Is Populism the Way to Go?

History Professor Jefferson Cowie provides food for thought in his book Freedom's Dominion.

Last night I watched a talk titled Populist Rage and American Illiberalism given by American History Professor Jefferson Cowie at the American Academy in Berlin. My political book club is reading his book, Freedom's Dominion, which describes a kind of freedom embraced by the Southern White man of being free to own other people. It is also a freedom not to have the federal government interfere in how one handles ones business. We are only half way through the book, so I cannot really discuss it at this point other than to say; I am starting to understand the concept that tyrants have of freedom: free for me, but not for thee; “I have all the rights, and you have none.”

In his talk, Jefferson Cowie told us that populism drives US politics and has done so since at least the last century. That makes sense, because it was the 1900s that saw more people around the world embracing liberal democracy. In a liberal democracy, we consider the needs of the masses. He says that one thing that is interfering in our response to the current backlash against the democrats is that we did not protect voting rights, which are being decimated. Cowie says we should get rid of the electoral college, as it is not democratic. According to him, two-thirds of people in the US do not have college degrees, so any political platform needs to include these people.

Cowie claims that the Democratic party and the Republican party used to each be made up of two parties, the Liberal Democrats and the Conservative Democrats, and the Liberal Republicans and he Conservative Republicans–and there was tension within parties between these two groups, and across parties between these two groups. The Democratic party used to be the party that addressed the needs of the working class White man. Then, in the middle of the last decade the democrats lost this group.

While Cowie is not sure which people in the Democratic Party are populists, he refers to Populism not under the bad rap it gets from illiberal leaders, but as being for the working class. While he is not sure, Cowie feels that elevating Musk was a bad move on the part of Trump because Musk is clearly–at least to me–not about the working people., As this becomes clear to more people, the opposition will grow. Cowie thinks a fight in the Democratic party to define it and its leadership is a good thing, because the party is no longer standing for the working class, but for (paraphrased) two groups on the ends of a U, with the educated elite on the one end, and the multicultural rights of the so called “DEIA people”on the other, while the working class are in the middle. He is not against these groups, but says that politics needs to reflect the will of the people.

For some background which also ties in to his book, Cowie says that we have waves of Reconstruction, followed by a period of backlash, which the White Southerners under the populist president Andrew Jackson called Redemption. So, after the Civil War, we had a period of Reconstruction where Black men got the right to vote. They exercised it, mostly voting for and running as Republicans, and winning in the counties where they were the majority.

This angered the White Southerners, who felt things slipping out of their grasp. In the Alabama county that Cowie focuses on in his book, Barbour County, where George Wallace, a later populist came from, they handled this by violently preventing people from voting. They killed Black Republicans and the White people that supported them, of which were very few. The Federal government under Andrew Johnson stepped back from protecting the newly Freedmen from voting, by saying voting was under the states’ jurisdiction.

Cowie sees the second Reconstruction coming from this backlash (redemption) against the first Reconstruction as being with the passing of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 under Populist president Lyndon B. Johnson. I have heard both Cowie and American Historian Thomas Zimmer say that the US was not a democracy until the Voting Rights Act was passed.

Cowie feels that it was a huge mistake on the part of the liberals not to protect voting rights. Now it is the Republican party making the inroads on destroying voting rights rather than the Democratic party, and we don’t need to look at Putin or Orban to find examples of voting suppression but just into our own history. It is no surprise that it was Black leaders who were insisting to Biden that voting rights was the first thing he needed to tackle. However, Biden decided to focus on the economy first.

I assumed Biden was thinking that if he improved the lives of people, they would appreciate that and see that things could be different than they were under Trump. That made sense to me at the time. However, under Trump, working and impoverished people got breaks they had never had during covid. Landlords could not evict them because it was a public health crisis, student loan debt was put on hold, and people were able to apply to the government for extra money. When Trump was re-elected there were people who were saying that they expected to get a $2,000 check. Clearly for them their lives were better under Trump.

While it may have been the Republicans who forced the government to call an “official” end to Covid and stop the covid supports, the average person does not seem to follow or understand government well enough to see that as anything other than: Biden was president and they had to go back to their hard existence, and everything that was put off was now due, and evictions could proceed. That was quite a shift.

A populist leader would implement such supports as were seen during Covid. This is what we have in European countries: much more support from the government. In fact, when Trump first announced the support for people during Covid I felt like we were becoming like Canada and European nations. That was Trump 1.0, who was able to do that. Now, in this incarnation of Trump, that is not likely to happen, unless the people force him to provide support like they have in the past. Of course, with all that Trump aka Musk and DOGE have already stripped, Trump can put back things taken away and that will already seem like an improvement.

Cowie also says that it was surprising that Trump did not get the US into an expansionist war during his first presidency, because no one who has done that has ever lost a reelection. I suspect that Covid might have taken too much out of Trump to do that though. Cowie feels that Trump is likely to get us into an expansionist war this time around. Trump is certainly threatening to do this both with economic and military means with several countries, and he has not even been back in office more than two months.

Cowie sees the Democratic party as needing new leadership, with a populist message. This sounds like it is not just true of the Democrats in the US, but is desired in other countries as well Populist messages seem to be a key to success. We see that the AfD in Germany is using what appears to be a populist message as were the CDU/CSU Union, and the Left Party. Each of these groups has criticised immigration, while the Left are the only ones who support it. Supporting immigration appeals to those who are called liberal elites, whereas tightening up on immigration appeals to the working class.

I am around tradesmen all the time because we have been remodeling our old house in Germany to be more energy efficient. Since I am in Germany, it is more common for people here to talk about politics. Right now, we see that in England the Labor party, clearly a populist party, is back in power, and in Serbia there are massive protests in the streets over corruption of the government over a train station collapse that angered people at their corrupt government. People are rising up in Hungary, Romania, and Georgia as well to protest their illiberal governments. In Greece, there are also massive protests about the corrupt handling of a train crash. In China, there have been an uprising over the actions of the government regarding Covid restrictions, and in South Korea the people have risen up against the President for placing them under an illegal martial law. We saw women rising up in Iran, in a populist demand for more bodily autonomy. In the US, people are rising up against the actions of Trump and protesting in the streets. So, we can see that there is a populist expectation that the government serve the people.

Meanwhile: Cowie’s message is a populist one: it is not that we do not want to keep the gains that diverse groups of people have made, but that we need to be coming together with shared populist demands. He did not get to talking about immigration much, but he is causing me to examine what kind of populist message is against immigrants and immigration. Not a positive one. In Germany, I know that the incoming government does not want to spend so much money supporting people being jobless, but rather on getting them working. It is felt those who voted for parties who are taking stances against immigrants that the supports currently in place are not successful enough. Perhaps people believe their wages would be higher if they continue to have a shortage of workers. This is one sided and does not look at the loss of taxable income when a country does not have enough people to do the work, and also the lack of services if this is the case as well.

I was on the bus yesterday when a woman caused a bit of a hullabaloo. It was early afternoon, when the bus to my house is usually crowded because of students getting out of school. They as well as others pack the buses. The woman was sleeping curled up on two seats around the middle of the bus, and most assumed she was sleeping off a drunk. She appeared homeless. In any case, one of her legs started slipping off the seats and sticking out into the aisle, blocking it. People did not want to touch her and so there was a bottleneck of people in the front until she pulled her leg back in. I cannot see her holding a job without lots of support, and she seemed relatively young. I would say under 40. Supporting people who cannot easily fit into the job market takes money.

So, full employment is probably not going to happen here in Germany or anywhere because there are people who are not able to manage jobs. Otherwise it is good if there is a person for each job. However, there are many things to be considered in terms of moving people and housing them in places where the job that fits them is, if it is not where they are located. Definitely a problem in rural America. Ideally people in our government would be thinking about how we accommodate people so that more people feel like they can work, and live decently. This is important. However, who is working on this?

Cowie is saying we need to be connecting to each other and we need to find true populist leaders. He does not think Bernie Sanders is a populist but I was not clear on why not. He also said he is not sure about Alexandria Ocasio Cortez.. He says that populist initiatives like the Affordable Care Act are so popular that people who do not like Obama speak about it positively by calling it by its name instead of Obamacare. He sees Obama as a populist president, and they come on both sides of the aisle.

From what Cowie says, the Democratic party, which used to be the party of the racist Southern white man rich and poor, is now the party of the mostly Northern liberal elite and the “DEIA” as the Republicans like to call women, non-Whites, LGBTQ+ people and people with disabilities.

Cowie pointing this out helps me to see why there is no hue and cry amongst the masses about the loss of academic research funding. It is very removed from most people’s lives, and perhaps many don’t even know what academic research is. It also makes sense that if populists do not trust the educated elite they do not trust doctors, or medical research, so no cries at this loss either, unless people are personally affected. The working class also considers federal workers elites in that they have college educations to hold their jobs, so no huge and cry over them losing their jobs until people figure out which services that they need, that they can no longer get. That won’t happen overnight. Young men also do not seem to be massively concerned by the loss of women’s bodily autonomy until someone they love is in need of life saving abortion care. So many of the issues that the “educated elite” as people with college degrees are portrayed, are not recognized by the two-thirds of the country’s non-degreed population as being a problem for them. That goes for immigrant rights as well. If it leads to better pay because of more scarcity of workers, that is a win as far as the average person is concerned.

The task for the Democratic party as laid out by Cowie is to figure out who is going to be leading, and to get some populists into the leadership of the party, and then work on getting the message across. This means going beyond being a sympathetic ear, but having some answers as to what needs to happen to improve the quality of people’s lives. In addition we have to fight for voting rights. It should not just be the few liberal lawyers who have taken on this battle, but the Democratic party itself. The right to vote is what needs to be “reconstructed” The other thing that needs to be changed is that we need to get rid of the Electoral college. Also, we need to make two-thirds of the population see that the Democratic party is not just for the educated elite and the people who have won civil rights, but also for the working class White males who make racist and sexist remarks and do not want to have to take a workshop each year to learn how to treat people better. They also need to redefine immigration, something Cowie says should have been done a long time ago. A final task is to help to expand unions. Biden was working on this, but still this was not recognized as genuine. There is still too much catering to the corporate elites by the Democratic party.

This is a tall order and probably the most effective thing people are doing is taking to the streets while the Democratic party sorts itself out. Marches not only show Trump that he does not have a mandate to do what he is doing, but also shows the people in the trenches like lawyers and judges that people care enough to make it worth sticking their necks out. The more people are aware of what is going on, and how it is not solving their problems of the costs of living the more they are going to want answers.

Will Trump stick by Musk and the billionaires group that he is part of? I don’t know if he can let them go. The price of eggs is not going down. Most of the masses do not care about the stock market, even if it affects their pension. They do care about Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and the cost of health care. In order for them to trust the party, people need to hear that the Democratic party is more concerned about people having food on their table and being able to pay their bills than whether they are saying the correct things all the time. I think a piece that Cowie did not mention, but is critical, is to take on campaign finance reform. For the Democratic party to transform, Democrats need to listen to people and figure out how to address their problems. Whether or not the party heeds Cowie's advice and turns to a populist message, the party must rethink what it stands for and what it can do for people.

Here is a link to Cowie’s lecture. You need to scroll down to the bottom to see the Vimeo recording.

https://www.americanacademy.de/person/jefferson-cowie/

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/greek-minister-faces-probe-into-handling-deadly-train-crash-after-violent-2025-03-05/

https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2025/mar/16/drone-footage-shows-mass-anti-government-protest-in-belgrade-video

https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/longform/2022/12/22/the-protests-that-exposed-cracks-in-chinas-middle-class-dream

https://carnegieendowment.org/emissary/2024/12/martial-law-south-korea-overturned-what-happened?lang=en

https://apnews.com/article/hungary-pride-ban-orban-lgbtq-rights-e7a0318b09b902abfc306e3e975b52df

https://civil.ge/archives/649547

https://www.rferl.org/a/tbilisi-budapest-bucharest-belgrade-protests-political-unrest-2025/33350353.html