My God! Has it already been almost five months since I last insulted Ross Douthat? Well, time flies when you’re fightin’ the COVID, I guess (a very mild case, fortunately). But now I’m back, definitely, and loaded for bear! Not to mention smart-mouth conservatives!
What got me a little ticked was a recent Ross confection, America’s Doug Mastriano Problem, most of which I very much agreed with, to my surprise, but, as I say, I was a little ticked at Ross’ decision to toss some entirely unmerited shade on one William Jennings Bryan, accusing him of being, in effect, the 1896 version of Donald Trump, the pitch being that WJB was a “populist” and Trump is too, QED. Opines Ross, in full professorial chin stroke mode,
Whenever a destabilizing populist rebellion is unleashed inside a democratic polity, there are generally two ways to bring back stability without some kind of crisis or rupture in the system.
Sometimes the revolt can be quarantined within a minority coalition and defeated by a majority. This was the destiny, for instance, of William Jennings Bryan’s 1890s prairie-populist rebellion, which took over the Democratic Party but went down to multiple presidential defeats at the hands of the more establishmentarian Republicans.
Well, we can skip the rest, because I would like to point out that, among other things—among many other things—when WJB lost, he didn’t claim that the election had been, you know, stolen. Bryan, whatever his faults, was not a conscience-free sociopath who wanted to torture his enemies.
You see, Mr. Douthat, “populist” is not necessarily a synonym for “evil”. Perhaps “free silver”, aka “bimetallism”—treating silver as well as gold as “specie”, setting its value as one-sixteenth that of gold, and thus increasing the money supply, which is what Bryan proposed, was not an optimal economic policy for the U.S. in 1896 for the U.S. to pursue, but deflation, the result of the retention of the gold standard during an unprecedented global economic expansion, wasn’t either, and the “crisis”, which was pinching agricultural interests throughout the industrialized world, was largely resolved by the fortuitous discovery of gold in both Alaska and South Africa, not by the inherent wisdom of the gold standard itself.
Moreover, Bryan believed in a lot of unquestionably good things, like free trade, direct election of senators, rejection of American imperialism,1 and the income tax. To “define” populism as, effectively, Trumpian nihilism, which is what Ross is implicitly doing in this piece, is nonsense. Bryan is almost always pictured in American history as a naïf, which may well be true, but he was the furthest thing imaginable from Trumpian malignancy.
Afterwords
In his piece, Douthat does make the correct observation that the Democratic Party is ill-positioned to “save” us from “Trump II”, whatever form that may take, because the Democratic rank and file have moved so far to the left, on both social and economic issues. The “Old Guard”—Biden, Pelosi, and Schumer—reign, but scarcely rule, which is why they can accomplish so little. The twin pillars of neoliberalism—a “free market” domestic policy and an aggressive, “essential nation” foreign policy—both came crashing down during the Obama administration. While Obama gets mostly favorable marks from me for domestic policy, except for being too considerate of Wall Street, which repaid his loyalty with the opposite, he was painfully stupid in his insistence on pursuing an interventionist foreign policy long after the folly should have been obvious. Remarkably, Arthur M. Schlesinger predicted all this twenty-five years ago. As a result, we are left with a discredited center, surrounded by angry “populists” on both the right and left. (As many people pointed out at the time, “early Bernie” Sanders—deeply hostile to both free trade and immigration—was essentially Donald Trump without all the racism.)
“Bad populists” include Joe McCarthy and George Wallace. McCarthy was, I think, as empty and unscrupulous as Trump, but Wallace, though certainly unscrupulous in many ways, did see himself, I think, as the spokesman for the little man being screwed over by the big shots. Both George McGovern and Jimmy Carter were outsiders, who weren’t all that “popular”, who managed to win the nomination of a deeply divided Democratic Party, which is about where the Democrats are now. Two and a half years is a long time in politics, fortunately, but it's definitely up in the air as to whether any Democrat can win in 2024.
1. Bryan was, of course, massively outspent by Republican nominee William McKinley, who won by a convincing popular vote margin of 51-47 percent. Bryan supported the Spanish-American War, serving in it though not seeing combat, but he fiercely objected to the annexation of the Philippines. Would the U.S. have entered World War II without them? Of course, a Bryan win would have changed history in so many unimaginable ways that there may not have even been a WWII. So, anyway.
As usual, I found a lot to agree & a little to disagree about in your post.
I think you missed the point of Douthat’s column. He didn’t compare Trump & Bryan, except to label both of them as the spearhead of populist movements and used them (and others) as examples of a populist threat to the existing political establishment, that had to be “contained”. Which is surprising since you quote Douthat making that point about Bryan.
The popular election of senators removed one of the federal structures intended by the Founders to keep democracy from metastasizing, contributing (along with social media) to the political disaster we find ourselves in today. And the income tax is what made it possible for the federal government to break the bonds of federalism financially – another of the structures – as well as be able to finance what has become the American empire.
I think you might be right about Bryan’s election impacting WWII because we might have stayed out of WWI, so that the post-war European political environment would not have included a humiliated Germany, giving rise to Hitler.
Nice comment, though I disagree with both of your points. I don’t think Douthat made any distinction between Trump and Bryan. They were both “populists”, and hence both dangerous. He says nothing to suggest that Bryan, unlike Trump, or McCarthy, or Wallace, was an honest man. As for direct election of senators, the Constitution as the founders wrote it is not holy writ. It was largely an ad hoc political document. I would also point out that direct election of senators was achieved through the Constitutional amendment process. What’s wrong with following the Constitution? Are the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments all “bad” too? Thanks for reading.