A Tale of Two Populists

By Peter Pavarini

In the prelude to the 2016 Presidential Election I posted on Facebook a series of commentaries that, following a self-imposed 2-year hiatus from all social media, evolved into the Alessandro Camp blog I’ve been publishing for about a year. Despite my tendency to blog about current events, I’ve strictly avoided partisan rants or personal attacks which, in my opinion, do nothing to change minds. Rather, as a storyteller, diehard history buff, and connoisseur of all things beautiful and inspiring, I try to draw most of my ideas from the world outside politics.

What I’ve Learned From Blogging. From my relatively short experience as a blogger, I’ve learned several key things:

• Although serious subjects are hard to address in less than 1,000 words, anything longer than a few hundred words is unlikely to be read by more than a handful of people.
• Clever titles and eye-catching images, as corny as they might be, do in fact attract more readers.
• Except for the most ideologically driven readers, very few people are comfortable sharing their personal views publicly in today’s environment.
• Being unfriended or unfollowed may be the highest compliment a blogger ever receives.

At the beginning of another Presidential Campaign (even though it seems like the last one never ended), I again wish to contribute to the on-line debate about candidates and issues in a constructive, non-partisan way.

Lessons From History. For me, history is often the most fertile place to look for ways to frame a discussion. Thousands of years of recorded human history demonstrates that nothing we are experiencing in Twenty-First Century America is fundamentally new. For this reason, during the coming months, I hope to comment on the Presidential Campaign without resorting to the customary dichotomies of Left vs. Right, Democrat vs. Republican, Liberal/Progressive vs. Conservative.  At best, these are shorthands for complex assemblages of principles, thoughts and values.  If anything, I see the political landscape shaping up to be a battle between Populists and Elites.

I recently stumbled upon Victor Davis Hanson’s 2018 article “Dueling Populisms”[i] which is available as an e-book through Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.  Regardless of what you think of Hanson’s politics, he does a remarkable job of tracing the tension between today’s populists and elites to ancient Greece and ancient Rome. I never seriously considered the possibility that the political polarization we are currently witnessing has been going on for over 2,000 years.

Hanson also predicted what is becoming the more probable outcome of the Democratic primary season. Just as Trump, a political novice, was able to best 16 establishment candidates in the 2016 Republican primaries and nomination process, Independent Senator Bernie Sanders, a self-described socialist, seems to have the best chance of claiming the Democratic nomination this summer. What could possibly explain this phenomenon?  What’s wrong with the ruling class in the United States when its legitimacy is being challenged by nonconformists like Trump and Sanders?

Two Very Different Forms of Populism. In his article, Hanson describes two varieties of populism which reasonably describe the Red State coalition of property-owning libertarians and conservatives who put Trump in the White House in 2016 and the Blue State coalition of egalitarian-minded redistributionists who could do the same for Sanders in 2020.

It’s too early to say whether 2020 will turn out to be a Tale of Two Populists.  However, I take solace in knowing that populist movements are not new and have played important roles in shaping Western Civilization (and probably elsewhere) for over two millennia.

Like spinning magnets in an electric dynamo, perhaps the friction of these competing ideologies will generate the necessary energy to propel our Nation forward and forge a new social compact for the next 250 years.

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[i] https://www.hoover.org/research/dueling-populisms