people – against the elites. As such populism can be found to align with both left- and right-wing agendas because a central tenet of
populism argues democracy should reflect the pure and undiluted will of the people.
In America, populism oftentimes expresses nostalgia for past reform efforts like the New Deal. It has also taken the form of commodity farm movements with radical economic agendas such as the U.S People’s Party of the late-19th century and the reactionary populism of George Wallace that promoted white backlash against the civil rights movement.
Populism has, some argue, been instrumental in pushing forward different political agendas: for example, a form of populism facilitated the French Revolution with its hatred of elites, it helped facilitate the rise of the Nazi party in Germany, the rise of Silvio Berlusconi in Italy, the rise of Marine Le Pen’s National Front, the election of Viktor Orban in Hungary, and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil when he won his first term. In America groups associated with populism have included the Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, and various anarchist movements. For this reason, it is hard to describe one model form of populism – which is why people tend to focus on a particular leader. In America, populist reformers range from Theodore Roosevelt to Robert Follette, Sr. and Huey Long.
More recently, they include Ross Perot, Ralph
Nader, John Edwards, Donald Trump, Bernie
Sanders, Josh Hawley, and Marjorie Taylor Greene.
One big concern expressed about populism is whether it is even possible to have populism without racism? As Benjamin McKean has noted:
The party platform ratified at the 1892 founding convention of the People’s Party of America, which gave populism its name, condemns an immigration policy that “opens our ports to the pauper and criminal classes of the world and crowds out our wage-earners; and we denounce the present ineffective laws against contract labor, and demand the further restriction of undesirable emigration.” And the populism of both George Wallace and the tea party movement rely on racial resentment and anti-immigrant views. Even Sanders can seem indifferent to outsiders. When he decries the trade policies that allow U.S. corporations to “pay slave wages in Mexico or China,” he usually implies that the solution is to bring U.S. jobs back rather than boost wages abroad.
This points to a key component of populism identified by McKean:
Populism isn’t the political expression of a
pre-existing working class. Rather, it’s how individuals use a grievance to identify
themselves as the authentic embodiment of “the people” — unlike those other people, the group they are blaming for that grievance.
Citing research of Williamson, Skocpol, and Coggin, McKean reveals the irony:
Research by Vanessa Williamson, Theda Skocpol and John Coggin shows that tea party activists typically identify as “workers” whose virtuous labor makes them part of the American people, who therefore deserve government support like Medicare. That was true even though a third of them were “students, unemployed people, or retirees” and even though most tea partiers had higher than average incomes. Williamson, Skocpol and Coggin report that activists identified “young people and unauthorized immigrants” as “non-workers” who may try to freeload at the expense of hardworking American taxpayers.
This mixing of people and agendas makes it extremely difficult to align particular people and outlooks to particular policy prescriptions. And so, to the question of whether it is possible to have populism without racism, McKean concludes:
The problem is that populism conflates equality with homogeneity. Populism can minimize differences in the name of unity, but it doesn’t make those differences go away. For example, if pointing out that white workers and black
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