Dueling

Populisms
By Victor Davis Hanson

HOOVER INSTITUTION
STANFORD UNIVERSIT Y 1
Dueling
Populisms
Trump has revived the ancient tension between urban
radicals who seek equality and rural conservatives who
seek liberty.

By Victor Davis Hanson

P
opulism is seen as both bad and good because people dis-
agree about what it represents and intends. In the present
age, there are two different sorts of populism. Both strains
originated in classical times and persist today.
In antiquity, one type was known by elite writers of that time to be
the “bad” populism. It appealed to the volatile, landless urban “mob,”
or what the Athenians dubbed pejoratively the ochlos and the Romans
disparagingly called the turba. Their popular unrest was spearheaded
by the so-called demagogoi (“leaders of the people”) or, in Roman
times, the popular tribunes. These largely urban protest movements

Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow
at the Hoover Institution and chairman of Hoover’s Working Group
on the Role of Military History in Contemporary Conflict. His focus is
classics and military history.

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 focused on the redistribution of property, higher liturgies or taxes
on the wealthy, the cancellation of debts, support for greater public
employment and entitlements, and sometimes imperialism abroad.
Centuries later, the French Revolution and many of the European
upheavals of 1848 reflected some of these same ancient tensions.
Those modern mobs wanted government-mandated equality of result
rather than that of opportunity, and they believed egalitarianism
should encompass nearly all facets of life.
This populism operated via
redistribution and it was the
In the present age, there antecedent of today’s progres-
are two different sorts sive movement. Contemporary
progressive populists favor
of populism. Both strains
higher taxes on the rich, more
originated in classical times entitlements for the poor,
and persist today. identity politics reparations,
and relief from debts such as
the cancellation of student loans. Various grassroots movements
like Occupy Wall Street, Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and the Bernie
Sanders phenomenon have all promoted such policies.
But there was always another populism—and in the ancient world,
it was considered a “good” form of grassroots activism even though
its contemporary version is disparaged by the liberal press: this
political movement stemmed from the conservative and often rural
quarters of the middle classes. The agrarian agendas of the Gracchi
brothers, Roman politicians from the second century BC, were quite
different from that of the later bread-and-circus urban underclass,
in the same way that the American revolutionaries emphasized lib-
erty while their French counterparts championed egalitarianism.
More recently, the populism of the Tea Party is antithetical to that of
Occupy Wall Street.
In ancient Greece, these agrarian populists were known as
“mesoi” or “middle guys”—those who were mostly responsible for
the rise of the Greek city-state and constitutional government.

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Their signature ideas were preserving ownership of a family plot,
seeing property as the nexus of all civic, political, and military life,
and passing on farms through codified inheritance laws and prop-
erty rights. The mesoi felt their approach offered stability to the
otherwise volatile political order.
Similarly, the complaints of the later Roman agrarians against
latifundia—the emergence of vast estates—today seems like a proto-
Trumpian rant that rural Romans fought endless wars abroad for
imperial expansion throughout the Mediterranean world without
personally benefitting from these campaigns. Yet the benefits were,
in a Roman context, an endless supply of cheap foreign slave labor-
ers, influxes of disruptive global wealth, and corporate consolation
of property at home. These profits went mostly to a Roman deep
state of well-connected senators, imperial functionaries, magistrates,
legates, provincial governors, and a permanent and expeditionary
military force.
The rise of Donald Trump and those like him reflect some of these
same age-old trends. Among contemporary conservatives, there
was a growing complaint that the Republican Party had often for-
gotten the reminders of Edmund Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville
that small property-owners were the stewards of conservatism, and
of traditional norms and customs. They were seen as essential in
stabilizing Western consensual systems, due to the pragmatism of
their own lives and the stability of rural communities. In the eigh-
teenth and nineteenth
centuries, such centrism
in the American context The Republican Party had often
set these agrarian prop-
forgotten the reminders of
erty owners against both
the absolutism of British Edmund Burke and Alexis de
monarchy and the reck- Tocqueville that small property-
lessness of mass revolu- owners were the stewards of
tionary movements like conservatism, and of traditional
those in France.
norms and customs.

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 Obviously America is no longer a nation largely of yeomen farmers.
But the ownership of a house, or a business, or a retirement savings plan,
along with static populations centered around small businesses and
well-paying manufacturing jobs, is perhaps the modern equivalent—
as are traditional and hereditary rural communities in between the
two coasts. Yet the trajectory of modern Republicanism had been
to largely ignore such communities of small property owners and
the effects that globalization and deindustrialization has had upon
them—a neglect that led to startling political repercussions in 2016.
Before 2016, both Republican and Democratic political elites and
establishmentarians in the media, Wall Street, the universities,
and entertainment largely agreed, albeit for different reasons, on a
number of issues that had combined to enervate the middle class of
the interior.
In the context of ancient
and modern parallels, recent
Political elites and establish-
complaints about misspent
time, money, and lives in wars mentarians . . . agreed, albeit
abroad recall the lamentations for different reasons, on a
of an Everyman character number of issues that had
who appears in Livy’s Roman
combined to enervate the
history, Spurius Ligustinus.
middle class of the interior.
Ligustinus was an impov-
erished small farmer in the
Italian countryside who in his fifties recites in anguish to the Roman
senate his 22-year career of overseas military service as a legionary
and centurion. The battle-scarred Spurius’s personal tenure was a
roadmap of overseas expansion—and a window into both the winners
and losers of Roman globalization.
Illegal immigration and open borders have also been accepted as
an almost natural expression of global labor and consumer markets—
with largely positive results for both left and right. Liberals and ethnic
activists championed those arriving, often illegally and unvetted, from
Latin America and Mexico in expectation of their permanent political

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 support. Identity politics has transformed the Democratic Party and,
in theory, empowered its electoral opportunities in the American
Southwest. Republicans, for their part, welcomed the cheap labor
and/or deluded themselves into thinking that amnestied impoverished
illegal immigrants would vote for family-values conservatives.
Neither party worried so
much about the insidious
Immigration was paradoxic- erosion of immigration law,
much less how laws that
ally seen as a boon to the
were otherwise applicable
economic interests of the
to most Americans could
elite Right and the social be arbitrarily ignored by a
justice agendas of the Left. select few. That illegal immi-
gration led to overburdened
social services and schools and drove down the wages of entry-level
American workers was written off as the whines of those who did
not understand the rules of free-market capitalism and the obso-
lescence of physical borders. In truth, open borders were unstable
and did not promote the interests of the American middle classes.
Illegal immigration reflected more the aristocratic/revolutionary
binaries of the French Revolution, as immigration was paradoxically
seen as a boon to the economic interests of the elite Right and the
social justice agendas of the Left.
There was a similar consensus across party lines to embrace, with-
out much reservation, globalization. It was seen not just as a reflec-
tion of Western cultural influence and technological revolution, but
also as something morally and culturally enriching. Nationalism and
borders would give way to a worldwide homogeneity—even as it left
millions of Americans between the coasts with stagnant wages, lost
jobs, or a sense of alienation from the centers of power in America.
Writing off large swaths of the American interior as the country of
losers has been among the most radical developments in American
history. For those who missed out on the advantages of one-world com-
merce, it was sometimes seen mostly, in Darwinian terms, as their own

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 fault, either because they did not, for example, pack up and head to the
fracking fields of Texas or North Dakota, or because their self-inflicted
pathologies excluded them from acquiring the skills and education nec-
essary to succeed in the knowledge-based “information” economy.
Closely connected in 2016 to
populist issues of trade and glo-
balization was deindustrialization.
Writing off large swaths Another notion took currency: that
of the American interior the age of the smoke stack and
as the country of losers assembly line was over. America,
has been among the most the idea went, had moved beyond
an economy fueled by muscular
radical developments in
labor and those who provided it.
American history. This was a strange mindset. The
winners of globalization were
materialists par excellence—eager consumers of costly appurtenances
that relied on hard labor, such as smartphones, luxury cars, wood
floors, organic fruits and vegetables, and expansive homes.
A few obvious disconnects arose. How exactly could millions of
Americans out of work be deemed to have had the wrong skills and
trades when what they used to do well—build, fabricate, mine, log,
and farm—was ever more essential to the enjoyment of the good
American life? Did it make sense to fuel an international commer-
cial system in which many of the most successful parties warped
the rules of engagement to
ensure advantages in trade
and employment? Was it Did it make sense to fuel an
really accurate that manu-
international commercial
facturing was irrelevant in
the United States, given the system in which many of the
country’s cheaper power most successful parties warped
rates, skilled work force, the rules of engagement to
sometimes-lower taxes, and ensure advantages in trade and
less intrusive government?
employment?

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 At best, Democrats talked
We are still in the midst of a about transitioning factory work-
populist pushback against ers or coal miners to wind and
solar industries; at worst, they
the two political parties.
saw the white working classes
of the Midwest as experiencing
the same lack of opportunities that minorities had suffered, evidenced
by their spiraling suicide rates and opioid addictions. Republicans
believed that the market would sort things out; a community’s lost
aluminum smelters and fertilizer plants proved that they should be
lost. “Creative destruction” was simply how the market worked, and it
always favored the most efficient outcome—efficiency defined in terms
of lowest financial outlay, without regard to the social and cultural
costs exacted.
We are still in the midst of a populist pushback against the two polit-
ical parties. The nature and themes are ancient—on the one hand, an
urban and radical effort to redistribute wealth and use government to
enforce equality, and, on the other, a counter-revolutionary pushback
of the middle classes determined to restore liberty, limited govern-
ment, sovereign borders, and traditional values.

Originally featured in Defining Ideas, a Hoover Institution Journal.

© 2018 by the Board of Trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University.

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