The Populist Explosion

Political analyst John B. Judis opens by surveying the rise of populist parties and candidates across the United States and Europe. He defines populism not as an ideology but as a political logic, drawing on historian Michael Kazin's characterization in The Populist Persuasion: Populists conceive of ordinary people as a noble assemblage and view elite opponents as self-serving and undemocratic. Judis distinguishes between leftwing populism, which is "dyadic," pitting the people against an elite, and rightwing populism, which is "triadic," attacking an elite accused of coddling a third group such as immigrants or minorities. Populist movements, he contends, arise when prevailing political norms fail to address popular concerns and serve as catalysts for change even when they do not achieve their stated goals.

Judis traces this political logic to the American People's Party of the 1890s, when Farmer Alliances battered by falling agricultural prices joined with the Knights of Labor, a national workers' organization, to challenge the laissez-faire consensus of both major parties. The party called for railroad nationalization, a graduated income tax, and monetary reform. Two-party dynamics destroyed the movement after Democrats co-opted its platform under William Jennings Bryan in 1896, but the People's Party established the foundational framework of "the people" versus an intransigent elite, and much of its agenda was eventually incorporated into the New Deal. The next major populist eruption was Huey Long's Share Our Wealth movement. Long, a Louisiana politician who served as governor and senator, broke with President Franklin Roosevelt and proposed capping family wealth at $5 million through redistributive taxes. His proposals functioned like the People's Party's call for "free silver," the expansion of silver coinage to increase the money supply: Both were deliberately ambitious demands that established an unbridgeable political divide. A secret 1935 Democratic poll showing Long could draw millions of third-party votes helped push Roosevelt to pass the Second New Deal, including Social Security and progressive tax reform.

Turning to rightwing populism, Judis examines George Wallace, the Alabama governor whose 1960s presidential campaigns framed opposition to civil rights legislation as a defense of ordinary white Americans against liberal elites. Wallace ran as an independent in 1968, winning 13.5 percent of the vote. His supporters fit sociologist Donald Warren's concept of "middle American radicals," voters who felt the middle class was neglected and held a mix of liberal and conservative positions. These voters migrated to the Republican Party under Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, reshaping both parties' coalitions and paving the way for Reagan's 1980 realignment.

Judis then traces the rise of neoliberalism, which he defines as the modification of New Deal liberalism to prioritize market imperatives. Beginning in the early 1970s, businesses responded to foreign competition and falling profits by opposing unionization, relocating plants overseas, and pushing for deregulation. Democrats capitulated under Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, accepting trade pacts like NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement) and financial deregulation. The neoliberal promise that growth would benefit all Americans was contradicted by manufacturing decline and rising inequality. The first populist repudiation came from Texas billionaire Ross Perot, whose 1992 independent presidential campaign opposed NAFTA and criticized corporate outsourcing, winning 19 percent of the vote. Pat Buchanan mounted a rightwing challenge in the 1996 Republican primaries, attacking trade deals and illegal immigration. Both campaigns faded during the late-1990s boom but anticipated the revolt that followed the 2008 financial crisis.

That crisis produced populist responses on both flanks. The Tea Party movement attacked the policies of Barack Obama, the newly elected Democratic president, dividing America into "makers" and "takers" and viewing the stimulus and Affordable Care Act as forcing the middle class to subsidize the poor and illegal immigrants. Judis explains the Tea Party's rightwing character by noting that New Deal protections and Great Society programs, the social welfare legislation established under President Lyndon Johnson, insulated the older, white middle class from the recession's worst effects; what they feared most was subsidizing those below them. The leftwing response came in September 2011 with Occupy Wall Street, whose slogan "We are the 99 percent" foregrounded inequality in political debate on both sides of the Atlantic, though the movement's rejection of formal leadership caused it to dissipate within months.

Judis devotes sustained attention to the 2016 candidacies of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Trump combined moderate positions on Social Security and Medicare with challenges to neoliberal orthodoxy: opposing trade deals, criticizing corporate outsourcing, and taking a hardline stance on illegal immigration. His base of older, economically pessimistic white working- and middle-class voters fit the profile of Warren's middle American radicals. Judis notes that Trump's bigotry toward Mexicans and Muslims and his demeaning attitude toward women distinguished him from earlier populists. Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist whose views had evolved from outright socialism to Scandinavian-style social democracy, ran on Medicare for all, free public college tuition, and reinstatement of the Glass-Steagall Act, which had separated commercial and investment banking. Judis places Sanders in the leftwing populist tradition of the People's Party and Long, arguing that his demands defined a conflict between the 99 percent and the "billionaire class" rather than opening negotiations.

Turning to Europe, Judis traces the rise of populism to three forces: the end of the postwar economic boom in the early 1970s, which led center-left governments to adopt neoliberal reforms that alienated working-class voters; the growth of non-European immigration, which mainstream parties dismissed as xenophobia, leaving a vacuum for rightwing populists; and the European Union's constraints on national economic policy, compounded by its democratic deficit. Rightwing parties such as France's National Front, Denmark's People's Party, and Austria's Freedom Party surged by linking anti-immigrant sentiment to defense of the welfare state.

In Southern Europe, where the Eurocrisis, the post-2008 eurozone debt and austerity crisis, brought unemployment to Depression-era levels, leftwing populism emerged. Greece's Syriza surged from 4.6 percent in 2009 to victory in January 2015 as voters punished PASOK, Greece's long-dominant socialist party, for accepting harsh austerity. Under Alexis Tsipras, Syriza won a July 2015 referendum rejecting the terms of the Troika, the negotiating body composed of the European Commission, European Central Bank, and International Monetary Fund. When EU and German negotiators refused debt relief and demanded further cuts, Tsipras capitulated, accepting even more onerous terms. In Spain, Podemos, founded in 2014 by political scientist Pablo Iglesias, framed its conflict as la gente (the people) versus la casta (the establishment) and rose rapidly, but after Syriza's capitulation undermined anti-austerity politics, Podemos moderated its demands and declined at the polls.

Judis also examines the resurgence of northern European rightwing populism after 2014, fueled by a spike in migration from the Middle East and North Africa and a series of terrorist attacks. In Britain, Nigel Farage transformed the UK Independence Party (UKIP) from a marginal anti-EU party into a working-class populist force by fusing immigration with EU membership, contributing to the June 2016 Brexit vote. In France, Marine Le Pen remade the National Front by condemning the anti-Semitism of her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, reframing opposition to immigration as defense of French secularism, and shifting the party's economics leftward with calls for reindustrialization and banking reform.

In his conclusion, Judis rejects comparisons of contemporary populism to interwar fascism. Today's populists operate within democratic systems rather than seeking to destroy democracy, he argues, and they reassert national sovereignty rather than pursuing imperial expansion. Dismissing these movements as fascist obscures their role as signals of genuine problems, from trade-driven job losses to the dysfunction of the eurozone. For the United States, Judis predicts a gradual erosion of neoliberalism, with Sanders's influence likely felt through congressional allies like Elizabeth Warren and Sherrod Brown. For Europe, the prognosis is more dire: The absence of centralized fiscal policy and the pressures of mass migration could lead additional countries to follow Britain out of the EU.