Two recent books are typical of the current consensus in presenting populism as a new threat to liberal democracy. But properly understood, it is neither modern nor rightwing

Why are the traditional parties of the left in the western world being defeated in so many places by outrageous blowhards of the right? The answer most often given is that rightwing politicians have discovered and embraced a diabolical form of super-politics known as “populism”. With its combination of magic words and evil deeds, this populism is breaking rules, beguiling voters and winning elections.

Populism is a subject I know something about. In the 1980s I studied the angry American agrarians who, a century before, squared off against railroad monopolists. I became fascinated with the populist culture of the Roosevelt era, with all its Fanfares for the Common Man and its admiration for working people.

Populism isn't a dirty word – it's time for the left to reclaim it Read more

What I saw around me in the 80s, however, was a sort of inverted populism, in which Republicans used the words of Thomas Jefferson to sell plutocracy and the will of the people was confused with the operation of the market. Later, I wrote about the phony populism that now dominates my home state of Kansas, and I followed the careers of right-populist superstars such as Richard Viguerie and Glenn Beck. I watched the country erupt during the bank bailouts and I was a spectator at gatherings of the Tea Party.

In my lifetime, the politicians who have most loudly proclaimed their solidarity with the humble producers have been rightwingers. Hypocritical rightwingers, yes, but by and large they have put the fiction over. Today it is the turn of Donald Trump, the “blue-collar billionaire”, to act as tribune of the plebs. In 2016, he won millions of votes from unfortunate toilers in hard-bitten places. Over the affluent zip codes of the US, meanwhile, a wail of aghastitude hangs in the air, a constant moan over Trump’s unfitness for the high office he holds. Aghastitude’s scholarly analogue is my subject here: the devil theory of populism.

Yascha Mounk, the author of The People vs Democracy, is a man of impressive establishment credentials: a lecturer at Harvard, a fellow at the New America Foundation and a columnist at Slate. According to his website, he is “one of the world’s leading experts on the crisis of liberal democracy and the rise of populism”.

By “populism” Mounk means the species of nasty rightwing politics associated with Trump and various European bad guys such as the leaders of Hungary and Poland. He uses the word as a kind of synonym for racist tyranny, and in his account populist politicians are villainous in ways that go beyond the profession’s conventions. Populists, he informs us, tell lies. They dislike the press, they shatter “norms”, and they aspire to be dictators. They carry what he calls, in a revealing phrase, “the populist disease”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The abandoned remains of blast furnaces, closed in 1995, in Pennsylvania. Photograph: Perry van Munster / Alamy Stock/Alamy

If Mounk represents social-scientific professionalism coming to cure what ails us, however, I fear we are in big trouble. He repeatedly tells us, for example, that rightwing populism is a new, consensus-smashing thing; that before Trump and co came along the politics of the western world were “frozen”; that things “barely changed”; that leaders respected “norms”. He never divulges who invented this hateful populism thing, but he does inform us that “one of the earliest populists” was Jörg Haider, a far-right Austrian politician who died in 2008.

I read all this with mounting incredulity. History wasn’t just a nice centrist monotone before Trump and the gang got started. There was a momentous turn in the west that began about 40 years ago; it involved the triumph of business interests over rivals such as the unions and the regulatory state. You know: Thatcher, Reagan, Clinton, Blair and so on. Take my word for it: the rightward turn was a big deal. And it’s still going. It dwarfs Trump; indeed, it subsumes him. Trump’s presidency is just the latest chapter in this ugly story, not some new thing altogether.

As for populism, historians typically trace the populist rhetorical tradition in America back to the time of Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. A radical leftwing political party that called itself “Populist” swept much of the country in the 1890s, and protest movements described as populist have come and gone. Populism’s evil rightwing doppelganger is usually dated to 1968, when George Wallace and Richard Nixon figured out how to turn the language of working-class majoritarianism against liberalism. Rightwing populists have been building movements and winning elections in the US ever since.

Mounk barely acknowledges any of this. Instead, he asserts a frightening new vision of populism without discussing the old one. “There can no longer be any doubt that we are going through a populist moment,” he writes at one point. “The question now is whether this populist moment will turn into a populist age – and cast the very survival of liberal democracy in doubt.”

Sounds bad, all right. Demonic, even. But the phrase “populist moment” rang a bell. I went to my bookshelf and pulled down my copy of – yes – The Populist Moment by the historian Lawrence Goodwyn, a celebrated study of Populism published in 1978. Here is how it starts: “This book is about the flowering of the largest democratic mass movement in American history. It is also necessarily a book about democracy itself.” What Goodwyn meant was that Populism in its 1890s permutation represented a vision of democratic participation that was actually more advanced than what we settle for today. Far from being a threat to democracy, Populism was democracy’s zenith.

We need to understand why liberal democracy is crumbling around the world

To produce a whole book on populism while ignoring this completely opposite interpretation strikes me as a serious oversight. Yes, I think we need to understand why liberal democracy is crumbling around the world. But to describe this process with the unmodified “populism” is a mistake. It is, after all, an American word. And the history of American populism contradicts item after item in Mounk’s devil theory. Populism is simply not what he thinks it is.

Take its supposed hostility to “ethnic and cultural pluralism”, a critical point in this and many other recent works on the “populist disease”. Yes, Trump and certain European leaders are bigots. But no, that doesn’t retroactively make all populists into racists. The Populist movement of the 1890s, for example, did lots of things wrong, but it’s also remembered for its effort to enlist black farmers alongside southern whites. The labour-union populism of the 1930s, meanwhile, was flamboyantly anti-racist – “a militant brand of producerism open to everyone but bigots and millionaires”, in historian Michael Kazin’s memorable description. And Jesse Jackson, widely described as a populist in 1988, was the leader of what he called the “rainbow coalition”.

Mounk implies that populists fundamentally oppose independent regulatory agencies. Yet two of the four American bureaucracies he names were set up by the bank-bashing administration of Franklin Roosevelt and a third at the behest of the populist Elizabeth Warren, a fact widely reported and extremely well known.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Austria’s far-right leader, Jörg Haider, in 2000. Photograph: Gert Eggenberger/EPA

Mounk also describes populists as would-be, sort-of dictators, a label that might apply to Trump and various others. How accurate would it be, however, to depict the vacillating Al Gore, who was sometimes described as a populist in 2000, as some kind of proto-Napoleon? Or the genial Jim Hightower (“America’s #1 Populist”)? Or the poet Carl Sandburg, who wrote The People, Yes in 1936? Or the ineffectual pacifist William Jennings Bryan?

Nor do the vices supposedly specific to populism turn out to be all that unique. Mounk moans, for example, that populists violate “norms” – but, then, so do elitists: in the private sector their actions are called “disruptions” and admired. Populists are also supposed to deal in “simplicity,” in “glib, facile solutions”, which we know they do because this is what Trump does. But so does nearly every politician. Examples: anti-communism, “free trade”, or the way Barack Obama told us federal austerity was necessary because families were “tightening their belts”.

William Galston is a different sort of political scientist, occupying a different sweet spot at the intersection of academia and politics. But his Anti-Pluralism amounts to pretty much the same thing: the devil theory of populism, with a few modifications. Again populists are said to reject “pluralism” and the “liberal democratic order”.And again the technique is to read Trump out onto the world, projecting his characteristics on to all populists, ever. This leads to a series of simple mistakes: not all populists are protectionists as Galston asserts; Bryan and Roosevelt both opposed high tariffs. Nor is populism “always anti-pluralist”, as a glance at any federal arts project mural will confirm. Besides, agrarian Populists of the 1890s were way ahead of the game on women’s suffrage. And on and on.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest John Langley Howard’s mural of unemployed California workmen (1934). Photograph: Marmaduke St John/Alamy

Yet Galston, like Mounk, understands that economic stagnation made Trump possible – that growing inequality and the fraying of the middle class played a huge role. He argues that liberal leaders have been “oblivious” to the sufferings of their fellow Americans and that “this blindness is often tinged with meritocratic snobbery toward those with less education and status”.

This is exactly right. Unfortunately, in Galston’s telling, these things are all the result of impersonal forces, of “globalisation” and “technological change” adjusting “the balance between labour and capital, setting in motion the slow erosion of the postwar middle class”. Shit happens, you might say. When things got hairy during the great recession, Galston writes, “established parties and institutions found it difficult to respond to rising public discontent”.

What a way to describe the Obama administration’s failure. They found it difficult. Difficult to get tough with their funders on Wall Street, I guess he means. Difficult to help out their taken-for-granted voters in unions.

I suspect Galston could tell us a lot more about this problem if he chose. In decades past he was a leading light of the Democratic Leadership Council, a group that aimed to stamp out the Democratic party’s hostility to corporations and the wealthy by neutralising its populist leftwing. The DLC set out to foster “New Democrats” – enlightened politicians who understood the need for trade agreements, welfare reform and a big crackdown on crime. Given they were arguing for such things, it would have been awkward to accuse the party’s leftwing of “anti-pluralist” tendencies. It was the DLC themselves who were constantly trying to outmanoeuvre Jesse Jackson and what the DLC leader coyly called “constituency groups”.

Galston’s role, at times, was to make it seem as though the centrist programme was just a response to the tides of historical change. In an article he co-wrote in 1998, he told Democrats that “the new economy favours a rising learning class over a declining working class”. To keep up with “new realities”, he wrote, Democrats needed to understand that labour was in decline, that the New Deal generation was dying, and that the future belonged to a certain group of affluent, well-educated people. The rest is history. New Democrats did indeed defeat populism. High-minded Democratic centrists did indeed abandon their traditional identification with working people in favour of the “learning class”. And Democrats started finding it “difficult” to take action on matters of basic economic fairness.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Supporters cheer President Donald Trump during a rally in Indiana. Photograph: Leah Millis/Reuters

Today Trump is president, and the connection between his rise and the Democrats’ renunciation of their historical identity should be obvious. He squats in their old place in the political ecosystem, pretending to care about ordinary Americans and preposterously claiming to be our instrument for getting even with the rich and the strong. The right name for Trump’s politics is “demagoguery” or “pseudo-populism”. By lumping him together with the genuine reform tradition of populism, we do that tradition a violent disservice.

Reduced to its essentials, populism is America’s way of expressing class antagonism. It is a tradition of rhetorical protest that extends from Jefferson to Franklin Roosevelt to Bernie Sanders and on to the guy who just cooked your hamburger or filled your gas tank . It is powerful stuff. But protest isn’t the property of any particular party. Anyone can be the voice of those who work, and when one party renounces its claim the other can easily pick it up.

All of which suggests a different answer to the question with which we began. Why is our traditional left failing? It is true that the other side doesn’t play fair any more, but it’s also true that the Democrats are lost in a fantasy of white-collar benevolence. For all their algorithms and their lavishly detailed position papers, their leaders have little personal sympathy any longer with the travails of working people. Populism isn’t the name for this disease; it’s the cure.

• The People vs Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger & How to Save It is published by Harvard (£21.95); Anti-Pluralism: The Populist Threat to Liberal Democracy is published by Yale (325). To order either book go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.