Chris Stirewalt - Every man a king : a short, colorful history of American populists

Copyright 2018 by Chris Stirewalt

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First Edition: September 2018

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ISBNs: 978-1-5387-2976-2 (hardcover), 978-1-5387-2979-3 (ebook)

E3-20180716-JV-NF

My dearest Newman and Arthur,

You have given your time and sacrificed my attention for this project. You have alsoeven without knowing ithelped me work out these ideas.

Keeping this republic will be your job, not mine. My generation is something of a historical pass-through in our country, bridging eras of momentous change. You are the ones who will get to decide what to do with this inheritancethe last, best hope of earth.

Knowing you, I could not be more pleased with our chances.

Gratefully,

Your loving father

Ive saved the lives of little children, Ive sent men through college, Ive lifted communities from the mud, Ive cured insane people.

Louisiana senator Huey Long in an interview with James Thurber for The New Yorker, August 1933

T here is something absolutely American about the notion that you, my friends, are getting screwed.

Royally.

The fix was in even before you got here, so at least its not your fault. In fact, you should count yourself lucky that you are one of the discerning few who understand how things really are.

And theres probably nothing you can do about it.

Unless

The political idea that we now know as American populism is older than the republic itself, and certainly greeted that same republic with suspicion.

Merchants and planters and elites conspired against you even before they gathered in Philadelphia to draft the charter for these United States. Out in that same twilight space where legitimate concern still brushes past conspiracy theory, the proto-populists were already nodding knowingly.

As Bertrand Russell put it, From the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal applies only upwards, not downwards.

Or as one of populisms most vivid apostles, Huey Long, would more succinctly say, Every man a king.

This energy has manifested itself in both parties and in various political ideologies over the centuries: conservatism, liberalism, nationalism, socialism, and even out-and-out bigotry.

But one constant has always been the fascinating assortment of charismatic leaders, characters, crooks, cranks, and sometimes charlatans who havewith widely varying degrees of successled the charge of ordinary folks who have gotten wise to the ways of the swamp.

The depths of despair and heights of exhilaration with which Americans greeted the ascendance and presidency of Donald Trump were partly rooted in the idea that it was something altogether new. Weve never seen anything like it before, they said.

But if you tug on one golden thread of Trumps presidential seal, you will find a cord running all the way back to the beginning of us.

Populist politicians have sometimes bedeviled us and sometimes saved us, but always fascinated us. And to understand our moment and what is likely to descend from it, we would do well to know some of those who have stormed the parapet before our current president made it over the top.

And as we come to understand these men, we also see that their successes and failures spring from some common traits and relied on some common circumstances in the republic and its people.

Every successful American politician has been some blend of democratic zeal and republican restraint. Our first partisan splita clash between the factions of Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamiltonwasnt a struggle between opposing views as much as it was a conflict over emphasis (and always, always, always personalities).

Jeffersons idea of holding regular constitutional conventions might rightly be described as a perfectly republican idea. Its certainly a more populist concept than the permanent but amendable charter we ended up with, but Jeffersons automatic conventions would have most certainly made clear the primacy of the Constitution.

Theres a reason why the party he founded once held both Democratic and Republicans in its name, you know.

Similarly, Hamilton owes his twenty-first-century vogue not to his sometimes breathtakingly elitist attitudes, like a nonhereditary kingship, but to his embrace of a culture of upward mobility and his vision of an activist, technocratic federal government.

(That and Lin-Manuel Mirandas ability to rhyme with Rochambeau.)

Conservatives now mainly see the Constitution as a means to constrain the federal leviathan, while todays liberals tend to focus on the charters guarantees of individual rights.

So its understandable that modern Americans are prone to forget that the purpose of the document was to create a central government more powerful than all but a few of the revolutionary generation would have initially envisioned.

We believe nowas they did in the summer of 1787that rightful government aims to produce the proper balance between freedom and order so that people are free to achieve their fullest potential. The tyranny of a despot and the tyranny of the mob are different in style but commensurate in their power to oppress and destroy.

In excess, both freedom and order can produce oppression. In equipoise, they produce miracles.

Americas prosperity and progress toward equal freedom under the law probably owes more to our culture than to our government. We are not free because the government says so, but rather because we the people have been (mostly) able stewards of these historically unprecedented blessings. But even the strongest culture needs guardrails to provide predictability and keep us from veering too far from our objective of maximizing freedom and opportunity. When our culture and government are both healthy, their traits are complementary. But when either proves deficient, they can help prop each other up and help correct the maladies in one another.

James Madison was the Founding Father who would ultimately strike the balance between the young Jeffersons belief in the sovereignty of the commoners and Hamiltons desire for a federal government of real sovereign power. He was the one who best explained the way a government could be powerful enough to provide adequate security and protect individual liberty without becoming tyrannical itself: Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.

By balancing powers between democratic institutions (such as the House) with republican ones (like the Supreme Court), the Founders created the governmental equivalent of a self-cleaning oven. There would be the rule of law to counteract popular excesses and popular sentiment to act against the abuses of the law.