THE rIGHT IS THE lEFT...AND AMERICANS ARE NEITHER:

The surprising success of the Trump 2020 campaign in the face of unprecedented circumstances poses some thorny questions: Did any of his "populist" promises in 2016 actually matter? Where was the discussion of mass immigration, his trade war with China, declaring peace with the social welfare state, and using the pandemic economic response to usher in a new industrial age for America? The only real takeaway from the 2020 election is that populism is not a policy platform; it is simply a campaign tool. [...]

Despite clear parallels to present-day politics, Frank's narrative begins to break down when he attempts to weave these earlier populist movements seamlessly into the modern Left. Frank is not exactly an honest broker: he openly considers himself a left-progres­sive populist, and his book is best read as an attempt to define American populism as an explicitly left-wing ideology, one that cannot be reconciled with the nationalist Right or the establishment center.

Multiracial working-class movements made up of poor farmers, domestic workers, and factory laborers might appear at first glance to parallel Bernie Sanders's romanticized vision of a political revolution within the modern Democratic Party, a vision Frank celebrates. But Frank's most compelling work comes in the section excoriating the rise of the so-called New Left, in which he skillfully eviscerates the anti-populism of the college-educated radicals who emerged in the 1960s, and points to it as the moment when left-wing politics diverged from populism.

Frank describes the widespread opposi­tion to the Vietnam War and larger fight against Soviet Communism on college campuses and how it contrasted with the hardhat workers who rioted in support of the war. This conflict in values represented the cultural gap that formed between American leftists who proclaimed to speak for work­ers and the actual working-class voters themselves, who were seen as un­informed, jingoistic morons by the same left-wing activists.

Ironically, many of Frank's critiques of the New Left apply to the current state of the progressive Left which he supports. Even Frank himself could rightfully be subjected to some of these critiques, given the unflattering picture of working Americans he painted in What's the Matter with Kansas in another political lifetime. There are also several instances in The People, No where he sounds like the elite anti‑populists of yesteryear whom he otherwise criticizes. In particu­lar, Frank uses rhetoric almost identical to that of the old gatekeepers when he assures his left-liberal readers that he sees Trump as a demagogue and "pseudo-populist" immediately after providing them with uncomfortable truths about what Trump got right in his 2016 campaign.

Frank's aggressive use of the term "pseudo-populist" and selective ire for so-called false populist figures like Pat Buchanan and Richard Nixon reveal the contradictions inherent in attempting to define populism at all. By Frank's telling, the rise of conservative populist figures, who dupe their voters by speaking to cultural concerns while fleecing them economically, culminated with Donald Trump. His criticisms of conservative populists are not necessarily untrue, but they fundamentally reveal the futility of trying to define the term populism in relation to any particular policy agenda. Frank essentially mirrors the progressive elites who use the term populism as an insult. In The People, No, the term "populist" mostly just means politicians Frank likes, while a "pseudo-populist" is any popular candidate he doesn't like. In other words, if a politician who happens to be on the right espouses beliefs that resonate with working-class Americans, then it is pseudo-populism. If, however, a politician on the left campaigns on policies in the name of the working class, then he is a true populist, even if rejected by working-class voters.

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