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Populists Can’t Be Populist if They Suppress the Vote

The crusade against ballot access, like virtually every other facet of Trump’s agenda, does nothing to serve the interests of “the people,” but our press is too brain-dead to notice.

Congress adjourned in August without making any further progress on President Donald Trump’s signature second-term legislative crusade: the grossly restrictive SAVE Act, a thoroughly MAGA-besotted effort to suppress ballot access in the name of subduing a wholly fabricated epidemic of voter fraud. (House Speaker Mike Johnson vowed to revive a watered-down version of the legislation this fall, but the prospects that it will make any more headway on Capitol Hill on the eve of the midterms are remote.)

The Oval Office bluster around the SAVE Act indicates that the legislation is yet another example of Trump’s ever-fickle authoritarian hubris; in time, he’ll no doubt revert to his other pet obsessions, like remaking the Washington, DC, cityscape, imposing more capricious tariffs, and pursuing old vendettas under flimsy new legal rationales. Yet as farcical as the SAVE Act drama may be, the underlying logic of the bill—that the success of the right-wing political project in America rests on minimizing mass participation in elections at all costs—remains foundational to conservative governance. It’s also, far from incidentally, why no facet of the MAGA agenda deserves to be called populist.

As a Beltway-bred political descriptor, populism is close to meaningless: It’s pundit shorthand for strongman-style evasions of constitutional restraint that are usually steeped in bigotry and xenophobia. This crude misreading of America’s capital-P Populist movement stems largely from the misleading and tendentious work of the historian Richard Hofstadter; it’s become infinitely dumber and more useless in the hands of a legion of cable hosts, clueless academics, and elite journalists.

The actual Populist movement, which was rooted in the economic plight of farmers and workers during the Gilded Age, was a campaign to expand American democracy into the marrow of our productive lives. This ambitious undertaking entailed everything from the formation of agricultural cooperatives to initiatives devoted to mass literacy and political education, to the establishment of a new currency system designed to reward workers directly for their labor and penalize unproductive financiers who exploited their monopoly hold on the means of production to confine most........

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