The central point is that populism of both strains is on the rise and, thus, America is moving into an era of increasingly angry politics

The rising appeal of American populism

By Robert W. Merry

The national mood is ripe for movement from both the right and left

Bad economic times breed angry politics. We remain in bad economic times, irrespective of what our leaders in Washington say, and the political climate is getting more and more angry. America is moving into a period of heightened populism of both left and right. The result will be increasing political polarization on top of the polarization we already have experienced in recent years. The next couple of election cycles will be raucous.

To understand all this, it helps to understand populism as a recurrent American political impulse and also to understand its conservative and liberal variants.

As a general outlook, populism is the angry response of people who feel abused by people and institutions more wealthy or more powerful than themselves. It could be the followers of President Andrew Jackson in the 1830s, who thrilled at his effort to kill the Second Bank of the United States because it represented too much concentrated economic power. It could be the Southern farmer circa 1890 — beset by a constricted money supply, low crop prices and pressures from the town banker — who felt that the politicians always seemed to favor that banker over him. It could be the followers of Louisiana’s Huey Long in the 1930s, who felt that the great villain of the Depression era was the big financial establishment of Wall Street.

The central cry of the populist is the need to smash institutions of entrenched power that, in the populist view, distort the American system to benefit themselves at the expense of the broad mass of citizens. When William Jennings Bryan, one of history’s greatest populists, ran for president in 1896, his campaign was touted as “the masses vs. the classes.” Populists particularly go after people who can be labeled as American “oligarchs” or “plutocrats.”

There are two strains of populism in the American political tradition, though — liberal and conservative. Both are rising in today’s political environment.
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