Populism in American Politics

Introduction

As the 2016 presidential campaign rushes toward the finish line one of the most commonly heard refrains involves the supposedly highly populist nature of the race thus far, on both the Republican and Democratic sides of the contest. One cannot read or listen to media analysis of the entirely unexpected popularity and success of Donald Trump without being informed that this success and popularity are due at least in part to Trump’s populist messages and appeals. The same was true of accounts of Senator Bernie Sanders when he was still in the race. Indeed, one could make the case that populist/populism has been the most prominent buzzword in American politics as a whole since the Obama Administration first came into office in 2009. The concept has been used to define and explain developments as seemingly different from each other as the Tea Party movement and the rapid rise of Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, the growth of Black Lives Matter and the racially motivated killings at an African American church in Charleston, SC (Balz 2015).

It would, however, be a mistake to conclude that the rise to prominence of populism in American politics is a recent phenomenon. George W. Bush was often described as adopting a somewhat populist persona, as were Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan. ^[1] Alabama Governor and presidential candidate George Wallace was labeled a populist demagogue in the 1960s, in many ways following in the footsteps of Father Charles Coughlin and Senator/Governor Huey Long in the 1930s. The capital “P” Populist movement of the late 19th century briefly had a relatively powerful impact on American politics, and the coming of Jacksonian Democracy in the 1820s and 1830s is often described as a populist wave. While Thomas Jefferson and James Madison are generally not identified as populists, many of those who supported them and put the Jeffersonian Republicans into political power certainly were. Indeed, many scholars see no small amount of populism in the Anti-Federalist movement formed in opposition to the Constitution as reported out of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787. So rather than a recent phenomenon, American populism is as old, if not older, than the republic itself.

This all being said, populism in American politics is often ill-defined. Its make-up and substance are often presented as givens, its contents and contours as well established and known to all. Neither of these are true. This lack of clarity is not unique to American populism. The concept of populism is too often left fuzzy no matter where one finds it. Populism is rarely defined with any precision or specificity (Jansen 2011; Pied 2011). Its shape and content go unexamined in any systematic way. The term is used to describe a wide variety of things. This paper attempts to address these shortcomings, at least within the context of American politics. In the following pages I will present a substantive sketch of populism in the American context and close with an attempt to discern populism’s place in the tumultuous scene of contemporary American political conflict.

The Substance of American Populism

Whither Populism in Contemporary American Politics?

In light of this sketch, where do we stand in terms of the presence of populist sentiment in recent American political history? In an attempt to answer this I scoured the 1948–2012 ANES Cumulative Datafile and pulled out all variables that might be seen as indicative of American populism as outlined above. Simple frequencies were run to determine the level of possible populist indicators for each year that each question was asked. These results are presented below in Table 1 for the earliest year and the most recent year that ANES asked the question, grouped by element of populism that are thought to tap into. It is important to keep in mind that these indicators are often far from perfect for the task at hand, but they are the best to be had in the ANES Cumulative File.

What can we glean from Table 1? First, even the most cursory look at the far right column of the table indicates that there is a sizable reservoir of populist sentiment in the US to be tapped into. Views that might be seen as epitomizing the themes of ordinary people vs. the elites, fear of centralized authority, and to a lesser extent concern with unfair economic arrangements have increased substantially since the ANES first asked these questions and are now at high or very high levels within the American population. Views on items that could be tapping into populist themes of defending national ideals from threat and support for traditional arrangements have for the most part not changed too much but are also still present at relatively high levels. There are a few exceptions here. The percentage of respondents who say that government does not pay much attention to what people think has been at consistently low levels over time, and likely is not a great indicator of anti-intellectual views. The ANES Cumulative File does not provide much leverage on this particular populist element. Items on greater tolerance for different moral standards and cool thermometer ratings of African Americans have remained similarly steady and low although one does wonder how guarded respondents are in their answers to these questions, especially on the group thermometer for Blacks. Finally, the cool feeling thermometer readings on gays indicator has declined precipitously. This is likely indicative of real opinion change within the American public. This being said, one could make the case that the one third of respondents who rated gays coolly in 2012 might be more prone to populist activation than the more than two thirds who rated gays similarly in 1984 as their negative view of homosexuals is now a minority position, and thus under greater threat. Nonetheless, the bottom line in Table 1 is that there is clear evidence of populist perspectives available to be tapped, and also evidence that views of some populist elements have increased in recent years.

So populist building blocks are clearly present in contemporary American politics. But what about populism itself? Have these populist elements been tapped and activated into current political conflict in the US? As indicated at the outset of this piece, political commentary in the media answers this question with a resounding yes. This is particularly true for coverage and analysis of the 2016 presidential campaign. While early on in the campaign other candidates – primarily Bernie Sanders but to a lesser extent Ted Cruz and Ben Carson – were discussed in terms of populist appeals, the primary populist spotlight has always been focused on Donald Trump. Moreover, Trump has monopolized the label of populist candidate since securing the Republican nomination. Mara Liasson, NPR’s National Political Correspondent, placed Trump “in the classic tradition of American populism,” (Liasson 2015). Michael Lind, co-founder of the New America Foundation, entitled a piece that he wrote for Politico “Donald Trump, the Perfect Populist,” (Lind 2016). Cohn (2016) in the New York Times, Goldberg (2015) in the National Review, Lehmann (2015) in Newsweek, and Packer (2015) in The New Yorker have all written about how Trump is a populist candidate making populist appeals. The theme of Trump as populist has gotten so much play that an angry Barack Obama launched into a presidential “rant” as to why Trump was not a populist (Shabad 2016).

The question of whether or not Donald Trump is truly a populist is of course one that only Trump himself can answer. But we can assess the degree to which Trump’s campaign messages fit within the American populist tradition as outlined in this paper. In many ways Trump’s campaign appears to fit nicely within the universe of American populism. Indeed, Trump’s co-primary campaign issues – foreign trade and immigration – are both presented almost entirely as populist appeals. Trump routinely argues that America’s now decades long trend of negotiating in his view bad trade deals with other nations has weakened the American economy in general, and has decimated the American working class in particular. This is a quintessential example of the unfair economic arrangements element of the American populist tradition. Furthermore Trump presents America’s economic elites (a group to which he of course belongs) as using these trade deals to send American jobs overseas while further enriching themselves with increased profits. Throw in Trump’s attack on hedge fund managers as people who get rich by shuffling paper to hurt the average people and one can see without a doubt that Trump’s campaign is populist in the sense of railing against unfair economic arrangements. This particular populist theme is one (but not the only) reason commonly given for Trump’s success amongst White voters with less than a college education. He is seen as speaking to their sense of economic injustice (Balz and Clement 2016; Cohn 2016; Peters 2016; Rosenthal 2016).

Trump’s anti-immigrant message is a similarly good fit within American populism. Trump’s depiction of undocumented immigrants from Mexico as “criminals, drug dealers, rapists” and his call for a moratorium on Muslim immigration clearly tap into the racist and nativist elements often present in American populism. They can also be seen as representing both a longing for previous status quo of a more White America and a defense of traditional arrangements. During the course of his anti-immigrant rhetoric Trump also frequently argues that immigrants ignore and flaunt traditional American societal norms, which as Brewer and Stonecash (2015) document has become a consistent source of political conflict in the US. Vavreck (2016) argues that Trump has virtually single-handedly “reinvigorated explicit appeals to ethnocentrism” and that these appeals are a large part of why working class White voters who “believe that Whites are a supreme race and who long for the Confederacy” are heavily supporting Trump’s candidacy. If one combines economic injustice with anti-immigration we can see them joining together to speak to the White male working class who increasingly sees itself as losing out in American society. This fits Hofstadter’s (1955) loss of status populist theme perfectly.

There is still more to lend support to the idea of the Trump campaign as populist insurgency. It is hard to imagine a better fit for the populist theme of conspiratorial threat than Donald Trump. While his association with the so-called “Birther” conspiracy receives the most attention, Trump’s habit of using conspiracy theories to appeal for voter support does not stop there. To identify but a few of the others, Trump famously linked Ted Cruz’s father to the assassination of President Kennedy, raised questions about the deaths of Vince Foster and Antonin Scalia, and argued that President Obama did not really attend Columbia University (DelReal 2016; Sarlin 2016). The liberal digital media organization AlterNet has kept a running tally of the conspiracy theories that Trump has at least somewhat supported. The total as of September 17, 2016 was 58.

Trump’s appeals based on economic unfairness, anti-immigration, loss of status, and conspiracy theories certainly point to his 2016 presidential campaign being populist in nature. Such an evaluation gains further support when one realizes that all four of these appeals identify an enemy for Trump supporters to be against. Whether it is ineffectual American leaders or the smarter foreign leaders who are duping them, Mexican immigrant criminals, Muslim terrorists, or shadowy conspirators, Trump is offering up enemies to those whose support he is hoping to attract. This is a classic populist trope in American politics.

But before we get too far down the Trump as populist road we need to consider where his campaign does not fit the classic American populist model. The largest failed connection is undoubtedly Trump’s virtual total failure to lionize and identify himself with the “ordinary” people (Postel 2016). This is not to claim that Americans fail to see Trump as a “regular guy.” Indeed, many of his supporters do. But this has absolutely nothing to do with efforts on Trump’s part. In Trump’s mind and language he is anything but ordinary. He is the smartest, the richest, is the best and has the best no matter what is being discussed. Moreover, the idea of Trump espousing the wisdom of the common people as the solution to a problem – any problem – is absurd. Trump is against some elites, but only because they are not his elites. Trump as president would solve problems by surrounding himself with similarly smart people and making others bend to his will. This most certainly does not fit within the American populist tradition. Trump is also not opposed to centralized authority. He rails against the current centralized authorities in Washington, but only because of what he sees as their incompetence. Trump sees no problem with power, so long as it is properly used. One can see this clearly in his numerous positive comments regarding Russian President Vladimir Putin. If anything, Trump seems to promise his supporters that he will further centralize power to the White House and personally use it to make their lives infinitely better almost overnight. This is clearly demonstrated in Trump’s Republican presidential nomination speech in Cleveland where he thundered “I’m your voice” to the working people of the US and capped his account of an America in dire circumstances by stating “I alone can fix it” (Appelbaum 2016). This is another glaring disconnect with the American populist tradition. The complete failure of the Trump campaign to check the populist boxes on valorizing the common people and railing against centralized power makes one wonder if something else beyond populism is at play in the phenomenon that is Donald Trump.

Thomas Edsall in a January 2016 New York Times op-ed points us in the direction of where to look for this missing element (Edsall, 2016). After consulting with a number of academics on the subject of Trump’s success, Edsall argues that the key to understanding the rise of Trump in the 2016 presidential campaign is authoritarianism. Summarizing what he heard in his conversations, Edsall outlines Trump’s appeal as a promise to restore order and provide protection in the face of dire internal and external threats to the nation. He will reward the good and punish the wicked, restore the purity of American society. In the eyes of those Edsall spoke with, Trump as authoritarian savior was the secret to his success.

Authoritarianism has a long and somewhat checkered history in social science research. The concept was famously first introduced by Theodor Adorno and his colleagues in their 1950 study The Authoritarian Personality. Although widely discredited in the decades following its publication due to methodological issues, Adorno et al.’s take on what made up the authoritarian personality is still worth thinking about. According to them (1950, p. 228), authoritarianism was marked by (paraphrasing in spots): “rigid adherence to conventional…values,” submission to proper authorities, aggression against those who go against these values, anti-subjectivity, superstition and stereotypes, power, hostility, a belief that “dangerous things go on in the world,” and an “exaggerated concern” with sex (particularly sex that was viewed as abnormal). For Adorno and his colleagues, those who scored high on these characteristics were ripe for authoritarian appeals from potential leaders.

Although among those highly critical of the methodology employed by Adorno et al., Bob Altemeyer’s two books on authoritarianism (1981; 1996) established a portrait of right wing authoritarianism that borrowed three of Adorno et al.’s traits: submission to legitimate authorities, aggression toward outgroups so long as it was approved of by the established authorities, and strict adherence to established societal conventions. Altemeyer’s right wing authoritarians respected and trusted the proper authorities, were willing to harshly punish transgressions of societal norms, were prone to racism and ethnic prejudice, and tended to see themselves and those like them as good and others as bad, enemies (Altemeyer 1981).

Two additional works in the last decade have done a great deal to bring authoritarianism back into the minds of scholars who study American politics. The first is Karen Stenner’s The Authoritarian Dynamic (2005). Stenner’s authoritarianism is marked by the traits of “obedience to authority, moral absolutism and conformity, intolerance and punitiveness toward dissidents and deviants, [and] animosity and aggression toward racial and ethnic out-groups,” (3). The second book to thrust authoritarianism back to center stage was Marc Hetherington’s and Jonathan Weiler’s Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics (2009). For Hetherington and Weiler, a “need for order” is the key to understanding authoritarianism. Authoritarians are rigid conformists who struggle with ambiguity and nuance. They crave order, and look to legitimate authorities to provide this order. To quote Hetherington and Weiler at length:

In sum, authoritarianism is fundamentally motivated by a desire for order and a support for authorities seen as best able to secure that order against a variety of threats to social cohesion. For authoritarians, proper authorities are necessary to stave off the chaos that appears to be just around the corner. Furthermore, authoritarians often imbue authorities with transcendent qualities, not subject to questioning and doubt. Emanating from such a conception is a suspicion of ideas that appear to pose a threat to such authorities and of groups that may, by their very nature, unravel the social fabric. A tendency to rigid thinking and an unwillingness or inability to process new information that might challenge such thinking also appears to be characteristic of authoritarians’ mode of political understanding (41).

Here we might just have found the non-populist parts of Donald Trump’s appeal. Authoritarianism has no requirement to lionize or empower the ordinary people. The authoritarian leader only has to demonstrate to the people that she or he knows what is best for them and promise to provide it. Authoritarianism also sees power as a virtue, and virtually begs its leaders to use it to the fullest. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign fits on both counts. Trump also promises order and security, and his rhetoric and tone are about as aggressive as it gets in American politics outside of the fringes.

So is Donald Trump a populist authoritarian (or authoritarian populist, take your pick)? Norris (2016) says yes, rooting his rise in “a cultural backlash in Western societies against long-term, ongoing social change.” Rahn and Oliver (2016) say no, arguing that Trump is a straight-up populist in the American tradition. At this point I tend to side with Norris. Separately, neither populism nor authoritarianism can fully explain the appeal and success of Donald Trump. Together, the two concepts seem to cover all it is that has led Trump to the steps of the White House. What this development says about the state of American politics is a discussion that is just getting started. But what we do know at this point is that populism is front and center in contemporary American politics. So is authoritarianism. We need to understand this, and we also need to be careful not to conflate the two concepts.