Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump wouldn’t seem to have much in common beyond a penchant for oddball haircuts. Yet both have been drawing large crowds by preaching that the little guy is getting starved while fat cats are getting fatter. Neither is typecast for the role. Trump boasts of his enormous wealth. Sanders says he is a socialist, a no-no since the red baiting of the Cold War era.
Still, they’ve joined a long line of offbeat politicians who’ve thumbed their noses at the establishment by riffing on a rock ’em, sock ’em speech given on 63rd Street in 1896. The nation was in the grip of a bitter depression when the Democratic Party met on Chicago’s South Side, and William Jennings Bryan asked the convention delegates:
“Upon which side will the Democratic Party fight; upon the side of the idle holders of idle capital or upon the side of the struggling masses?”
That question got Bryan nominated for president, and though he lost the election (as he would twice more), it added a term to America’s political lexicon: “populism.”
Basically, populism is a conviction that the 1 percent shouldn’t call the shots while the rest of us quietly fall into line. It was echoed by Theodore Roosevelt, who decried “malefactors of great wealth.” His cousin Franklin Roosevelt pledged himself to the cause of “the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.”
Harvard-educated, the Roosevelts spoke the cultivated English of their alma mater. But the populist movement has also had comic-relief characters, like Louisiana Gov. and Sen. Huey Long, who answered the phone, “Kingfish speaking.” It was a nickname he adopted from a raffish character on the “Amos and Andy” radio show. Calling for the nation’s wealth to be divvied up, Long took Bryan’s slogan “Every Man A King, But No One Wears A Crown,” set it to music and sang it over the airwaves.
There is a political advantage to playing the clown, as Trump seems to have intuitively realized. Politicians who play it straight have to offer solutions for problems that may well be unsolvable.
Trump doesn’t mince words. He says things like: “I will build a great, great wall on our southern border, and I will make Mexico pay for that wall.” That has been criticized as impractical and heartless. Yet is Trump’s thinking any more pie-in-the-sky than a proposal to regularize the status of unauthorized immigrants that has bipartisan support? It depends on the assumption that grateful recipients will tell relatives abroad to stay home rather than inspire family to come get citizenship too.
Trump is like the resident loudmouth of many a corner tavern. He is fun to listen to precisely because he is so cocksure of himself and contemptuous of other opinions.
By contrast, Sanders sounds like a professor even when his voice is horse from whipping up a crowd’s enthusiasm. If Trump wants an audience to imbibe his anger, Sanders aims to share his ideas. He is a product of the University of Chicago, a veritable temple of reason. When he was there in the 1960s, an air of imminent revolution hung over the campus. Freudian-minded undergraduates saw it as a psychological liberation; student activists pictured sit-ins and barricades. Sanders seems to have inhaled both views.
Moving to Vermont, he speculated in an alternative newspaper that having too few orgasms could cause cancer. His message is still sprinkled with traces of the Marxist theory of class warfare.
“The taxpayers of this country bailed out the illegal behavior of Wall Street,” he has said on the campaign trail. “It is time for Wall Street to bail out the middle class.”
A high-priced political consultant would scratch that line out of Sanders’ stump speech. Conservatives have tried to send Sanders’ campaign to an early grave by depicting him as a Bolshevik. Rush Limbaugh has said, “The Democrat Party is moving toward communism.”
Yet the more Sanders is denounced, the better his poll numbers. Some of that might be attributed to now-veterans of 1960s movements seeing in Sanders a reminder of their youthful enthusiasms. But how many nostalgic ex-flower children can there be?
Perhaps Sanders’ drawing card is a message that resonates with people who see their share of the American Dream sliding away. “They understand that the greed of Wall Street and the greed of corporate America is destroying the great middle class of this country,” Sanders has said.
Of course, it’s quite possible that Sanders’ and Trump’s campaigns will flame out, just like the presidential run of Bryan, the patron saint of populism. But as long as they’re in the race, I’ll be rooting for them. Yes, both of them. Because in the enthusiasm of their crowds, my mind’s eye can see the thunderous cheering and stamping of feet that greeted the windup of Bryan’s speech.
The big issue of 1896 was whether to mint silver dollars. Hard-pressed folks thought it could get them out of debt. Bankers wanted a strictly gold standard, and both arguments had been heard at the convention.
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Looking his opponents right in eye, Bryan simply said: “You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.”