The Upside of Populism

PICTURE AN ERA OF RAPID TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE, economic growth, and globalization that benefits only some. With inequality mounting, social anxiety is high. A severe recession starting with a financial panic spreads to the whole economy. A movement blaming immigrants and pining for a return to an old, idyllic age gathers steam. Trust in institutions is decimated, and the leaders of the new movement blame politicians for scheming against common people. “From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice,” a new party says, “we breed the two great classes—tramps and millionaires.” The scene is set for a combustible mix of social resentment and economic discontent that could bring down the country’s institutional edifice.

We are describing the United States, of course, just not in the 2010s. In the 1890s, the scheming elites were the railway, steel, petroleum, and finance tycoons—the “robber barons,” who had enriched themselves partly thanks to their political connections. The financial crisis is not that of 2007-2008 but the panic of 1893. The political betrayal is not by lobbyists and super PACs but the “treason of the Senate,” as a series of articles in magazine called it, which is controlled by the robber barons. Anti-immigrant rhetoric isn’t coming from the Republican establishment but from the People’s Party, a left-wing populist outfit whose Omaha Platform of 1892 fretted about tramps and millionaires and condemned “the