Steve Bannon made me laugh out loud.
I was listening to my colleague Ross Douthat’s excellent, informative interview with President Trump’s former chief strategist, and Bannon said this: “Trump came down in June of 2015, and for 10 years there’s been no real work done to even begin to understand populism, except that the deplorables are an exotic species like at the San Diego Zoo.”
I’m sorry, but that’s hilarious. Ever since Trump began winning Republican primaries in 2016, there has been a desperate effort to understand populism. JD Vance is the vice president in part because of that effort. His book, “Hillbilly Elegy,” which came out shortly after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, was a monumental best seller because so many Americans — including liberal Americans — wanted to understand the culture and ideas that brought us Trump.
If you consume political media, you’ve no doubt seen the countless focus groups of Trump voters, and you’re familiar with the man-on-the-street” interviews with Trump supporters at Trump rallies. We’ve read books, watched documentaries and listened to podcasts.
And if you live in Trump country, as I do, you’ll find that Trump voters are very eager to explain themselves. This is not a quiet movement. They don’t exactly hide their interests and passions.
So, Mr. Bannon, we understand populism quite well. You’re the person who’s obscuring the truth. Regardless of how a populist movement starts, it virtually always devolves into a cesspool of corruption and spite.
And that’s exactly where we are today.
If you grow up in the rural South, you understand populism almost by osmosis. The region has long been populist territory, and sometimes for understandable reasons. The antebellum South was an extraordinarily economically stratified society, with a small planter elite that both owned slaves and exercised political and economic dominance over the yeoman farmers who made up the bulk of the white Southern population.
Andrew Jackson’s populist campaign for the presidency was started in the 1820s from his home state, Tennessee, but it’s the period after the Civil War when populism took a more permanent hold over Southern hearts.
A movement called the Farmers’ Alliance swept through the South in the 1870s and early 1880s. It began — as many populist movements do — with a host of legitimate grievances and concerns. Southern society was not unjust only in its treatment of its Black citizens. Working-class whites suffered from exploitation as well — so much so that there were at least some efforts to unite white and Black farmers into a working-class coalition.
For example, Tom Watson, a prominent Georgia populist, wrote in 1892 that populists should be “founding our new policy upon justice” and root it in “the simple but profound truth that, if the voice of passion can be hushed, the self-interest of both races will drive them to act in concert.”
In those words, you have an early American attempt to create a broad, multiracial coalition. But, it turns out, the “voice of passion” could not be hushed, not even in Watson himself.
As Eli Day recounts in a fascinating 2021 analysis of Southern populism in The American Prospect, by the time he was elected to the Senate in 1920, Watson had become a brutal bigot — even to the point of endorsing lynching as a “good sign” that “a sense of justice yet lives among the people.”
In fact, populism is never separate from this “voice of passion.” That is its defining characteristic. It begins in deep grievance. Some of those grievances can be quite real and consequential — such as when modern populist anger is rooted in fury over the Great Recession, long wars in the Middle East or shuttered factories in the Midwest.
Some of the problems, however, that motivate populists aren’t problems at all, and populist anger is rooted in something else entirely. Segregationist zeal fueled Southern populism for generations, for example. Xenophobia has always created fertile ground for populist demagogues.
But regardless of whether the grievances are justified, the real energy of populism is in its emotion — in its raw, unmitigated anger. It’s that passion that makes populist movements so vulnerable to charlatans and demagogues.
Another way of putting it is that solving grievances with good policy is hard; inflaming passion is much easier.
There was no easy way to crawl back from the 2008 financial crisis. There are no easy answers in the Middle East, despite Trump’s faith in coastal real estate development in Gaza. The reasons for the loss of Midwest manufacturing jobs go far beyond the trade deals that “they” inflicted on “us.”
If policy is hard and passion is easy, then the shrewd populist politician leans on the passion. The shrewd populist politician mirrors and reflects that populist anger right back at the public. The shared emotional connection delivers a singular message: I am your champion, and you are my legions.
Twentieth-century Southern history is full of examples of populist political cults. George Wallace dominated politics in Alabama for a quarter-century and served as the governor on and off for 16 years. Orval Faubus of Arkansas won six consecutive governors’ races between 1954 and 1964.
More recently, Louisiana’s Edwin Edwards spent 12 years in the governor’s mansion, and his hold on his state’s voters was once so secure that he famously said the only way he could lose the 1983 election was if he were “caught in bed with either a dead girl or a live boy.”
Edwards, an heir to the Huey Long machine in Louisiana, reminds us that there is nothing unusual at all in populist voters’ embrace of colorful and scandalous personalities. In fact, the scandals can add to the appeal. Edwards was ultimately convicted of bribery and extortion (among other charges), but even after he served a prison sentence, 30 percent of Louisiana voters said he was the state’s “best governor” since 1980.
Populism may not place a high premium on honesty, but it is all about authenticity. Virtually every Trump voter I know loves that he speaks his mind and says what other people are thinking but are too afraid to say. Lots of people have lived rather messy lives, and they can see themselves in the politician who doesn’t hide his warts — and sometimes even in the politician who revels in his transgressions.
They’re seen as real, while even the most honest politician can seem fake for coming across as too polished.
(I remember once being in a room with Mitt Romney during his second run for president, in 2012, and listening to a number of activists and consultants urging him to “show America the real you.” Exasperated, Romney responded, “This is the real me!” He was authentically polished and polite.)
In its final form, populism can become almost entirely devoted to a person, the champion who both channels populist rage and possesses the towering self-confidence to declare, “I alone can fix it.”
And when the elected populists don’t fix everything (because they can’t), they lean back on their shared emotional bond to avoid accountability or consequences. After all, in the never-ending battle of us versus them, one can always blame the other side for every failure and frustration. At least for a while.
We’ve seen this clearly with Republican devotion to Donald Trump. He inherited a growing economy and maintained its growth for the first three years of his term. While he deserves a degree of credit for that continued economic success, Trump’s messaging was relentless — he had created the strongest economy in the world.
But what of the failures of Trump’s first term? Well, that’s a “they” problem.
The soaring murder rate in 2020 wasn’t Trump’s fault. That was all about B.L.M. and the left.
The confusion, incompetence and deception that marked Trump’s response to the pandemic were forgotten. The left was the real villain of the pandemic, with its school closings and mask mandates.
Trump didn’t lose the election in 2020. It was stolen from him through fraud and illegitimate changes in election law.
So when America ended Trump’s first term deeply divided, with lower life expectancy, more murder, less economic growth, more deadly overdoses and higher unemployment than when he entered the Oval Office, none of that was his fault. All of it was due to circumstances beyond his control.
Besides, said MAGA, no one gets us like Donald Trump.
This brings us to the con. In one sense, the entire enterprise of building a populist cult of personality is a con all by itself. It ruthlessly exploits public anger and public civic ignorance.
If you watch populist media or listen to populist politicians, there is very little ambiguity or nuance. Stories are mapped out in terms of good versus evil (or friend versus enemy). “They” are always wrong. “They” are worse than wrong — “they” are callous, uncaring, even evil.
A well-informed population is less vulnerable to the demagogue. Even if informed voters are not political obsessives, they’re aware enough of the limits of the president’s power to know that he or she can’t truly fix anything alone. If they’re even somewhat aware of the complexity of the economy, or of health care, or of foreign policy, they know that the political savior narrative is suspect.
No one should think that well-informed voters are immune from populism — some of the most politically obsessed people I know are enthusiastic members of the MAGA movement. But we saw the basic divide in 2024. An NBC News poll last April showed that Trump had a 26-point lead with voters who don’t follow political news. In contrast, voters who got their political news from newspapers, the most comprehensive form of daily news, supported Joe Biden by a vast margin, 70 percent to 21 percent.
But if the bond with the populist public is tight enough, the con man can and will fleece his own supporters. Steve Bannon is a perfect example. Bannon has faced federal and state indictments for allegedly defrauding hundreds of thousands of donors to his “We Build the Wall” campaign.
According to the Department of Justice, Bannon and his associates raised more than $25 million for private construction of a border wall. One of his colleagues pledged that he would “not take a penny in salary or compensation” and that “100 percent of the funds raised” would be “used in the execution of our mission and purpose.”
The Department of Justice said this promise was false. It said that Bannon funneled more than $1 million to a nonprofit organization under his control, and he used some of that money to cover his personal expenses. In 2022 two of his associates pleaded guilty to federal charges related to the scheme.
Lest you think this was a political prosecution by the Biden administration, it was Trump’s Justice Department that indicted Bannon. Trump, however, pardoned him as one of the last acts of his first term. Bannon still faces state charges in New York, however, and is still set to stand trial.
For the sheer scale of his financial exploitation, Bannon can’t compete with Trump. The president has sold his supporters overpriced Trump Bibles and absurd Trump digital trading cards and, perhaps most cynically of all, he just artificially inflated his net worth by billions of dollars with a Trump meme coin that possesses no meaningful real-world use, aside from its value as a purely speculative investment.
I’m reminded of theDutch tulip mania of 1636. But at least Dutch tulips had some utility. They’re beautiful. Trump’s meme coin exists only to make Trump money.
Populism’s evergreen appeal is easy to understand, but it’s difficult to defeat — especially when it’s rooted, as it usually is, in real concerns and very real problems, including real failures by the entrenched elite. And does anyone doubt that elite failures contributed to the Great Recession? Or helped lead to immense military challenges in the Middle East? Or contributed to the loss of so many industries in America’s heartland?
Opponents of populism have to be very careful that their opposition to Trump doesn’t devolve into a rote defense of the status quo. The answer to Trumpist populism isn’t “everything is fine.” It’s pointing out that the populist cure is worse than the elite disease while also addressing the real problems and real needs of the populist public.
The border was out of control. Inflation has presented working and middle-class families with terrible challenges, to make choices they don’t want to have to make. High interest rates may be necessary to help control inflation, but they impose their own kind of economic pain. And the world is more chaotic and dangerous than it was a few years ago.
Too often, I see people respond to these problems by denying or minimizing their severity. It’s important to correct errors and to fact-check lies, but you will not win over a working family that still possesses less purchasing power than it had in 2019 by telling it that inflation is lower here than in Europe, as true as that might be.
It’s not easy to fix any of those problems. It’s even harder when fending off populists who claim that they’ve got the answer, and that answer is a man named Donald Trump. Just hand him the reins of power and, in the words of Ben Shapiro, once a Trump opponent who’s become a staunch supporter, “Let Donald J. Trump cook.”
When historians tell the full story of the Trump era, it will also have to be a story about us, the American people. It will be a story about how democracies are prone to trade reason for passion, truth for lies and empathy for cruelty.
It will be a long story — one that stretches from Andrew Jackson to Donald Trump. And when we watch Trump exploit the very crowd that chants his name, we will remember the wisdom of Solomon in the Book of Ecclesiastes: “There is nothing new under the sun.”
The post The Populist Cure Is Worse Than the Elite Disease appeared first on New York Times.
