Salena Zito

Salena Zito

Politics

The populist struggle will continue after Election Day

COLUMBUS, NEB. — Our first great American experiment with populism began 120 years ago, right in this mid-country prairie town. The anxiety of those people, and the belief that theirs was a virtuous cause, is strikingly similar to what we’re seeing in the 2016 election.

Back then, people revolted with pitchforks and parades. Today, it’s Twitter — but the underlying sentiment remains. Populists still see the world in stark terms: Things are black and white, not 100 shades of gray.

People here in 1890 had had enough of a withering drought that crippled the economy and governing elites who didn’t hear their concerns. So they formed the Populist Party to advocate “for the people.”

They held nominating conventions and massive parades that disrupted main streets across the state; as the pressure built, they developed songs and slogans. Local newspapers happily covered the sensationalism of farmers in wagons, grease-smudged railroad workers and upturned pitchforks marching down the street.

Elites were horrified. So were big-city newspapers, which described the Populists as “hogs in the parlor,” “horny-handed sons of toil,” “hayseeds” and “political thugs.” No matter how much politicians and the press berated the Populists, they carried on.

In that year’s election they won control of Nebraska’s state Senate, sweeping Republicans out of power for the first time since Nebraska earned statehood. They also gained control of the state House and sent all three of Nebraska’s members of Congress to Washington — including a young lawyer named William Jennings Bryan.

Six years later, Bryan fused the Populists with the Democrats and ran a fiery populist campaign for president.

Throughout American history, populists have seen themselves as struggling against one group of oligarchs or another; it’s what Ross Perot, Occupy Wall Street and Donald Trump’s campaign have in common.

But it’s not just an economic critique: It’s consumed by moral outrage over the perception that condescending, overreaching elites have upset the natural democratic order.

The brutal new numbers on ObamaCare offer a perfect example. This week, the Department of Health and Human Services announced 2017 premiums would rise by an average of 25 percent for a significant group of health plans sold through HealthCare.gov.

Even people with a basic understanding of math knew the bill was inherently flawed and those flaws would have the biggest economic impact on folks in the middle of the food chain — not the elites, who were in many cases either exempt from the law’s impact or wealthy and politically connected enough to be insulated from it. Yet it was written by — not for — elites: aloof politicians, lobbyists and connected special interests.

And if you wonder why people think the system is rigged, you need look no further than Bill and Hillary Clinton’s friend and governor of Virginia, Terry McAuliffe: His political-action committee donated $500,000 to the election campaign of Dr. Jill McCabe — the wife of an FBI official who helped to oversee the investigation into Hillary’s use of a private e-mail server as secretary of state.

And that was just one day’s worth of news. The list goes on and on — and will no doubt continue to do so.

Populism feeds off disgruntled, disgusted voters.

Populism feeds off disgruntled, disgusted voters. It thrives when those voters think their political class doesn’t address the problems they deal with on a day-to-day basis. And just imagine how it thrives when politicians are perceived to have created those problems.

There will be an autopsy when this election is over, but those same elites will be in charge of determining for the two major parties (especially the GOP, for obvious reasons) what went wrong.

How much time will they spend between the coasts? They parachute in for campaign events but rarely stick around. National political journalists, usually based in the big cities, do the same. Neither fundamentally understands the people they represent or report on, sometimes without spending any time with them.

Perhaps, if we finally digest how we got to this point, perhaps then we can figure out how to address it. But if we keep sweeping it under the table, keep blaming the motives on racism, sexism or whatever “ism” the elite uses to label, mock and dismiss those who disagree, then this movement will continue.

And it will feed on both parties until they are so fractured that governing becomes impossible.