Ferdinand Mount on America’s Populist Moment

Ferdinand Mount on America’s Populist Moment

Populist movements have come and gone in politics, usually foundering on party splits

The rise of the Trumpery Tendency bears more than a passing resemblance to the rise of the Know-Nothing Party in the 1840s and ’50s. The Native American Party, as it laughably called itself, was born out of fears that the country was being overrun by Catholic immigrants from Germany and Italy, whose first loyalty was supposedly to the pope, not to the Constitution of the U.S.



At their peak, the Know-Nothings elected mayors in Chicago, San Francisco and Washington, D.C., and swept the state of Massachusetts. Donald Trump’s call to ban Muslims from the U.S. and Republican resistance to President Barack Obama’s plan to resettle thousands of Syrian refugees in the U.S. suggest that a similar resentment still has plenty of political mileage (though no real votes are in yet).



Does the tendency have legs? Populist movements have come and gone in American politics. They have usually foundered on party splits (the Know-Nothings were hopelessly divided on slavery) and were ultimately washed away by public ridicule. They have also been eroded by demographic factors. To win in the big cities, the Know-Nothings soon began to need the support of those German- and Irish-American blue-collar workers. Today, anti-immigrant rhetoric that sounds too menacing risks alienating the emergent Latino middle class. Almost every country in the European Union is seeing the rise of populist parties that are disenchanted with Brussels and want to reclaim national independence, with the aim first and foremost of closing their borders, if necessary by building fences.



n Central Europe, those fences are going up at a dazzling pace. The U.K. has managed to squeeze the flow of illegal immigrants through the Channel Tunnel down to a trickle. On its border with Mexico, the U.S. is well ahead of the game. The political reality is that almost everywhere the existing government is already responding to the populist clamor. The huddled masses yearning to breathe free may have to hold their breath, or at least form an orderly queue.



But the biggest test awaiting the new American president is whether a more proactive and generous foreign policy can bring some sort of stability to the failed states in the Middle East and elsewhere that are fueling this desperate tide. The ultimate answer to populist resentment may lie in resurrecting the spirit of Gen. George C. Marshall rather than in blowing louder than Donald J. Trump.



Mr. Mount was head of the Downing Street Policy Unit under Margaret Thatcher and editor of the Times Literary Supplement.

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