In modern political discourse, populism has become an increasingly prominent ideological current—as well as a pejorative term of abuse. The rise of right-wing populist politicians such as Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, and Jair Bolsonaro has resulted in widespread concerns from liberal democrats about the potential for democratic backsliding and the destruction of institutional safeguards in countries under populist leaders. This essay will offer a nuanced historical perspective of populism, offer criticism of notional populism itself given its widely divergent implications in different contexts, and defend certain iterations as a response to legitimate grievances left unresolved by the political establishment.
This essay hypothesizes that populism emerged in three stages, first as agrarian protest against encroachment from financial interests, second as a movement for participatory democracy or as a nonpartisan political appeal, and third as a reactionary force seeking to undo social progress and demonize minority groups as the “other.” It is important to note that the first and second stages should not be considered extinct in the modern day—agrarian populist and participatory-democratic movements are still very much commonplace—merely that they are manifestations of populism which emerged earlier than their reactionary cousin.
Stage I – Populism as Agrarian Protest – The U.S. People’s Party
Though the term “populism” first originated in mid-19th century Russia to describe the ideological outlook of the Narodniks, the agrarian and proto-socialist predecessors of Victor Chernov’s Socialist-Revolutionaries which emerged in the early 20th century, it first came into common use in the English language to summarize the worldview of the People’s Party of the United States (also known as the Populists.) Though it was first formally organized in 1892, the movement from which it developed originated from the Farmers’ Alliance, which according to Canovan (1981) was founded in Texas and spread rapidly across the South and West in the 1880s. The Alliance itself developed out of rural resentment against the railroad corporations, which were able to charge farmers extortionate rates given their nature as “captive customers,” as well as Eastern financial interests and their institutional capture of established politicians of both the Democratic and Republican parties.
It was not without hesitation that the Farmers’ Alliance, a decentralized organization whose members held divergent views, decided to evolve into a partisan political movement, and advocates for a third party within the Farmers’ Alliance faced resistance both from “nonpartisan” internal factions as well as the ironclad entrenchment of Democratic partisanship in the South. Encouraged by local successes in Kansas, state People’s Parties were formed in Texas, Alabama, Georgia, and North Carolina before partisanship fully won out nationally in July 1892, when Civil War general James Weaver was nominated in Omaha as the Populist presidential candidate and a national platform, calling for government ownership of railroads, the unlimited coinage of silver (an inflationary policy considered agrarian in nature), a graduated income tax, and the banning of strikebreakers. These proposals were viewed as intrinsically socialistic in nature given the massive extensions of government control which they would require.
The reason why I place so much emphasis on when partisan fault lines began to appear between the farmers’ movement and the political establishment is because the U.S. People’s Party is among the first examples of a popular, organized, and partisan political movement led by and for commercial farmers in a democratic society. What differentiates movements such as the People’s Party from other American agrarian factions such as the Jeffersonian Democrats were that they were organized from the bottom-up rather than the inverse and that policy, strategy, and all the other tasks of a political organization were executed on the grassroots level rather than decreed by faraway bigwigs and implemented by local political machines.
The reason why I place so much emphasis on when partisan fault lines began to appear between the farmers’ movement and the political establishment is because the U.S. People’s Party is among the first examples of a popular, organized, and partisan political movement led by and for commercial farmers in a democratic society. What differentiates movements such as the People’s Party from other American agrarian factions such as the Jeffersonian Democrats were that they were organized from the bottom-up rather than the inverse and that policy, strategy, and all the other tasks of a political organization were executed on the grassroots level rather than decreed by faraway bigwigs and implemented by local political machines.
Yet the last laugh was had by the Populists. Bryan lost the 1896 election to the Republican William McKinley and would be defeated in a 1900 rematch, but his followers, including many former Populists, would emerge as an significant force within the Democratic Party. When McKinley was assassinated in 1901, Theodore Roosevelt would succeed him and, in part motivated by a desire to compete for ex-Populist votes, began to aggressively enforce antitrust legislation to break up railroad companies and rein in the power of Wall Street. This era in which both major parties embraced the reformist impulses of the electorate came to be known as the Progressive era, one undeniably influenced by the Populists.
Historians continue to debate the legacy of the Populist party. Though more recently it has been viewed as a vehicle for legitimate grievances which had been vindicated by history, previous scholarship extensively focused on its pursuit of inflationary monetary policy and exclusionary views towards immigrants and minorities and painted it as a dangerous proto-fascist movement which seized upon the notion of a financial conspiracy as an explanation for farmers’ ills. The debate over whether the Populist movement was progressive or reactionary (and by extension a threat to democracy) remains unresolved. However, agrarian populism in itself does not constitute such a threat. In the late 1910s, the Progressive Party emerged in Canada as an agrarian protest movement inspired by the People’s Party, drawing on the post-WWI collapse in wheat prices and frustration over protectionist policies. Though the Progressives died out after just a few elections, they were influential in pressuring the Liberal Party to enact tariff reductions, expand farm price supports, and introduce old-age pensions. Such a movement could hardly be described as anti-democratic.
Some have made the argument that early agrarian populist political currents inevitably reflected the reactionary tendencies of their constituents—altogether one not without merit—but the fact remains that greatly historically progressive political forces, such as the Socialist-Revolutionaries and People’s Party, developed from those currents. That being said, modern agrarian populist parties such as the hardline anti-LGBT Peasants and Greens Union (LVŽS) in Lithuania, reflecting the social conservative and anti-environmentalist tendencies of their voter base, have also been described as reactionary, though not unanimously so. For example, AGROunia, an agrarian populist political movement in Poland, despite its roots as a splitter from the reactionary conservative Law and Justice (PiS), has endorsed legal recognition of same-sex partnerships, abortion rights, and expanded climate action.
Stage II – Populism as Participatory Democracy or Nonpartisan Appeal – The Canadian Election of 1957
The aforementioned Progressive Party of Canada had never truly been a partisan movement at all. Progressive parliamentary candidates were largely backed by local movements such as the United Farmers, not by a national party organization, and when they were elected they were not bound to the whims of a parliamentary whip. Progressive MPs held widely divergent views, ranging from moderate conservatism to social liberalism to socialism. In the hung parliament of 1925-1926, Prime Minister Mackenzie King, despite not having a plurality of seats in the House of Commons, managed to hold onto power by expanding agricultural supports and old-age pensions to win Progressive support and delay a vote-of-no-confidence, though new elections were eventually called anyway. After the Liberal victory in 1926, most of the Progressives pilfered into the Liberals while the socialist minority stood as Labour candidates and eventually helped found the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF). Despite a setback in 1930, Mackenzie King’s Liberals won majority governments in 1935, 1940, and 1945, heralding a new era of Liberal dominance and marginalizing the Progressive Conservative (PC) and CCF opposition. The CCF, now renamed to the NDP, remains Canada’s premier left-of-center party to this day.
In 1957 the Canadian people were enjoying unprecedented economic prosperity brought about by the sound economic management of a Liberal government deeply entrenched by two decades of incumbency. Under the steady hand of Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent, Canada had gained 314,000 jobs and doubled its industrial output, unprecedented new social welfare programs were introduced, and Canadian diplomats had helped defuse the Suez Crisis, the most divisive event to face NATO since its foundation. Liberal defeat in 1957 was nigh-unthinkable. As political scientist H.S. Kerns put it (Beck, 1968), the general assumption was that Prime Minister St. Laurent would be easily carried to another term in office. “Nobody’s going to shoot Santa Claus.” The pundits were all decisively proven wrong when the Canadian electorate did precisely that on June 10, returning to Ottawa a Progressive Conservative minority government with John Diefenbaker as Prime Minister.
The shock result of the 1957 Canadian federal election is one of the most clear-cut cases of populism as an appeal to participatory democracy in human history. Though the victorious PC campaign incorporated elements of agrarian populism—pledging to expand farm price supports, cash advances on grain, and agricultural protectionism—that did not constitute the core of its appeal. The main reason why so many Canadians defected from the Liberals was because they were viewed as having grown abusive with the power which voters had granted to them election after election. The crux of this issue were the series of events known as the Pipeline Debate, wherein the Liberals attempted to speed legislation authorizing the construction of the TransCanada Pipeline through the House by invoking cloture beyond what would usually be allowed within the bounds of parliamentary procedure.
The general public’s backlash against the perceived authoritarianism of the Liberals throughout the Pipeline Debate fueled a PC campaign which framed the 1957 election as a referendum on the survival of Canadian democracy itself, playing down the relevance of material concerns. According to Newman, the most precise planks of the PC platform, and those which were most often emphasized by Diefenbaker, were measures to reform parliament and make it more accountable towards the layperson, such as the appointment of a permanent speaker, the abolition of cloture, and the revitalization of parliamentary committees. Throughout his national stumping tour, Diefenbaker claimed that only a Progressive Conservative government could restore such basic tenets as the rule of law to Ottawa. For example, in a speech in Hanover, Ontario, Diefenbaker stated that a vote for the Liberals was tantamount to a vote against democracy. “If you send this Government back to office,” he threatened, “don’t ask [the] Opposition to stand up for your rights. For you no longer will have any rights.”
This rhetoric symbolizes the gradual shift of “populism” as a political current away from a simple conduit of rural resentments and towards a broader appeal in favor of genuine public participation in the decision-making process, as opposed to policy being determined and promulgated collectively by the political class and the civil service with public participation being limited to the periodic arrangement of elections. While participatory democracy was certainly a plank of the platforms of the rural populists—for example, the Omaha platform of the U.S. People’s Party advocated legislative initiatives and referenda and the direct election of U.S. Senators—they mainly focused on economic issues. Emphasis on participation is what differentiates the two.
It is difficult to argue that participatory democratic populism is a threat to democracy. There is an argument to be made that excessive direct democracy is undesirable, but that argument could hardly be twisted into one arguing that participatory democracy is intrinsically anti-democratic. A more compelling point, perhaps, is that appeals to direct democracy can be disingenuously deployed by reactionaries. It should be noted that direct democracy can often erode traditional systemic checks and balances, and thus be used as a tool by reactionary populists to exploit popular majorities on specific issues to advance reactionary policy goals. Referenda and other participatory democratic tools are double-edged swords which can just as easily work in favor of reactionary outcomes or against them—for an example of the latter, see the 1988 Chilean national referendum wherein Chile voted to remove far-right dictator Augusto Pinochet from power.
Another way in which the 1957 PC campaign reflected the changing meaning of populism in the 20th century was Diefenbaker’s embrace of what Canovan referred to as “politician’s populism,” which she described as “broad, non-ideological coalition building” that drew upon “the unificatory appeal of ‘the people.’” Diefenbaker focused extensively on playing up his own image at the expense of that of his party and discarded most of his party’s usual policies. In doing so he was able to bring together a coalition of supporters of widely divergent ideological dispositions to throw out the Liberals. His non-ideological statements about the election as a choice between “a road to greatness in faith and dedication or [a] road of non-fulfillment of Canada’s destiny” thread the needle between higher-income voters bored by the prosperity of the 1950s and lower-income voters left behind by record economic growth. His campaign style was also much more personal than the norm at the time, and his invocations of the “common man” were an effective nonpartisan appeal to the average voter. “Politician’s populism” was also utilized by Governor Jimmy Carter in his quest for the Presidency—to thread the needle between competing factions within his Democratic Party, he described himself not as a liberal or a conservative but as a “populist,” playing to his party’s “catch-all” nature.
Though politician’s populism could be criticized as disingenuous in nature, it is only possible to view it as a threat to democracy to the extent that one can view political communications in general as disingenuous. We can accept that some messaging is more disingenuous than others, and we can perhaps accept that it would be preferable for politicians to focus on discussing the issues as opposed to making vapid oratorical appeals, but politicians are incentivised to appeal to the median voter as a feature, not a flaw, of free expression and democratic elections. In the modern day, acceptance of “politicians’ populism” is a precondition for acceptance of democracy as a lesser evil to autocracy. Whether excessive policy equivocation brought about by this trend is a threat to effective government is perhaps another story, though it must be noted that most democracies do not feature measures to correct this phenomenon and that personality-centric political cultures tend to be fertile ground for the far-right.
Stage III – Populism as Reactionary? – George Wallace, Pat Buchanan, and Donald Trump
The relatively sudden demise of the People’s Party left a significant vacuum in the American political spectrum. Though the more mainstream and progressive elements of the movement pilfered into the progressive wings of the old parties, its more reactionary elements eventually provided the electoral base for a small handful of reactionary populist movements, such as the fascist cult of personality behind Nazi sympathiser Gerald L.K. Smith, the Union Party of William Lemke, the followers of America Firster Charles Lindbergh, and Holocaust denier Willis Carto’s Liberty Lobby. None of these movements enjoyed any significant degree of electoral success, and have relatively little in common with reactionary populism today.
It was in the 1960s that a reactionary populist current comparable to the right-populists of the present day emerged in the United States, when what once was the Southern wing of the Democratic party largely abandoned their national leadership and began agitating against racial integration of public facilities, government services, and housing. The Southern Democrats backed George Wallace’s independent candidacy in the 1968 presidential election, and though the core of his following was in the South, he also attracted a substantial degree of support from white working-class voters across the North.
Much of the anti-integration movement was populist in nature, though its leaders, such as Wallace, were hesitant around the term for fear of being branded as unprincipled. Though Wallace avoided using the term himself, complaining that “pseudo-intellectuals” used it “as a sort of highbrow smear,” he also “claimed to be following in the path of the nineteenth century populists who attacked big business and the Trusts as unresponsive to the needs of local communities,” albeit indirectly (Rohler, 1999). Willis Carto, a Wallace supporter, made a very similar claim in his book Profiles in Populism, wherein he attempted to connect his movement not only to the founding fathers but also to many Populists and Populist-inspired progressives, such as Thomas E. Watson.
Labels aside, it is abundantly clear that Wallace exploited the reactionary prejudices of the Middle American against ethnic minorities, liberal intellectuals, and coastal elites for electoral gain. He portrayed himself as the champion of the white working class, preying on the racialized economic anxieties of underprivileged whites disillusioned by the perceived failures of the Democratic and Republican parties. Though he did not win the Presidency, he won six Southern states in the 1968 election and, following his return to the Democratic party, made two more bids for the Democratic nomination. Following in his footsteps, conservative activist Pat Buchanan challenged incumbent President George Bush for the Republican nomination in 1992, railing against multiculturalism, immigration, and the New World Order and appealing to racial resentments. He performed so well against the incumbent that he was given a prime speaking slot at the 1992 Republican National Convention, which he used to warn the nation of an impending “religious and cultural war.”
It is hard not to draw parallels between the rhetoric of Wallace and Buchanan and that employed by President Donald Trump on the campaign trail. Even Pat Buchanan agreed in 2016, saying that he was “astonished” by the similarities. Like Wallace, Trump’s antagonistic rhetoric offers relief to working-class people who, to quote future Vice-President JD Vance, “[feel] like their… politicians [aren’t] standing up for them.” Like Buchanan, Trump demonizes immigrants and ethnic minorities, promises draconian mass deportations, and runs on the slogan of “America First.” The difference between the likes of Wallace and Buchanan and Trump is that the latter has been elected President twice and in the process shattered American civil society, possibly irrevocably.
It is undeniable that Trump’s ascendancy has been a disaster for American democratic norms. From inciting insurrection over false claims of a stolen election, to stuffing the civil service with Heritage Foundation sycophants, to demonizing and dehumanizing political opponents, there is absolutely no question that Trumpian populism is a threat to democracy. It is also evident that conservative populists elsewhere, such as Orban and Kaszynski, have no qualms with squashing civil institutions and domestic dissent, showing that reactionary anti-democratic populism is not merely an American phenomenon. The question is whether reactionary populism is also a form of democracy. If a leader is elected by popular vote, that is a form of democracy, and right-wing populist leaders are no different. Though many of the grievances exploited by reactionary populism are themselves reactionary, many others are economic or parochial in nature, and the victory of right-wing populists should remind liberal democrats to at least ensure that grievances are heard and processed within the system.
Conclusion – The Divergent Implications of Notional Populism
According to Bjerre-Poulsen, “if the notion of ‘populism’ had been conceived by social scientists, it would surely have been rejected as a poor and useless invention.” This statement is just as true now as it was four decades ago. In this essay I have outlined a framework summarizing four iterations of populism, all of which are forms of democratic expression and only one of which constitutes a threat to democracy. Thus, this framework rejects the conception of populism as inherently anti-democratic as an over-generalization. The threat posed by reactionary, right-wing populism, however, poses a real and present danger to civil society and is only fueled by systemic ignorance towards the threat it poses or systemic inability to address legitimate grievances faced by the socioeconomically or otherwise underprivileged. In summary, any effort to address the ascendancy of anti-democratic populism must accept that it is, despite everything, a form of democracy, its support is not predicated on evil but on the best of intentions, and that it is only fueled by caricatures, trivializations, and derogation. To quote Sun Tzu: know your enemy.
Bibliography
Canovan, M. (1981). Populism.
Tindall, G. B. (1960). A Populist Reader: Selections from the Works of American Populist Leaders.
Liberal Party of Canada. (1957). Vote Liberal.
Beck, J. M. (1968). Pendulum of power: Canada’s federal elections.
Newman, P. C. (1973). Renegade in power: The Diefenbaker years.
Duffy, J. (2002). Fights of our lives: Elections, leadership and the making of Canada.
Carto, W. (1982). Profiles in populism.*
Bjerre-Poulsen, N. (1986). Populism – A brief introduction to a baffling notion. American Studies in Scandinavia, 18(1), 27–36. https://doi.org/10.22439/asca.v18i1.1190
Rohler, L. (1999). Conservative appeals to the people: George Wallace’s populist rhetoric. Southern Communication Journal, 64(4), 316–322. https://doi.org/10.1080/10417949909373146
Greenfield, J. (2016). Trump is Pat Buchanan with better timing. Politico Magazine. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/donald-trump-pat-buchanan-republican-america-first-nativist-214221/
Garcia, P. (2017). J.D. Vance for President? https://www.vogue.com/article/hillbilly-elegy-author-jd-vance-on-trump
Boas, T. C. (2015). Voting for Democracy: campaign effects in Chile’s democratic transition. Latin American Politics and Society, 57(2), 67–90. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-2456.2015.00267.x
Interviews with experts and commentators on Polish and Lithuanian politics.
* Reading this book made me physically ill, because it is racist antisemitic apologia by and for Nazis like Carto. I only cite it because of the importance of primary sources.