Colin Dueck's new book interjects a needed dose of sanity and clear thinking into current conversations on this fraught subject. Crucially, Age of Iron correctly underscores how commentators elide over national and electoral distinctions, frequently lumping together Venezuela, Russia, America, Turkey and Hungary, etc., as succumbing to populism's spell and its dastardly consequences for democracy. This tendency is a refusal to take seriously the political matter at hand, affording cultural and political elites a convenient reason to dismiss their critics while not “actually listening to any specific or valid complaints of populist voters.” Nothing to see or hear, folks, just bigots and cranks.
America's experience with populism is one that has had lasting democratic effects, as Dueck notes. Populism in America has been a part of our politics and has not resulted in authoritarian policies. He observes, “perhaps the single most striking feature of American populism historically is its sheer variety in terms of attitudes, platforms, and specific issues of concern.” From William Jennings Bryan's late 19th-century agrarian movement, FDR's New Deal, and the Nixon conservative populism that came to remake the GOP, populism has constantly been at work in our politics, with “these power struggles tak[ing] place—as America's founders believed they would—within the framework of a federal constitutional republic.”
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