Regarding the use of the term populism, I have been struggling with this since at least the late 1990s. Like my friend Chuck Tanner, I am uncomfortable ceding the concept to the right on political/strategic grounds. Yet there is, in my view, an analytic core in the Berlet/Lyons formulation that can’t be ignored—even though I am not convinced by the particulars.

I’ll make some comments on the analytical and political issues tied up with “populism” below, really no more than some abductive proposals in search of a research agenda, but first a few comments about anti-Semitism in the context of the Trump administration and the contemporary Right.

In the context of American culture and society—set aside the left-right political spectrum—Jews and more specifically an abstract, quasi-mythical Jewishness has long been understood as the suspect, and often fully demonic, alter-ego of Americanness.

Although actual Jews have—obviously!—been the target of anti-Semitism in the United States, to a great extent Jewishness as the alter of Americanness is disembodied, a kind of imaginative nightmare that can be projected onto almost anything perceived or construable as negative, and particularly anti-American. Leonard Zeskind refers to this as a devil theory, rather than just a conspiracy theory. The most salient difference is that a conspiracy theory “explains” what might otherwise be seen as a merely unfortunate event, as the result of some particular criminal and malevolent intent. A devil theory, by contrast, seeks to explain malevolence itself as flowing from some external (usually supernatural, always at least understood as unnatural) intelligence.

(Note that in the post-9/11 period, Radical Islam—here as an equivalent to an abstract Jewishness—is increasingly construed in similar ways. Witness the otherwise bizarre terror of the imposition of “Sharia Law” in some quarters, when the actual Muslim population of the United States is barely one percent. Such fear, however, makes perfect sense in the context of fear of an abstract evil.)

The complicated “racial structure” of the United States has been the primary inflector of the most salient differences between European anti-Semitism and its American counterpart. In the United States, Blacks have historically been the primary “near Other” of American culture and politics. The construction of white supremacy is such that the threat posed by Blacks in the racist imagination and related rhetorics has been from direct violence and miscegenation. The presumed inferiority of Blacks disqualified them from being the metaphysical source of the evils afflicting a presumptively “white” real America. In such an environment, if the Jews did not exist, then something akin to Jewishness (in the anti-Semitic imagination) would still have to be invented. Kevin MacDonald, the current dean of “scholarly” anti-Semitism in the United States, makes this explicit in his writings which view Jews (really, what I am calling “Jewishness”) the master manipulators of history, strategically oriented to the destruction of “whiteness” through diversity, miscegenation, and manufactured racial self-loathing.

Such explicit anti-Semitism, however, is no longer to be taken for granted even on the far right of the American political scene. Even as the overt racism, evidenced in law and rhetoric alike, of the Jim Crow era has largely been replaced by formally color blind forms of structural racism in the last 50 years, so de-Semitised forms of anti-Jewishness have arisen to overwhelm (not replace) the older, cruder forms of anti-Semitism.

There are, of course, differences between “color blind” racism and the rhetorics of de-Semitised anti-Semitism. Color blind racism, for one, is acted out on the bodies of Black folk, largely through the criminal justice system, which has perpetuated a stigmatized under-caste in the post-Jim Crow era. Whereas de-Semitised anti-Semitism does not—for the most part—depend on actual Jews and often finds itself more than happy to be in league with the settler colonialism of Israel.

Elements of the American far right, e.g. of the nebulous designation Alt Right, have managed to successfully colonize a provocateur niche, attacking the non-explicit racism and, in some cases non-explicit anti-Semitism, of the American center and center-right (which has, it should be emphasized, also been adopted by the center left and elements of the left). They add to this these provocations an explicit misogyny. All of this serves the political entrepreneurs of the Alt Right directly, attracting attention to their “outrageousness,” while reinforcing the center as the “reasonable” ones and dragging them toward appeasement with the Alt Right (which is to say with the openly racist right).

Which brings me to the exclusion of certain media outlets from Trump administration news conferences and Trump’s explicit construction of “the media” as “enemies of the American people.”

In my terms this is exactly an example of de-Semitised anti-Semitism. What I mean by this is that the construction “the media”—meaning a selection of what might be called not “mainstream” but “elite” media–is in the underlying American imagination infused with “Jewishness.” It is set apart and antagonistic to the Middle American Everyman by characteristics of intellectualism and universalism that are practically inseparable from “Jewishness,” even though the direct involvement of actual Jews, or indeed the recognition that such traits have been historically connected to Jews, can be obfuscated to the point of incoherence.

The cultural logic is very similar to the color blind racism that allows American politicians of virtually all orientations to speak of “criminals” in the abstract, and know (in some cases know without recognizing that they know) that the image their rhetoric evokes in the minds of voters—not to mentions the strategies for law enforcement, the assumptions of prosecutors, and the decisions of judges and juries—are highly racialized. In the years since the infamous “Willy Horton” advertisement that did so much to sink the Dukakis campaign, the equation of Black man equals criminal and criminal equals Black man has become so cemented in the American political imaginary that attempts to dispute it are routinely met with exasperated eye rolls and pedantic explanations.

In the case of de-Semitised anti-Semitism, the connection between ultimate object of defamation (Jews) and represented object is somewhat more abstract than in the Black man equals criminal formula noted above. Where Black men (and Black folk generally) are presumed to be personally liable and individually dangerous—because of a biological (or in some more mainstream versions cultural) essence that predisposes them to criminal pathology—it is not so much Jews that are liable as individuals, but a “Jewishness” which has become indelibly imprinted on certain institutions in the United States, for example, “elite” journalism, higher education (especially social science and the humanities), legal scholarship and practice, civil rights, human right, and civil liberties, and, of course, finance.

It is entirely possible, of course, that hatred and defamation of abstract “Jewishness” can redound back on individual Jews—something that the wave of threats and attacks since the beginning of 2017 makes all too clear. Nor, I hasten to add, is the analysis above meant to describe anti-Semitism as such. Nazi anti-Semitism was thoroughly racialized, targeting a biological essence that inhered in individuals—combining this with a transcendental devil theory. After World War II, at least in the United States, Jews were not so much deracinated, as provisionally whitened. This provisional grant of white privilege, however, did not obliterate the devil theory associated with Jewishness, it just abstracted and institutionalized it, removing the Semitic labeling in mainstream discourse.

What does any of this have to do with populism? I think it probably has a lot to do with it, but it’s going to take some work to sketch in the connections.

First, populism is one of those vexed concepts that is nearly meaningless absent a qualifier. Without very specific definitions, “populism” can mean anything from a demagogic politician cynically pandering to a broad segment of the population—with substantive policies or empty rhetoric—to a broad-based movement for state-supported programs supporting redistribution of resources and the public good.

That is, everything from the Hitler’s appeals to the a Volkish culture and racial superiority to the cross-race alliance of small farmers and workers proposed by Tom Watson in the post-Civil War United States have been classes as “populism.” It is so easy to applaud movements like the latter, which terrified the white elite, and which was the same sort of threat that led to the creation of the cross-class alliance of European settlers that became known as whiteness, white privilege, and white supremacy in the pre-Revolutionary period. Between these two extremes we see everything from Julius Caesar’s land reform, providing farmland for both veterans and the urban poor, to FDR’s New Deal programs. Simply put, any analytic category that can encompass Hitler, Caesar, Watson and FDR flirts with incoherence.

And yet–there remains something intriguing, something potentially useful in a category that can bridge the murky abyss that so often separates a popular politics from a pro-population politics.

Part of the problem here is that none of the potential definitions of “populism” as such has anything, analytically, to recommend it over another unless we narrow the criteria. This is because populism as such is not an ideology but a style of politics, or a political aesthetic that pits “populace” against “elites” and appeals to the former for the “good of the state.”

One way out of this definitional conundrum would be to limit the label populism–unmodified by say “pseudo” or “right wing”–to those politics that are at once popular and pro-populace, particularly with respect to the use of state power to redistribute wealth and provide for the public good. In practice, I tend to default to a definition of this kind, but only in a negative sense, referring to the sort of things Trump and company are doing as “pseudo-populism” but withholding the label of populism propper from any contemporary movement.

Part of this is because policies that are truly for the people–meaning “all but the elite” or the “99%”–are rarely popular in the American scene–at least in their inception. (They become popular enough once they kick over into the category of “entitlements.”) Moreover, such policies that focus on the positive use of state power to redistribute not just “opportunity,” but wealth are properly described in ideological terms as some form of socialism (social welfare, democratic socialism, meliorism).

Some may object that a plurality of Americans, often a majority, actually do support many policies that would, de facto, result in the redistribution of wealth so long as they are not labeled with the nefarious, anti-American adjective “socialistic.”

Wait! Perhaps there is a connection to the foregoing discussion of de-Semitised anti-Semitism and color blind racism. Is it possible that actual populist “movements” in the United States have to contend with the irreducible racialization of the classes and demonization of pluralistic forms of analysis that oppose racialization–that are associated with Jewishness?

Well, yeah.

So in the cusp between the end of the Civil War and the counter-Reconstruction or between he end of Jim Crow and the rise of mass incarceration, the United States has seen Reconstruction in the first place and the Poor People’s Movement in the second, but for the most part movements that claim populist credentials–from the Klan of the 1920s to the “Populist Party” of the 1990s–have been negatively framed. That is, they are framed in terms of resentment and refusal against an imagined elite that is using foreign, anti-American others to undermine real Americans. These movements have not (mostly) been fueled or founded by working class folk, but by middle class Americans who fear that “their wealth” will be appropriated to support racial others in the urban centers or in the form of immigrants and refugees.

Working people can be attracted to such movements of resentment when they are told that most of the problems of our society are because of a racial undercaste and that if not for government largess to culturally and racially Other newcomers their own lives would somehow be better. The transparent untruth of such claims–the absolute lack of material benefit associated with the exclusion of immigrants, funding better education, healthcare, and a reasonable safety net for the urban poor–is not particularly relevant, since virtually every contemporary mainstream politician has been making claims of this sort to one degree or another for decades.

Enter Trump. Here we have a politician who, contrary to Democratic Party rhetoric, is not simply the inevitable outcome of recent Republican strategy, but the non-inevitable outcome of a politics of what I am going to call resentment populism that has been fostered by both of the major parties, from Johnson’s War on Poverty that actually set up many of the community surveillance systems that presupposed the pathology of Black culture, through Nixon’s Law and Order rhetoric and on to include Reagan’s War on Drugs, Clinton’s “no Republican is tougher on crime than me,” and Bush and Obama’s continuation of such policies in all of their important particulars.

This is not to say that there is no difference between the two major parties–I know many of my friends and colleague on the Left object to this formulation, insisting that there is no difference–but that the difference has been played out in the degree to which they overtly tapped the politics of resentment populism.

Trump is the politician who begins to say openly what both Democrats and Republicans have been saying in color blind euphemism for decades: Blacks, Mexicans, and Muslims are responsible for the big bad in your lives. He promises to stop coddling Blacks (that is, kill and incarcerate even more of them), deport the Mexicans (giving working class Americans back their good-paying union jobs), and exclude the Muslims (protecting us from the existential threat of “radical Islamic terrorism.”) The fact that none of this has even the vaguest relationship to reality is utterly besides the point. What is real is the resentment, and Trump has tapped into it more successfully than any American politician since Andrew Jackson.

Now, what I have not mentioned yet is the role of nationalism and militarization in the contemporary resentment populism. Nationalism and populism have usually been closely connected, not ideologically, but because they are both political styles that are relatively plastic and improvisational, thus often compatible. Indeed, the forms of populism, say that of the late MLK or Watson before his cooptation by the Southern white elites, that I (and many if not most of my sympathetic readers) might approve of were never all that “popular,” running aground on the obnoxious rock of white privilege and the cross-class alliance that has always been essential to maintaining it in the United States.

Nationalism, and to an extent militarization, have often served as a kind of social glue that has supplemented white privilege in American political and social life–meaning, of course, the social-political practice and mythology of white America.

Trump’s call to “Make America great again” is on the one hand so easy to criticize, but on the other hand, from the point of view of resentment populism it is precisely its fuzzy unreality that makes it attractive. Trump’s ordinary supporters don’t want to “go back” to an era before say Social Security and Medicare–they want to be guaranteed “good jobs with benefits” the demise of which is blamed on  globalization and immigration. They want their taxes to go to pay for, if anything, improvements to their own communities–rather than being siphoned off to pay for programs to improve the lives of the (Black) urban poor.

The fact that antiquated energy technologies such as coal are never going to make a comeback (short of expensive, environmentally destructive subsidies) does not diminish the anger of miners and processors who have lost work. The reality of the ways in which largely unregulated globalization has contributed to the degradation of American labor provides enough of a grain of truth to provide cover for a profound and systemic (and consistent across regimes) lack of government support for a labor movement that is, in any case, woefully degraded by decades of impossible compromises.

The divide between Producers and Parasites highlighted in the work of Berlet and Lyons in the context of the development of American-style populism remains important in the contemporary context, at least as a salient echo, but there is no contemporary movement that really addresses this division in a popular way. Occupy made an attempt, but in spite of my sympathy and admiration for what they were able to accomplish, it is Trump with his politics of open resentment populism who is now president, and various flavors of Republicans, who mostly espouse similar but less open forms of resentment populism, who control both houses of Congress as well as most state legislatures.

The most open question of the Trump adminstration is to what extent it will combine aggressive militarization–including pursuit of opportunistic wars–with domestic resentment populism. Such wars, properly couched, almost always provide at least a short term nationalist boost to a regime. This certainly worked in G. W. Bush’s favor when the 9/11 attacks effectively pressed the reset button on his lack-luster administration. Of course there is plenty of room for continuing and expanding militarization at home and all-too-bloody near war abroad, but I think that the optimistic predictions of a more isolationist America under Trump were always wishful thinking. As much as I want to be proved wrong, I anticipate (if not quite predict) expanded overseas belligerence and will not be surprised if it is on a massive scale. This in turn will provide more political cover for the aggressive expansion of  militarization at home and the free reign of resentment populism.

I’ll be very, very happy to be shown to be a doom-saying and myopic Cassandra.