Populism is “for the People.” So, Why Does it get Such a Bad Name?
From Steve Bannon to Bernie Sanders, it’s time for the populist party to ACTUALLY win, and stop being co-opted by the “demons in disguise”
If the former era was considered the “War on Terror” era the new era should be considered the “War on Populism”. The age before that was the “War on Communism”, “Radicalism”, “White Nationalism”, it seems these people who you’d never find in “Basic Training” always have a war to fight. The same folks, aside from the presidency, that were once the warriors against terrorism, communism, radicalism, etc. are now the same folks fighting the “good” fight against populism.
During these wars of all sorts and sizes, many techniques and legislative exercises were developed to fight these various ism’s, that in the last decade have been re-aimed and recalibrated inward. And the Trump administration, once the target of their aims, is now following the same playbook and firing off himself. It’s very strange that the enemies of populism, and in turn the enemies of the American people, once the intelligentsia of the United States is still taking aim at the arch-populist that is Donald Trump, as he’s heading full speed toward their side of the fence. Maybe that’s their aim, we’ll never know. But this isn’t about whether every policy that Donald Trump is carrying out is purely “For the People”, this is more about the what of populism? And why does it get such a bad name?
“A government of the People, by the People, for the People.”
For that to be the standard anything less than populist should be, and is, not accepted. Every four years the person who seems to be the most populist wins.
Think about that, if Kamala Harris’ final stand in her campaign hadn’t been dragging out names from the most anti-populist presidency in our memory, the Cheney’s, would she have won? Nobody had worse policies than George W. Bush, nobody. And the very worst of his administration? Dick Cheney, no doubt! George W. Bush’s way to reform social security was for everyone to invest portion of their paychecks into stocks, not long before the financial crisis. Idiot!
That was surely the final straw for me, and the last thing I, and many others like me, could remember of her on election day.
This is the Age of Populism
I very often describe the age that we are in as the information age, but I believe that is shorthand for what this actually is, the “Age of Populism.”
With the availability of information and how-to at such a large scale, never before has there been more opportunity to do and be anything you want. But it’s not just information that makes this possible, however, it is a lot of it.
The fact that I am able to do what I am doing right now is Populism.
Thomas Frank wrote an excellent book a few years ago rebuking the anti-populist sentiment of the institutionalized class — as I like to call them — since 1896 called “The People, NO!!!”
Which, by the way, if you have access to, he says what I am saying way better than I could and I will be poaching quite a bit from it.
It concludes with what I would describe as an early instance of the possibility now allotted to us all by the internet. The Haldeman-Julius “Little Blue Book” Collection. Here is Thomas Frank on the first experiment in information dissemination to the masses:
Let me relate one final tale of democracy’s promise. It’s a story that starts with the Appeal to Reason, the legendary Kansas newspaper that began life as a supporter of the People’s Party before transferring its allegiance to the Socialists.
Years later, as Socialism followed Populism into oblivion, the remaining editor of the Appeal to Reason, a child of Jewish immigrants named Emanuel Haldeman-Julius, cast about looking for ways to rescue the sinking publishing operation. The idea he eventually hit upon in 1919 owed much to the old Populist traditions of pamphleteering and mass popular education: left-wing essays, famous works of literature, and self-education tracts printed up in pocket-sized form and priced so low—five cents—that virtually anyone could afford them.
The People’s Pocket Series, he called them, before eventually changing the name to the Little Blue Books. You could buy them from vending machines in railroad stations. You could get twenty titles for a dollar, postpaid from Girard, Kansas. They were great books for the common man, a bridge between the agrarian radicalism of the 1890s and the labor radicalism of the 1930s.
The Little Blue Books, Haldeman-Julius once wrote, represented “a democracy of literature” in which the highest of highbrow culture was made available to anyone who wanted it. They were not meant to be showy: their covers were unpretentious; their paper was coarse and uneven. Yet this flatly proletarian business model was an overwhelming success. Ten years after launching his cheapskate publishing empire, Haldeman-Julius had sold a hundred million of the little books. By 1951, the year he died, there were some twenty-five hundred different titles in his warehouse in Kansas; the grand total of Little Blue Books sold came to five hundred million.
The books themselves are relics of an age when tramps read Zola and dirt farmers wanted to know about Goethe and every village had an atheist who could quote Tom Paine or Robert Ingersoll. Scan the biographical literature on Haldeman-Julius and you will find testimonials from people who read Little Blue Books while on strike or while in prison, people who read them on the subway train, people who passed them around in hospitals and at boardinghouses.
Haldeman-Julius’s idea was not to reinforce hierarchies of taste but to demolish them—to “put all books on the same level,” as he once wrote. “The door to learning and culture has been forced open,” proclaimed one of his ads from the 1920s. The plain blue booklets were “not intended to decorate shelves but to enrich minds,” announced another.
The historian Christopher Lasch once famously declared that the professions “came into being by reducing the layman to incompetence.” Haldeman-Julius’s idea was to do the opposite—to undermine elites by making ordinary people capable. The Little Blue Books were emphatically about the intelligence of the “self-taught” American, about their ability to read Ibsen and Balzac on their own, about their power to undertake complicated projects by themselves: How to Psycho-Analyze Your Neighbors; How to Be a Gate Crasher; Airplanes and How to Fly Them; How to Make Your Own Cosmetics; How to Acquire Good Taste; How to Be a Modern Mother; How to Become a Writer of Little Blue Books; How to Build Your Own Greenhouse, and here, have a shot of Schopenhauer while you’re building it.
The big idea behind the enterprise, Haldeman-Julius wrote, was to put an end to “cultural, intellectual, economic and political subservience and inferiority.”
“There are men (rich and powerful) who shudder at the thought of a free world—free thinking, free living, sane behavior, mass health and happiness, individual freedom and social responsibility, the right to candid speech on any possible subject. They live on lies. I don’t merely disapprove of them. I more than dislike them. I hate them with an implacable hatred.”
This form of populism was no “celebration of ignorance.” It was a one-man campaign against the falsehoods of the mighty, against racism and intolerance, against organized religion, against superstition, against conventional interpretations of history, against orthodoxy of every kind.
Isn’t that a great empowering story, “Of the People, By the People, for the People.” That’s what Populism is! Now, compare that story with what they want you to believe it is:
“Populism arrays the people against the intelligentsia, natives against foreigners, and dominant ethnic, religious, and racial groups against minorities,” charges the Berkeley economist Barry Eichengreen. “It is divisive by nature. It can be dangerously conducive to bellicose nationalism.” The Populist Temptation: Economic Grievance and Political Reaction in the Modern Era
Interesting, well there is more to that story:
For our purposes, though, it is Haldeman-Julius’s campaign against racism that means the most. Several Little Blue Books dealt with the Klan, which was generating great clouds of toxic nonsense in the twenties. In one of these, Haldeman-Julius described the Klan as a “viper,” a “beast,” a spreader of “poison,” “bigotry,” and “reaction.” In 1927 his wife, Marcet Haldeman-Julius, authored one of the most striking Little Blue Books of them all: an original account of a lynching in Little Rock, Arkansas, written so soon after the event that it reads like firsthand reportage. As the awful story unfolds, she interviews the people involved and describes the scenes in brutal detail: the cowardice of the city officials; the insane vindictiveness of the white population; the members of the mob who aren’t ashamed of what they’ve done.
It might seem if you were following the headlines currently that Eichgreen’s quote on populism was accurate, but I’d argue that isn’t populism. Populism is the charge that they wish we hated about the current administration, it's what they want us to hate about the current administration but, it isn’t that.
Anything Donald Trump does that is not for the people is not populist. Cutting H1-B visa’s? Populist. Cutting Visa’s for opposing Palestinian genocide? Not Populist.
Cutting foreign aid for countries that can afford free healthcare? Populist.
Opposing free healthcare to benefit the medical and pharma lobby? Not Populist.
An Executive Order restoring freedom of speech for all people in the country? Populist.
Unless they oppose Israeli policies? Not Populist.
Free trade? Not Populist.
Tariffs? Not sure.
Bernie Sanders is known for being on the Populist Left. According to him ‘Open Borders? That was a Koch Brothers proposal.
Immigration so lax that anyone can come in doesn’t benefit anyone, including legal immigrants, so therefore a lot of the current administration’s policies are? Populist.
Once you start deporting people based on your donor’s nationality, well, that’s not Populist.
Last week Donald Trump proposed “Taxing the Rich”, that is Populist.
The backlash he got for it from Wall Street? Not Populist.
That is why populism is hated by so many of the internationalist types, Their gonna tax the rich! It’s Socialism, sorry, we should, and I believe I would feel that way if I wasn’t making $25K/year on my best year. Rich people should at least be taxed at the same rate as middle class workers, if they are going to be taxed at all. Either all one standard, or cut the tax, period. Anything else is nuts.
Are you saying it makes sense for the lowest paid workers to pay more taxes than the 1% of America? Make that make sense. By the way, Populist.
Steve Bannon says, (and I think every leftist would be in favor of this) “Populism is anti-elitism, it’s anti-crony capitalism.” And I think if you’re against that, you are against America.
So, why does that get a bad name?
Hey, Why the Long Faces?
The government has decimated every populist movement from the anti-war movement and civil rights movement of the 60’s with COINTELPRO, Operation CHAOS, and the various MK’s to the movement against free trade in the 90’s with agents provocateurs in the protest movement. The anti-war movement of the ‘00’s.
The DNC destroyed Bernie and left them with nice, safe, internationalist warmonger, who’d been bankrolling their organization to take presidency. After all, the people would never vote for the horrible populist Trump, right???? Right.
When Donald Trump got elected, Brexit passed in the United Kingdom, populism was on the rise and it was time for another war, battlefield Earth. They knew just what to do.
Thomas Frank describes it like this:
“Populism” is the word that comes to the lips of the respectable and the highly educated when they perceive the global system going haywire like this. Populism is the name they give to the avalanche crashing over the Alpine wonderland of Davos. Populism is what they call the mutiny that may well turn the supercarrier America into a foundering wreck. Populism, for them, is a one word evocation of the logic of the mob; it is the people as a great rampaging beast.
What has happened, the thinkers of the Beltway and the C-Suite tell us, is that the common folk have declared independence from experts and along the way from reality itself. And so they have come together to rescue civilization: political scientists, policy advisers, economists, technologists, CEOs, joining as one to save our social order. To save it from populism.
This imagined struggle of expert versus populist has a fundamental, almost biblical flavor to it. It is a battle of order against chaos, education against ignorance, mind against appetite, enlightenment against bigotry, health against disease. From TED talk and red carpet, the call rings forth: democracy must be controlled … before it ruins our democratic way of life.
In attacking populism, the object is not merely to resist President Donald Trump, the nation’s thinkers say. Nor is the conflict of our times some grand showdown of Left and Right. Questions like that, they tell us, were settled long ago when the Soviet Union collapsed. No, the political face-off of today is something different: it pits the center against the periphery, the competent insider against the disgruntled sorehead. In this conflict, the side of right is supposed to be obvious. Ordinary people are agitated, everyone knows this, but the ones whose well-being must concern us most are the elites whom the people threaten to topple.
And how did they attack? They used every ability within their power.
A fellow elite who helped to push the war in Iraq:
“Democracies End When They Are Too Democratic” blared the title of a much-discussed 2016 essay by Andrew Sullivan. An article in Foreign Policy expressed it more archly: “It’s Time for the Elites to Rise Up Against the Ignorant Masses.”
The 2017 “global report” for Human Rights Watch was titled, simply, “The Dangerous Rise of Populism.” In March of that year, former British prime minister Tony Blair rang the alarm with a New York Times essay titled, “How to Stop Populism’s Carnage.” At about the same time he founded the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, an organization whose website announces that populists “can pose a real threat to democracy itself.”
Sober citizens were worrying about populism at the Aspen Ideas Festival. Scholarly types were moaning about it at the annual Prague Populism Conference. High-net-worth individuals reviled it at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland. The cool kids deplored it on the plains of Texas—at SXSW, a festival that originated as a punk rock gathering. In the Netherlands, the
Friedrich Naumann Foundation sponsored an event and described it like this: Populism has become a wide spread phenomenon throughout the world. The danger of their backward-looking nostalgia for an idealized past, half-truths and fake news stories pose a threat for free and open societies.
At Brigham Young University a squad of experts on this dangerous phenomenon were ready to go even before 2016; “Team Populism” (as it called itself) swung into action with a flurry of policy memos and innovative statistical techniques. At Stanford, the “Global Populisms Project,” which is co-chaired by a prominent former member of the Obama administration, declared as follows on its website: “Populist parties are a threat to liberal democracy.”
And in bipartisan fashion:
The liberal Center for American Progress came together in 2018 with its Beltway nemesis, the conservative American Enterprise Institute, to issue a report on “the threat of authoritarian populism” and to outline “the task facing America’s political elites” as they went about beating it down.
*The National Endowment for Democracy, supposedly a nonpartisan foundation, hosted a launch party for two books dedicated to pumping up the fear. Anti-Pluralism: The Populist Threat to Liberal Democracy was one of them; in it political scientist William Galston announced that “Populists damage democracy as such.” The People vs. Democracy was the other; in it political scientist Yascha Mounk wrote that populism is a “disease.”
And the disease was spreading; it was in fact an epidemic. “There can no longer be any doubt that we are going through a populist moment,” Mounk continued. “The question now is whether this populist moment will turn into a populist age—and cast the very survival of liberal democracy in doubt.
*Very ugly that the NED, known as the regime change arm of the state department is helping to publish books about our domestic politics. If you don’t know, it was created in 1983 to overtly do what the CIA had been doing for 25 years covertly. That is carrying out regime changes in countries not getting on board with our system. This is straight from the mouth of establishment journalist for the Washington Post David Ignatius.
The sugar daddy of overt operations has been the National Endowment for Democracy, a quasi-private group headed by Carl Gershman that is funded by the U.S. Congress. Through the late 1980s, it did openly what had once been unspeakably covert — dispensing money to anti-communist forces behind the Iron Curtain.
To read through the NED's grant list (a public document) is to take a stroll down the democracy movement's memory lane: In Czechoslovakia, the endowment began aiding democratic forces in 1984, including support for Civic Forum; in Hungary, the aid began in 1986 and included election help and funding for Hungary's first independent public-opinion survey; in Romania and Bulgaria, the endowment has supported new intellectual journals and other tools of democracy.
Norm’s colleagues at the Brookings Institute, not the ones at Northrup Grumman or Bell Technologies who also make bombs that blow up children that fund the place, but William Galston wrote ‘The rise of European populism and the collapse of the center-left’ in 2018.
Populist governments in Hungary and Poland have intensified their efforts to weaken core liberal institutions such as a free press, independent civil society, and constitutional courts. Majorities in both countries increasingly are defining their national identity in exclusionary ethnic and religious terms, and anti-Semitism in on the rise. With rhetoric and imagery reminiscent of the 1930s, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán has castigated Hungarian-born Jewish financier George Soros as the architect of the European refugee crisis. After Poland criminalized public discussion of its role in the Holocaust, the Polish prime minister characterized some Jews as collaborators in the destruction of European Jewry.
Because President Vladimir Putin’s embrace of ethno-nationalism and religious traditionalism has proved attractive to populist movements, their rise has strengthened Russian influence throughout Europe. He offers an attractive model of renewed, unapologetic patriotism and national confidence. He has shown that when liberal democracy is not deeply rooted, democratic governance failures can open the door to authoritarianism that enjoys widespread support, despite the erosion of individual liberties and the rule of law.
So, if you caught that, antisemitism is populism, and Vladimir Putin likes populism.
After all these years of demonizing populism it’s no surprise that when Steve Bannon shows up on a podcast with some leftist viewers people are very surprised at what they hear! They thought this guy was a fascist!
Turns out he just dislikes people being poor. Hmmm…
The Switcheroo’s Keep Happening
So, this really gets to the bad name. Every president runs as populist, wins as populist, continues to be called populist but somewhere along the way is no longer populist.
Bill Clinton ran for president as a Democrat, for the people. From there he passed policies that were worse on the people at large than any president in history. Policies so bad that Hitler and Stalin would tip their hats to him.
As Steve Bannon said in the podcast above, “every great financial crisis triggers a populist backlash.” I disagree with that. Because when you say that what logically follows from that statement is “therefore, populism-bad,” and I just don’t agree with that.
It is true that every crisis has blowback, and maybe you could call it a populist backlash if what follows is more populist than what came before it, but that seems to be casting unnecessary evils onto something that might actually be, the people, looking for a candidate that is more for the people. What is American leadership if not that.
However, every presidency, the president runs on for the people policies, gets elected by the people, then throws the “of the people” straight into the wastebin.
Bill Clinton raised the minimum wage, expanded the earned income tax credit, and placed a substantial tax on the wealthy. Then he signed NAFTA, sent all the jobs overseas, and if you’re anything like me and end up drowning your sorrows in, or attempt to produce money from, the biggest drug of the 90’s, he fucked ya there too when he passed the ‘94 crime bill.
Although NAFTA was negotiated under Bush Sr, Bill signed it, he could’ve stopped it. Brent Scowcroft, under H.W. Bush, met with Chinese officials offering to normalize trade cooperation with China and offered to get China into the new organization he was laying the groundwork for, the World Trade Organization. Big surprise to Bush, he lost in the 1992 Election, and this was passed on to the populist Democrat Bill Clinton and created in ‘95.
He (George H.W. Bush) pushed for economic liberalization in other ways, too. After the Soviet Union fell, his administration advocated for it in Eastern Europe, and over time, the policies he supported there attracted “a wave of factory investments from global automakers, suppliers and other industries,” according to Automotive News.
As president, he ignored pleas from American automakers to protect their profits by keeping Japanese cars out of the United States, or at least making them more expensive. “There would be an immediate boost to the industry and to the economy if Japan would temporarily back off from their relentless pursuit of increased U.S. market share,” Chrysler chief Lee Iacocca wrote to the president in 1991.
Bush refused to help and would not name Japan an unfair trading partner. The president opposed government-imposed quotas and joined the leaders of General Motors, Ford and Chrysler on a trip to Japan to meet with the top officials at Toyota and Honda.
His biggest accomplishment, though, was the negotiation of NAFTA, and he signed the accord just a month before leaving office
But Bill Clinton, supported, signed it into law, and took the credit for it, bad or good. Unfortunately for him, it was the former.
Let’s move on to the ‘94 crime bill, co-authored by our very own, Joe Biden. More specifically, The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. Democrats have always had trouble with feeling the need to puff out their chests and appear to be the ones actually “tough on crime”. You see this metastasize in every democratic campaign most recently with Kamala Harris, who was presenting herself as a “cop” who “knew how to handle criminals (Donald Trump).”
According to the ACLU the ‘94 Crime bill gave the federal stamp of approval for states to pass even more tough-on-crime laws. By 1994, all states had passed at least one mandatory minimum law, but the crime bill encouraged even more punitive laws and harsher practices including by prosecutors and police, to lock up more people and for longer periods of time.
“1994 law shaped Democratic Party politics for years to come. Under the leadership of Bill Clinton, Democrats wanted to wrest control of crime issues from Republicans, so the two parties began a bidding war to increase penalties for crime, trying to outdo one another.
“The platform encouraged states to pass truth-in-sentencing laws, bragged about instituting the death penalty for nearly 60 more crimes, and even encouraged the prosecution of young people as adults.”
The most punitive and I believe the most outwardly racist of these laws was the “100-1” statute, which means that powder cocaine, which is more expensive and more prominent in Richy white communities, politicians, Wall St, etc. carried 1/100 of the sentence as crack, or rock cocaine which, because of the market for it, and the ability to sell it at any amount, is more common in the black community, and being that it’s the exact same substance, you just ingest it differently, this was an extremely racist, if there ever was one, and unjust law.
Specifically, let’s say 5 years, because that’s where the statute starts at, you get a mandatory minimum of five years in prison for one gram of rock cocaine, you would have to have five hundred grams of powder cocaine for the same mandatory minimum.
Here’s an enlightening video with more info on this… but I must move on.
George W. Bush was elected in 2000 as an anti-war populist Republican and we all know how that turned out. That may be what he ran on but his administration all the way up to his Vice had other plans.
They enacted a surveillance state unlike anything ever seen. Created the TSA, who has never stopped a terrorist in 24 years, the DHS-whose idea of “Homeland” Security is issuing “REAL I.D.” so they can protect you from yourself—cost the American people 8 trillion dollars, fighting wars that were either unneeded, not fightable, and caused more harm to the American people they were supposed to protect than a hundred 9/11’s in every major city in America. The switcheroo was so immediate it is almost never commented on.
Barack Obama ran as an anti-war populist against the wealthy insider first lady who got us into the mess as it stood, Hillary Clinton, and against John McCain of the Senate Arms Committee who never seen a war he didn’t love and ran on Staying in Iraq for a hundred years! A commonplace in our politics “Change” vs. “More of the Same” the people will always choose change.
As soon as he was elected the fix came in. He increased the warfare in Afghanistan, leading to the rise of Isis in Syria, to fight Isis in Syria he elected “moderate rebels” who included factions of al-Qaeda. You know, the guys we were just at war with, it was mess after mess after mess.
The financial crisis took place, he bailed out all the banks, with nothing in return, made sure the crooked bankers got their bonuses while the American people were starved out and left in the streets.
And go figure, Citi Group & Goldman Sachs, actually picked his cabinet for him. Sound crazy? We know this thanks to Rolling Stone’s publishing our own
’s expose “Obama’s Big Sellout.” Which is essential reading if you’re interested in how we got here. Just read this because it says it all:Barack Obama ran for president as a man of the people, standing up to Wall Street as the global economy melted down in that fateful fall of 2008. He pushed a tax plan to soak the rich, ripped NAFTA for hurting the middle class and tore into John McCain for supporting a bankruptcy bill that sided with wealthy bankers "at the expense of hardworking Americans." Obama may not have run to the left of Samuel Gompers or Cesar Chavez, but it's not like you saw him on the campaign trail flanked by bankers from Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. What inspired supporters who pushed him to his historic win was the sense that a genuine outsider was finally breaking into an exclusive club, that walls were being torn down, that things were, for lack of a better or more specific term, changing.
Then he got elected.
What's taken place in the year since Obama won the presidency has turned out to be one of the most dramatic political about-faces in our history. Elected in the midst of a crushing economic crisis brought on by a decade of orgiastic deregulation and unchecked greed, Obama had a clear mandate to rein in Wall Street and remake the entire structure of the American economy. What he did instead was ship even his most marginally progressive campaign advisers off to various bureaucratic Siberias, while packing the key economic positions in his White House with the very people who caused the crisis in the first place. This new team of bubble-fattened ex-bankers and laissez-faire intellectuals then proceeded to sell us all out, instituting a massive, trickle-up bailout and systematically gutting regulatory reform from the inside.
You might say, “well they probably hated him. Maybe RS didn’t want a black guy in office?” You’d be wrong. Matt was surprised they let him run this story because Rolling Stone was so pro-Obama. I think they couldn’t dispute it, maybe they were upset about it themselves.
Let’s jump forward to what we are dealing with now. Donald Trump ran as a genuine rebuke from these neoliberal, neoconservative leaders and DC insiders that keep pulling the ball right as we get our kick-off.
A man of the people, just like no one saw Obama being flanked by bankers in the campaign, no one saw Donald Trump surrounded by tech oligarchs until his inauguration. Sure, we saw Elon, but everyone knew Elon is… different.
I understood Elon, I even understood Mark Zuckerberg, since I knew of his change after the security state pushing Facebook to censor Americans sending memes and stating inconvenient facts.
But, Jeff Bezos? Larry Summers? All those tech oligarchs now sharing the stage with Donald Trump. I believe we could probably look to these magical uni-party oligarchs for the sway from populist to anti-populist in the presidency. But no doubt, it was Populism that we voted for.
After seeing that I was still onboard, at least he’s got some good people in his cabinet, right? Right?!
Then one by one, they got knocked off. Tulsi supporting the bombing of the Houthis, USAID put in the hands of Rubio, RFK jr fighting the real health threat “antisemitism,” and finally Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, the two most vocal critics of the Epstein files not being disclosed have their “Hostage Video”
And finally, to top it off, the final oligarch not mentioned is the one most important to the Epstein disclosure, Bill Gates. Even Bill Gates is on Trumps side, sorry, the fix is in.
We got, I’d say, some good things in the first days of the presidency, now we’ve got to hold on tight and look forward to the next populist candidate whichever side he/she might come from and hope the next one can outdo the entrenched interests that seem to have control of our system.
And that is why populism has such a bad name.
Thank you for reading!
Editor-in-Chief