By Victor Davis Hanson

HOO VER INS TIT UTION

S T A NFORD UNIVERSIT Y

Dueling

Populisms

opulism is seen as both bad and good because people dis-

agree about what it represents and intends. In the present

age, there are two dierent sorts of populism. Both strains

originated in classical times and persist today.

In antiquity, one type was known by elite writers of that time to be

the “bad” populism. It appealed to the volatile, landless urban “mob,”

or what the Athenians dubbed pejoratively the ochlos and the Romans

disparagingly called the turba. Their popular unrest was spearheaded

by the so-called demagogoi (“leaders of the people”) or, in Roman

times, the popular tribunes. These largely urban protest movements

Dueling

Populisms

Trump has revived the ancient tension between urban

radicals who seek equality and rural conservatives who

seek liberty.

By Victor Davis Hanson

Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow

at the Hoover Institution and chairman of Hoover’s Working Group

on the Role of Military History in Contemporary Conﬂict. His focus is

classics and military history.

focused on the redistribution of property, higher liturgies or taxes

on the wealthy, the cancellation of debts, support for greater public

employment and entitlements, and sometimes imperialism abroad.

Centuries later, the French Revolution and many of the European

upheavals of 1848 reected some of these same ancient tensions.

Those modern mobs wanted government-mandated equality of result

rather than that of opportunity, and they believed egalitarianism

should encompass nearly all facets of life.

This populism operated via

redistribution and it was the

antecedent of today’s progres-

sive movement. Contemporary

progressive populists favor

higher taxes on the rich, more

entitlements for the poor,

identity politics reparations,

and relief from debts such as

the cancellation of student loans. Various grassroots movements

like Occupy Wall Street, Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and the Bernie

Sanders phenomenon have all promoted such policies.

But there was always another populism—and in the ancient world,

it was considered a “good” form of grassroots activism even though

its contemporary version is disparaged by the liberal press: this

political movement stemmed from the conservative and often rural

quarters of the middle classes. The agrarian agendas of the Gracchi

brothers, Roman politicians from the second century BC, were quite

dierent from that of the later bread-and-circus urban underclass,

in the same way that the American revolutionaries emphasized lib-

erty while their French counterparts championed egalitarianism.

More recently, the populism of the Tea Party is antithetical to that of

Occupy Wall Street.

In ancient Greece, these agrarian populists were known as

“mesoi” or “middle guys”—those who were mostly responsible for

the rise of the Greek city-state and constitutional government.

In the present age, there

are two dierent sorts

of populism. Both strains

originated in classical times

and persist today.

Their signature ideas were preserving ownership of a family plot,

seeing property as the nexus of all civic, political, and military life,

and passing on farms through codied inheritance laws and prop-

erty rights. The mesoi felt their approach oered stability to the

otherwise volatile political order.

Similarly, the complaints of the later Roman agrarians against

latifundia—the emergence of vast estates—today seems like a proto-

Trumpian rant that rural Romans fought endless wars abroad for

imperial expansion throughout the Mediterranean world without

personally benetting from these campaigns. Yet the benets were,

in a Roman context, an endless supply of cheap foreign slave labor-

ers, influxes of disruptive global wealth, and corporate consolidation

of property at home. These profits went mostly to a Roman deep

state of well-connected senators, imperial functionaries, magistrates,

legates, provincial governors, and a permanent and expeditionary

military force.

The rise of Donald Trump and those like him reect some of these

same age-old trends. Among contemporary conservatives, there

was a growing complaint that the Republican Party had often for-

gotten the reminders of Edmund Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville

that small property-owners were the stewards of conservatism, and

of traditional norms and customs. They were seen as essential in

stabilizing Western consensual systems, due to the pragmatism of

their own lives and the stability of rural communities. In the eigh-

teenth and nineteenth

centuries, such centrism

in the American context

set these agrarian prop-

erty owners against both

the absolutism of British

monarchy and the reck-

lessness of mass revolu-

tionary movements like

those in France.

The Republican Party had often

forgotten the reminders of

Edmund Burke and Alexis de

Tocqueville that small property-

owners were the stewards of

conservatism, and of traditional

norms and customs.

Obviously America is no longer a nation largely of yeomen farmers.

But the ownership of a house, or a business, or a retirement savings plan,

along with static populations centered around small businesses and

well-paying manufacturing jobs, is perhaps the modern equivalent—

as are traditional and hereditary rural communities in between the

two coasts. Yet the trajectory of modern Republicanism had been

to largely ignore such communities of small property owners and

the eects that globalization and deindustrialization has had upon

them—a neglect that led to startling political repercussions in 2016.

Before 2016, both Republican and Democratic political elites and

establishmentarians in the media, Wall Street, the universities,

and entertainment largely agreed, albeit for dierent reasons, on a

number of issues that had combined to enervate the middle class of

the interior.

In the context of ancient

and modern parallels, recent

complaints about misspent

time, money, and lives in wars

abroad recall the lamentations

of an Everyman character

who appears in Livy’s Roman

history, Spurius Ligustinus.

Ligustinus was an impov-

erished small farmer in the

Italian countryside who in his fties recites in anguish to the Roman

senate his 22-year career of overseas military service as a legionary

and centurion. The battle-scarred Spurius’s personal tenure was a

roadmap of overseas expansion—and a window into both the winners

and losers of Roman globalization.

Illegal immigration and open borders have also been accepted as

an almost natural expression of global labor and consumer markets—

with largely positive results for both left and right. Liberals and ethnic

activists championed those arriving, often illegally and unvetted, from

Latin America and Mexico in expectation of their permanent political

Political elites and establish-

mentarians . . . agreed, albeit

for dierent reasons, on a

number of issues that had

combined to enervate the

middle class of the interior.

support. Identity politics has transformed the Democratic Party and,

in theory, empowered its electoral opportunities in the American

Southwest. Republicans, for their part, welcomed the cheap labor

and/or deluded themselves into thinking that amnestied impoverished

illegal immigrants would vote for family-values conservatives.

Neither party worried so

much about the insidious

erosion of immigration law,

much less how laws that

were otherwise applicable

to most Americans could

be arbitrarily ignored by a

select few. That illegal immi-

gration led to overburdened

social services and schools and drove down the wages of entry-level

American workers was written o as the whines of those who did

not understand the rules of free-market capitalism and the obso-

lescence of physical borders. In truth, open borders were unstable

and did not promote the interests of the American middle classes.

Illegal immigration reected more the aristocratic/revolutionary

binaries of the French Revolution, as immigration was paradoxically

seen as a boon to the economic interests of the elite Right and the

social justice agendas of the Left.

There was a similar consensus across party lines to embrace, with-

out much reservation, globalization. It was seen not just as a reec-

tion of Western cultural inuence and technological revolution, but

also as something morally and culturally enriching. Nationalism and

borders would give way to a worldwide homogeneity—even as it left

millions of Americans between the coasts with stagnant wages, lost

jobs, or a sense of alienation from the centers of power in America.

Writing o large swaths of the American interior as the country of

losers has been among the most radical developments in American

history. For those who missed out on the advantages of one-world com-

merce, it was sometimes seen mostly, in Darwinian terms, as their own

Immigration was paradoxic-

ally seen as a boon to the

economic interests of the

elite Right and the social

justice agendas of the Left.

fault, either because they did not, for example, pack up and head to the

fracking elds of Texas or North Dakota, or because their self-inicted

pathologies excluded them from acquiring the skills and education nec-

essary to succeed in the knowledge-based “information” economy.

Closely connected in 2016 to

populist issues of trade and glo-

balization was deindustrialization.

Another notion took currency: that

the age of the smoke stack and

assembly line was over. America,

the idea went, had moved beyond

an economy fueled by muscular

labor and those who provided it.

This was a strange mindset. The

winners of globalization were

materialists par excellence—eager consumers of costly appurtenances

that relied on hard labor, such as smartphones, luxury cars, wood

oors, organic fruits and vegetables, and expansive homes.

A few obvious disconnects arose. How exactly could millions of

Americans out of work be deemed to have had the wrong skills and

trades when what they used to do well—build, fabricate, mine, log,

and farm—was ever more essential to the enjoyment of the good

American life? Did it make sense to fuel an international commer-

cial system in which many of the most successful parties warped

the rules of engagement to

ensure advantages in trade

and employment? Was it

really accurate that manu-

facturing was irrelevant in

the United States, given the

country’s cheaper power

rates, skilled work force,

sometimes-lower taxes, and

less intrusive government?

Did it make sense to fuel an

international commercial

system in which many of the

most successful parties warped

the rules of engagement to

ensure advantages in trade and

employment?

Writing o large swaths

of the American interior

as the country of losers

has been among the most

radical developments in

American history.

At best, Democrats talked

about transitioning factory work-

ers or coal miners to wind and

solar industries; at worst, they

saw the white working classes

of the Midwest as experiencing

the same lack of opportunities that minorities had suered, evidenced

by their spiraling suicide rates and opioid addictions. Republicans

believed that the market would sort things out; a community’s lost

aluminum smelters and fertilizer plants proved that they should be

lost. “Creative destruction” was simply how the market worked, and it

always favored the most ecient outcome—eciency dened in terms

of lowest nancial outlay, without regard to the social and cultural

costs exacted.

We are still in the midst of a populist pushback against the two polit-

ical parties. The nature and themes are ancient—on the one hand, an

urban and radical eort to redistribute wealth and use government to

enforce equality, and, on the other, a counter-revolutionary pushback

of the middle classes determined to restore liberty, limited govern-

ment, sovereign borders, and traditional values.

We are still in the midst of a

populist pushback against

the two political parties.

Originally featured in Dening Ideas, a Hoover Institution Journal.

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