This essay is a summary of the longer ‘How the Democratic Party Lost the Working Class and how Populism Won the Republican Party’ essay.
Populism as a Recurring Feature of American Democracy
Populism is neither new nor unique to the 21st century or Trump, and ‘latent populist energy’ is an inherent property of democracies. For example, following the Civil War, it was a large populist movement that challenged and drove fear into the elite Southern Democrats. Teddy Roosevelt’s 1912 Bull Moose Party, for all intents and purposes, was a populist party. Robert La Follette ran as a progressive populist in 1924, winning 16.6% of the national vote. Before his assassination in 1935, Huey P Long was a very serious national populist rival to FDR. George Wallace ran as a segregationist racial populist in 1968 and won 13.5% of the national vote while also winning the ‘Solid South’ states. Ross Perot captured 19% of the national vote (20 million) in 1992 as a third-party populist, despite the absence of any major national crisis beyond widespread dissatisfaction with the political establishment. Therefore, if populism is inherent to democracy, it cannot be “cured.”1
How America’s Two-Party System Channels Populism
There is no single ‘populist bloc’ in America. A Leftist populist, an Independent populist, and a Rightist populist are not interchangeable and represent different values. They may converge (most likely into a third party), but convergence is not durable.
America’s two-party system makes it nearly impossible for third-party candidates to win national elections, so populist threats exist almost exclusively within the parties themselves.
The McGovern-Fraser Reforms and Candidate-Centered Primaries
The 1968 McGovern-Fraser reforms uprooted labor’s institutional access to the Democratic Party, as well as that of other organized factions. The previous system was about as close to a solution to populism as you can get in the US.
The reforms shifted the principal source of voting leverage to state primaries, creating a candidate-centric system in which candidates could more easily exploit a noisy, low-information environment.
For example, after failing to win third-party in 1968, George Wallace, who, again, was a segregationist racial populist, ran through the now open Democratic primaries in 1972 and did exceptionally well. He received 23.17% of the national Democratic vote to Hubert Humphrey’s 25.42% while also placing second in delegate wins (though far behind George McGovern) through the primary and caucus process.
Why Strong Unions are Politically Important
It should be understood that without strong unions, the working class has little to no collective leverage and therefore cannot exert durable bottom-up pressure on either party. This means there is no reliable way for the working class to both make cohesive material demands and discipline party elites. Unions also discipline working-class individuals by binding them together economically and making defection over cultural issues more costly. Labor’s institutional access can provide meaningful representation only when unions themselves are strong.
Why Labor Needs Institutional Access
It is specifically important that labor has institutional access within a party because it gives union leaders, beholden to millions of workers, high leverage in a late-stage, high-information environment to exert their will—meaning true, durable bottom-up political representation. Despite their personal interests and biases, these leaders are deeply incentivized to act and select candidates in the best interests of the workers they represent.
Having access to a party’s biggest stage also means a working-class culture is created within the party, trickling down to every level below it. Cultures develop from structural arrangements. Right now, the Left is being increasingly dominated by a stratified elite credentialed class, so the culture is that of a stratified elite credentialed class. Which, by the way, is why the college education divide, not the economic divide, is the most consistent predictor of political alignment. It’s about access.
How Populism Functions on the Left and Right
The Right is traditionally aligned with business interests and hostile to labor. Barring the very unlikely emergence of a New Deal–like insurgency, it will not develop a genuine labor movement, but will instead continue stoking (predominantly White) working-class cultural grievances and blaming their (very real) economic woes on immigration, elites, and the Left. This is unfortunate as I don’t know if there is a ‘solution’ to populism in this party like I think there is on the Left. Being business-first and hostile to labor means populism exists almost exclusively as a symbolic top-down movement.
To be clear, this should not be taken to mean Leftist populism is better than Rightist populism. As a matter of fact, it has been shown that Left-populist governments are more hostile to press freedom and perform worse economically over the long run than Right-populist governments. The Left is just generally much more friendly to unions and labor than the Right, so at least provide a more viable path to course correction, in my opinion.
Anyways, in otherwise perfect conditions, it can be argued that the best arrangement for the two parties is to have a Right that is more libertarian and business interested among other things and a Left that is more representative of working-class interests (among other things). That’s a topic for another day, though.
How Trump Captured the Republican Party’s Populist Energy
Trump exploited the latent populist demand in the GOP to win the Republican nomination in 2016, developed a populist culture with the GOP elite over the years—though, if we’re being more nuanced, candidate-centric systems themselves incentivize populist rhetoric from even establishment elites anyway—and later more forcefully brought the party elites to heel in 2024. Sycophants then filled his cabinets, and ambitious politicians witnessed firsthand the absolute power that populism grants a leader as he began to more successfully scam Americans and rip apart our institutions to recreate them in his image.
Now, these ambitious political elites, and apparently media stars, on both the Left and the Right are all licking their chops at the prospect of being next in line to capture their party’s populist energy, as Trump has now cracked the code for making populism work in America.
Footnotes
- But this should not be taken to mean that it cannot be solved.↩
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