THE PEOPLE, NO

Political commentator Frank tries to reclaim populism from the Trumpites and tea partiers.

“I hate the common masses and avoid them.” So said Roman poet Horace centuries ago. Best known for his 2004 polemic What’s the Matter With Kansas?—Kansas being the birthplace of a left-agrarian populist movement of old—Frank conversely urges his readers, likely to be among the urban elite, from dismissing those folks in flyover country who, given one person and one vote, are presumed likely to make poor choices: “If you give them half a chance, they will go out and vote for a charlatan like Donald Trump.” Since its emergence as a political force in the U.S. in the 19th century, populism has always been dismissed as a refuge of the stupid or lunatic, the purview of con artists and bigots. Yet, the author argues, populism is not just an old American way of doing politics, but fundamentally a progressive one as well, uniquely concerned for the well-being of workers. Trump managed to parlay his putative commitment to those workers into votes. However, notes Frank, he is definitively an autocrat and not a populist, who made promises of “populist-style reform, none of them sincere,” that sounded good enough to enough voters to launch him into an office won by that least populist of institutions, the Electoral College. “How does it help us, I wonder, to deliberately devalue the coinage of the American reform tradition?” asks Frank, who encourages his readers to imagine that the matter of most pressing importance in the political landscape today is economic justice for the vast majority of people who have been overlooked by supposed progress—to say nothing of both political parties. The author lays on the indignation a little too thick at times, but it’s a convincing case all the same.

A sometimes-overheated but eminently readable contribution to political discourse.