An American populist in the White House

Opposing Trump populism will require an alliance based on support for democracy and greater economic justice

The United States is currently embarked upon the most aberrational presidency in the history of the republic. Plenty of past American presidents have done things that sparked off international protests, but no president has ever before provoked mass demonstrations in his own country and more than sixty others simply for taking the oath of office.

The moral force of these protestors relies partly on the assurance that most Americans do not support Donald J. Trump, who won despite losing the popular vote by a margin of nearly three million. And the missing mandate rankles - hence Trump's repeated, baseless claims of voter fraud, dovetailed with his anti-immigrant messaging that millions of 'illegals' voted against him.

But Donald Trump is not really interested in electoral arithmetic, more with projecting himself as a winner, the all-time winner. He appeals directly, not to 'the people' as the sovereign power in a representative democracy, but to people as an audience of fans. His favourite mode of political interaction is the rally, a stage-managed event in front of a crowd of supporters. After the election, Trump embarked on a 'thank you' tour of self-congratulation, and even since his inauguration he has returned to his comfort zone of stadium show stumping.

This particular form of unpresidential behaviour is generally explained in psychological terms - something Trump needs to fill the bottomless pit of his ego. Perhaps this is true, but it misses the larger political point. This was precisely the playbook that won Trump the Republican presidential nomination because it broke all the rules of campaign fundraising and politicking. Trump turned his run into a prime-time pop spectacle and gained all the media attention he needed - for free. For many heartland Republican voters, it was enough that he was promising to restore greatness and that he looked like a winner.

It's easy to lose count of the ways Trump's election win turned conventional wisdom on its head: the polls were wrong, the party elite was overthrown, the traditional policy platform was torn up, endorsements didn't matter, disqualifying behaviour and comments were not disqualifying at all, traditional disclosures like medical records and tax returns were denied, demagoguery was an asset not a liability, and so on.

Again, all true. But these are the epiphenomena of the one truly important fact: 2016 was the year that a populist won the presidency. With the possible exception of Andrew Jackson - nicknamed 'King Mob' by his opponents - in the early nineteenth century, no such rabble-rouser has ever before attained the White House. (The comparison is not lost on Trump, who has hung a portrait of Jackson behind his desk in the Oval Office.) This makes Donald Trump the apogee of a distinctively American type: the reactionary populist.

Populism and hucksterism

Populism in the US derives from the People's Party that formed in 1891. Also called the Populist Party, it began as an agrarian movement rooted in the anger of Midwestern farmers and Southern sharecroppers at what they saw as exploitation by Eastern elites - price-fixing and overcharging by banks and railroad companies. It was radical in its economic demands, calling for an end to the monopolies and greed of the robber-baron capitalism of the Gilded Age. But, although the Populists did make some alliances with labour organisations that shared their redistributionist agenda, they largely retained the social conservatism of their agrarian origins.

The Populists swiftly became a national force in politics thanks to the Panic of 1893, a serious depression caused by a collapse of railroad stock speculation and series of bank failures. Unemployment shot up from below 4 per cent in 1892 to a peak of 18 per cent in 1894, and it was five years before the recovery came.¹ But the Populist Party's initial success was short-lived for a number of reasons. The Democratic Party adopted parts of its programme, and in some areas the two parties formed a 'fusion' electoral coalition. In the...