[Elites who tar their critics in the U.S. with the sly pejorative
of “populist” count on our collective amnesia. They’d rather the
real Populists remained forgotten, along with the potential they
represented.]
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CONTEMPORARY PUNDITS NEED A REFRESHER ON POPULISM’S HISTORY  
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Steve Babson
May 14, 2023
History News Network [[link removed]]

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_ Elites who tar their critics in the U.S. with the sly pejorative of
“populist” count on our collective amnesia. They’d rather the
real Populists remained forgotten, along with the potential they
represented. _

From the People's Party Paper, 1892,

 

The way “populism” is typically invoked in today’s media, you
wouldn’t know that the word comes down to us from one of America’s
most successful progressive movements— the grass-roots crusade that
resisted corporate power and fought to save democracy 130 years ago.

Many of today’s pundits would have you think otherwise.

“Is American Democracy Doomed by Populism?” asks Yascha Mounk of
the Council on Foreign Relations, writing days after Trump supporters
stormed the Capitol. _Politico _called Trump “The Perfect
Populist” in 2016, likening him to George Wallace, Alabama’s
white-supremacist governor in the 1960s. “Trump and Sanders Lead
Competing Populist Movements,” says the _Washington Post_, echoing
a common claim that progressives share some kind of “populistic”
perspective with the far right.

In this ahistorical babble, you rarely hear mention of the men and
women who organized a multiracial resistance to the first corporate
oligarchs.

“The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up
colossal fortunes for a few,” the Populists announced when they
formed the People’s Party in 1892. The mega-rich who “despise the
republic and endanger liberty” were the real danger to democracy.

The People’s Party would contest the rule of these “plutocrats”
at a time of rapid social change. Railroads, electricity, and
mechanized crop harvesting were transforming the economy, making the
“Robber Barons” who controlled these new technologies the richest
men on earth. While many workers took home less than $10 a _week_ in
1890, Jay Gould, the infamous stock speculator, was pocketing more
than $20,000 a _day_ (in today’s dollars, about $700,000).

Farmers were routinely abused. Railroad monopolies gouged them with
inflated charges for shipping wheat and cotton to distant markets,
while lenders (especially in the South) extorted interest of 40% or
more on loans for overpriced supplies and equipment. At a time when
farmers and farm laborers accounted for more than 40 percent of the
labor force, their collective anger posed a genuine threat to
unfettered capitalism.

Neither the Democratic nor Republican parties saw what was coming.
Both were dominated by monopoly capitalists who wanted minimal
taxation, no regulation of their “private” business empires, and
no legal rights for the farmers and workers who resisted corporate
profiteering. At a time when there were no primary elections for
choosing a party’s presidential candidate, there was little prospect
for internal reform in either major party.

The Populists had to launch a new political movement, drawing support
from the Farmers Alliance, the American Railway Union, the women’s
suffrage movement, Christian Socialists, the United Mine Workers, and
utopian reformers. The People’s Party was also a multiracial
movement in the South, where African Americans served on the party’s
state executive committees in Texas, Louisiana and Georgia.

The economic and political goals of these Populists were as broad as
their membership. They wanted farmer-owned cooperatives that would
negotiate for better prices from processors and merchants. They
favored public ownership of railroads, utilities and other natural
monopolies. They called for postal savings banks and low-cost federal
loans for farmers and workers. They wanted recognition of farm
organizations and labor unions. Where bankers favored the high
interest rates that came from basing the money supply on scarce
reserves of gold, the Populists wanted to abolish the Gold Standard
and expand the money supply with government-issued bills and silver
coinage.

Above all, they wanted to restore a democracy corroded by the blatant
buying of privilege. Nationally, they favored the election of senators
rather than their appointment by bought-and-sold state legislatures—
as was then the case. To reform state government, they called for
referendum, recall, and votes for women. In the South, they favored
political rights for Black voters.

On this reform platform, the Populists called on the “producing
classes” to vote for the return of government “to the hands of the
‘plain people’.”

They failed nationally, but it was a close call in the West, the Great
Plains and the South. Fifty Populists won election to Congress from 16
states. North Carolina, Oregon, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, and
Colorado all elected Populist governors. The Populist vote would have
been higher still in the many southern states where white elites
organized a deadly backlash, stealing votes, murdering Populists, and
imposing one-party rule by white-supremacist Democrats.

Even so, the Populists transformed the political terrain in America,
marked by the subsequent emergence of progressive movements in both
national parties. The watershed was 1896, when William Jennings Bryan
won the Democratic Party nomination for president on a pledge to
regulate the railroads and expand the money supply with silver.
Running as a Democrat— and widely viewed as a “Popocrat”— he
fell short with 47 percent of the popular vote. But progressives
thereafter gained ascendency in the party, leading to reforms in the
next century that included much of the Populist platform: election of
senators, votes for women, corporate regulation, collective bargaining
rights for workers and farmers, and an end to the Gold Standard.

Bernie Sanders, the Democratic Socialist, is at least a distant cousin
of these original Populists. Donald Trump is not. Even the phrase
“right-wing populism” is— historically speaking— an oxymoron.
The Populists of the 1890s would have despised the likes of Trump, a
preening billionaire allied with today’s mega-rich.

Mainstream pundits would nevertheless have us believe that any popular
movement calling on “the people” to overturn “corrupt elites”
is a populist threat to democracy. Lumping Sanders together with a
wanna-be fascist like Trump implies that both men seek to sway voters
with equally polarizing and manipulative rhetoric.

Those who apply this shape-shifting term are actually branding
themselves. Some are simply unwitting users of a phrase that’s in
vogue and gives the appearance of historical insight. Others may know
better, but have gotten used to it. Still others deliberately use the
populist label to stigmatize any movement that challenges the
questionable legitimacy of our elite-dominated “meritocracy.”

Elites who tar their critics in the U.S. with the sly pejorative of
“populist” count on our collective amnesia. They’d rather the
real Populists remained forgotten, along with the potential they
represented.

_Steve Babson is a labor educator, union activist, and history PhD
living and working in Detroit. He is the author of the
just-published Forgotten Populists
[[link removed]]: When Farmers Turned Left to
Save Democracy. _

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