What we must recognize is that, in many ways, the configuration of the white working class, like that of the populism often associated with it, is very much the product of a particular political moment, one made possible by the transformation of the global economy over the past half- century. Declining industrial employment, stagnating wages, the dramatic weakening of large private-sector unions—all results of new economic forces and a relentless offensive on the part of manufacturers and financiers—ended the historic compromise that industrial workers struck after World War II. At the same time, the Democratic Party, like its Labour counterpart in Britain, moved to the center and also helped to undermine the material conditions and political leverage these workers had achieved. The “white working class” and contemporary “populism,” then, are expressions less of an emerging social and political landscape than of the contempt with which leaders in both center-right and center-left parties regard those who have lost ground in the last several decades and are now seeking outlets for their anger. (This is where Isenberg’s book has much to teach us.)
Angry whites have certainly earned some of that contempt. The far right has played to their fantasies of a world restored and to their fears of those who could be blamed for destroying it, and many white Americans have bought into this explanation, sometimes becoming shock troops of reaction, particularly when alternative options have been marginalized. But as was true with Vance’s grandmother, the political dispositions of those who have taken it on the chin in the new global economy are by no means set or easily shoehorned into the category of right-wing or left-wing populism. They can, as Gest shows, make any one of several political moves: They can take their fight into the established parties; they can withdraw from active participation in politics; or they can veer to the right, aiming to disrupt the political system they believe has failed them. “Populism” is meant to stand in for the last of these choices, when anger among the humbled and poorly educated threatens to rupture the political sphere. This populism has no program—indeed, it rarely even calls itself “populist”—but is instead the embodied rage, often awash in conspiracy theories, of those who detest the establishment and their clients and who imagine they can retrieve a world they have already lost.
Yet it is worth recalling that in the late 19th century, amid the extravagances of the Gilded Age, there was a different sort of populism that emerged: a Populist movement and party that challenged the rule of those they called “robber barons” in order to readjust the balance of economic and political power to the benefit of “producers”—workers and small farmers. The Populists of this era—and they were willing to call themselves “populists”—had their share of warts; some traded in racism and xenophobia. But they had an analysis of how political power and the distribution of wealth reinforced each other, and they developed a program—based on public control of the money supply, the nationalization of the means of transportation and communication, and cooperative exchanges—that aimed to rein in competition, exploitation, and corruption, and to make the industrial transformation of American society more democratic. Some also sought to extend their hands to potential allies across the lines of race, ethnicity, and region—at times with impressive results.
In the embers of their defeat, these Populists left a legacy of social-democratic thinking and activity that would influence the left wing of American progressivism, early 20th-century socialism (which was particularly robust in many Populist hotbeds like Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas), and the New Deal era of the 1930s. How we got from there to the populism of today, and from the producers of the Gilded Age to the white working class of the moment, holds the key to understanding our current dilemma. It might also allow us to better navigate our future and devise the social policies that can energize a new popular movement.