Historians Have Long Thought Populism Was a Good Thing. Are They Wrong?
Today’s populist resurgence has us rethinking the role these movements play in U.S. politics. By JOSHUA ZEITZ
January 14, 2018 This article is the third in a series on how President Donald Trump changed history—reviving historical debates that have simmered on low heat for years, and altering how historians think about them. See the other articles in the series here and here.Imagine, if you will, that millions of hard-working Americans finally reached their boiling point. Roiled by an unsettling pattern of economic booms and busts; powerless before a haughty coastal elite that in recent decades had effectively arrogated the nation’s banks, means of production and distribution, and even its information highway; burdened by the toll that open borders and free trade imposed on their communities; incensed by rising economic inequality and the concentration of political power—what if these Americans registered their disgust by forging a new political movement with a distinctly backward-looking, even revanchist, outlook? What if they rose up as one and tried to make America great again?
Would you regard such a movement as worthy of support and nurture—as keeping with the democratic tradition of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson? Or would you mainly dread the ugly tone it would inevitably assume—its fear of the immigrant and the Jew, its frequent lapse into white supremacy, its slipshod grasp of political economy and its potentially destabilizing effect on longstanding institutions and norms?
To clarify: This scenario has nothing whatsoever to do with Donald Trump and the modern Republican Party. Rather, it is a question that consumed social and political historians for the better part of a century. They clashed sharply in assessing the essential character of the Populist movement of the late 1800s—a political and economic uprising that briefly drew under one tent a ragtag coalition of Southern and Western farmers (both black and white), urban workers, and utopian newspapermen and polemicists.
<..snip..>
But Hofstadter is most useful when we scratch below that surface. His goal wasn’t to establish that populists, who over time have pursued a wide variety of ideological and policy ends, are bad people. His larger point was that populist eyes are often cast in the wrong direction—backward. At critical junctures in history, they prove unreconciled to economic and cultural change and to globalization, both in the form of open markets and open borders. They endeavor to reestablish lost worlds—a Jeffersonian republic of small farms and independent shops, or a latter-day utopia of tidy suburbs and unionized factories and mines, that have no hope of survival in a changing world. They bitterly but understandably resist acknowledgment that the country in which they grew up has irrevocably changed.
<..snip..>
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/01/14/trump-populism-history-216320
