Breaking History - Trump’s Populism Isn’t a Sideshow. It’s as American as Apple Pie.

Episode Date: January 22, 2025

Donald Trump, just sworn in as the 47th president, was reelected to be a wrecking ball, a middle finger, the people’s punch to the Beltway’s mouth. And while this populist moment feels “unprecedented,” it’s not. The rebuke of the ruling class is encoded in our nation’s DNA.  We have seen populist leaders like Donald Trump before. He stands on the shoulders of Texas billionaire H. Ross Perot, Alabama governor George Wallace, and Louisiana legend Huey Long. There have been populist senators, governors, newspaper editors, and radio broadcasters. But only rarely has a populist climbed as high as President Trump. In fact, it has happened only once before.  The last populist to win the presidency was born before the American Revolution. He rose from nothing to become a great general. His adoring troops called him Old Hickory, and his enemies derided him as a bigamist and a tyrant in waiting. His name was Andrew Jackson, and he’s the guy who’s still on the 20 dollar bill.  On today’s debut episode of Breaking History, Eli Lake explains how Andrew Jackson’s presidency is the best guide to what Trump’s second term could look like.  Credits: Andrew Jackson: Good, Evil and the Presidency; PBS Go to groundnews.com/BreakingHistory to get 40% off the unlimited access Vantage plan and unlock world-wide perspectives on today’s biggest news stories. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For decades, the Shalom Hartman Institute has been the preeminent destination for Jewish ideas, leadership, and learning across North America and Israel. I want to tell you about two incredible Hartman podcasts that are shaping the discourse about Israel and Jewish life. Identity Crisis with Institute President Yehuda Kurtzer as host is home to dynamic conversations about the issues facing contemporary Jewish life. Join Yahuda for weekly discussions with key leaders and thinkers like Yair Golan, Tal Becker, and Rabbi Felicia Sol. And then there's For Heaven's Sake. It's the award-winning number one Judaism podcast featuring senior fellow Yossi Klein Halevi and Donyell Hartman,

president of the Shalom Hartman Institute. Don't miss their thoughtful discussions on political and social trends in Israel and Israel diaspora relations. Discover these chart-topping podcasts at shalomhartman.org forward slash podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. As we gather today, our government confronts a crisis of trust. For many years a radical and corrupt establishment has extracted power and wealth from our citizens while the pillars of our society lay broken and seemingly in complete disrepair.

We now have a government that cannot manage even a simple crisis at home, while at the same time stumbling into a continuing catalog of catastrophic events abroad. It fails to protect our magnificent law-abiding American citizens, but provides sanctuary and protection. That man, Donald Trump, was just sworn in as our 47th president. He was elected to be a wrecking ball, a middle finger, the people's punch in the beltway's mouth. My recent election is a mandate to completely and totally reverse a horrible betrayal

and all of these many betrayals that have taken place and to give the people back their faith, their wealth, their democracy, and indeed their freedom. From this moment on, America's decline is over. The working class just told the ruling class to go to hell. We're not gonna take it Hell, we ain't gonna take it We're not gonna take it While Trump's political career feels eternally unprecedented,

the American voters' rebuke of the establishment is nothing new. It's a sentiment encoded in our DNA since the founding of our Republic. Every few decades, a figure emerges to direct popular rage at the people in charge. And in this respect, Donald Trump's extraordinary comeback represents a return to the politics of populism. It's not a philosophy. It's not even a movement. It's really more of a vibe. Populism pits the people against the powerful, the best of us against the rest of us, and

every once in a while, it rolls up its sleeves and barges into the corridors of power, shouting, move aside, I'm landing this plane. Yes, populism is as American as baseball and apple pie. We will never escape it. Our culture is drenched in it. Populism is Sam Adams dumping shiploads of imported tea into the Boston harbor. It's the protagonist in a John Grisham novel discovering the whole damn system is corrupt. It's Walt Whitman's barbaric yawp.

It's Dirk Diggler in Boogie Nights, quitting on the set of a porno. You don't fuck you, fuck you, fuck all of you. You're not my boss. You're not the king of me. I am the fucking king of Dirk. You're nothing without me, Jack. You're not the king of me. I am the fucking king of Dirk. You're nothing without me, Jack. Populism is neither left nor right, donkey or elephant. It is a feral defiance that can burst from anywhere on the ideological spectrum. Populists comprise the early founders of the Congress of Industrialized Organizations, at the same time the Christian scolds who brought us prohibition were also populists. Populists sometimes champion deeply undemocratic ideas.

Populists can also emerge on the left. After all, what is Bernie Sanders if not a populist? Anybody here happen to know how much Amazon paid in taxes last year? Zero! As I said, American populism is not really an ideology. It's more of a mood. It's the desire to fire the bosses, to crash the country club, and ask the snobs sincerely, you think you're better than me? So, as unique as the presidential inauguration of 2025 seems, we have in fact seen populists like Donald Trump before. There was Texas billionaire H. Ross Perot.

Here's a common message. Don't you understand that ordinary people can't organize themselves? They can't get this done. Very difficult, very tedious. Well you showed them. There was Alabama governor George Wallace. So they got to say we are bigots. They got to say we are hate mongers. They got to say we are fascists. Well of course I'm not a bigot, nor a fascist, nor a hate monger, and I'm not a warmonger.

I'm one who believes in the right of local people to determine some things for themselves. And there was legendary Louisiana governor Huey Long. How many men ever went to a barbecue and would let one man take off the table what's intended for nine-tenths of the people to eat? The only way you'll ever be able to feed the balance to the people is to make that man come back and bring back some of that grubby ain't got no business with. There have been populist senators, governors, newspaper editors, and radio broadcasters. But – and this is important – while American history is littered with them, very rarely has a populist ever climbed as high as President Trump. In fact, it's only happened once before. The last populist to win the presidency was born before the American Revolution.

He rose from nothing to become a great general. He was the first man to represent the state of Tennessee in Congress. His adoring troops called him Old Hickory, and his enemies derided him as a bigamist and a tyrant-in-waiting. His name was Andrew Jackson, the guy who's still on the $20 bill. If it feels like 2025 is uncharted waters, perhaps Andrew Jackson's path to the White House would be the best guide to what Trump's second term might look like. Because there are eerie parallels.

Both presidents came to power insisting that the previous election had been stolen from them. Both were driven by their enmities. Both survived assassination attempts. Both Andrew Jackson and Donald Trump were outsiders who believed their elections were a mandate to vanquish the old establishment. And the establishments they railed against would really rather both of them just disappear. Tonight a new look for the world's most iconic office items identified with President Trump now gone. The portrait of former President Andrew Jackson in 2021. President Biden removed a portrait of Jackson from the Oval Office. And well, this is what Steve Bannon, Donald

Trump's chief strategist for his first run at the White House in 2016, told me he thinks the new president should do about that. Well, I hope, I hope that we put back in that great painting of General Jackson right there to the president's left so you could get in all the shots. I would hope that would go back up. Steve Bannon got his wish. Jackson has returned to the Oval Office. I'm Eli Lake, and from the Free Press,

this is Breaking History. Today, we look at the first time the elites got their butts kicked in a presidential election. What Andrew Jackson can tell us about Donald Trump and our populist moment after the break. Stay with us. ["Sleep Free Won't Take It"] John Quincy belated.

The bargain we hated has now been dissolved. If you've been following my work or tuning into Honestly, you know that at the free press we're interested in how history shapes the world around us. Understanding today's headlines means looking at how the past informs our present, but too often that context is distorted by bias or reduced to oversimplified narratives. That's why I'm excited to partner with Ground News, an independent app and website that prioritizes showing the full spectrum of perspectives. With Ground News, you get a quick summary of the stories shaping our world alongside every news source covering it from across the spectrum, whether that's corporate media

or independent voices like the free press. For example, you can use the ground news app to swipe to see how some outlets frame Trump's tariffs as a crucial step to safeguard American interests, echoing Jackson's advocacy for the common man, while others see it as a policy that disrupts global trade and alienates our allies. Both perspectives bring value to the conversations which shape our public opinion and foreign policy. That's why I find Ground News' blind spot feed indispensable. It surfaces important stories and angles the left and the right aren't talking about.

So go to groundnews.com forward slash breaking history to save 40% on the unlimited access advantage plan we use, knocking the price down to just $5 a month. It's an investment in your ability to think critically and stay informed while also supporting platforms like ours. It was March 4th, 1829, and just as winter was giving way to spring in the nation's capital, President Andrew Jackson was being inaugurated after an electoral landslide. At his speech at the East Portico of the capital, he told his adoring supporters that he had

a mandate to reform a republic tainted by what he called incompetent and unfaithful hands. For his fans, who came to see this political outsider's historic inauguration, it was confirmation of their arrival on the grandest stage. Here was the first president to come from a western state, Tennessee. Before him, all of our presidents hailed

from the prosperous and powerful East. With Jackson's victory, the United States government no longer resembled a locked box. But any solemnity of this momentous event didn't last long. As Jackson's carriage made its way to the White House for a public reception, the throngs of Jacksonians trailed him, and Bedlam soon followed. The mob descended on the free food and drink at the White House. There were freezers of ice cream, barrels of lemonade, and pails of whiskey spiked orange

punch, along with towers of cakes and pies. In the rush for the good eats, the crowd began breaking glasses and destroying the furniture. It soon became too perilous for the new president. Jackson's staff locked arms and formed a cordon around him and rushed him out of the White House, back to the hotel where he was staying. For the Washington aristocracy, the scene confirmed their worst suspicions. What a scene we did witness. The majesty of the people disappeared. And a rabble, a mob was scrambling, fighting, romping. Cut glass and china, to the amount of several thousand dollars, was broken in the struggle

to get the punch. Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, who attended the reception, surmised that the party was the reign of King Mob. Sound familiar? We need to open the doors of the Capitol. million? Trump's first term may have ended in a riot. Andrew Jackson's started with one. What was it about this politician that inspired so many average Americans to his cause? Well, Jackson cared primarily about two things, destroying the Second National Bank of the United States, which he considered a tool for East Coast plutocrats to further concentrate

their wealth, and the conquest of Native American tribal lands. As a governing philosophy, this did not amount to all that much, but as a populist platform, it promised the average white American voter, at least, both power and land. So we should get this out of the way. Andrew Jackson was a monster, yes. Even beyond the merciless wars he fought against the Seminole, the Creek, and the Cherokee, by the end of his life, he had enslaved more than 100 people, and unlike George Washington, he did not grant them freedom after he died. He even instructed the post office not to carry abolitionist literature.

All true. And at the same time, he was one of the most consequential figures in American history. At the Battle of New Orleans, Jackson's cunning won the day, and it salvaged the otherwise disastrous War of 1812 for the young republic. It was entirely possible that had old hickory not bested the redcoats in Sin City, New Orleans would have remained under the English crown. In 1818 he invaded West Florida and drove the Spanish out. He prevented a secession crisis in South Carolina and ushered in a new era of partisan politics. Andrew Jackson was also a tough son of a bitch.

He was the first president to survive an assassination attempt. Separately, he survived a bullet to the ribcage and lung, and he is the only prisoner of war to serve in the Oval Office, and the only president who ever actually murdered someone. More on that later. One story sums up the sort of guy he was. At the age of fourteen, after being captured by the British in the Revolutionary War, he refused an officer's order to shine his shoes.

When the officer swung his sword at the adolescent Jackson, the kid parried the blow with his forearm. After his mother purchased his freedom, he walked 45 miles through the rain, mud, and snow in his bare feet back to safety. The Brits had stolen his shoes. But beyond all that, our seventh president was first and foremost a populist. He came to power as the voting franchise expanded from the landed gentry to include landless white men. And he was loved by this new electorate, the immigrant strivers in the East Coast cities, and the poor white farmers on the frontier. Jackson was an American hero, first as a brilliant general whose crushing defeat of the British

at New Orleans saved our independence in the War of 1812, and later as the seventh president of the United States, when he fought to defend the forgotten men and women from the arrogant elite of his day. Does it sound familiar? In some ways, it's strange that Trump would see in Jackson a kindred spirit. Jackson was born into poverty and grew into a rail-thin and serious man. He forged his discipline through war, in which he excelled, and came to office having served as a judge, a general, a member of Congress, and a senator. The rotund Trump was born into privilege and came to office in his first term as a political amateur.

Nevertheless, there is a connection. I think that Jackson, if he were around, he would recognize in some of Trump's rhetoric a kind of a class consciousness that spoke to him. This is historian David Brown, author of The First Populist, The Defiant Life of Andrew Jackson. Of course, this is ironic because Jackson was a frontier aristocrat and Donald Trump is a billionaire. I think that where Jackson would really differ from Trump is, you know,

we think of the bank war, Jackson did not believe that money made the man. Jackson thought that leadership, the character made the man. So when Donald Trump said, I think it was in 2015, 2016, when he was asked, you know, why run for the presidency, what equips you? And he said, well, you know, I've got a lot of money, I'm a billionaire, I'm really good with numbers, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

That's the kind of economic self-interest or privilege that Jackson was very much against. Despite these differences, Andrew Jackson was the Donald Trump of his day. Both men built political movements that sought to upend the complacent elite. Alexis de Tocqueville called Jackson, quote, the spokesman of provincial jealousies. Slap that phrase under Trump's mugshot and you've got yourself a strangely articulate MAGA t-shirt.

Provincial jealousies, you see, are a powerful force in American elections. After the break, the story of how the populist Andrew Jackson took on the establishment of his day and how the establishment fought back. We did great in 2016. A lot of people didn't know we did much better in 2020. We won. We won.

We did win. It was a rigged election. That was Donald Trump in 2024, sounding a lot like Andrew Jackson 200 years earlier. Trump supporters called their doomed movement to block the certification of the election stop the steal. Jacksonians railed against what they called the corrupt bargain. 1824, the 10th election of the American experiment is underway. Four candidates emerged.

Essentially, they were all from the same party, but this period of consensus rule in American politics was fraying. To make a long story short, Andrew Jackson won the most electoral votes that year, but because he failed to win a majority of the electoral college, the election was thrown to the House of Representatives. Those are the rules. It's all there in the 12th Amendment to the Constitution. But Jackson still believed that as a matter of principle, the popular vote should have

secured him the victory. Well, the Speaker of the House, at the, Henry Clay, who was also a presidential candidate, thought otherwise, and he arranged to throw his votes behind John Quincy Adams, who ended up as our sixth president. After the inauguration, the other shoe dropped. Clay was named Secretary of State in the new Adams administration. Jackson cried foul. His supporters felt robbed.

They accused Clay of selling out the country for personal ambition. And that unsettled grudge fueled Jackson's campaign four years later, much as Trump supporters convinced themselves, without evidence, that they too had been cheated, fueling a righteous indignation that swept him back to power. It's providential we lost. This is Steve Bannon again. That burning, burning, burning in the grain of our soul that it was stolen and we could not let this happen to the Republican, everything we saw, that built up the greatest comeback

in the history of this country. When the 1828 election rolled around, John Quincy Adams and his supporters knew Jackson would be really hard to beat. But they had something in their back pocket. Jackson's wife, Rachel, was technically married to another man for the first three years of her union with Andrew Jackson. Jackson would say it was a bad rap. Her husband, Louis Robards, had petitioned for divorce in 1790 and Rachel and Andrew wed in 1791. However, Rachel's first marriage was not actually dissolved until 1793, forcing the new couple to marry again.

To many, this was considered a scandal. And when Jackson went to the presidency, Easterners say that this is sort of beyond the pale. Again, this is David Brown. It did not cost him votes though in the West, probably parts of the East as well, like much of upstate New York or Pennsylvania. I think that these communities, they recognize that in the West, customs were different, that amenities were different, and Jackson and Rachel, they did what they did

because that's how people in the West lived, which is not knowingly and big of me. So you can look at this in a number of different ways. This is just a relationship, a marriage, where this is also a kind of an East versus West tension. For Jackson, questioning his marriage was akin to questioning his wife's honor, and in Tennessee, they knew how to deal with a jackass who did that. A duel. Jackson, ever the tough guy, loved to duel, a bizarre tradition brought over from Europe where men would settle their feuds in a refereed gunfight. And he challenged Charles Dickinson, the young gandy behind

the accusation, to pistols at dawn. Jackson believed that he was really being called out, that Dickinson had made comments about Jackson's marriage. And Jackson, I think, also had the feeling that Dickinson was trying to make or extend his own reputation at Jackson's expense. Dickinson shot first and grazed Jackson's rib cage and lung. And then Jackson squeezed the trigger and fired straight at Dickinson's heart. He didn't miss.

Hours later, Jackson got word that young Dickinson would not make it through surgery. Upon hearing the news, the General sent over a bottle of wine his opponent would never have a chance to enjoy. Brutal. Needless to say, the East Coast establishment was not impressed by Jackson filling a rival full of lead. But the electorate felt differently. They didn't care about dueling in Bigamy. They voted to send a message to Washington that things were about to change.

Jackson's victory should have been his apex, but it was bittersweet. On a trip to Nashville at the end of the campaign, his beloved Rachel picked up a pamphlet accusing her of adultery. She would later write, "'The enemies of the general have dipped their arrows in wormwood and gall and sped them at me. On December 22, 1828, Rachel Jackson suffered

a heart attack. She died before Christmas Eve. Andrew Jackson was devastated. He blamed her death on John Quincy Adams and his allies. He wanted vengeance. He saw himself as his era's Hercules, clearing the Ogden stables of government, and he went to war with the bureaucracy. It's a standard move for populists to target distant, unseen powers, like the government, the banks, or in Donald Trump's case, the media and the deep state. James Parton, one of Jackson's first biographers, writes that he fired 919 civil servants in his first term, a massive number, considering the limited size of the government at the time.

And doesn't that also sound like someone we know? First, I will immediately reissue my 2020 executive order restoring the president's authority to remove rogue bureaucrats, and I will wield that power very aggressively. Trump has Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy's Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Andrew Jackson had Martin Van Buren, who would serve as Jackson's Secretary of State, Ambassador to England, and Vice President in his second term. It was Van Buren who would succeed Jackson in the White House in 1837. Known as the Little Magician, Van Buren was in charge of divvying up the spoils of government jobs to the victors in the President's new coalition, and it absolutely terrified the

Postmaster's clerks and land surveyors who were on the chopping block. In his biography of Andrew Jackson, American Lion, John Meacham relays a great story of how Solomon Van Rensselaer, the postmaster general of Albany, New York, pleaded with Andrew Jackson to please not sack him. Quote, Van Rensselaer went to the White House and waited for Jackson to finish with his guest at a reception. General Jackson, I have come here to talk to you about my office, Van Rensselaer said once he had the president alone. The politicians want to take it away from me, and they know I have come here to talk to you about my office," Van Rensselaer said once he had the president alone. "'The politicians want to take it away from me, and they know I have nothing else to live

upon.' Accustomed to such pleas and committed to his course, Jackson said nothing. Desperate, Van Rensselaer moved to strip off his own clothes. "'What in heaven's name are you going to do?' Jackson said. "'Why do you take off your coat here?' "'Well, sir, I'm going to show you my wounds which I received fighting for my country against the English.

Put it on at once, sir, Jackson said. I'm surprised that a man of your age would make such an exhibition of himself." I should say, Jackson ended up letting Van Rensselaer keep his post. But this philosophy of replacing the old guard with one's loyalists now seems like an American political tradition. But it was the populist Jackson who started it. He believed his voters gave him a mandate to reform and he didn't have to be polite about it. You have to seize the institutions. You have to seize them. You have to control them. Number one is just for expertise. Remember, a populist movement is a grassroots movement.

This is Steve Bannon again. General Jackson's term in office is a great example, where he wanted to take down the central bank, and he had all kind of problems just even staffing out and getting things done. He accomplished a lot. But populism's restrictions is always the ruling class or the established order.

They're not going to give it up, and they think they can wait you out, because history shows they can wait you out. They control the institutions, they control the education, they control the money centers. This is just about in every populist revolution. As his second term begins, Donald Trump will wage war against what he calls the deep state, the media, and who knows, maybe even Canada. Andrew Jackson's populist crusade was against the Second National Bank of the United States. The debate over a national bank goes back to the founding of the republic.

Alexander Hamilton argued that it was necessary to build the economy with a national bank. Thomas Jefferson, his rival, argued that states should have their own banks to prevent the consolidation of wealth in one central institution. Andrew Jackson mistrusted the national bank and didn't really understand infrastructure finance. His adversaries in Washington tested Jackson's medal. Congress passed legislation to extend the charter of the bank that Jackson hated. And when the president vetoed the bill,

they thought it would cost him his reelection. They could not have been more wrong. The American voters were with Andrew Jackson. Jackson was right that the vision they had was not well aligned with the priorities of most of the American public. And somehow that bridge had to be built. This is Yvonne Levin, the director of social, cultural, and constitutional studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

And so, you know, in a sense, Jackson's critique was a way of saying, look, the world these Hamiltonians want is not the world the American people want. In 1832, Jackson vetoed a bill to extend the bank's authority with a declaration of pure populist fire. I'm going to read from it here. It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes. Distinctions in society will always exist under every just government.

Equality of talents, of education, or of wealth cannot be produced by human institutions. But when the laws undertake to add to these natural and just advantages, artificial distinctions, gratuities, and exclusive privileges, to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society, the farmers, mechanics, and laborers, who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their government." In other words, we see you plutocrats, and your time is up.

This wasn't the only fight Jackson waged against the status quo. The Founding Fathers had intended the Supreme Court to be the only source of authority for interpreting the Constitution. Jackson openly disputed this. Not only was that legally dubious, it also gave his opponents an opening. The opposition party, which called themselves at this point the Whigs, began to call him King Andrew because he was asserting an authority that was not rightly his. And this was not just spin. In 1831, the Supreme Court ruled that the state of Georgia could not enforce state law over the Cherokee Nation.

Jackson ignored that ruling and ordered the removal of the Cherokees anyway. It was the gravest threat to the Constitution in the Young Republic's history. This was a populist leader crashing up against the American system of government with all of its checks and balances. Eventually, Jackson was shamed into issuing a proclamation that stated, the Supreme Court was the final arbiter of the Constitution. One sees an echo of this threat in Donald Trump's refusal to accept the rulings of the courts after he lost the 2020 election. Populous indignation can lead presidents to ignore

the constitutional restraints on their power. All in all, Jackson had a successful two-term presidency. His vice president, Martin Van Buren, won the 1836 election and continued his policies of Indian removal and his opposition to the Second National Bank. As such, Jackson's moral and political legacy is at best mixed. But his legacy as a populist leader is unquestionable. He attacked institutions, he battled with the Supreme Court, he represented average Joe's against the elites. And today, the real question is what will happen to the man 200 years later who is taking on Jackson's mantle as the populist president. The politicians, they've had me to their homes.

They've introduced me to their children. I've become their best friends in many instances. They've asked for my endorsement, and they always wanted my money. And even called me really a dear, dear friend. But then, suddenly, decided when I ran for president as a Republican that I've always been a no-good, rotten, disgusting scoundrel.

And they totally forgot about me. That was Donald Trump more than eight years ago at the Al Smith charity dinner in New York. I think that clip captures the populist contempt that Trump and his movement has for all of the bigwigs in that room on that evening back in 2016. These events are supposed to be pageants of bipartisanship. The Republican and Democratic candidates make self-deprecating jokes and tuxedos and evening gowns for Catholic charity.

But Trump chose instead to drop the mask and tell it like it is. He was once in their club, but now he's the barbarian at the gate. And this says something about populism. Because as effective as Jackson and Trump were as campaigners, they were better at destroying an old order their voters despise than building something in its place. Part of this is because populists distrust large institutions. Part of this is because populists are prone to conspiracy theories. Jackson couldn't understand the importance of a central bank to building roads and canals, so he assumed the bank was a tool of plutocracy. Trump was so contemptuous and

distrustful of the FBI that he was willing to obstruct their investigation into his personal papers he shipped from the White House to Mar-a-Lago. These are the negative sides of populism. Well, the dangerous side is pretty obvious, perhaps. As historian Michael Kazin explains, It can be used by authoritarians, both on the right and the left, to evoke their, quote, people against an elite they think is dangerous to the country and to their rule and justify legitimize authoritarianism, legitimize cracking down on that elite in the name of the people.

But the opportunity, I think, for people who talk a populist language is that it evokes the gap between the ideals of the society, which are usually wonderful ideals, freedom, equality, that people should rule in democratic societies anyway. In this sense, populism can be necessary by keeping the parties that actually know how to govern in touch with the people. I think generally in American history, when populism has been successful in changing our politics, it's been successful by forcing one or both of the two major parties that we've almost always had to integrate its core critique into their vision of American politics.

This is Yvonne Levin again. And so the parties are good at governing. Populism arises as a challenge to the parties, and then the parties respond to that challenge by grasping something about what the public wants that the populists understood better than they did and turning that into a governing vision. I think that's the story of progressivism where it happened in both parties.

I think it's the story of the Jacksonian era where the Democrats were able to do this. It's the story of the 1970s where Republicans ultimately were able to translate populist energy into a governing vision. We saw this somewhat in the 90s where Ross Perot, after winning an amazing portion of the popular vote in the presidential election, was then kind of integrated, again, into both parties and both Clinton and Gingrich understood something new because of the Perot phenomenon, and the

parties were able to integrate it into their governing visions. So you could say populism is a little bit like poison. Its toxicity is determined by the dose. Some popular exasperation at the political elites can be a healthy corrective to the inevitable corruption of bureaucracies and oligarchies. Too much can lead to a constitutional crisis as seen in Jackson's defiance of the Supreme Court in the Cherokee Nation decision. For all the unrest it inspires, populism has ironically helped preserve our union. Our system has survived nearly 250 years,

despite a civil war, presidential assassinations, the Great Depression, two world wars, and a host of other catastrophes great and small. And that is remarkable considering that our nation was founded in revolution. In this respect, American populism has been an escape valve for the boiling rage of voters when the system has failed them. Our republic has endured because it can accommodate movements and leaders that seek to overturn elites. Donald Trump and Andrew Jackson are as much a part of our national story as its heroes. Jackson's legacy is not as pristine as Abraham Lincoln's or Martin Luther King's,

but he helped forge our nation nonetheless by reflecting who we were, even if parts of that image are grotesque. Donald Trump's legacy has not yet been written. He has a second administration in front of him. But it's worth remembering that even Andrew Jackson's insurgents eventually became their own establishment. And in the election of 1840,

the Jacksonians lost the White House to the Whigs, a party comprised of the old elite politicians that Jackson once defeated. The voters had had enough of populism and wanted a change. Thanks for listening to Breaking History. If you learned something, if you agreed with something, if you disagreed with something, please share it with your friends. And if you like more of this kind of journalism, there's only one way to get it. TheFP.com.

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