Donald Trump is a walking contradiction that still needs explaining. He's a first-time campaigner who's never held high office (or any office) but is trouncing accomplished politicians in the polls; an insult comedian who seems only more beloved by his fans with every wildly inappropriate remark; a habitual liar who somehow has a reputation of being unvarnished and candid. And he's running, with success that few would have ventured to predict, as a “populist billionaire”—a phrase used as early as 1988 by New York magazine and revived during his current run for the presidency. "I'm not a populist," Trump has averred, but the populist label still clings to him, in part because of own cultivation of his image as blunt-spoken man who echews elite refinement.



Both sides of the "populist billionaire" equation can called into question, of course, and often have. Trump’s populist rhetoric is belied by his constant defense of privilege. It's not absolutely clear how rich he really is—and it is certainly true that his fortune is due to the luck of having a rich dad rather than any actual business acumen. Still, even if “populist billionaire” doesn’t quite describe the reality of Trump, it certainly captures the image he’s crafted of someone who embodies both the common-sense wisdom of the average person and the supposed leadership skills of the wealth-creating elite.

But how has he fit together populism and plutocracy into an appealing formula for so voters? Two sturdy books of political science offer us a way of understanding the two sides of Trump’s contradictory appeal: Donald I. Warren’s The Radical Center: Middle Americans and the Politics of Alienation (1976) and Isaac William Martin’s Rich People’s Movements: Grassroots Campaigns to Untax the One Percent (2013). The two political traditions outlined in these books are very different—one being lower-middle-class populism, and the other upper-class plutocracy. Trump has found a formula for combining them. But he's not the first.

The Radical Center grew out of the 1970s fascination with the phenomenon of blue-collar conservatism, reflected in everything from the political campaigns of George Wallace to clashes between construction workers and anti-war demonstrators. Archie Bunker, the loudmouth working-class bigot on All in the Family (1971-1979), memorably encapsulated the grassroots version of this policital character. Using extensive polling data, Warren argued that the Archie Bunkers of the world were a distinct ideological cohort; he labelled them Middle American Radicals, or MARS.

MARS were lower-middle-class white Americans who didn’t fit the familiar patterns of either the left or right: They were hostile to black Americans, but also to the corporate elite; they supported government programs like Social Security and Medicare, but opposed efforts to help the black poor. They were, Warren wrote, "caught in the middle between those whose wealth gives them access to power and those whose militant organization in the face of deprivation gains special treatment from the government.” These voters tended to be extremely nationalistic, while also believing that the Washington elite was corrupt and the rich had too much power. Opposing both the rich and the poor, MARS felt alienated from both the Republicans and Democrats, and preferred an outsider candidate like Wallace, who combined strong support of segregation with an equally vigorous defines of New Deal style economic policies.