Since the Democratic Party emerged under Andrew Jackson, Democrats have run campaigns on the theme of the people versus the powerful. This was, more or less, the campaign theme of Andrew Jackson, William Jennings Bryan, Al Smith, Franklin Roosevelt, and most of the Democratic Party ticket up and down the ballot for every decade in between them. At times, the “people” have meant rural farmers and at other times urban workers. The “powerful” once meant railroads and Eastern money, and at another time it meant big box stores and multinational brands. Although the details change from year to year, if you want to identify one great unifying ideal running throughout every historical incarnation of the Democratic Party, it would be that Democrats have always identified as a party of little people fighting against the interests of a powerful elite.

Except haven't both major parties always attracted legions of the powerful, all happily bundling millions of dollars for candidates and getting Lincoln bedroom sleepovers and attending White House dinners? Doesn't each party just attract different kinds of powerful people, whether corporate executives, energy tycoons, Wall Street titans, Silicon Valley billionaires, Hollywood moguls, popular media personalities, and so on? And don't a lot of struggling Americans, like the rural working class, viscerally hate the party that's supposed to represent them? Don't Republicans regularly maintain that they're the party representing the authentic America and that the Democrats are actually the party of out-of-touch elites—college professors, wealthy tech titans, and opinionated actors?

People sense that the Democrats are, and have always been, the party of populism—it's just that populism isn't what most people think it is.

THE IDEOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS OF POPULISM

Populism is probably the oldest and most persistent idea across the entire history of human politics. Although the specifics of the arrangement change across time and societies, every human social group ultimately forms some hierarchical scheme consisting of rulers and the people over whom they rule. Sometimes that has meant a hereditary king. Sometimes that has meant a warlord. Sometimes that has meant a powerful tribe and tributary tribes. Sometimes that has meant a caste of priests. Sometimes that has meant nobles and slaves. Wherever there have been groups of people living together, some have had more wealth and power and some have had less. The people who had more generally fought to keep it, first for themselves, then for their families, and then for people like themselves, whether their caste, their tribe, their class, or their culture.

History books tend to focus on the politics of the ruling class. Claimants struggle over thrones. Barons fight with kings over rights and powers. Priests, warriors, and nobles maneuver to determine who has power over whom. Leaders of one tribe promote their own and destroy rivals in other clans. Yet most times these political battles were always a mere sideshow to the real political story, the simmering tension between rulers and those under their rule. Underneath most political struggles of nobles fighting over thrones was an unspoken fear lurking across the entire civilization that one day the peasants and slaves might rise up, storm the castle, and put every noble head they found upon a spear. Every once in a while, they did. In ancient Greece, sometimes the mob would rise up to overthrow the tyrant. Rome had periodic slave revolts that expanded into full-scale wars, with entire armies clashing in battles. In Medieval Europe, mobs of peasants stormed the capital and murdered the Lord Chancellor and Archbishop of Canterbury in the Tower of London. In China, the great peasant revolt of the Yellow Turban Rebellion tore China apart for years and terminally weakened the Han Dynasty. Long before we had elections and democratic politics in which “the people” were consulted about their government, this smoldering tension between “the people” and “the powerful” was the single most important issue motivating human politics.

Despite its importance throughout human history, however, populism traditionally has had a bad reputation among academics. For a long time, most scholars widely dismissed it as angry, emotional, and violent, a force that, when unleashed, destroys good government, damages democracy, and disrupts societies. Many scholars classically disdained populism as an empty, irrational, angry, and destructive ideology of no real value to civilization. In fact, many contested whether populism was even an ideology at all, as opposed to a method of political performance or a democratic pathology.1 This glib view of populism, while understandable, is a mistake. Populism is a primal force in human politics. When it erupts, time and again across history, it rocks societies, knocks down institutions, forces change, and often threatens national stability as it chases off national elites without a thoughtful plan for what comes next. Yet populism is also a lot like fire. It's an immensely dangerous force of nature when allowed to burn out of control, yet it's also valuable when it's understood and beneficially harnessed.

One of the reasons populism has historically received so much scholarly disdain is it's an ideological force nearly impossible to describe or define using the traditional tools of political analysis. As Ernesto Laclau, one of the preeminent scholars of populism, wrote of it:

A persistent feature of the literature on populism is its reluctance—or difficulty—in giving the concept any precise meaning. Notational clarity—let alone definition—is conspicuously absent from this domain. Most of the time, conceptional apprehension is replaced by appeals to a non-verbalized intuition, or by descriptive enumerations of a variety of “relevant features”—a relevance which is undermined, in the very gesture that asserts it, by reference to a proliferation of exceptions.²

Nearly every other popular political ideology—from liberalism to conservatism to socialism to progressivism to communism to fascism to democratic republicanism—promotes a discrete political framework setting forth how people ought to organize society and how they ought to govern it. Populism doesn't offer such an easily identifiable agenda, program of ideas, or vision for society. In fact, it's frequently observed that populism is on its face contentless and empty. It's considered what's called a “thin ideology,” meaning that, while it offers a coherent approach to politics consistent with calling it an ideology, it lacks the expected ideological answers to political questions like “who gets what and how.”3 Populism tells you who should get to rule, but it doesn't tell you what they ought to do with the power they acquire. That's why populist movements have almost inevitably attached themselves to other ideologies like socialism or nationalism to give content to their program.⁴ History thus yields up a cacophony of rival populisms, from right-wing populism to left-wing populism to populist socialists to populist nationalists, all of whom agree on little yet whom we all recognize as populist.

It turns out what every form of populism has in common isn't a political program but a common claim. Populism is an ideology about power, control, justice, and ultimately redemption that separates society into two rival groups, the people and the elite. Populists claim to speak for “the people” fighting to replace a corrupt “elite.”⁵ Society, the populist believes, is under control of the elite—corrupt outsiders who neither understand nor care about the people. The populist claims to speak for the people—the humiliated, disrespected, and alienated majority of society unfairly subjected to elite power. The people, in whatever way the populist defines them, are the rightful heirs of the community. Not only because they're the actual majority, giving them a democratic right to rule, but because their specific life experience, perspective, demographic roots, and cultural beliefs make them the most authentic and virtuous part of the society. While the people, to the populist, are thus the most legitimate representation of the people's will and thus entitled to rule the elites in power, who don't share a common interest or identity with the people, can't possibly represent the society. These elite outsiders have no legitimacy to exercise power over a virtuous people they neither care about nor understand. These elites are therefore both illegitimate and corrupt, as they're siphoning from the people power and resources to which they have no right. Thus, what populists want is to overthrow the corrupt elites, replacing them with the people—meaning people more like them.

Dividing society between a virtuous people and a corrupt elite is the heart of every populist movement in history. It's the essence of “left-wing” populist revolutionaries, “right-wing” authoritarians, South American caudillos, Latin American Chavistas, and European populist-nationalists. Populists make an almost Rousseauian moral claim that the people—meaning people like them—have a legitimate right to rule because only they embody the general will of the society.6 As one scholar of populism wrote, “Those who are excluded and stigmatized with administrative categories such as ‘the poor,’ ‘the informal,’ and ‘the marginal’ become ‘the people’ conceived as the incarnation of all virtue. And the elites, who constantly humiliate them, become moral reprobates.”⁷ The elite—outsiders exercising power where they have no right—are thus essentially stealing wealth and honors they have no right to take from a people they denigrate and disrespect: “[Populism] transforms the humiliations that the rabble, the uncultured, the unseen, and those who have no voice have to endure in their daily life into sources of dignity and even redemption.”⁸

Populist claims aren't subject to negotiation or compromise, because populism isn't about specific policies or programs or even seizing resources. Populist claims are moral claims about who is a legitimate and authentic representative of society and who is entitled to rule. Populism seeks not spoils but dignity, representation, and justice to remedy what they see as corruption, disrespect, and humiliation. Populism is moreover both representative and antidemocratic at the same time. Populists generally believe in representative government, but also believe the only legitimate representatives of the people are themselves. Any outcome other than one in which the hated elite is vanquished and the “people” are allowed to rule is itself evidence of corruption and illegitimacy.⁹ Populism therefore demands one thing, to remove the elite from power, replacing them with the people—in practice, with populist leaders claiming to speak in the people's name.

Populist politics is one of the fundamental drivers of human civilization. As a species, we inevitably anoint leaders, or leaders seize power over others. The people shut out of the top of the new hierarchy become resentful at the unfairness of their situation. They want to topple a system they believe is unjust. There's no way to avoid this cycle of populist resentment and revolt because every society will always have a people and an elite. When one group has power, it means some other group doesn't. If some people are better off, others are worse by comparison. No matter how kind those who rule are to those under them, no matter how equally those rulers share the resources they control with others, no matter how fair rulers seek to make their orders, they can't change the glaring fact that they have power when others don't, and those who don't are keenly aware of their relative powerlessness. In the real world of fallible human beings, moreover, those with power have never been perfectly kind to those they rule over, have never sought to equally share resources in a way everyone in society believed fair, and have never only issued orders that are angelically just.

This tension between the people and the elite exists everywhere humans gather. It's in the relationship between line employees and the bosses in the C Suite. It's the relationship between students and principals. It's the relationship between the “cool kids” and the not-so-cool kids. And it's in the relationship between ordinary working people struggling to get by and the glamorous people on their televisions drinking champagne, driving Bentleys, and using phrases like “the help.” Sometimes this resentment lies lurking underneath a seemingly stable system. Sometimes a Che Guevara comes along to organize the resentful to do something about it. Populism is everywhere. It's powerful. It's disruptive. It is, and has always been, a major driver of human politics. Including in America.

THE DEMOCRATS AND POPULISM

One might think a democratic republic in which the people choose the government would have no use for populist politics. Yet populism has thrived in America since the republic's earliest days. The American Revolution was itself a great populist revolt. To the British, Americans were rubes whom they thought of in the same way as refined people today dismiss “rednecks” from “fly-over country.”10 The colonists' rebellion was motivated as much by resentment at blueblood Englishmen who looked down on their unrefined colonial cousins and refused to grant them seats in their parliament as a hatred of unfair taxes. Once they established their new republic, America's Founders—wealthy and educated intellectuals living lives far different from the struggling common working American—continued to flirt with populism. Thomas Jefferson was a rich plantation-owning wine connoisseur with European tastes and a philosopher's pen, yet he and his Democratic-Republicans won countless elections by attacking Federalists as aristocrats and elitists. Then Andrew Jackson rode to the forefront of American politics, and American populism really took off.

Old Hickory saw himself as a common man of the people. His party, the Democrats, built an ideology around celebrating the wisdom of the common American and fighting against corrupt elites.11 Jackson and his party decried the corruption and “special privileges” of the American “aristocracy,” which profited the few off the backs of the people.¹² It hated elite institutions like banks. Democrats wanted to elect judges, instead of obeying judges appointed by their alleged betters. They wanted to appoint ordinary people to high office in the belief that any man could do the job. They wanted to expand westward, where any hardworking settler could build a better life with his own hands without having to obey those who already had wealth and power. Jackson's Democrats were a classic populist movement pitting the people against corrupt elites, and its elite resentment and glorification of the common American became the backbone of every iteration of the Democratic Party since.

After the Civil War, the Democrats became a mostly Southern party representing the grievances of the Reconstruction South married to the anger of mostly Catholic immigrant workers who were locked out of the Protestant establishment in Northern cities. Although controlled by wealthy and powerful Bourbons, the Democratic Party voiced the resentment of people who felt trapped under the boots of outsiders—under the rule of military governors and “carpetbagger” Northern Republicans as the South transformed from a wealthy region into a mostly impoverished one left out of the Northern commercial boom. Again, Democrats claimed to represent the people against corrupt elites. With the rise of William Jennings Bryan, who proclaimed as his campaign slogan “let the people rule,” the Democrats stood up for agrarian Americans against Gilded Age elites—faraway Eastern bankers, industrial titans, corrupt politicians, and railroad presidents who they saw as treading upon the farmers and workers of America. Once more, Democrats claimed to represent the people against corrupt elites. In the wake of the Great Depression, Democrats repainted themselves as the party of the blue-collar and working-class average Joes who resented the rich, waspy, cocktail-sipping aristocrats hanging out in country clubs after crashing the national economy into depression and throwing working people into poverty. During the civil rights era, the party later extended its populist appeals to other groups it considered disenfranchised, such as African Americans, Hispanics, and women. Democrats again claimed to represent the people against corrupt elites.

Through every era and through every realignment, the Democratic Party has remained a party claiming to represent common working Americans against the interests of the elite. The Democratic message has always been that the party represents “the people,” and that its enemies are “the powerful.” The Federalists, the Whigs, and now the Republicans, until quite recently, have through every era always represented the elites against whom populists raged. Over the years, Democrats married their populist politics to other movements, ideas, and principles, as populists inevitably do and must. The substance of the party's agenda shifted and changed over time, as did its model picture of who exactly constituted the “people” and who was the “corrupt elite.” What never changed is that Democrats embraced populism's logic, that politics is a great battle between the people and the powerful—and that Democrats represented the authentic American people, the true source of political legitimacy.

Of late, however, working people with seemingly the most to gain from Democratic programs, and who until recently overwhelmingly supported Democrats, have increasingly come to embrace the Republicans. Americans living in small towns in Middle America, in bleak industrial towns in the Rust Belt, or in rural areas across the South, until quite recently were the “people” Democrats claimed to represent—the real Americans and ordinary working people who feared they were beset by corrupt outsiders carelessly ruling their destiny. The Democratic Party still presents itself as the party looking out for the interests of common Americans against the power of wealthy elites on Wall Street and in corporations. It favors policies and programs like national health insurance, social insurance, and regulatory controls intended to redistribute income and power toward ordinary people and those struggling. It defends labor unions and supports raising the minimum wage. Yet many of the working people the Democratic Party sees itself as championing viscerally hate it.13 Democrats sometimes see something untoward in this, believing that Republicans have unfairly stolen away a core Democratic constituency by tricking them to vote against their interests.

What many modern Democrats fail to appreciate about their party is that populism has nothing to do with money or programs. Providing programs to help people and improve America isn't populism—that's progressivism, an ideology more associated with Republicans than Democrats for much of the era in which Democratic populism reigned. Populism isn't about, and has never been about, which party offers the most to “the people.” Populism isn't about what government provides at all. Or what government is going to do. Or even whether government treats certain groups right. Nor is it about segments of society seeking to leverage their numbers to get more resources from their rulers. Populism is about the indignity people feel when they have to ask in the first place. It's about righting the injustice humans inherently feel when they believe others control their destiny. It's not about material things but power and dignity. Populists don't want gifts from their betters. They want to overthrow and replace them with people like themselves, seizing back the dignity and control that goes to members of the ruling class. It's about the people—meaning people like “us”—taking back power and control from the elites in power—people like “them.”

Democratic populists through most of America's history weren't elites offering to shower gifts and programs on workers and laborers. From Jackson's patronage programs to Tammany Hall's political machines, Democrats offered real power to people the system locked out. Destroying the Bank of the United States, opening up more settlement in the West, breaking the power of railroads, and “free silver” were more than ways to help working people in America. They were about sticking it to elites, breaking elite power, and freeing working people from their control. William Jennings Bryan wasn't a Bourbon offering gifts to struggling farmers and laborers; he promised to overthrow the elites in bed with bankers and railroad presidents, replacing them with people more like them. In the early part of this party system, New Deal Democrats strengthened labor unions, organizations run by ordinary workers who rose to union leadership. They worked through political machines, which built vast patronage networks that provided public jobs and opportunities to immigrants and other working people who might not have otherwise qualified in a purely merit-based system. New Deal Democrats celebrated the virtues of ordinary working people as the backbone of America and proclaimed the people for whom they worked, to whom their farms were mortgaged, and whom they served as undeserving elites. Most of all, they elevated politicians who came from among them—people from humble backgrounds without elite educations, who had worked on farms or lived in urban slums. Voting for Democrats meant voting for people with unpolished exteriors and rural or working-class backgrounds, politicians like Lyndon Johnson or Richard J. Daley. The Democratic Party offered populists more than beneficial policies, they also offered them dignity, respect, and a full seat at the banquet of power. Voting for Democrats didn't just mean more benefits for you. It meant electing more people like you.

During the 1960s and 1970s, however, the way the Democratic Party related to working-class populists changed.14 Around the time the baby boomers came of age, American politics shifted attention from economics to moral issues. A counterculture of young activists known as the “New Left” rose to prominence within the party, young radicals interested in rowdy protest movements and moralistic politics. These “New Left” Democrats began to clash with the traditional working-class populist Democrats, whom many in the New Left viewed not as allies but enemies and impediments to progress. The New Left progressives saw the Old Left populists—with their conventionality, their pragmatism, and their traditional social beliefs—as at best antiquated relics, and at worst backward bigots holding the nation back. The Old Left populists saw the young New Left progressives—with their noisy protests, their transgressive appearance and dress, and their shocking-for-the-time social beliefs—as disruptive radicals. For decades, these two rival groups struggled for power inside the Democratic Party while spitting contempt at each other. Over time, as young New Left activists aged into party leaders and officials, the New Left perspective strengthened its hand within Democratic Party councils as the once-formidable Old Left machines lost relevance. Where Democrats once lionized rural America and the working class as the nation's backbone, more and more prominent Democrats became openly dismissive of rural and working-class America as backward places without enlightened values. While the Democratic Party still wanted to speak for the working-class populists of the party's traditional base, key elements of rising party constituencies no longer seemed to like them.

That shift from economic to moral issues within the Democratic Party created a profound shift among its traditional working-class populist base. The party didn't change ideologically. Democrats still believed in New Deal liberalism and offered America the same New Deal programs. Democrats still promised to empower institutions like unions. They even promised to extend new programs that helped working people and the middle class against the elite. Just as in the days of Jackson, the Democratic Party was still formally a populist political party. At the same time, party leaders also changed the way they prioritized and interpreted their party's ideology. Democratic leaders began to worry less about labor and lunch-pail issues and more about issues like social justice, racial equality, and environmental purity. Democrats also began extending their populist appeals to new groups as America changed and new communities joined the party's coalition, offering the benefits of populism to African Americans, women, Hispanics, and gay and lesbian people—respect, seats at the table, and shared resentment. Most important, Democrats stopped providing the same power, respect, and opportunities to its old working-class populist base. Archie Bunker was no longer the party's base but the problem.

Populism and progressivism are hardly natural allies. Progressives may want to help “the people” but they're also by definition elites. The progressive desire for rational management and good government is in natural tension with actually empowering ordinary people, who progressives may believe don't fully appreciate their complex plans. In a prior era, progressives and populists grappled fiercely over issues like civil service reform, as progressives worked to dismantle the very patronage networks that supported populists. Progressives saw themselves as molding the lower classes into reflections of their betters, while populists resented the expert-loving scientific-minded progressives as representatives of elite condescension.15 Lumping these two very different principles under the ideology “liberalism” too often causes Democrats to mistake progressive policies intended to help the working class as a kind of populism—which they are not—and outbursts of resentment-driven populism as cries for progressive solutions—which they are not.¹⁶ It's possible to champion a form of progressivism that hopes to improve the lives of the powerless without actually ceding them power and control, much as the pro-business, moralistic, and elitist turn-of-the-century progressives once did. It's also possible to champion an angry populism of resentment with no interest in the expert-driven good government that progressives prize.

When working-class populists first attached themselves to the Democratic Party in the 1930s, the alliance made sense. Populism, as a thin ideology, had to attach itself to another ideology to provide direction. Economic progressivism, which championed an agenda specifically meant to elevate and benefit people like them, made a reasonable partner. The moral progressivism that grew out of the 1960s and 1970s, on the other hand, specifically sought to remove people like them from influence as obstacles to progress. The Democratic Party wanted to continue to represent working-class populists; it considered them key members of the Democratic voting coalition, and it thought it could buy their continued loyalty with policies and programs that benefited them. Yet an alliance between working-class populism and moral progressivism never made much sense. This evolving Democratic Party now no longer offered working-class populists what populists actually crave—the respect and power that comes from replacing elites with people like them. The Democrats no longer offered parts of its populist base the same route to respect and power in exchange for votes as it once did. Electing Democrats no longer meant replacing elites with people like them. It was a deeply destabilizing shift both within the Democratic coalition and our current party system, unmooring many working-class populists from America's formally populist party and encouraging them to seek what they as populists actually desired—respect and dignity and representation and power—somewhere else.

Ideologically, the Democrats have remained a populist party offering a populist program under the banner of New Deal liberalism. For some populists—women, African Americans, Hispanics, and other traditionally disenfranchised groups—voting Democratic remains a reasonable way to replace elites with people like them. For traditional working-class Democratic populists, however, the Democratic Party in practice no longer really offers what populism demands—power, dignity, and redemption. The Democrats no longer offer working-class populists a full seat at the table of power. Electing Democrats no longer means throwing out the hated elites to restore power to the authentic American people—meaning people like them.

THE POWER OF THE POPULIST TRADITION

America has always had, and will likely always have, a populist political party. Wherever there are human societies and power there will also be populism. While populism has waxed and waned in intensity throughout American history, at different times attaching itself to new ideas and allies, it has always played a role and never truly disappeared. People who feel locked out of power and disrespected by others will always find a political outlet. Nor would we want populism to disappear. Despite its unfortunate unsavory reputation, populism isn't actually inherently bad. In fact, it's almost certainly essential to maintain the integrity of republican democracy. As various scholars of populism have justly noted, populism is indeed an angry, reactive, and resentful ideology. It's not a philosophy about building or improving things. It places little value on good-government policy ideas and much onto identity, resentment, and raw power. It's a political ideology that must always find an ideological partner because it lacks any ideas, agenda, or political program of its own. Populists aren't organized around what they want to do with power, they simply want to take it away from the outsiders who have it and get it to people like themselves. Yet populism is also the natural counterweight to stagnation and corruption in a democracy.

While populism may lack a ruling agenda of its own, it's also the primary force holding national elites accountable. Ruling factions naturally tend to entrench and reward themselves at the expense of others with less political power. Worse, they too often justify that control and privilege as the well-earned reward for what they consider their superior educations, values, and backgrounds. What limits this inevitable pull toward elite corruption is the fear of angry populist backlash. Populism may not have ideas about what to do with power, but it's a potent force for stopping national elites from leveraging their power and advantages to reward and entrench themselves at the rest of the society's expense. Populist pressure has time and again stopped America from drifting too far into corruption and unaccountable privilege. Jackson's revolt helped correct the drift toward elite privilege during the Era of Good Feelings, bringing ordinary Americans into the democracy. Bryan shocked the corrupt Gilded Age elite into cleaning up the graft for good government and reform. The constant pressure of populism is what discourages national elites from indulging in too much corruption, and periodic populist eruptions are what cleans up such corruption when it goes too far. Were populism ever to disappear completely from our politics, disaster would likely follow.

When attached to the right ideology, moreover, populism is a valuable vehicle for reform. Since populism inevitably attaches itself to other ideas for direction, when it's attached to the right movement its anger and resentment can become energy driving necessary change. Jackson's, Bryans, and FDR's Democrats all harnessed the might of populism to drive their agendas of innovation and reforms. They brought people who felt like outsiders back into the political system and used their enthusiasm to force through change. They didn't just seek to replace elites with the people they claimed to represent, they then put those people to work building a better America than before.

As the most ancient and primal force in all human politics, populism can be harnessed either for good causes or destructive ones. Populism is by itself nihilistic, which is why populists attach themselves to other powerful ideas with firm agendas for concrete change like agrarianism, nationalism, communism, or progressivism. While populism can be horrifically damaging to rational government when directionless or attached to the wrong ideology, when attached to a better one it can drive important change by providing energy, emotion, and urgency. If channeled poorly, it can rip apart a nation's politics in favor of primal irrational politics of power and resentment. If channeled well, populism can become a beneficial force keeping the powerful in check and driving necessary reforms. You can't destroy populism. You can only let some air out of populists pressure from time to time to reduce its strength, while watching which allies populists choose. As we navigate the next political realignment, populism can become a key driver of political renewal, but it can also become an angry whirlwind of disruptive emotions, rough politics, violence, and political chaos. It can be a force around which we rebuild the next party system, or the one that tears the old one down—or both.