American Populism Through the Ages

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American Populism Through the Ages

Trump's people-first platform is consistent, not inconsistent, with American history

 

November 11, 2016

by Craig Shirley and Scott Mauer | Updated 11 Nov 2016 at 9:34 PM

It has been often said the ultimate value of conservatism and populism is to question authority, to question the status quo, and to move away from corrupting “bigness” and move back toward the citizenry. Sometimes the Democratic Party runs against the corrupt status quo, as did FDR, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Other times, the Republican Party does, as with Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Barry Goldwater, and Ronald Reagan.

 

This time, Donald J. Trump ran on a platform of anti-corruption, anti-Washington and anti-Bigness.

 

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat said that Trump’s platform and appeal to the people “is like nothing we have seen before — a shatterer of all norms and conventional assumptions, a man more likely to fail catastrophically than other presidents, more constitutionally dangerous than other presidents, but also more likely to carry us into a different political era, a post-neoliberal, post-end-of-history politics, than any other imaginable president.” Douthat is wrong.