Last summer, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders wrote an opinion piece in the Boston Globe entitled “The War on the Middle Class.” He concluded with a statement that has become all but ubiquitous along the Sanders presidential campaign, as it neatly encapsulates the convictions the self-identified democratic socialist has promoted through his candidacy: “It is time to say loudly and clearly that corporate greed and the war against the American middle class must end. Enough is enough!”
The same summer, in the words of The Hill’s Jonathan Easley, “belonged to Donald Trump.” The billionaire reality television mogul, initially branded a sideshow by many pundits and political analysts, lead in national polls for weeks on end and generated a veritable media fever. When the primaries began, both candidates won their respective contests in New Hampshire and made strong showings in Iowa, and while Sanders has lost his initial momentum with defeats in Nevada and South Carolina and on Super Tuesday, Trump has maintained his delegate lead.
The concurrent rise of a man who once recorded a folk album dubbed “We Shall Overcome” with that of one who embodies plutocracy may seem a peculiarity of this campaign, which has buoyed several candidates whose success is incongruent with the establishment-centered electoral system. The parallels, however, run deeply through the currents of popular sentiment sustaining both Sanders and Trump and in some often-unnoticed similarities in their policy platforms. By donning the mantle of tribune while espousing policy positions more favorable toward tycoons than grassroots organizers, Trump is tapping economic populism similar to that harnessed by the Sanders campaign.
Though each candidate’s supporters would likely hasten to differentiate themselves from the other’s champions, Trump and Sanders share a notable number of policy positions. On opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, support for maintaining present Social Security benefits, propositions of some tax hikes on particularly wealthy earners, their condemnation of the insidious influence of money in politics (though, while the majority of the Sanders campaign’s funding has come from individual donations under 200 dollars, Trump’s profession of funding his own campaign is false), the conviction that the money diverted toward the Iraq war would have been better spent on domestic projects such as infrastructure improvements, their support for a single-payer healthcare system (to the extent that Trump’s current stance on the issue can be discerned), and concerns over the potential of rising immigration rates to lower the wages of low-income workers, the two possess some degree of agreement. Indeed, in a February 17th MSNBC town hall interview, Trump was given a description of an unnamed candidate: “considered a political outsider by all the pundits…tapping into the anger of the voters…delivers a populist message; he believes everyone in the country should have healthcare. He advocates for hedge fund managers to pay higher taxes. He’s drawing thousands of people at his rallies and bringing a lot of new voters into the political process and he’s not beholden to any Super PAC.” Trump identified this profile as his own and was informed by the interviewers that this portrait was, in fact, of Bernie Sanders.
It is worth noting that many of these policy correspondences are quite rudimentary, and that Trump’s politicking bears a far uglier underbelly than Sanders’. His proclamations often deteriorate into a bigotry shockingly bold even in a party that has long faced criticism over its use of racially coded language to appeal to white conservatives, and over the course of his campaign, he has mocked, denigrated or otherwise attacked women, people with disabilities, people of color—more specifically, Mexican immigrants and black people—and Muslims. This aspect of Trump’s appeals contrasts sharply with Sanders’ attempts to incorporate racial justice into his policy proposals and the Sanders endorsement recently offered by Erica Garner, daughter of Eric Garner. While the two diverge sharply on such matters of social justice, their most similar rhetoric and positions lie in economic proposals, specifically populist approaches to economic reform: increasing taxes on the most affluent members of American society, reducing the role of money in politics, and concern over the wages of the so-called average worker. Indeed, Trump has even claimed that he would force Apple to manufacture all of its products domestically, a declaration meant to cater toward the workers left behind by an increasingly globalized economy.
Those workers, ultimately, explain how Trump—a man who received an eight-figure inheritance and parlayed it into a ten-figure fortune—can play the role of populist to which Sanders’ background as an organizer within groups such as the Congress of Racial Equality and the Young People’s Socialist League, and message about inequality and injustice that has remained consistent for decades, permit him access. Statistically, the devotees of the candidate most apt to label his competitors losers tend to be the losers of globalization. They are the individuals who saw the only decline in real income experienced by any group across the globe between 1988 and 2008: working-class individuals in wealthy nations. Trump appeals to these voters through rhetoric about a declining country brought to its nadir by corrupt elites, lamenting the plight of these denizens who once felt middle-class and now feel unanchored and insecure between wealthy and low-income citizens.
This ability to purvey a specious populist image stems from Trump’s attractiveness to a unique segment of the American electorate. These voters were first identified and dubbed Middle American Radicals (MARS) by the sociologist Donald Warren in the 1970s. They defied traditional partisan divisions on nearly every front, antagonistic toward those occupying both upper corporate echelons and lower income levels, supporting government programs but opposing efforts to support the poor (particularly poor black individuals), and possessing intense nationalism while also condemning the corruption of their government. This blue-collar conservative population, alienated from both Democrats and Republicans, has gravitated toward Trump because his policy proposals, while ideologically inconsistent, pander to the populist sentiments of those whose unifying belief is the besiegement of their socioeconomic class. Trump’s demonization of individuals whose identities are not entirely congruent with those of lower-middle-class and working-class white supporters resonates with the conviction that immigrants have exacerbated those supporters’ economic losses.
The political beliefs of this group of voters aligns in many ways with a personalitytrait identified in recent research as a predictor of support for Trump: authoritarianism. Authoritarians, who favor strong leadership and loyalty, are more likely to support Trump than almost any other group, and they are politically amenable to limiting the rights of those whose lifestyles and identities diverge from their own communities. This disposition bolsters Trump supporters’ consistently displayed fear of terrorism and opposition to immigration and echoes the MAR’s desire to protect his own economic class even at the expense of others. That this personality trait is a powerful predictor of a Trump predilection also helps to explain the support he has received from voters with seemingly disparate backgrounds and interests, especially in a national context of rising fears about security and the seeming inability of the establishment political system, with President Obama as its most visible personification, to ameliorate those fears or to overcome partisan polarization. By creating enemies of both the economically and politically marginalized and the powerful, Trump has crafted a message with appeal to this segment of voters uniquely responsive to a populism more bitter than the more inclusive appeals of Sanders.
Yet Trump, amidst his professed indignation over hedge-fund speculators “getting away with murder,” has proposed a standard Republican tax cut that would disproportionately favor the wealthy. Thus, as the New Republic’s Jeet Heer points out, Trump is “wielding right-wing populism to keep tax cuts for the rich at the core of American politics,” a strategy populist in name only. Trump’s ability to activate voters with a language of economic populism paralleling Sanders’ critique of the greed of corporations, most clearly exhibited in his condemnation of the impunity with which speculators reap enormous profits, rests on a rhetorical appeal to the sense of loss in, and near betrayal by, the American economy felt by the faction of his supporters who lack college educations and have experienced most profoundly the effects of outsourced manufacturing positions. But Trump’s rhetoric remains firmly in the camp of verbal demagoguery and plays essentially no role in his policies, which build directly upon mainstream GOP economic approaches.
Thus, while both Sanders and Trump are tapping into a similar vein of populist discontent, most clearly directed at the avarice of economic elites, the latter has capitalized upon this sentiment through purely cosmetic appeals, which cloak a fundamentally traditional—and, in some regards, elitist—economic bent. Though Trump and Sanders may converge on a number of specific proposals, the consistency between Sanders’ intense emphasis on the need for a more democratic economic apparatus and his policies—notwithstanding the debate over their feasibility—diverges distinctly from Trump’s duplicity. Though some have praised the parallels between the two candidates as suggesting that Sanders’ brand of populism may attract support outside the most progressive wing of the Democratic party, what the populist strategies deployed by Trump indicate more clearly is how easily a clarion call for populist reform can be manipulated in defense of the oft-maligned “establishment” and the status quo.