Richard Linnett is a freelance writer and the author of In the Godfather Garden: The Long Life and Times of Richie ‘the Boot’ Boiardo, and co-author of The Eagle Mutiny, a chronicle of the only mutiny on an American ship since the Amistad.

On November 14, Fred Harris, the man Jesse Jackson once called the “Godfather of Populism,” sat hunched in a chair, shaking a Navajo rattle and singing a Comanche prayer at his home in New Mexico. The former two-time U.S. senator from Oklahoma learned the chant from his ex-wife’s grandfather, a Comanche medicine man who ate peyote. The night before, at a family gathering celebrating his 86th birthday, Fred sang the song for the first time in years.

“I suddenly realized,” he said, stopping midverse. “I was singing the wrong song. That was a peyote song.”


He meant to sing a dirge performed at funerals. “It’s kind of an alma mater song, celebrating standing together for the last time.” He hunched over again, shook the rattle and starting wailing like an ancient warrior in mourning.

“Populism” might be the word of the year in American politics. It’s what propelled Donald Trump to the White House, and what Bernie Sanders used to nearly upend the Democratic Party. But long before Trump or Sanders attempted to harness populism to reach higher office, Fred Harris owned the term. He authored two books on the subject, traveled the country railing for economic fairness and ran for presidency on the promise of returning power to the forgotten people.

But now, with populism arguably at its high-water mark in American politics, Fred Harris isn’t excited. In fact, he’s appalled.

When Harris looks at Donald Trump’s campaign, he sees a vision of populism fundamentally opposed to the way he saw the movement. In the 1970s, Harris aimed to build political clout by creating new coalitions across boundaries of race, gender and class, uniting people on the basis of their shared struggle.

“Populism is simply about voting for your own interests instead of against your interests—with the knowledge that your interests are the same as the interests of everyone else,” Harris says.

In electing Trump, Fred Harris believes the people voted against their own interests, choosing a man who will enrich himself and not them. He sees Trump as a leader who has built walls between groups and emphasized their differences in order to gain power—in fact, Harris isn’t so sure that the president-elect’s views can even be called populist.

“It really pisses me off when they talk about populists being racists, and calling George Wallace and Donald Trump populists,” Harris says. “Trump populism is really just demagoguery. It’s not my kind of populism.”

***

The son of an Okie sharecropper, Fred Harris was born in a two-room shack in the Oklahoma dust bowl during the Great Depression. His parents were New Deal Democrats who supported Franklin Roosevelt, the progressive icon who led the nation through the Great Depression, and Harris traces his own populism back to the values they taught him—as well as Oklahoma’s political climate at the time. When Harris was born in 1930, Oklahoma’s 1917 Green Corn Rebellion was a recent memory. Though it’s largely forgotten today, the rebellion was a populist uprising by a coalition of working-class blacks, Indians and whites who organized resistance to the draft during World War I. They transcended differences of identity.

The idea of populism as a way to unite different people toward a common goal clearly informed Harris’ beliefs—indeed, it’s the core spirit behind his 1971 book, Now Is the Time, a populist proclamation that called on college students, militant blacks, suburban housewives and Harris’ fellow “rednecks” to join forces based on their shared self-interested need for jobs. Two years later, he followed Now Is the Time with a second book, The New Populism.

What exactly is “New Populism”?

“Well, it means whatever I say it means, because I dreamed it up,” Harris laughs, before explaining in his spry, Slim Pickens-like Oklahoma drawl: “Actually, what it means is that a fair distribution of wealth, income and power should be the specific goal of the country.”

Since the election of Donald Trump, the books feel uncannily relevant. “Pandering to the baser fears and prejudices that lurk within us all is not what Presidents are for,” Harris wrote in Now Is the Time. “Officials and candidates— and political parties—have a higher duty, a duty to lead, to search out and gather up and shout forth a better vision of ourselves. We do not only need someone to tell us what we look like when we are at our worst. We need someone to help us see what we can be when we are at our best.”

Those aren’t qualities he sees in Donald Trump.

Post-mortems in the wake of Donald Trump’s remarkable upset victory all tend to agree that the Democrats were defeated because they lost touch with the white working class. More than 40 years ago, Fred Harris saw something similar happen when Richard M. Nixon rose to the presidency on the strength of the “silent majority.” Harris, at the time a Democratic senator, responded by abandoning liberalism, which he felt narrowly represented “intellectual elites” and urbanites, and adopting a populism that embraced progressives and blue collar workers, uniting Americans of sundry backgrounds on the basis of their common struggles.

Forty years before 2016’s “populist” president-elect stumped the country in his personal Boeing 757, Harris made his own quixotic bid for the presidency, crisscrossing the country in a borrowed Winnebago ahead of the 1976 Democratic primaries. At times wearing a cowboy hat atop his unruly head of dark hair, evoking a lumpen Johnny Cash, Harris financed his campaign with yard sales, house parties and picnics, and stayed overnight in ordinary voters’ homes in exchange for IOUs for a night in the White House, should he be elected. (One night on the trail, he and his then-wife stayed in a convent, invited by nuns, despite his pro-choice stance on abortion rights.)

The Winnebago jaunt, dubbed “On the Road to the White House,” actually headed away from it—starting in Washington, D.C., and ending in San Francisco. “This was because I believed that the right way to get to the White House was to first go out to the people,” Harris explained at the time.

“There is little about Fred Harris that resembles the American politician we’ve come to associate with the race for the presidency,” Tom Hayden wrote in a 1975 Rolling Stone feature. “In fact, Harris looks and sounds like he’d be more comfortable at a farmers' market in Oklahoma.” Jim Hightower, Harris’ campaign manager, told supporters at rallies: “Our candidate is not just another pretty face, as you can plainly see.”

The field of Democratic candidates that year was as colorful and crowded as the Republicans felled by Trump — Mo Udall, Birch Bayh, Henry “Scoop” Jackson, George Wallace, Jerry Brown, Frank Church and Jimmy Carter. Fred Harris was the rowdy truthsayer of the bunch. His ad hominem statements were considered outrageous, the period’s equivalent of Trumpisms—though lacking Trump’s acidic mean-spiritedness. During a Face the Nation appearance, Harris likened the evasive and always-grinning Carter to a horse trader who showed his teeth but not the horse’s. After Vice President Nelson Rockefeller admitted to a congressional committee that hadn’t paid personal federal income taxes, Harris railed: “We ought to sue him for nonsupport.” His campaign laser-focused on income inequality; his version of “It’s the economy, stupid” was “The issue is privilege.” His most popular campaign button: “Take the rich off welfare.” His constant mantra: “Too few people have all the money and power, and most people have little or none.”

After surprising the pundits by placing third in the Iowa caucuses, CBS News’ Walter Cronkite made a prediction: “Fred, you’re going to win this thing.” He didn’t, of course — his funds ran out and his momentum died down. He delivered the most famous line of his candidacy shortly before he dropped out of the race after a poor showing in the New Hampshire primary. It is a line that remains legendary in the annals of political huckstering: “Ours was a campaign for the little people. But the problem was they couldn’t reach the levers.”

Carter, who won the primary, copped Fred Harris’ populist gospel and tactics in the general election, traveling by bus, staying in people’s homes and preaching about income inequality. Meanwhile, Fred dropped out of professional politics and, in his words, “got back out into the country.”

***

Today, Fred Harris lives in a passive-solar adobe home on the verdant banks of the Rio Grande, and is a professor emeritus of political science at the University of New Mexico. He may still easily blend in at a farmers’ market, but is more likely to be found in a bicycle shop. Harris gave up running for political office decades ago, but he makes the occasional 20-mile ride on his road bike. And he keeps up with party politics. His wife, Marge Elliston, is chair of the Sandoval County Democratic Party, Harris served as the New Mexico co-chair of the 2008 Obama presidential campaign and has been a delegate to every national convention, including this year in Philadelphia, where he was a delegate for Hillary Clinton.

Naturally, the results of November’s election disappointed Fred, and in the aftermath he has received countless emails from fans, friends and relatives seeking solace and wise council.

In an email blast to his fans, he blamed Hillary’s loss on “Putin, Comey and the Electoral College,” but he also feels that the loss was a wake-up call—due, in no small part, to Democrats losing touch with their populist roots. “You have to talk to people about jobs and the minimum wage,” he says.

Earlier this year, during a meeting with a small group of New Mexico Democratic Party donors, Bill Clinton talked to Harris about Trump supporters: “Fred, you and I know these people. We grew up with them,” he remembers Clinton saying. “Their lives are not very good. They’re not very happy about the way things are going.”

“Bill was right! Not only did I grow up with these people, I am these people,” Harris says. “When Hillary put Trump supporters into a basket of deplorables, she really stepped in it. We know these people! They want someone to pay attention to them. They’re asking us, ‘What about me? Why don’t some of you talk to me about my life? I’m paying too much taxes and not getting anything out of it.’”

Over the past month, as the reality of Trump’s victory has sunk in, Fred has been bombarded with fundraising solicitations from some of the many disparate grass-roots progressive groups, including Bernie Sanders’ Our Revolution, MoveOn.org, Progressive Democrats for America, Democracy for America, the Campaign for America’s Future and Barack Obama’s Organizing for Action.

“It seems to me, if somehow they could all merge, or even merge into the Democratic Party, you’d really have something. That’s what needs to be done. I’ve been thinking about talking to Elizabeth Warren and Sherrod Brown and some others about doing it. These groups have the same goals and platforms that the Democratic Party now has. It’s such a damn shame to have all this fragmented action for exactly the same goals.”

On a recent day, while saying goodbye to some visitors at his home, Fred signed a vintage first edition of The New Populism. There was an inscription in the book already, scrawled in heavy black ink and dated 1973. Fred recognized it.

“Yessir, that’s my signature,” he said, trying to make out the dedicatee. “I don’t know who this is. Must have been an officeholder, or something. You see, I wrote here, ‘To a real man of the people.’”