Chapter 46: The Populist Persuasion

Us vs. Them: The Politics of Exclusion

“A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism.” This dramatic declaration introduced the world to The Communist Manifesto in 1848.¹ Today, that famous statement has been repurposed. The spectre haunting Europe and indeed the world now is “populism.”²

The “spectre” metaphor is more appropriate for populism today than it ever was for communism. The dictionary defines spectre as “a ghost, phantom, apparition.”³ Communism was more than a mere spectre. It was an ideology with specific beliefs and goals. Populism is the “ghost, phantom, apparition.”

Populism “has no intellectual coherence. . . . Indeed, instead, it’s a strategy to obtain and retain power.”⁴ Populism has been around forever, but it has re-emerged forcefully in recent years “propelled by the digital revolution, precarious economies, and the threatening insecurity of what lies ahead.”⁵

Populism can be usefully thought of as a “persuasion.” It is a caste of mind, a method of apprehending and manipulating the world. It is about “means” without “ends.” Those means have been mastered by Trump and help explain his hostile takeover of American politics.

Populism makes a statement in a number of categories: The people (good) ; the elites (bad); common sense (good); intellect (bad); spectacle (good); pluralism (bad); conspiracy theories (good); institutions (bad); the “pleasure of transgression”⁶ (simply terrific); and the charismatic cult of personality (best of all).

Populism, as the name suggests, is about people. Populists claim to battle for the people and to speak for them. “My study is the heart of the people,” declares the protagonist in All the King’s Men, which has been described as “the greatest novel on populism ever written, based loosely on Huey Long’s career in Louisiana.”⁷ All fine and well, one might say, until one realizes that the definition of the people is sharply contested.

Here is Trump on the campaign trail back in May of 2016: “[T]he only important thing is the unification of the people – because the other people don’t mean anything.”⁸ Does this sound self-contradictory? It makes perfect sense to Trump’s followers.

Some people – “people like us” – are “in.” We are the true people, the soul of the nation. As for other people, they are “out.” Because “they don’t mean anything.” The “out” people include both poles of the socioeconomic spectrum. They are the elites and also marginal groups – more specifically, liberal elites on the one hand and racial minorities on the other. “The controversy over Barack Obama’s birth certificate made this logic almost ridiculously obvious and literal; at one and the same time, the President managed to embody in the eyes of right-wingers both the ‘bi-coastal elite’ and the African-American.”⁹ It is no accident that Trump was among the earliest and most vociferous “birthers.” Obama promised us hope and change. Unfortunately, his very identity unearthed long simmering discontent. Remember: pluralism is bad.

A billboard questioning Obama’s citizenship, 2010. Source

Juxtaposed against the people in the populist persuasion are the elites. No clear definition of this group is offered. Nevertheless, some elite traits can be identified. The elites are often described as being “from nowhere.” The people are “from somewhere.” The elites are people who many years ago would have been described as “jet setters.” They can easily travel and indeed transplant themselves from place to place and from country to country. The somewheres are from specific places. They can boast of a rootedness in a particular spot, often imaginatively located between the coasts. The somewheres live in places like Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and Topeka, Kansas. The nowheres, when they alight in one place long enough to be found, hang out in Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard, and Carmel.

The outs are alien to the soul of the nation. They have strange beliefs. Among the most striking advertisements of the 2024 presidential campaign featured the tagline: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”¹⁰ The Republicans ran this ad thousands of times in swing states, and at least one analysis indicates that it was very effective.¹¹

Source

The most important characteristic of the elite is that they have the nerve to look down on the true Americans. There has never been a more vivid illustration of this condescension than Hillary Clinton’s disastrous remark during the 1992 Presidential campaign.

For pure, distilled melodrama few episodes compare to the January 26, 1992 interview of Bill and Hillary Clinton on 60 Minutes. Bill and his campaign encountered a potentially devastating problem. A woman named Gennifer Flowers told a supermarket tabloid that she and Bill had been having an affair for 12 years. In those innocent bygone days so long ago, it was believed nobody could survive this and run for the Presidency.

The Clintons went on the air immediately following the Super Bowl in January of 1992. The campaign and Bill Clinton’s political future were on the line. Bill Clinton survived this episode thanks in large part to the key contribution of Hillary. Here is what she said: “You know I’m not sittin’ here as some little woman standin’ by my man like Tammy Wynette. I’m sittin’ here because I love him and I respect him and I honor what he has been through and what we’ve been through together.”¹² Bill was saved, but the reverberations of Hillary’s remark never fully died away from her public life.

This was a “make-or-break” moment for both of them. It was a “make” for Bill a “break” for Hillary. By accidentally telling the truth about herself, she and her ilk disrespected a lot of people.

Populists champion common sense over intellect. They advocate a “muscular” Christianity over effete intellectual snobbery. Nothing could be less surprising than Trump’s declaration of war on Harvard. The university is certainly not flawless; but it represents knowledge, inquiry, excellence, and above all truth. It represents everything that Trump dismisses.

To be successful in the United States, a populist must establish a charismatic bond with his followers. What differentiates the normal run of democratic politicians from populists is that the democrats “make representative claims in the form . . . of hypotheses that can be empirically disproven [by] the actual results of regular procedures and institutions like elections . . . . Populists, by contrast, will persist with their representative claim no matter what; because their claim is of a “moral” and symbolic – not an empirical nature, it cannot be disproven.”¹³

It is who Obama is, not because of what he did, that right- wingers hate him. By the same token, it is who Trump is, not because of what he does, that right-wingers love him. The New York Times reported that Trump was doing well among voters who were not following the news closely.¹⁴ What Trump was doing is less important than that he was doing it. Canadian scholar Marshall McLuhan said of Adolf Hitler that “his thoughts were a very little consequence.”¹⁵ The same can be said of Trump. The medium – the man himself – is the message.

There is no better illustration of the power of charisma then the following story. The scholar and diarist Victor Klemperer, a Jew who survived in Germany through the Nazi period, reported this incident after World War II was over. Germany had been pulverized into a heap of rubble. Millions of Germans had lost their lives. More millions had suffered life-altering injuries. Even more had lost every possession that they once called their own.

Klemperer encountered a former student who still supported Hitler. “I can’t deny it,” The former student said. “I believed in him.” To which Klemperer responded, “But you surely can’t still believe in him now; you can see what it all led to, and all of the regime’s atrocious crimes are now apparent for all to see.” A long pause in the conversation ensued. Then, the former student quietly said: “I accept all that. The others misunderstood him, betrayed him. But I still believe in HIM. I really do.”¹⁶

A Special Announcement

June 16 marks the 10^th anniversary of Trump’s ride down the escalator at his building in New York City to announce his candidacy for the Presidency. In the succeeding decade, he has become the most important American political figure since Franklin D. Roosevelt.

June 16 is an appropriate occasion to take stock of the Trump phenomenon. Two issues strike me as particularly salient.

1. What accounts for Trump’s rise to power?; and,

2. What do you think the course of American politics will be in the years to come?

I would like to hear from you on these issues, if you are interested in sharing your views. Please note, there is no need to write anything if you would rather not.

I can be reached at richardtedlow@me.com. Your name will not be mentioned in what I write, but the perspective you communicate will inform the content of the June 16 chapter on the Trump story.

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Let me express my gratitude to the readers of Dystopias and Demagogues for your engagement with this project.

1. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/

2. https://www.lse.ac.uk/ideas/Assets/Documents/updates/LSE-IDEAS-Understanding-Global-Rise-of-Populism.pdf

3. https://www.dictionary.com/browse/spectre

4. https://www.lse.ac.uk/ideas/Assets/Documents/updates/LSE-IDEAS-Understanding-Global-Rise-of-Populism.pdf

5. https://www.lse.ac.uk/ideas/Assets/Documents/updates/LSE-IDEAS-Understanding-Global-Rise-of-Populism.pdf

6. Christobal Rovira Kaltwasser, et al., The Oxford Handbook of Populism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017) p. 239.

7. Jan-Werner Müller, What Is Populism? (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) p. 33.

8. Müller, Populism,p. 21.

9. Müller, Populism,p. 23.

10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamala_is_for_they/them

11. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/07/us/politics/trump-win-election-harris.html

12. www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFBQ_uP4L54

13. Müller, Populism,pp. 38-39. The quotation around “moral” is added.

14. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/05/18/polls/trump-job-approval-news-attention.html?searchResultPosition=1

15. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: Gingko Press, 2013) p. 327.

16. Victor Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2025) pp. 121-122.