If Trump were Hitler, America would be unrecognizable. Rivals would vanish into prisons, courts would echo only his voice, and newspapers would print nothing but praise. Crowds would swear oaths, not wave flags, and dissent would end in silence, not jokes on late-night TV. Borders would mark racial purity, not national policy. Armies would march for conquest, and every institution would kneel. This is the dark fairy tale the left tells — that populism is fascism in waiting and Trump its would-be Führer.
But reality looks nothing like that. Rivals challenge him openly, courts strike down his orders, governors defy him, and the press mocks him daily. Rallies end with chants and music, not loyalty oaths; border fights are about policy, not purity; the military is still bound by law, not conquest. What exists is not fascist uniformity but the roar of populism — millions of ordinary people demanding their voices matter as much as the elites who sneer at them.
What Populism Is — and Why It’s Not Nazism
Populism is not an ideology but a mechanic: the people against the elites. It is aspirational — ordinary citizens demanding dignity, fairness, and a better future when power grows arrogant. Nazism, by contrast, was a totalitarian creed — racial purity, absolute loyalty to the state, and the destruction of dissent. The Nazis borrowed the style of populism — mass rallies, fiery rhetoric — but used it only as a mask for tyranny. Real populism breaks down the power of elites and lifts up ordinary people. Nazism only pretended to do this — while in truth it built a new ruling elite and crushed the people beneath it.
Trump often speaks of the “80:20 rule” — that a successful movement should focus on the eighty percent of issues where ordinary people agree, not the twenty percent that divide them. That instinct is tailor-made for populism. It shows that populism, at its best, is not about stoking division but about building solidarity among the people against those who set themselves above them.
The Southern Roots of Populism
American populism grew out of Southern contrariness and independence, the old Scotch-Irish folkways carried across the Atlantic. These were people who had lived under kings, landlords, and bishops and wanted no more of it. They developed what might be called a Southern nose for authoritarianism — an instinct that stiffens whenever someone claims the right to rule over free men.
Thomas Sowell, in his Black Rednecks and White Liberals, pointed out the vices of this culture: touchy honor, quick tempers, violence, suspicion of formal schooling. Those flaws are real, often even today. But the same folkways also inoculated Southerners against the disease of aristocracy. It bred a fierce independence, a refusal to bow to titles or credentials, and a deep suspicion of any man who says he knows better than you. Out of that mixture — flawed but resilient — American populism was born.
The American Populist Line
From those Scotch-Irish hills came the first great wave of political populism: Andrew Jackson. He spoke the language of the frontier, railing against bankers and bureaucrats, elevating the common man against entrenched elites. A century later, William Jennings Bryan thundered that Americans would not be crucified on a “cross of gold.” Bryan was a progressive Democrat, championing farmers and workers against the moneyed elite. In the Depression years, Huey Long carried the torch, promising “Every Man a King.” He, too, came from the progressive side of politics, mixing redistribution with showy populist fire.
In the late twentieth century, Ross Perot revived the style, using plain speech and charts to warn against trade deals that hollowed out ordinary workers. The Tea Party rose in the 2000s, demanding that Washington’s spending and overreach be checked by the people’s will. And in 2016, Donald Trump drew on all these currents at once — Jackson’s bravado, Bryan’s progressive fire, Long’s showmanship, Perot’s outsider defiance, and the Tea Party’s distrust of Washington.
What ties them together is not ideology but inheritance: a stubborn independence, a refusal to bow to elites, and that Southern nose for authoritarianism that has always marked American populism.
Populism vs. Totalitarianism
The American populist tradition has always been noisy, fractured, and unruly. Its leaders come and go, its loyalties shift, and its movements burn hot and then fade. What never changes is its suspicion of power: populism rises whenever elites grow too confident, too insulated, too arrogant to hear the people they rule. That’s why Bryan and Long could come from the progressive side, and Trump from the right — because populism is not an ideology at all. It is a mechanic, a way for ordinary people to shout back at those who presume to govern them.
Totalitarian movements look very different. They demand unity, conformity, and silence. They create official truths, enforced by priesthoods of experts. They elevate the state — or the party, or the leader, or even the religion or cult — above family, church, and conscience. Most of all, they are driven by fear: fear of impurity, fear of dissent, fear of the people themselves. Populism, by contrast, is driven by hope. It believes that the ordinary citizen has a voice, and that by raising it together, the people can bend power back into its proper place.
This is why the comparison between populism and Nazism fails. American populism is too decentralized, too suspicious, too aspirational to ever become totalitarian. But when we look around today, it’s not the populists who are enforcing dogma through institutions, silencing dissent, or demanding obedience to official narratives. That spirit, the old spirit of control, has found its home elsewhere.
The America they would make is quiet and airless, ruled not by kings but by experts who speak with the same authority. Its truths would be issued from on high, its rituals enforced by courts and schools, its heresies punished with silence and exile. The people would not roar in rallies or argue in noisy town halls; they would bow their heads and repeat the slogans handed down to them. The elites despise populism precisely because it is noisy, fractured, and unruly — because it cannot be managed from above. And if any side is drifting toward that shadowed country, it is not the populists who still shout back at power — it is the progressives, the new aristocrats of our age.
Democrat politicians and their radical supporters desperately want to paint Trump and his supporters as Nazis because it’s an easy way to turn people against us without having to come up with good policy ideas of their own.
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