The Populist Path to National Renewal

by Conrad Black (July 2017)

 

 

Populism is generally taken to mean a political movement that challenges the incumbent political elite and may overwhelm it. If in doing so, or at a subsequent stage, the movement becomes violent or departs from the confines of the orthodox constitutional system altogether, it ceases to be populist and becomes revolutionary or anarchic. In long-running democracies, economic fluctuations and occasional vagaries of talent of the political leadership assure that there will be populist political activity that will try to win big political prizes by constitutional means and by exploiting and evoking public discontent with the political class.

 

Though the United States has been fertile populist ground, its populist movements have never seriously threatened to overthrow the existing method of choosing governments. The United States was born of a revolution, but it was preeminently an act of secession, challenging remote British rule and establishing local self-government. It did not overturn the socioeconomic organization of the country. Even the Civil War, an insurrection, was conducted in defense of the institution of slavery.

 

The United States ranks with the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and parts of Scandinavia as the only countries that have been autonomous for over a century, where there has been no serious revolutionary violence directed at the continuity of governmental institutions. In France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Russia, China, Japan, and Turkey, the history is long and replete with upheavals and complete breakdowns of government, as well as many unsuccessful, but not merely frivolous, attempts to dispense abruptly with the existing institutions and people of government.

 

 

 

In the main English-speaking countries, parties tend to carry on in this way for generations. The American Whigs cracked up because they could not find a position on slavery that would counter the confidence trick of Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and Jackson for the Democrats as the party that would preserve Southern society (slavery), while reassuring the North that they alone would keep the South in the Union. The Compromise of 1850, crafted by the greatest of the Whigs, the three-time presidential candidate Henry Clay, and the greatest of the pre–Civil War Northern Democrats, Stephen A. Douglas, effectively guaranteed a civil war in each territory as it determined whether it would seek admission to the Union as a free or slave state, and provided for the relentless hounding of fugitive slaves in a manner that offended most conscientious Americans (especially after it was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in the egregious Dred Scott case).

 

 

The third American populist quest of this time was the Southern insurrection itself. In the decade bought by the Compromise of 1850, the U.S. population increased from 23 to 31 million, mostly in the North, so that in 1861 the demographic balance was 22.4 million free people in the North, to 5.1 million plus 3.5 million slaves in the South. The South nonetheless interpreted the election of Lincoln, the Republican candidate in 1860 who sought only to restrict slavery to where it already existed, as justifying its secession from the Union.

 

The South was spoiling for a fight. They had not seen a serious and purposeful Northern president since the Adamses, and John Quincy had been ejected from the White House by Andrew Jackson more than forty years earlier (and, though intelligent, worthy, and principled, he was no strongman). This is the danger of appeasement—the South had forgotten that there were strong men in the North. Lincoln had warned the South for two years that Republican victory would not justify secession, that secession would not be tolerated by the North, and that, while both sides were equally brave, the South could not defeat the North in a war because Southerners were not adequately numerous.

 

Between December 9, 1860, and February 1, 1861, South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana all seceded, claiming the new president was a regional candidate, an enemy of slavery, who would continue what was considered to be a war against slavery. Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee voted in their legislatures to secede if there were any effort to coerce a seceding state to remain in the Union. Referenda were held, even after the legislative votes for secession, in Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia, that yielded 25 to 35 percent negative votes, even though no serious federalist argument was allowed.

 

For a hundred years afterwards, only the whites voted in the South, despite the emancipation of the slaves, and huge numbers of European immigrants arrived in the great port cities of the North and moved westwards, generally provided for by the Democratic bosses in those cities. As the Democrats had held office for fifty-two of the sixty years prior to Lincoln, the Republicans did so for forty-four of the fifty-two years starting with Lincoln, losing the South en bloc, as they had before the war, but prevailing as the party of native-born Americans and the conservators of the Union in most of the North. Counterintuitively, federal expenses on pensions to Civil War veterans and their families steadily increased for forty years, as the Republicans bought votes to counter the Democratic strength in the proliferating Irish, German, Italian, and East European communities. From 1876 to 1892, the Democrats won the presidential popular vote four times, and trailed by only 6,000 out of nearly ten million cast in 1880, but were only elected twice. As originally adopted, the Constitution credited the South with 60 percent of the African-American slave population for purposes of calculating members of Congress and the Electoral College. Now 100 percent of African Americans were counted, but practically none of them voted. The South was decisively beaten on the battlefield, but not politically.

 

 

So perished American populism again, though it was buried by imaginative Rooseveltian counter-populism. There had been third-party movements when neither of the main parties addressed occupational discontents: the Popular Party of 1892—disgruntled farmers and workers led by the former congressman (and the sometime-Republican and Democrat) James Weaver—took 8.5 percent of the vote, but did not change the election result, and the party vanished. The Socialist Party in 1912 won a little over 6 percent for the perennial candidate Eugene V. Debs, and in 1924, when the Democrats took 103 ballots to choose John W. Davis, an almost non-political candidate, as a compromise between factions, a briefly revived Progressive Party led by Robert La Follette of Wisconsin garnered 16 percent of the vote. But again, it did not alter the result of the election and the Progressives vanished when the liberal (Roman Catholic) Governor Alfred E. Smith of New York was the Democratic nominee in 1928. Third parties never win in the United States, even when led by an ex-president (Van Buren in 1848, Fillmore in 1856, Theodore Roosevelt in 1912). Populism only has a chance when it takes over an existing party, as the Republicans took over the Whigs in 1856, Bryan took over the Democrats in 1896, Theodore Roosevelt the Republicans in 1901, and Donald Trump the Republicans in 2016.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The country had changed administrations every two terms starting in 1992 and removed control of the Congress from each of the three administrations. The state of the Union, domestically and in the world, appeared to most to have deteriorated steadily from the second Clinton term on, for the first time in American history, while these two families handed the greatest offices in the land back and forth between them. Washington, flattered by the entertainment community and protected by a docile and unrepresentatively leftish media, exuded complacency.

 

 

 

The consensus was almost unanimous: Trump could not win. His victory was an upset comparable to that of Harry Truman against Thomas E. Dewey in 1948, except that all the right people supported Truman, however condescendingly, and no one supported Trump, except the people.

 

If any Bush, Clinton, or Obama is heard from as a coming candidate for the headship of the nation again, it will be on a straight meritocratic basis and after the appropriate interval when spurs are won and the country is exposed to other families—the old-fashioned way, like the Adamses, Harrisons, and Roosevelts.

 

What has occurred is the supreme triumph of populism in American history and in the modern democratic world. Even Andrew Jackson had been a prominent general, albeit in Gilbert and Sullivan wars and in crushing the natives almost as brutally as Mussolini did the Ethiopians, and he had briefly been a senator and congressman, and ran once (and was the leading vote-getter in a four-way race) before he was elected president. Trump is the only person ever elected president who has never held a public office or a high military position, the oldest and wealthiest person ever elected to the office.

 

Among the great Western nations, only the United States has the constitutional and psychological ability to conduct a full exercise in populism. Some of the campaign against it as demagogy has been justified, though not the charge of mob rule. Yet in the last year, it was the only avenue to national renovation.

 

First published in The New Criterion.

 

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