What's The Populist Wave?

Trump and Brexit are just part of a global populist wave that’s been building for 25 years. Here’s where populist have taken over so far: Italy in 1994; Venezuela in 1999; Turkey in 2003; Bolivia in 2006; Hungary in 2010; India in 2014; Greece and Poland in 2015; the United States in 2017; Italy (again) in 2018; and Brazil, and England in 2019.

And there are strong populist movements in Sweden, Denmark, France, German and many other countries. In the U.S., Republicans have been lost to populism and the Democrats may soon follow. What the heck is going on?

This post is based on Chapter 16 of the new zFacts book, Ripped Apart (see below). That chapter answers the mind-bending question — How can Trump and Sanders both be populists? Sanders claims he’s one in his book “Our Revolution.” And Trump, although he’s an elitist at heart, or would be if he had a heart, is now doing a damn good job of playing the role of a right-wing populist leader.

Both, of course, claim to be on the side of the people, or as Trump says, “the real people.” And both divide the world into Us (the people) and Them (the elite), or as Sanders calls them, the 1%, the billionaires or the “establishment.”

This type of binary political worldview is what makes a populist. So of course, there are many kinds of populists because there are many, many ways to divide the world into Us and Them. And as long as Us is “the people” and you have a binary worldview you can proudly claim to be a populist.

Now, most politicians in a broad-based democracy use some populist talking points, but that doesn’t make them populists. We’ve had only two populist presidents in the last 231 years — Andrew Jackson and Donald Trump. The others have believed, like our founding fathers, in pluralism, not populism.

If instead of a binary view of the world, we believe that “the people” are composed of different groups with different views on what is right and just, then we likely believe that a central purpose of democracy is to find the best compromise between these groups. This is pluralism, not populism. And that’s what we have — a Republic with checks and balances.

It has been observed that a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny.

—Alexander Hamilton

In Republics, the great danger is that the majority may not sufficiently respect the rights of the Minority.

—James Madison, December 1829
Father of our Constitution and Bill of Rights

But were the founding fathers right? Does one-person-one-vote populism have problems with respecting the rights of minorities? Let me give you two examples from California.

Populist racism. Following the 1963 Rumford Fair-Housing Act, which banned the racial discrimination in housing that kept blacks in ghettos, the California Real Estate Association (CREA) immediately launched a populist repeal campaign. In November 1964, Californians voted two to one for an initiative (Proposition 14) that overturned the Fair-Housing Act and legalized racist housing discrimination.

But it wasn’t long before the California Supreme Court ruled Proposition 14 illegal and the US Supreme Court agreed. That’s what checks and balances are for. That’s why the founding fathers gave us a pluralist democracy and not populism. Here’s another example:

Populist incarceration. Unlike in the Johnny Cash song, Norman Williams never “shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.” But in 1982, Williams did burglarize a California apartment being fumigated. On the way out he himself was robbed at gunpoint. Even though he helped the police recover the stolen property, his burglary was strike one. A decade later he stole some hand tools from an art studio, but when confronted by the homeowner, he dropped them and took off running. Strike two.

Then in 1997, he stole a floor jack from a tow truck. Strike three. Twelve years later, he was still “stuck in Folsom prison” serving a life sentence under the harshest three-strikes law in the country. This populist initiative had been passed by an overwhelming 72 percent of California’s voters. That’s one-person-one-vote populism.

Norman Williams was saved by one of those anti-populist checks and balances when he was freed by a judge in April 2009, thanks to the efforts of Steve Cooley, a Republican district attorney from Los Angeles, and Michael Romano, founder of the Three Strikes and Justice Advocacy Project at Stanford Law School.

Maybe our Founding Fathers were onto something that Trump and Sander haven’t quite figured out. And perhaps America shouldn’t be riding the global populist wave that keeps overthrowing liberal, pluralist democracies.