The 2016 election constituted one of the great populist uprisings of American history. A large segment of the electorate rose up against American elites and many of their underlying governing nostrums—globalism, lax border control, free trade, American military adventurism, a wariness toward nationalism, the cozy relationship between Big Government and Big Finance. It’s an open question whether President Trump, who ran against those nostrums, will govern as he campaigned. There are sound reasons to believe he will abandon many of his campaign pronouncements and meld his populist rhetoric with more establishmentarian actions. If so, his political story could become one of the great sleight-of-hand perpetrations of the American experience.
It may be instructive, in any event, to look at the other great populist uprisings of our history by way of a comparative analysis. Herewith then is a list of the country’s five most powerful waves of populism.
Andrew Jackson: We can’t understand Jackson’s populism without understanding how Thomas Jefferson set the stage for his emergence. The country’s first dominant party was the Federalists, unabashedly elitist in its advocacy of a strong federal government and a strong executive within that government. The greatest Federalist was Alexander Hamilton, who had argued during the Constitutional Convention that presidents should hold office until they died. Jefferson set himself foursquare against the Hamiltonian ethos. Following his 1800 presidential victory, he killed the Federalist Party and put to rest its brand of power consolidation.
But that irrepressible figure Henry Clay fashioned a successive political philosophy he called the American System—a governmental commitment to public works designed to pull the nation up from above. It included federal support for roads, bridges, canals, and even a national university. It also included high tariffs to plenish federal coffers (to pay for those public works) and to protect fledgling U.S. industries. It embraced the kind of national bank that Hamilton had fostered in his day. Finally, Clay wanted to sell public lands in the West at high prices to generate federal funds and bolster federal power.
Jackson opposed all this. He despised any concentrations of governmental power and didn’t feel the federal government needed to pull up the country from above. Let the yeoman thrive on his own, believed Jackson, and he would push the country up from below. Thus he favored selling land at low prices—or giving it away altogether—and he opposed the national bank, the national university, and federal support for projects he felt should be left to states and localities.