There’s always been a strain of populism in America with politicians promising to be the champions of the working class and the foes of those who exploit them. It has included a range of people from Andrew Jackson and William Jennings Bryan to Sarah Palin and George Wallace.  

Populism has often been fueled by economic and cultural grievances. It has opposed everything from immigration to pointy headed intellectuals. In the Gilded Age, economic populists took the side of exploited workers and painted their foes as tools of the robber barons. For many years that view remained the norm. Plutocratic donors favoring a GOP that they relied on to protect their wealth and power from populist-leaning Democrats.

Today’s Republican Party still seeks to protect the wealthy from regulation and taxation, but needs to appeal to a larger base. Thus, the motive for the Trumpist party’s faux populism which caters to cultural and economical grievances. It is often less interested in legislating than in denigrating.

Trump’s first inaugural address painted a bleak picture of a dystopian country. According to this vision of “American Carnage,” we are in decline with government overreaching at the expense of people who lost jobs, factories closing, poverty growing, streets full of gangs and  drug addicts, foreign competition sapping our strength, our military in decline, and our infrastructure rotting.

Ron DeSantis, a Trump Mini-Me is now campaigning in a similar vein, describing America as “in decline, militarily, culturally, and economically.” His cast of villains includes unwelcome Chinese imports, foreign immigrants, cultural elitists, and the woke who are ruining everything from education to Disneyland. Much of this is pretty rich coming from DeSantis. 

For starters the anti-immigrant xenophobia rings false from a guy named DeSantis, not exactly a fine old American Indian name. He also puts on a tough guy, blue collar act, but the dissing of the “elites” is a bit much coming from a graduate of Yale and Harvard Law School. If that doesn’t count as elite, what does?

Clearly he’s trying to work the same con as Trump. As the ambitious heir to the real estate fortune of a slum lord from Queen’s, Trump tried to join the big boys in Manhattan, but he was  too crude and crooked to be accepted in that more exalted realm. The magnates refused to regard him as anything but a sleazy parvenu. 

He found his audience in suckers for glittering towers, macho self-help books, and eventually his act as a billionaire on a TV game show that allowed him to say “you’re fired” to underperforming contestants. It was only a step from that to conning voters into imagining the showy mogul could run the country and be their savior. 

But as in the case of DeSantis, Trump was not interested in the traditional populist goal of improving the lives of his followers. Rather he was interested in endorsing their grievances. Instead of enacting policies that would improve their lot, he exploited them with endless appeals for more contributions, rather like a televangelist. He sought to turn his reign into an autocracy by promising his disciples: “I am your justice. I am your retribution.”

This faux populism is a far cry from the older version that aimed to repair flaws in an economic system that favored the few and to improve the lot of the many. The Trump/DeSantis version seeks to exploit the anger, resentment, and disappointment of people who feel overlooked and left behind. It seeks not to make their lives better, but to promise to help them get even with those they blame. 

We saw what that sort of rage populism looks like in the Jan. 6 insurrection. It looks the replacement of democracy with anarchy. Those who fall for this version of populism are led not just to believe government is rigged against them but ought to be rejiggered to discriminate against anyone of a party, race, religion, or ideology they disagree with.