Diss at your peril
Populism then and now
In 1955 Richard Hofstadter published The Age of Reform, which included a chapter on the Populist movement of the late nineteenth century. Previous histories of Populism had emphasized the economic distress of farmers—the Populists’ core constituency—occasioned by falling prices for farm commodities. Hofstadter looked instead at the psychic blows suffered by farmers amid pell-mell industrialization and urbanization. “The farmer was beginning to realize acutely not merely that the best of the world’s goods were to be had in the cities and that the urban middle and upper classes had much more of them than he did but also that he was losing in status and respect as compared with them,” Hofstadter wrote. “He became aware that the official respect paid to the farmer masked a certain disdain felt by many city people.”
It was from the Democrats that the disdain was most jarring. Thomas Jefferson, the party’s founder, had praised farmers as the salt of the American earth, the sine qua non of American self-government. Democrats—and others—still paid lip service to farmers, but their demeanor and actions conveyed a different message. “For the farmer it was bewildering, and irritating too, to think of the great contrast between the verbal deference paid him by almost everyone and the real status, the real economic position, in which he found himself,” Hofstadter said. “Improving his economic position was always possible, though this was often done too little and too late; but it was not within anyone’s power to stem the decline in the rural values and pieties, the gradual rejection of the moral commitments that had been expressed in the early exaltations of agrarianism.”
The disdain felt by the farmers, Hofstadter said, was what accounted for the unsavory aspects of Populism: its xenophobia, its antisemitism, its penchant for conspiracy theories. To be sure, the farmers had economic complaints—against the deflation that added to their debt burden, against the railroads that gouged them on rates, against the great trusts that bought their crops and sold them their equipment. But it was the feeling that they were being looked down on by the new urban elites that really angered them and brought out their worst.
Hofstadter’s status-anxiety interpretation elicited controversy. Critics couldn’t decide whether he was apologizing for the Populists or disdaining them himself. But after a time the history profession moved on.
Hofstadter’s approach bears a fresh look at present, when another populist movement has pulled away a more recent part of the Democratic coalition. By the end of the 1930s, urban workers had become to the Democratic party of Franklin Roosevelt what farmers had been to the same party under Jefferson. For decades Democrats could count on labor unions to deliver the vote for candidates. The blue collar vote was a large part of what allowed the Democrats to dominate the House of Representatives for half a century starting with the New Deal.
But the Democrats’ hold on the working class began to weaken near the twentieth century’s end. Workers, like the farmers a century before, had complaints against a changing economy. In the workers’ case it was the offshoring of jobs. Yet the Democrats were no more responsible for that than the Republicans were.
What tipped the balance against the Democrats, in the minds of many workers, was the takeover of the party by a new elite, comparable to the urban elite that had alienated farmers from the Democrats in the late nineteenth century. The new elitists were college-educated and imbued with cultural sensibilities common on campuses. They celebrated the historically downtrodden, except for working class whites, who were presumed complicit in the racism that had held down people of color. The new elitists demanded special treatment for women and minorities, which often came at the expense of working class white men. They rewrote the rules of marriage and gender, and branded as homophobes and transphobes any who questioned their cultural revolution. They called for the defunding of police forces, which many working class whites (and blacks) had taken pride in being part of. When the candidate they nominated for president in 2016, Hillary Clinton, called them “deplorables,” adding, “They're racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic,” they felt the way those nineteenth century Populists had felt.
Political participation is about policy but also about belonging. The Democrats of the 1890s made farmers feel they didn’t belong in the party anymore, so they defected to the Populists. The Democrats in the 2010s made working class whites feel they didn’t belong in the party anymore, so they defected to the Republican party of Donald Trump.
The Democrats responded in 1896 with a desperate effort to win the farmers back. They nominated a populist candidate, William Jennings Bryan, who was also the Populist nominee, and they adopted much of the Populist platform. But they still lost the presidency that year—and again and again and again until 1912.
Their heirs, after losing to Trump in 2016, responded in 2020 by nominating Joe Biden, whose political roots lay in the Democrats’ blue collar era. Biden beat Trump, but the party didn’t change course. And Trump in early 2024 appeared to have a good chance of riding that working class alienation to victory again.