Today, The Free Press is launching a brand-new podcast. It’s called Breaking History, and it’s a combination of two things our readers love: news commentary and historical analysis. I’m the host. In each show, I’ll take a look at a person, a movement, or a controversy from the past that can help us understand contemporary America. If you liked my piece about how Republics unravel, or about how students become terrorists, then you’re going to love this podcast.
The first episode is about Donald Trump’s historic comeback—and why America sometimes craves an anti-elite elite. Trump is not the first populist to win the White House with a promise to drain the swamp. That distinction goes to Andrew Jackson, the seventh president of the United States, whose portrait has just been rehung in the newly redecorated Oval Office. And Jackson’s presidency might be the best guide to what the next four years could look like.
You can listen to the episode below, or keep scrolling to read a print adaptation of it. If you enjoy either, subscribe to Breaking History on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Donald Trump, just sworn in as president, was reelected to be a wrecking ball, a middle finger, the people’s punch to the Beltway’s mouth. But while this populist moment feels “unprecedented,” it’s not. The rebuke of the ruling class is encoded in our nation’s DNA.
Populism is hard to pin down. It’s not really a governing philosophy or a movement or an ideology. Some call it a political grammar that pits the people against the powerful, the best of us against the rest of us. It’s more of a mood, the desire to fire the bosses, crash the country club, and ask the snobs: You think you’re better than me? And every now and again, populism in America can sweep an old order out of Washington.
Populism is Sam Adams and his friends dressing up as Mohawks and dumping imported tea into Boston Harbor. It’s the protagonist in a John Grisham novel discovering that the whole damn system is corrupt. It’s Walt Whitman’s “barbaric yawp.” It’s Dirk Diggler in Boogie Nights quitting on the set of a porno, screaming, “You’re not my boss! You’re not the king of me!”
