History As It Happens: The ‘fake’ populists – Washington Times

Sen. Marco Rubio says President Biden has more important matters to tend to than sitting down with a small group of historians to discuss the fate of democracy at home and abroad. In an interview on Fox News, the Florida Republican referred to the historians as out-of-touch elitists who gave the president bad advice even though, it should be noted, Mr. Rubio was not present at the early August meeting.

One of the historians invited to the White House was Princetons Sean Wilentz, a preeminent scholar of American democracy specializing in the antebellum era. In a sharp response to Mr. Rubios criticism, Mr. Wilentz wrote in the Washington Post that the senators made-up version of the historians meeting stands in the sorry tradition of the great propagandists who are guilty of the deliberate manipulation and falsification of events for political purposes. In other words, Mr. Rubio engaged in fake populism, purporting to defend the interests and common sense of ordinary citizens against an assault by elites.

In this episode of History As It Happens, Mr. Wilentz discusses his spat with Mr. Rubio in the context of the resurgence of populist politics in America. To be sure, todays populists on the left and right may have little in common with the first populist movement in the United States.

The Populist Party, or Peoples Party, was founded in 1892. It was a social movement of small farmers and other Americans of modest means who supported a ban on foreign land ownership, the break-up of railroad monopolies and shorter work days. Later populist politicians, such as William Jennings Bryan, supported ending the gold standard and the return of silver coinage.

Nowadays, however, the definition of populism has been stretched to include an array of ideas divorced from the old movements fundamental aim of defending everyday workers from the exploitation of powerful interests, Mr. Wilentz said.

SEE ALSO: History As It Happens: George Wallace populism

There was a point in the 1950s, and a historian I admire, Richard Hofstadter, probably had more to do with this than anyone else, that populism was transformed from a political movement into a state of mind almost, into a style, the paranoid style in American politics, said Mr. Wilentz, referring to the title of Mr. Hofstadters famous work.

That was a frame of mind that was hyper-conspiratorial. There were interests out there, some of them phantom interests, that were oppressing the people at large, and the populists were going to get rid of those conspiracies in the name of the people.

Listen to the full interview with Mr. Wilentz about populism and how it endangers American democracy by downloading this episode of History As It Happens.

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History As It Happens: The 'fake' populists - Washington Times