Zadekpedia

Ask BobAsk a question of every episode, 2009–2023 — answers cite the minute

Populism

5 min read

Part of Elections and politics.

Start here

Every episode (3)

Who argued it

William Howell · Terry Moe · Bradford R. Kane · Frank Buckley

Donald Trump · Electoral College · Executive Power · Administrative State · 2016 Election · Immigration

Background

Populism as a historical force

Bob Zadek dates one American populist wave to the presidency of Teddy Roosevelt, arguing that “the populism of the Teddy Roosevelt administration” — which he glosses as comparable to “today Donald Trump populism” — combined with scandals over the buying of Senate seats to produce the Seventeenth Amendment, providing for the direct election of senators by the people of a state rather than through state legislatures. In his account the founders feared democracy and the impulsive voting of the mob, and designed the Senate as the more deliberative body representing the states; the amendment, he says, relegated states to being mere agencies of the federal government. Sarah Stillman on Minors on the Sex-Offender List (2016)

Bradford R. Kane, author of Pitchfork Populism, traces a longer lineage, saying there is a long history of populist movements in the United States and that one could argue the founding of the country in the 1770s was itself an outgrowth of a populist movement. He cites an agrarian populist movement in the 1800s, economic populist movements, Mary Elizabeth Lease’s movement in Kansas in the late 1800s, Jacob Coxey marching from Ohio on foot to Washington, D.C. with Coxey’s Army in search of veterans’ benefits, William Jennings Bryan, and Teddy Roosevelt’s Progressive Party. What such movements typically share, he says, is empowering people whose concerns they wanted addressed. Populism 201: Advanced Topics in American Democracy (2020)

Definitions and disagreement

Kane distinguishes what he calls “pitchfork populism” from populism proper: it is, he says, a distortion, a false populism, in which Donald Trump identified a disaffected, aggrieved cohort, embraced and mobilized them, and energized them to empower him, with a transactional approach to governing as the organizing principle. He notes references along those lines from Senator Ben Sasse and from John Kelly, former Chief of Staff to Donald Trump. Populism 201: Advanced Topics in American Democracy (2020)

Jayant Bhandari treats populism as a symptom of democracy rather than a deviation from it. In his view democracy is the worst form of government, because the lowest 51% of any society decides who runs the country, and a cycle of populism overtakes the institutions of government and corrupts everything in the society; associations and businesses become democratic and take on what he calls the virus of populism. He calls democracy a cancer, visible in third-world countries and only slowly decaying Western societies over the last 200 years. Capitalism and Morality: Twin Pillars of the West (2017)

Bob Zadek frames the question differently for William Howell and Terry Moe, authors of Presidents, Populism, and the Crisis of Democracy, asking whether populism is a system or a phenomenon and noting that four years earlier the word was heard in reference to dysfunctional governments abroad rather than American politics. Populism After Trump (2021)

Liberty, equality and the populist base

Zadek asks Kane to distinguish populism from the democracy the country has lived in for 231 years, and Kane answers that democracy is basically empowering the people: the settlers who came to what became the colonies were fleeing oppression in Europe and a caste society of serfs and lords and ladies with no social mobility, and they came for social mobility, a combination of liberty and equality that he calls the root of libertarianism as well. Zadek supplements this with economic mobility, arguing that in Western Europe where you were economically was determined at birth, while America offered no built-in structural barriers to economic success. Populism 201: Advanced Topics in American Democracy (2020)

Moe attributes populism in the United States partly to a white backlash to social diversity and to globalization, technological change and immigration, which he says brought real economic harms and insecurities and cultural anxieties to tens of millions of Americans. Those people, he says, were angry at a system that hadn’t solved these problems and at an ineffective government; had Hillary Clinton won, the populist base would still have been there, like a volcano ready to explode, and Trump simply took advantage of it in 2016. Populism After Trump (2021)

Remedies proposed

Zadek proposes permitting a majority of states — 26 or 27 — to nullify any federal law, which would repeal it, leaving the detail of whether to count states or population to others. He calls nullification a grand old concept, noting that Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in 1798 supported a proposition where federal law could be nullified by the states, though their concept was that a state was free not to follow federal law. Sarah Stillman on Minors on the Sex-Offender List (2016)

Bhandari’s remedy is implicit in his diagnosis: he treats populism as inseparable from democracy itself. Capitalism and Morality: Twin Pillars of the West (2017)

Across episodes: the same question, no development

Populism After Trump (2021)

Backlinks