Some moderate candidates have held back from populism, others have stretched the definition, but many are adopting the redefined populist rhetoric

When the Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren spoke in a New Hampshire town hall last month, she promised to break up Silicon Valley monopolies and levy a wealth tax on “the Rembrandts and the diamonds” of the super-rich, before quipping: “I’m sick of freeloading billionaires.”

Days earlier, the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders had addressed a rally in Concord, 45 miles west. He said his was a campaign that “tells the powerful special interests who control so much of our economic and political life that we will no longer tolerate the greed of Wall Street, corporate America and the billionaire class”.

During a road trip through the state days later, the former Texas congressman Beto O’Rourke stopped at a university in Keene to lament an economy that only works for “the very few”. “We never had this kind of income and wealth inequality unless you go all the way back to the last Gilded Age,” he said.

Much has been said about the unprecedented diversity among Democrats vying to replace Donald Trump in the White House in 2020. But voters in New Hampshire, which will hold the first in the nation primary next year, can be forgiven for feeling they all sound kind of similar.

Reporters on the campaign trail constantly ask Democrats if they self-define as a “socialist” or “capitalist”. Yet a better label for several of the frontrunners may be “populist” – at least in the moderate, diluted form in which the term is commonly used in the US.

That reflects a wider populist turn in Democratic politics, born from a realisation that in 2016 it was Trump, a real estate billionaire, who did better than Democrat Hillary Clinton at channeling widespread voter frustration at economic elites.

Now Trump has become emblematic of the swamp he once promised to drain. The president has given tax cuts to America’s wealthiest, given his family White House portfolios, stacked his cabinet with friends and donors with a combined net worth estimated to be worth over $4bn, and overseen an administration that some historians argue is the most corrupt America has endured since the 1920s.

“All that is perfect terrain for a leftwing populist to pounce,” said Michael Kazin, a professor of history at Georgetown University and the author of a book on American populism.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bernie Sanders says his campaign ‘tells the powerful special interests who control so much of our economic and political life that we will no longer tolerate the greed of Wall Street, corporate America and the billionaire class’. Photograph: Michael Reynolds/EPA

The movement that spawned the word ‘populism’

It is against this backdrop that Democrats are looking to a us-v-them style of politics redolent of the US agrarian revolts of the 1890s – the movement that spawned the word “populism” in the first place.

That was the era when an anti-elitist alliance of impoverished farmers, rail workers and union members briefly formed the Populist party, which called for an end to monopolies, a progressive income tax and government ownership of the railroads, telegraph services and post office.

After briefly threatening to upend America’s two-party system, the Populist party collapsed after selecting the Democratic nominee for president, William Jennings Bryan, who lost in 1896. But the movement has been credited with giving rise to a progressive era in Democratic politics that culminated in Franklin D Roosevelt’s 1930s New Deal.

The meaning of populism has evolved considerably since then, and scholars today generally accept populism can be deployed by capitalists as well as socialists. Rightwing populists came to the fore in American politics in the mid-2oth century with figures such as the segregationist governor of Alabama, George Wallace, and the Republican anti-communist senator Joseph McCarthy.

What populists across the spectrum have in common is a claim to serve the popular will of ordinary people in their quest to overcome powerful, self-serving elites. Kazin, who edits the leftwing magazine Dissent, said there has long been a rich seam of opposition to entrenched elites in American politics that “has always been there to be tapped” by politicians of all stripes.

Surges in populist rhetoric tend to be prompted by perceived political and economic crises. Kazin argues the current populist wave leads back to the 2008 financial crisis, which has framed American political discourse for more than a decade.

However, Kazin said he could not remember a presidential primary when so many prominent Democrats were running on a leftwing populist agenda – or a presidential contest, as 2020 may turn out to be, when both the Democrat and Republican are nominees are populists. “You’re probably not going to have a leading candidate this year – except, perhaps, Joe Biden – who is not going to be talking in pretty strongly populist terms,” he said.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Kamala Harris’s campaign slogan – ‘for the people’ – is a nod to her career as San Francisco district attorney, but also a classically populist term. Photograph: Tracy Barbutes/Zuma Wire/Rex/Shutterstock

The populist label

That may be an exaggeration. In addition to Biden, who has not announced his presidential campaign, moderate senators such as Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar and Kirsten Gillibrand have held back from populism.

Others, meanwhile, are probably stretching the definition. When Kamala Harris launched her campaign in Oakland in January, an aide to the California senator told New York magazine she was claiming the mantle of “a new populism”.

Her campaign slogan – “for the people” – is a nod to her career as San Francisco district attorney, but also a classically populist term. Yet while her speech referred to “the people” 15 times, it contained none of the sharp condemnation of elites that is also a hallmark of populist discourse. On the contrary, Harris made a point of stressing “our United States of America is not about us versus them”.

Even Barack Obama once toyed with the populist label. Reflecting on some of his leftwing policies, Obama openly mused on the idea that he might be a populist, but hedged: “Maybe somebody can pull up in a dictionary quickly the phrase ‘populism’.”

Had anyone bothered to do so they might have discovered the word is routinely misused. In Europe, it is often used pejoratively to refer to far-right, nationalist politics of leaders such as Italy’s Matteo Salvini and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. Many supporters of leftwing radicals such as the UK’s Jeremy Corbyn or France’s Jean-Luc Mélenchon balk at the populist label, which they argue tarnishes their candidates by association.

In the US, there is perhaps better understanding of the idea that populism can be a political language used by the right or left. But the word has also lost some of its meaning as it increasingly becomes a shorthand for economic redistribution. As a result, no candidate is more routinely referred to as populist than Sanders, but others include Warren and – until he dropped of the race – the Ohio senator Sherrod Brown.

Brown, one of the few politicians to embrace the populist label, dedicated a page on his campaign website to explaining “what populism is – and what it isn’t”. The page argued that populism “doesn’t fan resentments and exploit grievances”, a claim that might be disputed by scholars of leftwing populists such as Hugo Chávez – or even the original American populists, like Jennings Bryan .

‘We’re living in another Gilded Age’

Sixteen Democrats have so far formally declared bids for the presidency, and another dozen are criss-crossing the early caucus and primary states to test the waters. They include New York’s mayor, Bill de Blasio, who recently stopped by the Strange Brew Tavern in Manchester, for “happy hour with young Democrats”.

He told around a dozen party faithfuls gathered around a pool table that his “line” resonating most Iowa and South Carolina was that “there’s plenty of money in the country, it is just in the wrong hands”. “It don’t think it is an accident,” he added. “People are fed up.”

He later told the Guardian that populism was “very much part of who I am”.

“Recently in public discourse somehow populism has been described as a rightwing phenomenon, through a negative prism, when I think there’s a very rich history in the United States of progressive populism, centered on economic issues, referencing working people’s lives, and that’s what we have got to get back to,” he said.

De Blasio added he agreed with Warren’s proposal to break up technology giants. “I do see an emerging frustration with the technology sector that is about unfettered power. But also connects to the notion of large corporations, unaccountable to the people – just as people felt about Wall Street.”

“We’re living in another Gilded Age. The income inequality levels today are comparable to the time of the robber barons,” he added, arguing that a slew of political advances – anti-trust laws, progressive taxation and limits on corporate money in politics – were born of the populist backlash of the late 19th century.

“Those are all ideas that go back 100 years and more in this country,” he said. “Full circle, these ideas are now coming to life in much bolder form today.”

That much seemed evident in nearby Exeter, when Warren delighted the crowd, days earlier, with her unabashed attack on America’s “ultra millionaires”.

Nodding emphatically from a balcony above the stage was Janice, a woman in her 60s in a faded Mickey Mouse T-shirt. She declined to give her last name because she was embarrassed to admit she had voted for Trump in 2016.

“My friend kept saying: ‘Trump’s for the little people,’” she recalled – stressing that, at the time, she was holding down two jobs and struggling to pay the rent, so did not have time to vet the candidates.

She now believes Trump “talked that way to become president” – and after hearing Warren speak, she felt she’d found a more authentic version of the candidate she had been looking for. “Warren sounds like she’s on our side. And it’s us v them,” she said.