Thomas Frank: The u.S. History of populism and people's movements (ep290)
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Thomas Frank joins us in this episode to discuss:
the history of populism and the backlash against its rise;
how the democratic party made a deliberate turn away from the American working class in the 1960s and 70s;
how the two-party system set up barriers to prevent any rising third party from challenging their duopoly;
understanding "Trumpism” through the lens of populist politics;
the role of mass organizing in driving meaningful social change; and more.
Musical feature: Trust The Sun by Irene Skylakaki Raye Zaragoza (IG: @rayezaragoza, Spotify: Raye Zaragoza)
“The story of populism is the story of a mass movement of ordinary people. It was not a movement of politicians… and if you study American history, you see that mass movements like populism are one of the most important ways that change has happened.”
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Here’s Thomas on the origins of populism:
“The original populists, the people who made up the word, were a left-wing, third-party movement that was particularly big in my home state of Kansas. They were a farmer-labor party that came out of a type of farmer’s union.
Farmers were an enormous part of the population in those days—I think they made up the majority of the American population then—and farmers were very poor. So they came together and started this political party to be a party of working-class people. That was the objective. It was this great coming-together of different working-class reform groups, and their demands were basically to reform capitalism.
Whether it's the Labour Party in England, which was started at the same time, or the Labor Party in Australia, or the Social Democratic parties in Germany and Austria, all of these parties wanted to accomplish the same thing: They could see that we had entered this new era of industrial capitalism, and they said, ‘We have to reform it. Wealth is concentrated in the hands of a very small number of millionaires, there is lavish political corruption, and there are incredible monopolies that are strangling the livelihoods of ordinary people.’
Populism meant to undo all these things—to use the federal government to intervene in the economy on behalf of ordinary, working-class people.”
About Thomas Frank
Thomas Frank (Twitter @ThomasFrank_) is the author of Listen, Liberal, Pity the Billionaire, The Wrecking Crew, and What's the Matter with Kansas? A former columnist for The Wall Street Journal and Harper's, Frank is the founding editor of The Baffler and writes regularly for The Guardian. His latest book is The People, No.
