OPINION:
EVERY MAN A KING: A SHORT, COLORFUL HISTORY OF AMERICAN POPULISTS
Twelve, $28, 210 pages
“The depths of despair and heights of exhilaration with which Americans greeted the ascendance and presidency of Donald Trump were partly rooted in the idea that it was something altogether new,” writes Chris Stirewalt, Fox News politics editor in Washington and co-host with Dana Perino of a popular podcast.
“But if you tug on one golden thread of Trump’s presidential seal, you will find a cord running all the way back to the beginning. Populist politicians have sometimes bedeviled us and sometimes saved us, but always fascinated us.”
To some degree, each of the figures treated by Mr. Stirewalt — Andrew Jackson, William Jennings Bryan, Teddy Roosevelt, Ross Perot, and Pat Buchanan — came to the fore as a result of an imbalance in our democracy, whether political, social or economic, ften seen as penalizing certain groups to the benefit of others.
At its best, writes Mr. Stirewalt, “American populism is about testing the idea that small-r republicanism is still in good working order.” If there’s a government in power responsible to voters and “dedicated to preserving our natural liberties, it would be hard to get much momentum for a popular revolt.”
“But when freedom and order are out of balance, watch out.”
The first of Mr. Stirewalt’s populists, Andrew Jackson, our seventh president, and “Donald Trump’s putative favorite president, present company excluded, was a hard and exacting man who fought entrenched interests in Washington with the same abiding hatred he carried for the British he defeated at the Battle of New Orleans.”
Jackson, rejected by the Eastern elite, was the first and most successful “tribune of the people,” especially those who, like his parents, were immigrants to this country. Today, as a result of a new elitist intolerance, Jackson is increasingly shunned by the party he built; “but while Democrats may have taken his name off of the Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner, they won’t ever erase the way he made their party.”
William Jennings Bryan, congressman from Nebraska and three-time presidential candidate, “was a gripping, electrifying orator in an age when well-attended speeches and rallies made all the difference.” Bryan, who loved to eat, orate and pray, “fused Christian moralism with economic liberalism to make a new, thunderous coalition.”
Huey Long, former governor and senator from Louisiana, who gave the speech in 1934 with the title borrowed from Bryan that in turn gave Mr. Stirewalt the title for this book, “masterfully created a new permission structure for himself in which he could flout every rule; lie, cheat, and steal; and do it all in the name of sticking it to the man.” And his followers seemed to enjoy it, “even if they knew they were getting taken.”
George Wallace, former governor of Alabama, will be remembered “as the last, most famous segregationist.” But as Mr. Stirewalt points out, it wasn’t just desegregation that got Wallace almost 10 million votes in his presidential run. “It was anger. Wallace seethed alongside his voters who saw their country falling apart.” Anger at those radical groups, bombing and burning. Anger at the elites “who Wallace said were ’looking down their noses’ at decent hard working Americans.”
Whatever the verdict on Wallace, his candidacy aroused a powerful response from an overlooked constituency — working men and women who elected Donald Trump. And it was this constituency to which Pat Buchanan gave a name — The Silent Majority — used to describe the audience for a speech on Vietnam delivered by Richard Nixon in 1969.
Seventy-percent of the viewers, no longer silent, registered their approval. But the networks universally panned it, leading Mr. Buchanan to write a speech on the responsibilities of the media, delivered by Vice President Spiro Agnew in a nationally televised speech. The speech was an overwhelming success, Agnew was put on the cover of Time and Newsweek, and overnight became the voice of the Silent Majority, contributing significantly to the landslide victory of 1972.
Through his own presidential runs, Pat Buchanan ensured that his constituency continued to have a voice. And in 2016, when Donald Trump, whose first presidential run, as Mr. Stirewalt reminds us, was as a candidate on Ross Perot’s Reform Party ticket, became the Republican nominee, he made that Silent Majority roar.
As Mr. Stirewalt puts it, Pat Buchanan is “the grandfather of Trumpism” — a typical observation in a highly readable and concise treatment of a much neglected subject, written in sharp, clear prose and laced with good-natured humor and wit.
• John R. Coyne Jr., a former White House speechwriter, is co-author of “Strictly Right: William F. Buckley Jr. and the American Conservative Movement” (Wiley).
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