Forget Hitler: Trump Is the New William Jennings Bryan
(AP)
Pundits and academics toyed for a while with branding Donald Trump with the scarlet H – warning of his rise as a replay of the fall of Weimar Germany and the emergence of Adolf Hitler. Trump’s suggestions that the government surveil mosques, deport undocumented Mexicans and prevent Muslims from entering the U.S. was originally hailed as more Nazi than American, until we reflected on the pervasiveness of NSA surveillance, the treatment of Japanese-Americans during World War II and the mass deportations of Operation Wetback in 1954. Indeed, there are enough examples of such Trumpisms in the American tradition for comparisons of demagoguery without having to conjure up Hitler.
Consider William Jennings Bryan, who captured the Democratic presidential nomination 120 years ago in 1896. He made a name for himself as a journalist (both before and after serving as a member of the House of Representatives) and importantly as an orator who toured the country to speak to populist groups and agitate for the abandonment of the gold standard and the adoption of a silver-based currency. In his appeal to lowbrow tastes, his ability to turn politics into popular entertainment and his willingness to play to prejudice against judgment, Bryan was closer to a modern-day reality TV star than Trump is to Hitler.
[WATCH: After Super Tuesday, the Show Goes On]
To secure the nomination, Bryan applied the same rhetorical style that he had honed in prairie schoolhouses and southern convention halls – a popular forum that had been all but ignored by party elites, but through which he generated a “silent majority” that struck the establishment by surprise in 1896. Trump has no "Mein Kampf" equivalent, no brooding period of party-building and street-fighting thuggery. But like Bryan, he does have a long history of drawing audiences in the private sphere, an ear for the common tongue and an ability to paint complex problems in blindingly simple terms. Like Bryan, Trump is happy to play to paranoid impulses and vague conspiracies.
Among the most popular tools of the Bryan campaign were a series of ill-informed and wildly popular pamphlets featuring a young boy who lectured bankers on the intricacies of global finance. Witty, anti-Semitic and grossly simplistic, they reassured voters that there were solutions to America’s economic woes – solutions so clear that a child could see them. Like Trump, Bryan appealed to what he deemed to be common sense and warned his listeners that anyone preaching moderation only intended to keep the common man in the dark. Bryan’s affinity for religious imagery appears to have been grounded in something deeper than Trump’s clumsy efforts. When he opposed the teaching of evolution in Tennessee schools (nearly 20 years after his first nomination), it was a sensational appeal to the masses but also a sincere application of Bryan’s faith. The differences between them are much more matters of substance than of style.
Fifteen Democratic candidates received votes for the nomination at the 1896 convention, including six governors, five senators and the sitting vice president of the United States. They never overcame their interpersonal opposition to present a united front against Bryan, a former two-term representative and newspaper editor. Indeed, they hardly considered Bryan a serious contender until the convention met and he delivered his famous “Cross of Gold” speech decrying the gold standard and calling Democrats to an apocalyptic battle against the "Eastern Elites" who dominated both parties. “The warmest ties of love and acquaintance and association have been disregarded,” he warned, signaling his contempt for the party establishment, “old leaders have been cast aside when they refused to give expression to the sentiments of those whom they would lead, and new leaders have sprung up to give direction to this cause of freedom.”
The elevation of Bryan had long-term implications for his party. His predecessor as Democratic nominee, President Grover Cleveland, had made his career following a formula of running on reform principles and governing pragmatically. After 1896, Cleveland was a man without a party. He refused to support Bryan and retired in despair when Republican nominee William McKinley trounced Bryan and set up the GOP for a thirty-year period of dominance. Indeed, one reason Cleveland – a political giant of his day who won the popular vote three times but was only elected to the presidency twice – is so little remembered today is that Bryan’s nomination drove the Cleveland Democrats from the party, limiting their long-term impact.
[READ: The Most Hated Candidate]
During that period, the run-up to the Progressive Era, Republican policy so completely dominated the agenda that it became the home not only of the traditional northeastern party base, but also moderates in the Midwest and West. Democrats had sought to build a national majority with just such voters under Cleveland in the 1880s and 90s, but as the newly-energized Bryan base of the Democratic Party filled the vacuum left by the Clevelandites, they increasingly negated such a strategy.
But Bryan remained the master of what was left of the Democratic Party, despite the clear flaws in his candidacy and his isolation from the party’s establishment – particularly from its traditional major donors, nearly all of whom abandoned the party after 1896. He went on to attain the Democratic nomination in 1900 and 1904. Only Henry Clay was nominated for the presidency so many times after losing it in a general election.
Some secondary effects occurred from the Democratic catastrophe of the 19th century. Political scientist Walter Dean Burnham, in an influential 1965 article titled “The Changing Shape of the American Political Universe,” observed that the realignment of 1896 had broader effects on the practice of American democracy. Because the Republican Party’s electoral dominance was so secure during the Bryan period, incentives for mass mobilization were relaxed and turnout decreased significantly. As Burnham argued: “it is difficult to avoid the impression that while all the forms of political democracy were more or less scrupulously preserved, the functional result of the "system of 1896" was the conversion of a fairly democratic regime into a rather broadly based oligarchy.”
Burnham argued that this was an oligarchy that served the industrial capitalist order that Republicans had been advancing over the previous generation. Once both urban workers and capitalist elites abandoned the Democratic Party to Bryan, effective opposition to the Republicans’ pro-business policy agenda vanished. Thus “this realignment brought victory beyond expectation to those who had sought to find some way of insulating American elites from mass pressures without formally disrupting the pre-existing democratic-pluralist political structure, without violence and without conspiracy.”
[PHOTOS: The Big Picture – February 2016]
It is easy to imagine the emergence of an analogous situation under a Republican collapse today, even if it is one with different policy objectives. In fact, if you look at a map of the 1896 electoral college results demonstrating Bryan’s loss, you’re looking at the basic parameters of a Trump loss (with some give and take around the edges, particularly Washington, Virginia and Florida). The maps for 1900, 1904 and 1908 are even more likely parallels to what a long-term Trump dominance of the Republican Party would do to the electoral map. During those years, the base of Bryan’s party shrunk into irrelevance. During that time, voter participation declined by 14 percent.
If the Republicans of 2016 go the direction Democrats went with Bryan in 1896, it could mean years of wandering in the wilderness. We might look toward such a proposition with hope that the polarized politics of the past fifteen years would at last be broken. But we should also be warned of a democratic deficit, in which the incentives to mobilize in support of Democratic politics would wither along with the possibility of real party competition.
http://www.usnews.com/news/the-repo...itler-trump-is-the-new-william-jennings-bryan
(AP)
Pundits and academics toyed for a while with branding Donald Trump with the scarlet H – warning of his rise as a replay of the fall of Weimar Germany and the emergence of Adolf Hitler. Trump’s suggestions that the government surveil mosques, deport undocumented Mexicans and prevent Muslims from entering the U.S. was originally hailed as more Nazi than American, until we reflected on the pervasiveness of NSA surveillance, the treatment of Japanese-Americans during World War II and the mass deportations of Operation Wetback in 1954. Indeed, there are enough examples of such Trumpisms in the American tradition for comparisons of demagoguery without having to conjure up Hitler.
Consider William Jennings Bryan, who captured the Democratic presidential nomination 120 years ago in 1896. He made a name for himself as a journalist (both before and after serving as a member of the House of Representatives) and importantly as an orator who toured the country to speak to populist groups and agitate for the abandonment of the gold standard and the adoption of a silver-based currency. In his appeal to lowbrow tastes, his ability to turn politics into popular entertainment and his willingness to play to prejudice against judgment, Bryan was closer to a modern-day reality TV star than Trump is to Hitler.
[WATCH: After Super Tuesday, the Show Goes On]
To secure the nomination, Bryan applied the same rhetorical style that he had honed in prairie schoolhouses and southern convention halls – a popular forum that had been all but ignored by party elites, but through which he generated a “silent majority” that struck the establishment by surprise in 1896. Trump has no "Mein Kampf" equivalent, no brooding period of party-building and street-fighting thuggery. But like Bryan, he does have a long history of drawing audiences in the private sphere, an ear for the common tongue and an ability to paint complex problems in blindingly simple terms. Like Bryan, Trump is happy to play to paranoid impulses and vague conspiracies.
Among the most popular tools of the Bryan campaign were a series of ill-informed and wildly popular pamphlets featuring a young boy who lectured bankers on the intricacies of global finance. Witty, anti-Semitic and grossly simplistic, they reassured voters that there were solutions to America’s economic woes – solutions so clear that a child could see them. Like Trump, Bryan appealed to what he deemed to be common sense and warned his listeners that anyone preaching moderation only intended to keep the common man in the dark. Bryan’s affinity for religious imagery appears to have been grounded in something deeper than Trump’s clumsy efforts. When he opposed the teaching of evolution in Tennessee schools (nearly 20 years after his first nomination), it was a sensational appeal to the masses but also a sincere application of Bryan’s faith. The differences between them are much more matters of substance than of style.
Fifteen Democratic candidates received votes for the nomination at the 1896 convention, including six governors, five senators and the sitting vice president of the United States. They never overcame their interpersonal opposition to present a united front against Bryan, a former two-term representative and newspaper editor. Indeed, they hardly considered Bryan a serious contender until the convention met and he delivered his famous “Cross of Gold” speech decrying the gold standard and calling Democrats to an apocalyptic battle against the "Eastern Elites" who dominated both parties. “The warmest ties of love and acquaintance and association have been disregarded,” he warned, signaling his contempt for the party establishment, “old leaders have been cast aside when they refused to give expression to the sentiments of those whom they would lead, and new leaders have sprung up to give direction to this cause of freedom.”
The elevation of Bryan had long-term implications for his party. His predecessor as Democratic nominee, President Grover Cleveland, had made his career following a formula of running on reform principles and governing pragmatically. After 1896, Cleveland was a man without a party. He refused to support Bryan and retired in despair when Republican nominee William McKinley trounced Bryan and set up the GOP for a thirty-year period of dominance. Indeed, one reason Cleveland – a political giant of his day who won the popular vote three times but was only elected to the presidency twice – is so little remembered today is that Bryan’s nomination drove the Cleveland Democrats from the party, limiting their long-term impact.
[READ: The Most Hated Candidate]
During that period, the run-up to the Progressive Era, Republican policy so completely dominated the agenda that it became the home not only of the traditional northeastern party base, but also moderates in the Midwest and West. Democrats had sought to build a national majority with just such voters under Cleveland in the 1880s and 90s, but as the newly-energized Bryan base of the Democratic Party filled the vacuum left by the Clevelandites, they increasingly negated such a strategy.
But Bryan remained the master of what was left of the Democratic Party, despite the clear flaws in his candidacy and his isolation from the party’s establishment – particularly from its traditional major donors, nearly all of whom abandoned the party after 1896. He went on to attain the Democratic nomination in 1900 and 1904. Only Henry Clay was nominated for the presidency so many times after losing it in a general election.
Some secondary effects occurred from the Democratic catastrophe of the 19th century. Political scientist Walter Dean Burnham, in an influential 1965 article titled “The Changing Shape of the American Political Universe,” observed that the realignment of 1896 had broader effects on the practice of American democracy. Because the Republican Party’s electoral dominance was so secure during the Bryan period, incentives for mass mobilization were relaxed and turnout decreased significantly. As Burnham argued: “it is difficult to avoid the impression that while all the forms of political democracy were more or less scrupulously preserved, the functional result of the "system of 1896" was the conversion of a fairly democratic regime into a rather broadly based oligarchy.”
Burnham argued that this was an oligarchy that served the industrial capitalist order that Republicans had been advancing over the previous generation. Once both urban workers and capitalist elites abandoned the Democratic Party to Bryan, effective opposition to the Republicans’ pro-business policy agenda vanished. Thus “this realignment brought victory beyond expectation to those who had sought to find some way of insulating American elites from mass pressures without formally disrupting the pre-existing democratic-pluralist political structure, without violence and without conspiracy.”
[PHOTOS: The Big Picture – February 2016]
It is easy to imagine the emergence of an analogous situation under a Republican collapse today, even if it is one with different policy objectives. In fact, if you look at a map of the 1896 electoral college results demonstrating Bryan’s loss, you’re looking at the basic parameters of a Trump loss (with some give and take around the edges, particularly Washington, Virginia and Florida). The maps for 1900, 1904 and 1908 are even more likely parallels to what a long-term Trump dominance of the Republican Party would do to the electoral map. During those years, the base of Bryan’s party shrunk into irrelevance. During that time, voter participation declined by 14 percent.
If the Republicans of 2016 go the direction Democrats went with Bryan in 1896, it could mean years of wandering in the wilderness. We might look toward such a proposition with hope that the polarized politics of the past fifteen years would at last be broken. But we should also be warned of a democratic deficit, in which the incentives to mobilize in support of Democratic politics would wither along with the possibility of real party competition.
http://www.usnews.com/news/the-repo...itler-trump-is-the-new-william-jennings-bryan