The People, No

by Frank, Thomas

  That last phrase was one Reagan used in his 1980 acceptance speech to the Republican convention, and his theme that night, as with so many of FDR’s speeches, was the problem of out-of-control elites sneering at the common man. It wasn’t money changers in the temple that Reagan aimed to disperse, however; it was the temple itself that needed to be burned down. Reagan promised the assembled Republicans that he would do it in the name of the “working men and women” for whom the bureaucrat’s pet programs were merely a “theft from their pocketbooks.”

  So perverse had the situation become, Reagan continued, that the government now heeded the advice of “a tiny minority opposed to economic growth” rather than the voices of the great majority; it was actively “betraying the trust and goodwill of the American workers who keep it going” with their taxes. But his administration would put things right, Reagan declared: it would put “an end to the notion that the American taxpayer exists to fund the Federal government. The Federal government exists to serve the American people.”

  At Reagan’s feet the old-school Republicans celebrated their triumph—realtors and small-town bankers; insurance brokers and Buick dealers; pensioners and golfers-for-life. Dressed in the colorful blazers and whimsical hats of convention-goers circa 1980, they capered joyfully about the arena, screaming their approval. Now it was their turn to play rebel.

  “We can build a new majority around social and economic populism,” the conservative Republican congressman Jack Kemp announced that same year. What he meant by that expression was simple: tax cuts, like the far-reaching one that President Reagan would sign into law the following year. 24

  Mad-as-hell businessmen were now the ultimate populist subject. Not farm women, or sharecroppers, or day laborers. Business people: they were zealots for reform wherever you turned. The burning idea behind their uprising was that to oppose capitalism or to scoff at the successful were acts of snobbery if not of outright bigotry. No one put it better than social theorist George Gilder, whose 1981 book Wealth and Poverty was widely hailed as the handbook of Reaganism: “The war against the rich,” Gilder wrote, “is a campaign now led and inspired by the declining rich, to arouse the currently poor against the insurgently successful business classes.” In a verbatim reversal of the old Populist formula, he announced that “hatred of producers of wealth,” meaning capitalists, was “the racism of the intelligentsia.” 25

  Reagan brought all the seething resentments of right-wing populism together. His adviser Jeffrey Bell tried to describe the coherence of Reagan’s “Populist Agenda” for readers of the Wall Street Journal in 1981. The genial movie star, Bell wrote, was going on the offensive against elites and elitism in every policy area. Reagan was cracking down on judicial activism (“the epitome of elitist government”); he was cutting taxes (to the chagrin of “the economics profession”); he was slashing federal spending (thus fighting an “unelected Washington bureaucracy” wielding “unprecedented power”); and he might even return the country to the gold standard (which “puts him on the populist side,” Bell absurdly declared, because going back on gold would strip power from “central bankers and economists”). 26

  How did Ronald Reagan, the Hollywood dandy, come to hold such emancipatory views? Bell explained that the transformation had come about in “a radically populist way.” During the 1950s, Reagan had been a spokesman for General Electric, hosting the giant corporation’s weekly TV show and touring its factories to talk with its workers. It seems these visits to GE installations had been like a graduate seminar in the school of hard knocks. As Reagan met with workers on the shop floor, the suntanned Californian was forced to listen to their real-world grievances. Absorbing these long drafts of honest proletarian wisdom, according to Bell, he was eventually converted to his “populist” suspicion of government. 27

  Let me pause here to remind you of something everyone knows: the revolution Reagan would inaugurate as president would shift the wealth of the world upward in a history-altering way; it would smash the power of organized labor once and for all; it would deregulate the banks and crush the dreams of ordinary Americans in towns and cities across the country. But in the beginning the myth of Reagan as a man of the people seemed somehow plausible. When campaigning in 1980, the candidate deliberately avoided identifying with big business, preferring (as he put it) “all those people I shake hands with who have calluses on their hands.” 28

  * * *

  THE PSEUDOPOPULIST REVOLUTION of the early 1980s didn’t spend a lot of time pondering the nature of democracy or weighing its place in the Jeffersonian tradition. This populism was about winning elections and then rewriting the tax code, not theorizing. This uprising had no Omaha Platform; no Lawrence Goodwyn; no Bayard Rustin.

  To the extent that the right-wing revolt had a philosophy at all, it was that government was the real elite, with its outrageous taxes and its wasteful spending. Federal intervention of virtually any kind was elitist by definition because it removed power from individuals and handed it over to government workers in Washington, D.C. Therefore farm programs (so beloved of the original Populists) were elitist. So were public works. So was basically any effort to achieve economic equality. All of it was snobbery. As the conservative direct-mail guru Richard Viguerie put it in his contribution to the genre, “The elitists in Washington believe that a fair distribution of the nation’s wealth can be brought about only if it is controlled by the government, that is, by the elitists in Washington.” 29

  Two terms of the Reagan presidency curdled this upside-down populism into a grotesque self-parody. But on it went. In 1988, George H. W. Bush, a prince of the establishment blood and quite possibly the preppiest man in America, managed to get himself elected president by making what his campaign manager, Lee Atwater, called “an emotional, populist appeal to traditional values.” By which Atwater meant chomping on pork rinds, visiting flag factories, frolicking about the Midwest with country singers—and promising to get tough with criminals, meaning African Americans. 30

  For observers of populism-as-fraud, 1988 was a year of wonders, a zenith of fakery. Not only had populism become an almost exclusively right-wing phenomenon, but everyone who followed politics understood it to be a put-on. Even a born member of the nation’s aristocracy could pull it off, given a sufficiently oblivious opponent.

  The Democrats supplied that opponent: Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, a budget-balancing technocrat who took care to distance himself from his party’s egalitarian traditions. It was all about “competence,” Dukakis said, not “ideology.” Not surprisingly, the public chose flag-factory jingoism over tepid, complacent centrism.

  The disgust I felt that Election Day made me physically ill, and so I hope you will excuse me if I skip over all the preposterous variations on the populist theme worked in the years since then by such flag-waving champions of the working man as Oliver North, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin; or by George Bush’s son Dubya; or by the NRA, or by Fox News, or by Rick Santelli and the Tea Party movement. I am sick of them all.

  Still, let us genuflect before the superhuman perversity of the thing. Tax cuts, union busting, and deregulation—the historic achievements of right-wing populism—have led us straight back to the massively skewed economic arrangements of the 1890s. It takes a kind of hallucinatory bravado to call yourself a populist while cracking down on workers and ignoring antitrust laws, which the Reagan administration and its successors did. It’s like a banker calling himself a freedom fighter because he likes Basque cuisine. It’s like a slumlord signing his eviction notices, “Yours in solidarity.”

  * * *

  THE CAREER OF one particular right-wing warrior holds special significance for our story: Patrick J. Buchanan, who has worked variously as a newspaper columnist, a speechwriter for Richard Nixon, communications director for Ronald Reagan, a TV pundit, and who also ran three insurgent campaigns for the presidency. Along the way, he did as much as anyone to reorient our
understanding of populism. It was Buchanan who coined Nixon’s famous phrase “silent majority,” and who urged him to cast himself as the embodiment of a middle-American uprising against elites; it was Buchanan who roared, in a speech at the 1992 Republican convention, that the libs had launched a “cultural war” against ordinary Americans.

  Buchanan enthusiastically embraced the term “populist” during his presidential campaigns, seeming to understand that it ennobled his neo-medieval views; to this day on his website he can be seen posing with a pitchfork to emphasize his kinship with the angry agrarians of old. Strictly speaking, however, his claim to the title is weak: Buchanan is a lifelong Washingtonian whose ugly insinuations about Jews and Nazis and the Holocaust are well known. Getting more people to vote, he has even claimed, is the diabolical method by which liberals are going to “dispossess” good, reputable citizens. 31

  Bigotry and suspiciousness are not unusual on the Far Right, of course. What distinguished Pat Buchanan from his fellow Republicans was the startling innovation he brought to their primary contests: ripping corporate America and his own party for betraying working-class people with international trade agreements. Among conservatives this sneak attack was considered shocking, since it came from a man who virtually worshipped Ronald Reagan, destroyer of working-class organizations and the ultimate author of those trade agreements. * Still, it made for good theater, and in the course of his offensives against his old friends, Buchanan could sometimes sound like a 1930s labor leader, blasting GOP warhorse Bob Dole as “the bellhop of the Business Roundtable” and standing outside a shuttered factory to speak on behalf of the “losers from these trade deals.” 32

  Populism was “all an act with this Beltway Bozo,” a Boston newspaper columnist fumed, but nevertheless Buchanan succeeded in making the act seem noticeably more authentic. 33 Every Republican was denouncing elites back then, but Buchanan had gone from attacking the cultural elite for hating the flag to attacking the corporate elite as well. He did it, even more significantly, just as the traditional party of labor was recasting itself as trade-friendly “New Democrats.”

  In the run-up to the 2000 elections, a New York real estate developer with appalling taste but high political ambitions, Donald Trump, vied against Buchanan for the top spot on a third-party ticket. In the course of this contest Trump called Buchanan a “neo-Nazi” and a “Hitler lover,” deplored the way he picked on Jews, and wrote an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times depicting Buchanan as a busy little bigot who had a put-down for just about everyone. “On slow days, he attacks gays, immigrants, welfare recipients, even Zulus.” 34

  But by the time of his own presidential run in 2016, Trump had pretty much taken over Buchanan’s old program, from the ecumenical bigotry right down to his 1992 campaign slogan, “America First.” Trump had always been critical of America’s trade practices, and now he seemed to understand that the real audience for such a critique was not his fellow business leaders but American workers, abandoned by the increasingly upper-class Democratic Party. 35

  Buchanan, for his part, chortled with delight to behold the Trump phenomenon, which he described as “the future.” Trump had “hard proof these trade deals have de-industrialized America,” Buchanan told the Washington Post : “ From 2000 to 2010, the U.S. lost 55,000 factories and 6 million manufacturing jobs.” When the Post asked him how Trump should proceed with his presidential campaign, Buchanan came back with a reply that should have rung every alarm bell in Washington: “After securing the party base, go for victory in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin, by campaigning against the Clinton trade policies … and on a new Trump trade agenda to re-industrialize America.” 36 Those remarks were published in January 2016, a year before Trump would be sworn in as president after taking exactly those four states.

  Buchanan provided the model but it took a political entrepreneur named Steve Bannon to mold Donald Trump’s loudmouthed opportunism into the full-blown thing the world has come to know as “populism.” Class was central to the insurgency Bannon believed he summoned up as Trump’s chief campaign executive. Although Bannon once worked as an executive at Goldman Sachs, he is the product of what one profile called a “blue-collar, union and Democratic family” and was said to feel “an unreconstructed sense of class awareness, or bitterness—or betrayal.” Betrayal, specifically, by the two main political parties, which promised such fine things to “the workingman” and yet always chose the elite when the going got tough. 37

  Betrayal, more specifically, by Wall Street. It seems that Bannon’s dad, a salt-of-the-earth type, got badly played during the 2008 financial crisis, persuaded to panic by a financial huckster on TV and to sell—at almost the exact bottom, of course—his little hoard of shares in AT&T, the company where he spent his working life. “The only net worth my father had beside his tiny little house was that AT&T stock,” Bannon seethed shortly after the 2016 election. “And nobody is held accountable? All these firms get bailed out. There’s no equity taken from anybody. There’s no one in jail. These companies are all overleveraged, and everyone looked the other way.” 38

  As Buchanan had done with trade deals, so Bannon did with the bank bailouts: he swiped the outrage that should have belonged to the Left. Democratic officeholders never really contested his grab for it, of course: their energy was all going into claiming that everything was OK, that the problem had been solved, that there was no reason for the economic grievances expressed by people like Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders.

  So the Right stepped in, claiming leadership of this generation’s revolt against the financial establishment. For Steve Bannon, the financial crisis and the bailouts were the “inciting incident” for the global populist rebellion he wanted to lead.

  The movement in the United States—and the one that I am associated with worldwide—is anti-elite. We believe that what I call the “Party [of] Davos”—this kind of scientific, engineering, managerial, financial, cultural elite—has taken the world in the wrong direction, buying into globalization to the detriment of the “little guy.” And so this is really a representation of anti-elitism, and really about having the little guy get a piece of the action. 39

  Republicans had been performing indignation against a shadowy “liberal elite” for decades, but now Bannon came close to identifying society’s true dominant class. In the process, he swiped some of the classic formulations of the American Left. “We have socialism in the United States for the very wealthy, and the very poor, and a brutal form of Darwinian capitalism for everybody else,” Bannon said on one occasion. 40 He has spoken often of his dream of turning the GOP, that mighty fortress of bankers and billionaires, of fat cats and war hawks, into a “workers’ party,” which is what the original Populists tried to build in 1892. * In his brief career in the West Wing, Bannon reportedly fantasized about inflicting an old-fashioned 44 percent marginal tax rate on high-earning individuals.

  On the campaign trail, Donald Trump was playing a similar game. On the issue of trade, for example, he took an unusual stance for a Republican, constantly criticizing NAFTA and trade with China, the bêtes noires of organized labor, and reaching out to alienated, white, working-class voters, the rank and file of so many historical protest movements. He said he cared so very much about the people of the deindustrialized zones and their sufferings. He claimed to feel for the victims of the opioid epidemic.

  The billionaire did his best to sound like a protest candidate, angry to see ordinary Americans abused by the mighty. In his final TV commercial of the 2016 race, he tapped the zillion-volt themes of perfidious financial elites and the nobility of the common man. He denounced what he called “the establishment” as follows:

  It’s a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth, and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities.

  The only thing that can stop this corrupt machine i
s you. The only force strong enough to save our country is us. The only people brave enough to vote out this corrupt establishment is you, the American people.

  Let us pause here and acknowledge how strange this is: a conservative was assailing the “global power structure.” A Republican was claiming deindustrialization as one of the great causes of the Right. And he was doing so in language that bordered on the idealistic. With a few changes, Trump’s monologue might have been uttered by a Democrat of the old school—which was certainly his campaign’s intention. 41

  The most forthright statement of Trumpian populism, if that’s the name for it, was his inaugural address, which Trump took as another occasion to denounce “the establishment” in characteristically Bannonesque tones. An assemblage of one-line clichés, it saw the billionaire declaring that his rise to the presidency represented no mere trade-off between parties but rather a transfer of power “from Washington, D.C.” to “you, the American people.” He also declared, in a shout-out to the 1930s, that “the forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer” and described the landscape of deindustrialization as “rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation.”

  And then … the working-class hero in the Oval Office delivered a landmark tax cut for the rich. Trump deregulated Wall Street banks, too. With his attacks on Obamacare, the president did his part to make our capitalist system just a little more brutal and Darwinian for ordinary people. He turned over the judiciary to the elites of the Federalist Society. He turned over the economy to the Chamber of Commerce. He turned the EPA over to polluters. He ran the U.S. government in a way designed to enrich and empower himself. The one leadership task to which Trump took with enthusiasm—rolling back the regulatory state—is essentially an attack on one of the few institutions in Washington designed to help working-class Americans. If this is populism, the word has truly come to mean nothing.