What Does a True Populism Look Like? It Looks Like the New Deal.
'President Trump’s tough talk on trade and the tariffs he recently imposed on imported washing machines and solar panels, as well as the ones he threatened on foreign steel and aluminum, would seem straight out of the populist playbook. But in terms of targeting the real grievances of his popular base, they largely miss the mark.
The early history of American populism, culminating in the New Deal, suggests a more productive and less damaging kind of populism. When populism succeeds, it does so not by cosmetic gimmicks but by going after the roots of economic injustice directly.
At the 1896 Democratic National Convention, the 36-year-old former Nebraska congressman William Jennings Bryan delivered what became one of the most famous lines of American political oratory: “You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” Bryan’s immediate target was the gold standard, an emblem of the globalization of his day, which he blamed for the economic difficulties of what he called the “toiling masses.” Bryan ran for president that year as the joint candidate of the Democratic Party and of the People’s Party, also known as the Populist Party.
The populists of the late 19th century had many grievances, but the flames of their discontent were fanned by opposition to economic globalization. Under the gold standard, markets for money, goods, capital and labor had become intertwined among nations as never before. As John Maynard Keynes would later rue, a well-to-do inhabitant in a major capital city like London “could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth.”
Global competition also drove American agricultural prices down. And the rules of the gold standard enforced tight money and credit conditions — what we would today call austerity policies. The consequent economic distress among farmers in the South and the West fueled the populist movement. The populists viewed the railroads as well as the financial and commercial interests of the Northeast, the defenders of the gold standard, as their main opponents. Throwing off the shackles of the gold standard and reclaiming national monetary sovereignty became their rallying cry.'>>>
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/21/opinion/populism-new-deal.html?
