Populism: A Perspective

Bread, Circuses, Bullshit and Bacon

Trump and Mamdani peddle only slightly differing versions of populism. I wrote about Mamdani’s brand of promised people power two months ago in these pages, to no avail. His election marks a new high water mark in the ascendancy of populism in our times.

A brief definition: by populism I mean the politics of victimhood that insists the essential struggle is between the victimized People and their abusers, the Elites. These politics are an international phenomenon. The British writer James Marriott in his blog Cultural Capital writes about how victims have taken over British politics: “Since the start of 2020, “victims” have been mentioned in Parliament 16,515 times, more than “Brexit” (10,797 times), “welfare” (9,978), “immigration” (8,644), “pensioners” (3,438) and “voters” (2,540).” Further details are in this article from The Economist.

The ‘people’s party’ has been around since at least Andrew Jackson’s time as our seventh president (in office from 1829 to 1837.) George Wallace, the governor of Alabama, won 46 electoral votes as a third-party candidate in the 1968 election, using coded racism (like Trump) as a core part of his populist message. Mamdani too uses coded racism, but he wraps it up in his victimhood sermons and rainbow flag waving such that the unaware remain uninformed.

Teddy Roosevelt in 1912, running as independent, won 88 out of 531 electoral votes---the most successful showing for any third-party presidential candidate. What was the platform of his so-called Bull Moose Party? An eight-hour workday, a minimum wage for women, a social security system and a national health service. In other words, the 1912 version of populism. (Teddy’s party got that name because, like Trump, he was shot during the campaign, and said “it will take more than that to kill a bull moose.”)

Compare Jackson’s agenda with Trump’s. Jackson worked to kill the rechartering of what was our national bank at the time. He said it concentrated power in the hands of a wealthy, unelected elite favoring the rich over the common man. Jackson succeeded and the bank was closed. Trump’s been fiddling with the Federal Reserve Board in all sorts of way, with his own National Bank vendetta. Jackson wanted to expand suffrage to all white men, arguing the states should allow them to vote, whether or not they owned land or paid taxes. Trump’s been bellowing about absentee voting being done by illegal—-coded language for non-white—voters. They both thought it essential to count as many white votes as possible. Finally, Jackson worked vigorously to expand the spoils system, replacing incumbent government officials with his political supporters. Like Trump, he was as focused on lower-level people as on the higher-ups. “To the victors go the spoils,” has a long pedigree, so we shouldn’t be surprised that Trump forced out all those U.S. Attorneys and installed acolytes to secure the indictments he demanded.

Whether MAGA’s bulb dims after Trump departs, or the socialists continue to make inroads in re-branding the Democratic party, some version of populism will dominate our politics for a long time to come. We have too many angry, and increasingly impoverished voters in our midst, and their needs will not be satisfied in one or two presidential election cycles. At some point the populace will realize that populism is incoherent and thus useless as a governing proposition, but that is many years ahead of us.

Populism frames politics as a battle, so of course it’s a polarizing force. But polarization is not always to be avoided. Income inequality is growing, housing is unaffordable for many (and not just in New York City), and government at all levels has done a piss poor job for many decades in dealing with those, or most other, problems. I’m not opposed to tearing down the house, provided there’s a detailed set of workable drawings for what the new one will look like. Detailed and workable.

The challenge is an architectural one, where what matters are all those details involved in trying to build something new. The vision is of little importance if the foundations crack or the roof leaks. I believe we’ve only once elected an architect to lead a government: Frank Sargent (MIT, architecture, 1939) was the governor of Massachusetts from 1969-75. As for those details, where is Mayor Mamdani going to find the $100 billion he’ll need to build his promised 200,000 affordable housing units? Leaving aside the money fantasy, on what land will those units be built? Surely not on some former Superfund sites in the Bronx.

Jackson was a successful populist because he backed up his rhetoric with detailed plans. When the national bank’s charter was not renewed, he had a plan ready---an entirely legal one-- to move the deposits to state banks. He was a populist who understood the need for a blueprint to implement his rhetoric.

You can’t embroider a blueprint on a MAGA hat---another way of saying that Trump will continue to smash his way forward, backwards and sideways for the next three years and build nothing of value for the public. The new ballroom in the White House doesn’t count as a building project.

One day Trump’s voters will realize: that MAGA rhetoric has not made them more financially secure; that closing down the southern border shrunk the labor pool but that didn’t translate into higher average wages for working people; and that all those new factory investments Trump has announced won’t bring with them good paying jobs on the shop floor. In the battle between bullshit and bacon, there has only ever been one winner.

Of Mamdani, we’ll have to wait.... a bit. The signals from his campaign, and his victory speech are frightening, and should have been disqualifying. Much like Trump, Zohran has few qualifications to govern. Now that he’s won, he’ll have to attempt to govern. Of his bread and circuses promises to his supporters, like Trump, the odds are strong that he’ll only deliver on the circuses.