is different from 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 from 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.” It can be blue-collar workers, shopkeepers, or students burdened by debt; it can be the poor or the middle class. Equally, there is no common identification of “the establishment.” It can vary from the “money power” that the old populists decried to George Wallace’s “pointy-headed intellectuals” to the “casta” that Podemos assails. The exact referents of “the people” and “the elite” don’t define populism; what defines it is the conflictual relationship 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. These are not ordinary demands that populists believe will be subject to immediate negotiation. The populists believe the demands are worthy and justified, but they don’t believe the establishment will be willing to grant them. Sanders wants “Medicare for all” and a $15 minimum wage. If he wanted the Affordable Care Act to cover hearing aids, or to raise the minimum wage to $7.75, that wouldn’t define 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 People’s Party campaigned on a reduction in asylum-seekers, these 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, as when the Democrats in 1896 adopted the People’s Party’s demand for free silver, or if they abandon them as too ambitious, as Syriza did 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, but have sometimes suffered identity crises when they have entered government.
The Significance of Populism
The second important feature of the populist campaigns and parties I am describing is that they often function as warning signs of a political crisis. American populist movements have arisen only under very special circumstances. In Europe, populist parties have endured on the fringes at times, because the European multi-party systems tolerate smaller players. But like American populists, they have won success only under certain circumstances. Those circumstances are times when people see the prevailing political norms—put forward, preserved and defended by the leading segments in the country—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.
On both sides of the Atlantic, the major parties favored increased immigration, only to find that in the United States voters were up in arms about illegal immigration and in Europe about immigrant communities that became seedbeds of crime and later terror. The populist candidates and parties gave voice to these concerns. In Europe, the major parties on the continent embraced the idea of a common currency only to find it fall into disfavor during the Great Recession. In the United States, both parties’ leaders embraced “free trade” deals only to discover that much of the public did not support these treaties.
The movements themselves don’t often achieve their own objectives. They don’t necessarily succeed in providing Medicare for all or protecting workers against global capitalism or the European Union. Their demands may be co-opted by the major parties or they may be thoroughly rejected. But the populists roil the waters. They signal that the prevailing political ideology isn’t working and needs repair, and the standard worldview is breaking down. That’s why Trump and Sanders are important in America, and why the populist left and right are important in Europe. In what follows, I will describe how the logic of populism has worked and why at this particular moment similar kinds of populist protests are erupting across both sides of the north Atlantic.
The Logic of American Populism From the People’s Party to George Wallace
No one, not even Donald Trump, expected him to get the Republican presidential nomination in 2016. Similarly, no one, including Bernie Sanders, expected that up through the California primary in June, the Vermont senator would still be challenging Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination.
Trump’s success was initially attributed to his showmanship and celebrity. But as he won primary after primary, political experts saw him playing on racist opposition to Barack Obama’s presidency or exploiting a latent sympathy for fascism among downscale white Americans. Sanders’s success invited less speculation, but commentators tended to dismiss him as a utopian and to focus on the airy idealism of millennial voters. If that were not sufficient explanation for his success, they emphasized Hillary Clinton’s weakness as a frontrunner. It makes more sense, however, to understand Trump and Sanders’s success as the latest chapter in the history of American populism.
Populism is an American creation that spread later to Latin America and Europe. While strands of American populism go back to the Revolution and the Jacksonian War on the Bank of the United States, it really begins with the People’s Party of the 1890s, which set the precedent for movements that have popped up periodically. In the United States, in contrast to Europe, these campaigns have burst forth suddenly and unexpectedly. Usually short-lived, nevertheless they have had an outsized impact. While they seem unusual at the time, they are very much part of the American political fabric.
Two Kinds of Political Events
While the history of American politics is riven with conflicts—over slavery, prohibition, the trusts, tariffs, abortion, intervention abroad—it is also dominated for long stretches by an underlying consensus about government’s role in the economy and abroad. If that consensus doesn’t always unite the parties, it determines the ultimate outcome of political conflict. Thus, from 1935 to the 1970s, there were occasional debates about the virtues of a progressive income tax, but American policy reflected an underlying consensus in favor of it.