Populism and Bernie

When candidates as different on policy as Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are labeled “populist,” does the term mean anything?

It’s one of the most porous designations in politics, and scholars have struggled to define it more precisely. As Michael Kazin writes in the NYT Magazine,

There was a time when “populist” meant something more specific. The word originated with the decidedly left-wing People’s Party that emerged in the Midwest and the South amid the economic turmoil and rampant inequality of the 1890s. Journalists who knew some Latin started calling them “Populists” as a shorthand, and the name stuck. Those uppercase Populists championed small farmers and wage-earners who thought “the money power” — banks and industrial corporations — had seized control of both America’s economy and its government. The party called for nationalizing the railroads, breaking up the trusts and strengthening labor unions. At times, their leftism toppled over into paranoia; to explain society’s ills, they invoked “a vast conspiracy against mankind,” engineered by a plutocratic cabal. The Populists joined forces with the Democrats for the 1896 election and collapsed soon afterward. The word “populist” mostly disappeared into academic studies until the 1950s…

Looking beyond just the U.S. to foreign cases like Argentina’s Juan Peron and the Russian narodniki, Margaret Canovan offers the following definitions:*

1. Socialism in backward peasant countries facing modernization
2. The ideology of small rural people threatened by encroaching industrial and financial capital
3. A rural movement pursuing traditional values in a changing society
4. Belief that the majority opinion of the people is checked by an elitist minority
5. Any movement based on the premise that virtue resides in the simple people (who are the majority) and their collective traditions
6. The notion that the will of the people is/should be supreme over every other standard
7. A political movement which enjoys the support of the mass of the urban working class and/or peasantry but which does not result from the autonomous organizational power of either of those two sectors

Ruth Grant and Robert Keohane describe populism as one of four types of accountability frameworks, whereby…

the people entrust a leader or a party to speak for the interests of the people as a whole against groups in society that are understood to be “special interests.” Direct participation of the people in governing institutions is not seen as a primary goal. But the legitimacy of the party and its leader depends on the extent to which they can credibly speak for the people. Thus, the populist leader and party are held accountable to the public through frequent appeals to mobilized public opinion and through elections that serve as referenda on the leader’s or the party’s performance in office