How Closely Does the Classical Populism of the Tyrannoi Rhyme with Contemporary Populist "Demagoguery" Anyway?

My time machine is defective: I attempt this weekend to escape to the mid-1800s and to the centuries before -490, and find myself back at today...

My time machine is defective: I attempt this weekend to escape to the mid-1800s and to the centuries before -490, and find myself back at today...

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Sometimes students ask me, apropos of my colleague Barry Eichengreen, “how does he know so much?”

Sometimes I respond by claiming that Barry actually lives in the post-1871 pre-1939 era after the Franco-Prussian War and before World War II, the era of the rise and fall of the classical gold standard; and visits contemporary Berkeley to attend seminars and teach classes via time machine.

Right now I really, really wish that this were not my home era.

The problem is that no matter where and when I go, I find today’s issues looming up before me to trouble me, for as Samuel Clemens never said, history does rhyme.

This morning I was happily revising my standard lecture on the political economy of the poleis of classical Hellenic antiquity and the transformation from their being ruled by aristocratic-oligarchic clan networks to more formalized and constitutionalized and—occasionally—democratic governance. I came to the part about the role of the tyrannoi in decentering clan-kinship (whether actual or fictional) and patron-client loyalty and hierarchy networks. And then George Grim’s report from the Trump rally in Allentown, Pennsylvania intruded itself on my mind:

George Grim: ‘Being in the crowd… only gives me pessimism… [about] anyone… changing their mind…. Not there for… policy…. No matter what Trump said, it was either a loud cheer or loud boo. At one point Trump was talking about the estate tax and when he concluded with the wrong statement that Kamala wanted to get rid of it, they still cheered…. It was obvious… the campaign was playing damage control. Allentown… a large Puerto Rican community… 3 or 4 speakers… tried to portray Trump as a great friend to PR. I could only laugh to myself as Marco Rubio praised Trump and emphasized his interest in diversity and joy and how hateful Harris's campaign is. Curiously, I would not call it a diverse crowd, especially in a majority Hispanic city… <https://ryangrim.substack.com/p/my-dad-went-to-last-nights-trump>

“Not there for policy”—that still strikes me as really weird. What if not make policy does a president do?

Trump is called a “populist”. But Earlier “populists”—whether William Jennings Bryan, Andrew Jackson, Romans C. Iulius Cæsar, L. Sergius Catalina, and C. and T. Sempronius Gracchus, or indeed the original five Kypselos of Korinthos, Pheidon of Argos, Kleisthenes of Sikyon, Theagenes of Megara, or Peisistratos of the Athenai—had strong coherence between their followings and their policies. Originally: abolish the debts and redistribute the land. In the case of William Jennings Bryan and company: free silver, capping railroad freight rates, farm collectives, and antitrust. They are populists: not fascists. Populists serve and advocate for the people: “there go my people, and I must follow them for I am their leader”.

There is an alternative people- rather than oligarchy-based political movement. But it doesn’t pursue policies that give people what they know and want. Instead, it promises to protect a fearful people by leading them in a unified direction—by telling people what to do. That is the line we call fascism. In that line are figures more like Alkibiades of the Athenai, Augusto Pinochet, Francisco Franco, Benito Mussolini—and, yes, Adolf Hitler. They are selling a combination of fear, greed, and hatred: here are your enemies who want to enslave you, and I will defend you plus help you to take all of their stuff if you follow me—plus I will make them lament that they were ever born.

Admittedly, I am finding two figures especially hard to classify:

• Louis Bonaparte, who became Emperor Napoleon III of France, ruled 1848-180.

• Andrew Jackson, president 1828-1836.

In the case of Andrew Jackson, he was rallying frontiersmen—“the hunters of Kentucky”—and offering protection against Amerindians, armed by a Britain potentially controlling the Great Lakes and the Mississippi, burning out settlers and penning the US east of the Appalachians, plus also protecting you from the iron quadrangle of Amerindians who had snuck their way into getting land titles, land speculators, Philadelphia financiers, and corrupt politicians either disunionist or British-affiliated. But he was also selling hatred—of Amerindians, of Nicholas Biddle, of the British, of Henry Clay, of John Quincy Adams, and most of all of John C. Calhoun. And aside from stealing the land of the Amerindians, he did not do much to actually improve the lives of his supporters. But he did make, or at least try to make, those he hated pay.

I do wonder how today’s view of Jackson would be different if he had hated disunionist John C. Calhoun less. Without that, would Jackson have taken on his unionist role in squelching South Carolina tariff-law nullification which has led historians to see him as prefiguring Abraham Lincoln? The South Carolina nullificationists had a case. The South Carolina legislature claimed that it could apply the constitution and nullify the unconstitutional Tariff of Abominations within its borders, and thus for the Port of Charleston. Why? Because the constitution gave congress power to levy tariffs to raise revenue but not to levy tariffs to enrich New England factory owners. And hatred-driven Andrew Jackson had no love for New England factory owners.

And then I think that the biggest reason hated John C. Calhoun was that Calhoun’s wife Floride Bonneau Calhoun scorned Secretary of War John Henry Eaton’s wife Peggy O’Neale Timberlake Eaton and ostracized her as not much better than a common whore. And I think of Henry Clay’s and John Quincy Adams’s attacks on Andrew Jackson for having contracted a bigamous marriage with “Aunt” Rachel Donelson Robards Jackson. That the attacks were true, and that Aunt Rachel died two and a half months before Jackson became president, greatly reïnforced Jackson’s sympathy for Peggy Eaton and his hatred for those who scorned her.

Butterly wings, mathematical chaos, and history...

In the case of Louis Bonaparte, he was going to protect the good working people of France against both the socialist Parisian mob and the revanchist Old Régime Bourbon-royalist aristocracy. But he was also building railroads, canals, and ports while modernizing agriculture and the cities of France, plus restoring France’s international position by producing domestic stability that would then allow the enlarging of France’s empire beyond and of France’s influence within Europe. And while Karl Marx and the Rothschilds agreed on nothing else, they agreed that Louis Bonaparte was as unqualified to be the decider on issues of economic and foreign policy as… as… as… Donald Trump.

I mark that all of the plutocrats at the Al Smith dinner made sure to laugh long and loud at all of Trump’s jokes. And I still do not know whether Bob Lighthizer actually persuaded Trump that there were significant differences between NAFTA and the USMCTA or not, or whether Trump knows that there were no big differences but just knows that neither his supporters nor the American press corps care, and that the first are happy to believe and the second happy to “report” that Trump got rid of NAFTA.

Let me reset my time machine, and disappear again…

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