If you step back a bit, though, all of the players look more like pieces in a board game, whose rules and layout are predetermined. As Karl Marx famously remarked, in “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon,” “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”
Going into the 2016 Presidential election, our economic inheritance is forty years of income stagnation and rising inequality, which culminated, in 2007 and 2008, in a global financial crisis and a government rescue of bankers and other financial interests. Yes, this bailout has been followed by half a decade of modest G.D.P. growth and strong job growth, but the narrative of inequity, unfairness, and frustrated expectations remains fixed in the public consciousness.
As the Financial Times commentator Martin Wolf pointed out on Wednesday, Latin American-style income distribution leads to Latin American-style politics—populism of the left and the right.
.. In a January poll of likely voters in the Iowa Democratic primary, forty-three per cent of respondents described themselves as “socialist.” And it isn’t just Iowa. A 2011 study by the Pew Research Center found that forty-nine per cent of millennials—defined as Americans between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine—view socialism favorably, compared to forty-three per cent who view it unfavorably.
.. To my mind, the most striking thing about the Iowa poll wasn’t that virtually half of likely Democratic voters embraced the designation “socialist.” It was that eighty-eight per cent agreed that the word “optimist” described them.
.. In voting for Syriza and Podemos, the Greeks and Spanish weren’t indicating that they wanted to nationalize the means of production or bring back the Comintern. They were rejecting austerity policies imposed by a political system that seemed beholden to bureaucrats in Brussels and bankers in Frankfurt, and they were calling for a return to the Enlightenment ideals of popular sovereignty and popular participation.
.. For all his crankiness, Sanders is tapping into this optimism and providing an outlet for it.
.. If you look at the rise of populism in other countries, you will find that urging people to be realistic is a common reaction from establishment politicians and their supporters. It is a risky response, though. Trotted out too often, or too vehemently, it can make those who rely on it sound suspiciously like one of the “mothers and fathers” that Bob Dylan addressed back in 1964 ..
John Lukacs vs. Populism
It is hate that unites people, whereas love is always individual, rather than collective.
.. But even when pressed, Lukacs has difficulty finding any good words for populism, American-style. To him, the rise of right-wing populism here is troubling because it means that the conservatives no longer serve as a shield against the dangers of mass politics. Instead, ”conservative” has come to mean simply ”antiliberal.”
.. ”Nationalism is a very low and cheap common denominator that unites people,” he says. ”It is hatred that unites people. People take satisfaction from the idea that we are good because our enemies are evil. This is a very American syndrome but it is also universally true of mankind.”
My Sarah Palin Romance
But given Palin’s Alaskan past, the endorsement makes perfect sense. Her real roots are not in Reaganism or libertarianism or the orthodoxies of the donor class. They’re in the same kind of blue-collar, Jacksonian, “who’s looking out for you?” populism that has carried Trump to the top of the Republican polls. And it’s a populism that the G.O.P. is discovering has a lot more appeal to many of its voters than the litmus tests of the official right.
Which means that in a certain way, Trump and Palin together on a stage is the closest American politics has come to offering the populist grand new party that Salam and I called for two presidential campaigns ago.
Donald Trump’s Tax Plan Is a Predictable Cop-out
Why did I refer to this cop-out as predictable? Because I doubted all along that Trump had the depth and gumption to be a genuine American populist—a Huey Long for the Internet age. Such a figure, if he had channeled worries about immigration, ISIS, and national decline, then combined these with some seriously populist proposals designed to exploit resentment of corrupt financial and political élites, could perhaps have emerged as a genuinely potent and dangerous force. But Trump isn’t that guy. A self-satisfied showman and self-promoter rather than a real insurrectionary, he ultimately hasn’t got much to offer. This tax plan makes it painfully clear.