A political term describing a political agenda that aims to favor the ordinary person over the elite. It is an agenda that appeals outside the norms acceptable to the establishment political class and its supportive mainstream media.
Examples of populist legislation include the Right to Try Act, which was opposed by the FDA, Big Pharma, and their political allies. Opposition to globalism and unlimited immigration is also a populist view. Donald Trump has strong populist support. Former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) is a populist.
Populism can have both conservative and liberal elements. Voters who supported both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are populists. The Populist Party in the U.S. in the 1890s was a left-leaning coalition of leftist farmers and workers, who opposed the gold-only monetary standard. In the late 20th century Ronald Reagan and other conservatives adopted populist themes, attacking elites, such as federal judges and the national media, as too distant from the people, and calling for more power to the people.
Since 1900 famous populist leaders in the U.S. included Huey Long campaigning from the left in the 1930s, George Wallace (combining both left and right elements) in the 1968 presidential election, and Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump from the right in the 1980 and 2016 presidential elections, respectively. Among U.S. Senators, Ron Johnson (R-WI) is perhaps the leading populist in the early 21st century. Reportedly 12% of the supporters of the far-left Bernie Sanders in 2016 voted for the conservative, national-populist Donald Trump in the general election.
In the 21st century in both the United States and Europe, populism is seen as resistance to globalism. According to a May 2018 Pew Research Center survey, Western Europeans were more divided politically based on their views on populism versus the establishment than they were on traditional “left” versus “right” distinctions.
In late December 2020 amidst a massive “coronavirus relief” spending bill being passed by Congress, anti-establishment, populist-leaning politicians from both sides including Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) and Andy Biggs (R-AZ) criticized and denounced the pork-barrel legislation that only included $600 stimulus checks for Americans, with some far-left Democrats even concurring with President Trump’s call for a larger sum of $2,000 checks. However, establishmentarians such as Amy Klobuchar opposed Trump’s proposal to further help Americans.
Dangers of National Populism
It is recent Latin American history, not Europe of the 1930s, that provides a closer example to Trump’s brand of nationalist populism. Ironically, given that many of Trump’s supporters rail against “importing” third-world values, it is Donald Trump who is bringing echoes of Latin American politics to the United States.
Populism gave Hugo Chávez, Venezuela’s late dictator, a mandate to overtake private companies, all because he was said to be doing so in the interests of “the people.” The failing of Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela are well known. The country recently hit the final stage of socialism – it ran out of toilet paper. In Brazil, under Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva’s populist rule, a massive wealth redistribution program, which was promoted under the guise of fairness, has resulted in a tumbling GDP and skyrocketing inflation. Brazil has yet to recover from Lula’s reign.
Evo Morales, a radical leftist who has been Bolivia’s so-called populist president for over ten years, has attempted to nationalize several privately owned industries. In 2006, Morales signed a decree that enabled his government to take over the entirety of the nation’s gas industry. Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, Argentina’s far-left populist former president, nationalized the country’s oil industry. Though the extra-constitutional move was generally praised by the majority of the population at the time, the policy could not escape the laws of economics. Shortly thereafter, Argentina entered a recession, and the country’s currency rapidly devalued.
South America has greatly suffered as a result of populist rule. The supposed “leaders of the people” above have one thing in common: they left their countries in worse shape than when they stepped into office.
There are no checks that can be applied to a populist ruler. Nationalist populism, without limitations on the size of government and laws to protect individual liberty, enables tyranny to thrive. It creates a nation of men and not laws, the exact opposite of what America’s founders intended for our country. Rather than help the “working man,” the nationalist populist doctrine destroys his opportunities and creates a system of lawlessness in which only the powerful and connected truly thrive.
The path forward for conservatives is to channel the energy of populism into a movement that embraces the limited-government principles of the Founders, which will lead to legitimate reform and a restoration of American institutions.
Michael Needham, chief executive officer of Heritage Action for America, explained how Ronald Reagan used the energy of populism for conservative, limited-government means. A popular uprising against the American elite and bipartisan corruption need not mirror the eventually tyrannical ideologies that have plagued much of the world.
“In the American context, populism without conservative principles has led to expansions of government power as those with legitimate anxiety have their needs met by the security of a government blanket,” Needham wrote. Popular anxiety about the direction of the country and its fall from greatness flows from real problems, both foreign and domestic, that have been largely ignored by the elites of both parties. But nationalist populism has not solved these problems in other countries; rather, it has made them worse. In the words of an Argentine journalist, “populism loves the poor so much [that] it multiplies them.”
A Jacksonian message that attacks crony capitalism and endorses limited government, the power of free enterprise, and the need to return to constitutional restraints could in fact revitalize the Republican Party and lead to legitimate, positive reforms. However, without the principles that define American conservatism, nationalist populism will take the United States down a path that has ruined so many other countries: the American “shining city upon a hill” will look more like the gaudy but rotted out wasteland of Atlantic City in terminal decline rather than the exceptional country of the last two centuries. American greatness lies in restoring her institutions and Founding principles, not in the siren song that has destroyed lives in Latin America and Europe.
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