When the populist tide ebbs

What's left behind?

Whether America has reached peak MAGA won't be known until this coming November, at the earliest. If Donald Trump gets elected again, his populist tide might still be rising. If he doesn't get elected, the tide might already be ebbing. In either case, Trump populism won't last forever. What will it leave behind?

A look at past populisms can help us guess. The first wave of American populism elected Andrew Jackson president in 1828. It was part of a broad assertion of power by previously unenfranchised people. Property and residency restrictions on voting for adult white males had largely disappeared; the new voters made their presence felt by tossing out John Quincy Adams, the representative of the establishment, and electing the popular hero Jackson. 

Significantly, Jacksonian democracy was accompanied by a religious revival called the Second Great Awakening. Like its namesake, this movement embodied a rejection of authority by believers and a demand for a personal emotional connection to religion. The new awakening inspired reform movements, notably abolitionism, and a new American religion, Mormonism.

Mormonism and abolitionism outlasted Jacksonianism. America's political system has a knack for absorbing new movements and ideas. The Jackson wave of political populism left behind a new style of politicking, the “log cabin and hard cider” campaign. But after Jackson's presidency didn’t bring the millennium, but rather the financial panic of 1837, the stream of politics returned to its normal channel.

America's second wave of populism nominated William Jennings Bryan for president in 1896. Bryan didn't win that election, and the fact that he was simultaneously nominated by the Democratic party suggested that the populism of that time might already have been coopted. But if cooption is not a promising outcome for particular populists themselves, it indicates a degree of success for the movement and its ideas.

The populists had been demanding a cheaper dollar, to ease their debt burdens. The vehicle for their demands was free silver, a large injection of silver into the currency to complement gold. After Bryan lost the election, America got the cheaper dollar the populists wanted, albeit not via silver. Instead, new discoveries of gold and new techniques for refining the metal expanded the gold supply, thereby making each gold dollar cheaper.

The populists of the 1890s also demanded that the great monopolies be reined in, starting with the railroads. Theodore Roosevelt castigated populists as bloody-minded socialists, but he gave them the railroad regulation they wanted, in the form of the Elkins and Hepburn acts. And he launched the modern era of antitrust prosecution and regulation.

Some of the populists had also demanded prohibition and suffrage for women. These came in the form of the 18th and 19th amendments. Certain New Deal reforms, particularly payments to farmers, can be seen as laggard responses to populist demands from the 1890s.

What do the populists of today want? And what might they have gotten after Trump is gone? A feature common to all three waves of populism is distrust of government and other institutions. But government didn’t go away in the earlier phases, and it’s not going away now. Populists claim that the growth of government is the result of conspiracy among government officials to expand their grasp. This is rarely the case. Rather, government grows in response to popular demands. Sometimes these are made by populists themselves, as when they sought government regulation of railroads. Sometimes they have broader constituencies, as for Social Security and Medicare.

Populists today attack the established media, much as Jacksonian populists attacked banks, especially the Bank of the United States. Jackson killed the national bank, but he couldn't rid the country of banks, because they served a broad need. And the national bank eventually returned in the form of the Federal Reserve. Likewise with the media today. They serve a need for information, and that need will be met today’s media businesses or others not much different from them.

Populists in the 1890s attacked globalization, particularly international finance. Populists today are equally anti-globalist. As president, Trump launched tariff wars against America’s foreign competitors, and as a candidate again, he has promised more of the same. The 1890s attack hardly slowed the growth of international trade. Today’s attack has been equally unsuccessful. After a covid dip, world trade resumed its steady growth of around five percent per year. It’s more than twice as large as it was when the 1999 Battle of Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization kicked off the current anti-globalist campaign. 

Populism is as much a mood as it is an agenda. Sometimes parts of the agenda stick. The mood always passes.