The words populism and populist have no simple, coherent meaning. But that doesn’t mean we can’t understand in coherent and relatively simple terms how and why they have emerged now, as key words of our moment. The word Populist first appeared in 1891, as the proper name of a dynamic movement launched by farmers and workers in the Midwestern and Southern United States. They set out to challenge the control of corporate capitalists over their lives. Although the party faded within a decade, the words populism and populist have endured.
No one is more responsible for shaping the way we understand populism than the influential historian Richard Hofstadter, and when influential scholars err, that error can flourish. Writing during the early years of the Cold War, Hofstadter argued in The Age of Reform (1955) that members of the late 19th-century Populist Party were not small farmers losing their grip on independence. Instead, they were aspiring capitalists who, reeling from their loss in status, gave expression to their reactionary political concerns in backward, anti-Semitic and anti-modern ways. Hofstadter was writing at the height of the anti-communist crusade of the US senator Joseph McCarthy, and it’s easy now to see him trying, through his rendering of the Populists, to understand Americans who supported McCarthyism.
By the 1970s, spurred in part by criticism from the historian C Vann Woodward, Hofstadter conceded that he had created more of a caricature than a historical interpretation of the Populists. Nevertheless, the cavalier and at times derogatory use of populist has endured and adapted to describe everything from the tough-talking anti-integrationist politics of the Alabama governor George Wallace to the inclusive, broad-based appeal of the former president Barack Obama.