protestant and often xenophobic – railed against the bankers and corporate owners “who favored tight money and high interest rates.” These polices made for scarce access to financing, where small producers and farmers favored greater monetary supply to spur investment and debt deflation. The true distinction of movement populism comes in its more coherent philosophy and electoral success – populists won numerous local, state, and federal elections from 1890-1908. Little immediate institutional change resulted, but the stage was set for Progressive Era politics. The third form, oppositional discourse populism, maintains an apparent commitment to the same principles, but performs a complete ideological about-turn. By the mid-20th century, business (and libertarianism, generally) had adopted the “discourse of small farmers and union workers to their own ends.” Such is the ideological promiscuity of populism, which, as America’s neo-liberal trn takes place, lapses into dishonesty. Once a “grassroots” politics, populism becomes an “astroturfing” politics – the process of disguising corporate interests and issues positons as arising from a genuine “grassroots” politics and discourse. The continuity in appearance, especially in the context of the American Dream myth, is at the core of the middling classes’ identification with Trump. Following the Tea Part, and the so-called “Alt-Right”, the Trump campaign employed precisely these age-old populist ideals to appeal to those Americans positioned, “self-consciously in the middle, perched insecurely between social extremes – [fearing they might] fall below.” In response, both strategically and Ideologically, the Clinton campaign followed decades of liberal wisdom. Running to the political center, they courted independents and moderate Republicans who opposed a vulgar, chauvinistic, and “un-presidential” candidate. Rather than contest this faux-populism with support for substantive ideals, they ran a campaign against their “deplorable” opponents. They offered a fair-minded and sober “campaign against bigotry” that emphasized a need for “love and kindness” in an already great America. Empirically, this strategy
won only one percentage point more of the female vote than Obama. A number of pundits and political operatives attempted depressed turnout among these traditionally Democratic groups, especially in the Rust Belt, to a strategic failure to canvass. Regardless (by extrapolating the above data on ‘white voters’ to the national level) it becomes apparent that only an electorally insignificant fraction of the four Democratic groups flipped to Trump – most voted third party or stayed home. In fact, of 700 counties won twice by Obama, about one-third (209) went for Trump, and of those 207 counties that Obama won once, nearly 94 percent (194) went for Trump; the 209 Obama strongholds that flipped to Trump were 81 percent white and those counties that split their vote in 2008 and 2012 before going for Trump were 86 percent white, whereas those counties that went for Obama and Clinton were only 55 percent white and 71 percent white, respectively. The post-1980 Republican base – a middle-class of small business owners, the professionals and managers, and evangelical Christians – was pretty well assured to vote Trump. What made the difference was picking up a percentage of the white working class unseen since Reagan. His (white) nationalist populism appealed to just enough older, white working- and middle- class, low education voters. This middling class of citizens – whose financial outlook is quite precarious due to the Great Recession (and its historically slow recovery) – are increasingly aware of shifting demographics and unhappy with the neo-liberal establishment, both of which are blamed for their plight. In summation, the idea that we are in the midst of a populist revolt is vastly overblown, and a variety of factors led to Trump’s victory, but there is significant support for the notion that Trumpism is in the vein of an oppositional discourse populism that appeals to working-class whites. The recipe for this appeal, however, is not complete without discussing the impact, of the other three constants, starting with paranoia.
While economists and politicians present government as having little role in the economy, “the market” is not “some pre-political state of nature.” The decline in top income tax rates, the estate tax, and capital gains tax, the gutting of unions, the de-regulation of the FIRE (finance, insurance, and real estate) sector, the creations of ‘rents’ through promoting and/or allowing effective monopolization within numerous industries – all of these changes, which radically re-structure our economic system, fundamentally involve the work of government and are only possible because of Washington’s submission to business interests. The Radical Right and its predecessors had laid the groundwork for business’ since the 1930s, but it began in earnest in the 1970s. This was epitomized by Lewis F. Powell Jr.’s 1971 American Enterprise Institute (AEI) Memorandum. That this memo, a relatively sober articulation (at least in rhetoric and logic) of the ‘anti-collectivist’ “paranoid style,” was written by a soon to be Supreme Court Justice signifies the direction of fiscal, monetary, and regulatory tides. This was the birth of what Hacker and Pierson call the “politics of organized combat” (POC): from 1968 to 1978, companies with registered D.C. lobbyists rose fourteen-fold, from 175 to 2,500; from 1976 to 1980, corporate PACs went from less than 300 to more than 1200; etc. Lobbying and campaign expenditures (especially by wealth families once hesitant to openly fund political action in support of their ideology), interest group and policy institute (e.g. the Business Roundtable, the Heritage Foundation, the AEI, etc.) influence, and “astroturfing” have since been organized and institutionalized as ideological weapons. Lobbying becomes the most efficient means of influence because professional interest groups can provide an intense, sustained, and organized, but flexible, effort to shape policy. Coordinated across industries and directed at multiple public institutions, companies can synchronize shared aims and pursue them proactively. By 2009, during a recession, lobbying expenditures hit a record $3.5 billion.