The Deep Lowdown, Issue #1: What Is Populism?

The debut issue of our new long-form series

Jul 11, 2025

In this issue:

What is populism?
Why do some people call right-wing extremists “populists?”
History lesson: The rise of populism in America
Extra credit: How populism became wrongly associated with racism, demagoguery and more
Conclusion
Further reading
Download a printable PDF of this issue
Extra, extra credit: Some words for Hightower from Lawrence Goodwyn in 1977

When we were considering the topics available to us for the debut of the The Deep Lowdown, we certainly weren’t lacking choices—and your suggestions offered even more options into what we might consider for these new, more expansive articles. The breadth of bullshit that’s out there gives us an unfortunate pile of source material! But that wide selection made us take a step back and examine what those challenges fundamentally have in common, and that returned us to Hightower’s lifelong organizing principle: too few people control too much of the money and power, and they’re using that control to grab more money and power from the rest of us. That principle is the foundation for the set of values that comprise, and movement that is, populism.

So we’re kicking off The Deep Lowdown by sharing our vision of populism: we’ll define it for the work we face today, we’ll share the historical context of its evolution, we’ll grapple with the elements its history that sullied its good name, we’ll show why it remains a politically powerful identity, and we’ll suggest that it’s the connective tissue that supports and coheres all the different issues and causes championed by progressives and small-d democrats. Because, as we see more and more people identifying as real populists, we want to celebrate the movement and welcome everyone in.

What is populism?

Thanks to the devolution of understanding its meaning over the last 80+ years, it’s tempting to start this conversation by sharing what populism is not. Every time someone calls Trump or Marjorie Taylor Greene or, God help us, JD Vance a “populist,” Woody Guthrie rolls over in his grave. But defining anything by saying what it isn’t would also make our high school English teachers roll over in their graves. So let’s start with what it is, and what it means to us.

Populism is, at its core, the movement to create more power for everyday people and the Common Good, and to fight against those who currently withhold that power from us. Specifically in the United States, those in power are often moneyed elites and corporate titans who continually seek to exploit and steal from folks just trying to survive. The whole point of populism is to overhaul the economics that currently benefit the greedy few while the masses suffer.

Economics systems are also unfairly structured to place common folk at a disadvantage according to different facets of identities, so we also define populism to include the fights for basic human rights, inclusive of (not regardless of!) race, gender identities, sexuality, abilities, religion and every other possible characteristic that makes us diverse human beings. We bring our identities with us to the table every day—populism does not tell folks that their allegiance to a movement or party has to come before their identity to achieve our collective dreams. Populism today acknowledges and reckons with the fact that the American experiment has for too long relied heavily on the exploitation of labor from Black people, women, immigrants and more. Real populists work to dismantle these divisions and to create a future where everyone’s participation is welcomed and celebrated.

Everybody does better, when everybody does better.
— W. F. Hightower, Jim’s dad

Why do people call right-wing extremists “populists,” then?

If we had a nickel for every time we heard this!

Part of this is historical, which we’ll get into in more detail in the extra credit (below)—but the main takeaway is a tale as old as time. Basically, when poor white farmers in the South started to collaborate with the poor Black farmers to address how badly everyone was getting screwed by the economics, the conservative elite (at that time, Democrats) felt wildly threatened. They sowed racism, xenophobia and nativism into everything they did, creating deep mistrust within that new alliance, and the Populist Party tanked right along with that radical collaboration. We see the same tactics used today: when the economics are screwing all of us, right-wingers tell us that it’s immigrants' fault, that trans people are harming communities, that Black folks are getting unfair advantages. That’s not populism!

Centers of power, economic and otherwise, fear populism because they know and fear the true power that emerges when people work together and embrace differences. Thus, we see a lot of misuse of “populism” in academia and media, in particular: when we say we’re anti-elitist, they hear “anti-intellectual.” Egads, they cry, the mob is after us! We are not after them, actually, but we sure wish they’d climb down out of their ivory towers and have an occasional non-condescending beer with us all. No populist begrudges people for getting educated or making good money; we begrudge people who talk down to those of us who don’t have their level of education and income.

Thus, those centers of power—think tanks, mainstream academics, the DC consultant-class—use “populist” incorrectly to conjure up this idea that mobs of mindless Americans are running amok, attacking anything that threatens their liberal notions of How Things Just Are. And we’re talking about the classic liberalism that wholly embraces charity as the solution to all societal ills—”helping” the “less fortunate”—versus changing the systems that created such extreme disparities in the first place. This is the liberalism of, in its most recent iteration, the Clinton-style Democrats, for example: talking about representing everyone, but ultimately caving to corporate desires and whims.

When right-wingers use the culture wars to rally their loudest and most extremist members to their side, classical liberal power centers like academia and media—often operating at the behest of corporate and moneyed interests—try to beat them back with their pearl-clutching gasps of “populist!” in an effort to dismiss these often racist and everything-phobic loudmouths as uninformed chumps. Instead of recognizing that our systems of power and money have flaws going to the roots, and working on changing that, they ignore the very real issues that allowed those people to be so easily riled: the abandonment of us regular folks, of all identities, by the corporate political class. And right-wingers don’t care, because their own moneyed interests will be preserved and strengthened if they achieve their goal of eliminating the diversity that is America’s strength.

This is where real populism presents us with a golden opportunity: while we’re not interested in reaching out to Stephen-Miller-style fascists, we are interested in extending a hand to the workaday people out there who feel abandoned (ideologically and often literally) by mainstream politics. Populism has the strength to address economic fears while refusing to throw anyone under the bus for the sake of an extra vote or two. With populism, we name the real villain: corporate and Wall Street power interwoven within a rigged political system designed to extract as much as possible out of each human being and resource the planet has, with as few limitations as they can get away with. Populism doesn’t tell us to ignore racial inequity or trans people’s human rights for the sake of talking about economics; populism says, “We’re in this together, no matter what.”

History lesson: The rise of populism in America

One of the things we find most helpful when we’re faced with the challenges of modern politics is looking at what our predecessors faced. When we do, it can be tempting to throw up our hands and say, “Wait, are we doing this all AGAIN?!” But when we start to look at progress as an iterating evolution and not one-and-done moments in time, things begin to make more sense. Our movement histories give us grounding: learning about what worked and what didn’t can help us feel less uniquely alone and despairing.

Hightower wrote a brilliant short history of populism for the Lowdown back in 2009, and we’re including it here for your enjoyment.

Not only is American populism a powerful and vibrant idea, but it also has a phenomenal history that has largely been hidden from our people. The Powers That Be are not keen to promote the story of a mass movement that did—and still could—challenge the corporate structure. Thus, the rich history of this grassroots force, which first arose in the late 1870s, tends to be ignored entirely or trivialized as a quirky pitchfork rebellion by rubes and racists who had some arcane quibble involving the free coinage of silver.

The true portrait of populism is rarely on public display. History teachers usually hustle students right past this unique moment in the evolution of our democracy. You never see a movie or a television presentation about the movement’s innovative thinkers, powerful orators, and dramatic events. National museums offer no exhibits of its stunning inventions and accomplishments. And there is no “populist trail of history” winding through the various states in which farmers and workers created the People’s Party (also known as the Populist Party), reshaped the national political debate, forced progressive reforms, delivered a million votes (and four states) to the party’s 1892 presidential candidate, and elected 10 populist governors, six U.S. senators, and three dozen House members.

This was a serious, thoughtful, determined effort by hundreds of thousands of common folks to do something uncommon: organize themselves so—collectively and cooperatively—they could remake both commerce and government to serve the common good rather than the selfish interests of the barons of industry and finance.

While the big media of that day portrayed the movement as an incoherent bunch of conspiracy-minded bumpkins, the populists were in fact guided by a sophisticated network of big thinkers, organizers, and communicators who had a thorough grasp of exactly how the system worked and why. Most significantly, they were problem solvers—their aim was not protest, but to provide real mechanisms that could decentralize and democratize power in our country. The movement was able to rally a huge following of hard-scrabble farmers and put-upon workers because it did not pussyfoot around. Its leaders dared to go right at the core problem of an overreaching corporate state controlled by robber barons. Populist organizers spoke bluntly about the need to restructure the corporate system that was undermining America’s democratic promise.

“Wall Street owns the country,” declared Mary Elizabeth Lease at an 1890 populist convention in Topeka, Kansas. A powerhouse orator who took to the stump and wowed crowds at a time women were not even allowed to vote, Lease laid out a message her audiences knew to be true, for they were living what she was so colorfully describing. “It’s no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street,” she roared. “Our laws are the output of a system which clothes rascals in robes and honesty in rags…The people are at bay, let the bloodhounds of money who have dogged us beware.”

These populist voices tapped directly into people’s anger. But, still, how could common farmers and laborers—largely impoverished and powerless folks—possibly take on Wall Street, the railroad cartels, corporate trusts, and lobbyists, as well as the politicians that these powers owned? Well, even the smallest dog can lift its leg on the tallest building, and—after all sorts of starts-and-stops—populists found five ways to organize the movement and make their mark.

ECONOMIC. In 1877, before populism even had a name, it had a mission, which was to do something—anything—about the spreading economic plight of farmers all over the country. They faced not only the usual disasters of weather and bugs, but also the unnatural disasters of rampant gouging by bankers, crop-lien merchants, commodity combines, railroad monopolies, and others. Government was worse than unresponsive; it sided with the gougers.

An economic alternative was needed, and it came out of Texas. Known as the Farmers Alliance, it created a network of cooperative enterprises that could both buy supplies for farmers in bulk and pool their crops to sell in bulk, bypassing the monopolists, getting better prices, and giving farmers a modicum of control over their destinies. It was an idea that worked.

The first Texas Alliance quickly spawned 2,000 sub-alliances around the state with a total of 100,000 members. Alliances were soon being formed throughout the South, in all of the Plains states, in the upper Midwest, and all across the West to California, bringing more than a million farmers into a common economy. This was a vast, multi-sectional structure of radical economic reform, creating a new possibility that its leaders called a “cooperative commonwealth.”

CULTURAL. The Alliance gave the movement a solid structure, as well as essential credibility, through its delivery of tangible benefits to members. But it also created something much larger and more important: the means for ordinary people to learn what a democratic culture really is and to implement a vision of an alternative way to live.

These were working-class families of very modest means. They had little formal education, lived in isolated communities, and were treated as nobodies by the influentials who ran things. But—whoa!—now these outcasts were running something, and they mattered, both individually and as a group.

It was transformative for them. Lawrence Goodwyn, author of Democratic Promise, the definitive book on the populist phenomenon, sees this cultural awakening as the key triumph of the Alliance: “[The cooperative experience] imparted a sense of self worth to individual people and provided them with the instruments of self-education about the world they lived in. The movement gave them hope—a shared hope—that they were not impersonal victims of a gigantic industrial engine ruled by others but that they were, instead, people who could perform specific political acts of self-determination.”

It was not all about business, either. Parades of farm wagons and colorful floats, day-long picnics, brass bands, song fests (Mary Elizabeth Lease was a renowned singer, as well as an orator), dances, poetry, and other social/cultural events enlivened and deepened the Alliance community, creating what Goodwyn calls a “mass folk movement.” In addition, the Alliance ran a massive grassroots education program throughout rural America, providing everything from literature networks to adult-ed classes.

“[We seek] such legislation as shall secure to our people freedom from the onerous and shameful abuses that the industrial classes are now suffering at the hands of arrogant capitalists and powerful corporations.”
—Farmer delegate at the Cleburne Convention of the Farmers Alliance in 1886

MEDIA. To stay connected and provide a steady flow of energy, the movement relied on a concerted program of education and communication—not only to enlighten and invigorate its widely dispersed members, but also to bring in new recruits. This required the Alliance to create its own media, for the establishment outlets offered only scorn and ridicule for the populist cause.

Books, over a thousand populist magazines, newspapers, and hundreds of popular songs and poems flowed from the movement. The communication lynchpin, however, was the Alliance Lecture Bureau, a stable of trained, articulate speakers—40,000 strong!—who regularly traversed the country from New York to California, bringing information, insight, and inspiration to all corners of Populist Nation. Goodwyn notes that this amazing system of reliable messengers was “the most massive organizing drive by any citizen institution of nineteenth century America.”

COALITIONS. Though it created serious tensions in various Alliance chapters, the movement kept trying to broaden its base by joining hands with other groups that were also confronting corporate power. Early on, its leaders reached out to the emerging labor movement. While there were Alliance leaders who thought of farmers as Jeffersonian, small-scale capitalists, many others (and many more rank-and-file members) viewed farmers essentially as working stiffs battling the same robber barons that labor was confronting. In 1885, the Knights of Labor were on strike against two companies in Texas, and several county alliances in that state voted to boycott the companies. This stand was a defining moment for the Alliance, for it heralded the co-op movement’s shift into a more radical political phase.

By 1892, the Alliance’s political arm, the Populist Party, fully embraced the relationship with industrial workers. Ignatius Donnelly of Minnesota electrified the national delegates to the party convention that year with a speech pointing directly to a shared cause with the union movement: “The urban workmen are denied the right of organization for self-protection; imported pauperized labor beats down their wages; a hireling standing army, unrecognized by our laws, is established to shoot them down….The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes….From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed two great classes-paupers and millionaires.”

An even tougher match-up for the leadership was with black farmers, who had organized their own Colored Farmers National Alliance with about a million members. Aside from the obvious barrier that entrenched racism presented to this possible coalition, there was another degree of separation: white Alliance members tended to be farm owners (albeit heavily-mortgaged owners), and black Alliance members were mostly field hands, renters, or sharecroppers. Yet, there was such a strong feeling of a shared fight that real and successful efforts were made to join together.

In A People’s History of the United States, author Howard Zinn writes, “When the Texas People’s Party was founded in Dallas in the summer of 1891, it was interracial and radical.” A white leader at that meeting demanded that each district in the state include a black delegate, pointing out that, “They are in the ditch just like we are.” Two black Alliance members were then elected to the party’s executive committee. Alliances in Arkansas, Georgia, and North Carolina also made notable advances in interracial actions, and eminent historian C. Vann Woodward has said flatly that, “Never before or since have the two races in the South come so close together as they did during the Populist struggles.”

The Alliance also included what was, at the time, a remarkable number of women activists. They made up roughly one-quarter of the membership and held many key posts.

POLITICS. By the mid-1880s, the Alliance reached a point where it had to abandon its original stance of non-partisanship and start flexing its political muscle. The big commodity brokers and railroad barons were brutalizing the co-ops with predatory pricing and other monopoly tactics, and bankers were squeezing the Alliance’s marketing co-ops by refusing to provide loans. The major political parties, which were in harness to these moneyed interests, offered no relief from the corporate assault, while also refusing to advance any of the Alliance’s broader reform agenda.

For about six years, Alliance members held countless local meetings, debates, and consultations on how to proceed politically. Finally, Alliance delegates met in Omaha on July 4, 1892, for the founding convention of the People’s Party of America, proudly branding themselves “The Populists.”

Now, they could run their own people for offices up and down the ballot, campaigning on a broad platform to counter the “corporations, national banks, rings, trusts…and the oppression of usurers” in order to advance the common interests of the “plain people.” The Knights of Labor were a part of this founding, and the preamble to the party’s 1892 platform declared that “The interests of rural and civil labor are the same; their enemies are identical.”

Yes, the Populists called for the “free and unlimited coinage of silver” to provide both debt relief and economic stimulus for small enterprise, but the snickering cynics who try to marginalize populism by defining it in terms of this narrow (though important) issue ignore the party’s broader and amazingly progressive agenda, including these provisions:

The first party to call for women’s suffrage.
An eight-hour day for labor, plus wage protections.
The abolition of the standing army of mercenaries, known as the “Pinkerton system,” which violently suppressed union organizers.
The direct election by the people of U.S. senators (who were chosen by state legislatures at the time).
A graduated income tax.
Legislation by popular initiative and referendum.
Public ownership of railroads, telephones, and telegraphs.
No subsidy of private corporations for any purpose.
Prohibition of speculation on and foreign ownership of our public lands and natural resources.
A free ballot and fair count in all elections.
Civil-service laws to prevent the politicalization of government employees.
Pensions for veterans.
Measures to break the corrupting power of corporate lobbyists.

We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.
—Louis Brandeis

Extra credit: How populism became wrongly associated with racism, demagoguery and more

So, if the Populists were so eager to create equity for everyone, how did the term end up associated with demagoguery, racism and anti-intellectualism?

This is an extremely condensed explanation, so be sure to check out the recommended readings for a more in-depth examination—we’re not kidding when we say they’re actual page-turners.

Let’s start with the fundamental idea of who rules in America: contrary to our schoolbook teachings, America wasn’t actually founded for the benefit of We The People, but for an elite who figured they not only knew how to govern better than King George, but also better than the everyday people of the new country. In particular, disenfranchisement of non-white, non-male, poor people was baked into the American way from the start—and those of us who match these descriptions remain absolutely distrusted by our wealthier, dudelier counterparts. American society is supposedly “classless,” but when we get real about this foundational elitism, we can see more clearly countless historical examples of how our celebration of rugged individualism and upward mobility hide the fundamental economic and social structures that keep the Powers That Be entirely dominant over us, a.k.a. the Powers That Ought to Be.

Remember those farmers who organized themselves in the 1870s-90s? They absolutely terrified those in power. That was the era of the Gilded Age, where industrialized corporate power meant exploitation on steroids, so business interests and politics became synonymous. Also, our first mass media was really coming into its own: newspapers. Who owned most of those? Rich metropolitanites! They had no interest in reporting on what the farmers were suffering through (and the suffering was truly immense), but they also actively feared the farmers. Because of the Farmers Alliance’s cultural influence, including deploying hard-hit farmers as traveling speakers to rally communities to the group’s cooperative efforts, we got the first round of “demagoguery” label: newspapers depicted these organizers as firebrands riling up the uneducated, unwashed masses against the “natural” forces of elite rule. Demagogues!

Then, the Democratic Party stepped in. Remember, in that time, the Democratic Party was considered the conservative party, in large part because of its popularity in the South as “the party of the fathers,” agrarian capitalists like Jefferson, Washington, Madison and Monroe. Northern industrialists were Whigs and emergent Republicans and considered “progressive” for the time, due in large part to their focus on industrial “modernization,” converting rural people into exploited urban wage workers. But as Lawrence Goodwyn points out in The Populist Moment, the Democratic Party was the institutional pillar of white supremacy, and in its post-Reconstruction era, it had ditched every association with “the plain people” that it could, while actively flaming racial hatred, exclusion and violence.

These Democrats were wholly uninterested in the plight of poor white farmers—and they actively undermined, stole from and killed Black farmers. So, you can imagine their reaction when white and Black farmers started organizing together and reaching out to laborers. Hell, no!, exclaimed Bourbon Democrats, as they set out to destroy the Populists. Martin Luther King, Jr., recounted this history in his speech in front of the Alabama state capitol building in 1965, after the march from Selma to Montgomery:

Toward the end of the Reconstruction era, something very significant happened. That is what was known as the Populist Movement.The leaders of this movement began awakening the poor white masses and the former Negro slaves to the fact that they were being fleeced by the emerging Bourbon interests. Not only that, but they began uniting the Negro and white masses into a voting bloc that threatened to drive the Bourbon interests from the command posts of political power in the South.
To meet this threat, the southern aristocracy began immediately to engineer this development of a segregated society. I want you to follow me through here because this is very important to see the roots of racism and the denial of the right to vote. Through their control of mass media, they revised the doctrine of white supremacy. They saturated the thinking of the poor white masses with it, thus clouding their minds to the real issue involved in the Populist Movement. They then directed the placement on the books of the South of laws that made it a crime for Negroes and whites to come together as equals at any level. And that did it. That crippled and eventually destroyed the Populist Movement of the nineteenth century.
If it may be said of the slavery era that the white man took the world and gave the Negro Jesus, then it may be said of the Reconstruction era that the southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow. He gave him Jim Crow. And when his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide, he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than the black man. And he ate Jim Crow. And when his undernourished children cried out for the necessities that his low wages could not provide, he showed them the Jim Crow signs on the buses and in the stores, on the streets and in the public buildings. And his children, too, learned to feed upon Jim Crow, their last outpost of psychological oblivion.

And then came the anti-intellectualism twist that really brings it all together—demagoguery, racism, anti-elitism—in the form of… drumroll… Joe McCarthy!

In the post-World War II era, the emerging fields of psychology and sociology were taking off. The Red Scare was also really starting to take hold, so culturally, America was living through this schizophrenic moment of triumphing over fascism (yay) but terrified of common people rising up (boo). In stepped old Joe, direly proclaiming that lurking around every corner was a commie intellectual or artist or labor leader or musician or teacher waiting to snatch their hard-earned suburban houses and new automobiles (real or aspirational) and pervert their kids into communist cells. Absolutely infuriated and frightened by these attacks, too many McCarthy opponents reacted by assailing the Wisconsin demagogue with cries of “populism,” when in fact he was the ultimate plutocratic reactionary aiming to crush every element of democratic populism.

Let’s also revisit that founding principle of American leadership: only the elites know how to govern, and the uneducated masses need to submit their lesser intellect to this fact. This is the common theme running through our entire history—people with money and education know better than the rest of us, and this is either bestowed by A) God’s will, or is B) the “natural,” scientific order. Either way, that’s just the way it is. For most of their existence, our institutions of higher education didn’t exactly dissuade their students and scholars from this thinking; in fact, it was often blatantly reinforced through the unholy collaborations of junk science and mass media (sound familiar?). Thus, throughout history, the intellectual class often viewed any uprising of “uneducated” people with suspicion and outright fear, thinking that their own livelihoods or even lives were about to be ended if they no longer held the influence on government that they once did.

So when Joe McCarthy started coming for the intellectuals, they often experienced these attacks as yet more in the long line of historical “attacks” on the educated by the “uneducated.” In this era, thanks to bad science that promoted the tradition of elite hierarchies and rulers, many scholars feared working class and poor people ruining the country because they were simply too dumb to know better. Right-wingers seized on that and amplified it, knowing from experience that they could continue to divide and conquer if they weaponized racial and ethnic issues (hello, anti-Semitism, Jim Crow and the Red Scare) within the working class.

One of the ivory tower scholars who did the most damage was this guy: Richard Hofstadter. We don’t have enough words in the dictionary to expound on the blistering amount of misinformation this “historian” has spread about populism, so we’ll let Belgian researcher Anton Jäger sum him up for you:

These Cold War-era accounts painted a picture of Populism as inherently conspiratorial and proto-totalitarian. As Hofstadter saw it, populists exemplified the “paranoid style in American politics,” with mad ravings against the “money power” and a proclivity for racial phobias. Together with Cold War intellectuals like Daniel Bell and Seymour Martin Lipset, Hofstadter drew a straight line from big-P Populism to American McCarthyism, arguing that both traditions share the same pedigree.

And there you have it! Iterations of this kind of misappropriation of “populism” continue today.

But we think it’s past time to bring the word and movement back into the light of our collective Common Good.

Conclusion: Onward! Together!

Now that you have a sense of where we’ve come from, let’s weave ourselves together into the gorgeous fabric of human dignity, joy and aspiration that can be the true future of an equitable America: populism. We’re already seeing some of our great modern organizers embrace the term, not just in rhetoric, but actual practice. There’s Bernie Sanders, of course, but there’s also people like J.D. Scholten, who’s running for the Senate seat held by Joni “We’re All Gonna Die” Ernst in Iowa, and Clayton Tucker, running for Agriculture Commissioner here in Texas. There are elected officials like Sen. Chris Murphy, and Representatives Pat Ryan and Pramila Jayapal who embrace the populist tradition. Organizations like the Carolina Federation talk about their vision for a “multi-racial, progressive left populism.” Who else should we add to this (in no way exhaustive) list?

Now more than ever, we need each other’s strength to forge through this frightening battalion of fascism that threatens to block our path into the populist justice future that would benefit all of us, and while we’re all aware of the immense challenges, we also have the collective tools, history and multi-generational smarts to build cooperative movements for true justice for everyone.