They Say There’s Never Been a Man Like Donald Trump in American Politics. But There Was—and We Should Learn From Him.

Zachary D. Carter
Wed, October 16, 2024

The story of Georgia’s political firebrand Tom Watson will never be a defining national myth. Its extraordinary implications for American democracy notwithstanding, Watson’s life is saturated with too much tragedy to qualify for the righteous optimism demanded by the national canon. When Watson’s statue was removed from the steps of the Georgia state Capitol in 2013, the event went virtually unnoticed outside Atlanta. Without historian C. Vann Woodward’s transcendent 1938 biography, Watson would have surely disappeared even from academic study, like most politicians of his era.

But Watson’s life retains an unsettling power that, once encountered, inescapably colors interpretations of the American past and present. Watson was the most charismatic leader of the late-19th-century political thunderclap that came to be known as American populism, and his story resonates with the full promise and peril of the American project—he can be understood without exaggeration as the heroic scion of the Boston Tea Party and the fevered progenitor of Donald Trump’s violent fantasies.

Born to slave-owning Confederate parents, Watson watched his family descend into poverty after the Civil War, and rose to prominence in Georgia politics as a lawyer and newspaperman who assailed the prevailing economic order. Watson accurately described Gilded Age political rule as a predatory alliance of Southern political bosses and Northern capitalists. As the 1880s turned to the 1890s, Watson came to understand racial division as an essential tool of this bipartisan system—one that elites in both parties inflamed to weaken the political power of Black and white working people by turning them against each other. He ran for Congress as a member of the independent People’s Party, winning support from prominent Black intellectuals, including W.E.B. Du Bois, with his pledge to erase America’s “color line” in pursuit of agrarian liberation. The radicalism of the People’s Party is easily obscured by the fact that so many of its early demands were eventually enacted, from an eight-hour workday to free mail delivery to a progressive income tax. But the most extraordinary aspect of the Populist Party was its coalition. When Georgia police arrested Black voting rights activist H.S. Doyle on the streets of Augusta ahead of the 1892 election, one of Watson’s henchmen sprang Doyle from prison and sheltered him at Watson’s estate, where more than 2,000 members of the People’s Party armed themselves to successfully defend Doyle from a state-backed lynch mob.

But Watson eventually lost his 1892 campaign, and the populist movement that had gripped the country disintegrated within a few years. By the early 20th century, the party was gone, and Watson had transformed himself from a prophet of racial cooperation into a fountain of white-hot racial resentment. He endorsed the complete disenfranchisement of Black voters, ranted against Catholics and socialists, and eventually used his newspaper to incite a lynch mob into murdering Jewish factory superintendent Leo Frank.

Watson’s embrace of the dark side brought him his greatest electoral success. When he died in 1922, Watson was a United States senator from Georgia, representing the very Democratic Party he once denounced.

Watson was an effective demagogue because he practiced a politics of anger in an era that demanded it. Even at his most inspiring—and his losing 1892 campaign was an intoxicating cultural phenomenon—Watson didn’t so much promise to help as fight. He had a policy platform, but he was also operating an economic cooperative and very nearly an armed rebellion. Throughout the Gilded Age, workers and farmers really were being exploited by a predatory oligarchy. The political system was indeed thoroughly corrupt, and the economy was a system of mass deprivation marked by financial crises, endless deflation, agricultural mismanagement, mechanized industrial cruelty, and child labor. People had a right to be angry.

Today’s global economy is for the most part gentler, but a similar politics of anger has returned. The 2008 financial crisis distilled a sense that the game was rigged against ordinary people. The federal government saved banker bonuses and shrugged off financial fraud as unemployment soared to 10 percent and more than 9 million homes were lost to foreclosure. The wealthiest one percent of American households captured half the economic gains across Barack Obama’s presidency, and by the close of 2015, the bottom 99 percent had recovered only about two-thirds of the income it had lost during the crash.

It’s not hard to understand how a politics of anger can be mobilized when the political system fails ordinary people while taking extraordinary measures to protect the wealthy. What is more difficult to process is how that anger has been sustained over the past eight years.

The unemployment rate was below 5 percent for all but the final nine months of Donald Trump’s presidency and for all but the first six months of Joe Biden’s. For context, the unemployment rate never moved below 5 percent between January 1974 and April 1997. And while nobody enjoyed the bout of inflation that set in between 2021 and 2022, worker wage gains have outpaced price increases since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Inflation peaked at 7.2 percent in June 2022—but inflation was actually higher across the entire first year of Ronald Reagan’s presidency (followed by nine consecutive months of double-digit unemployment) without a populist uprising. The U.S. labor market hasn’t been as robust as it is today in 50 years, and even accounting for inflation, the overall economic performance of the past two years has been the best since at least the end of Bill Clinton’s presidency. The U.S. economy is not without problems; housing is too expensive, for instance, and just about everything associated with being a parent has become extremely difficult. But it just isn’t true that the nation’s political system has been ignoring the plight of ordinary workers. It has responded quite vigorously to their needs in the form of repeated multi-trillion-dollar investments in domestic industry and direct household support.

Nevertheless, Donald Trump and J.D. Vance will almost certainly secure the votes of nearly half the American electorate this November, deploying a campaign of vicious dishonesty that would make Sen. Watson proud. This isn’t a populist campaign in any meaningful economic sense; Trump’s vow to repeal Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, for instance, is a promise to renege on more than $1 trillion in American manufacturing. But it remains a campaign predicated on anger. At the recent vice presidential debate, Vance repeatedly squeezed anti-immigrant vitriol into his economic commentary—claiming that illegal immigration was “one of the most significant drivers of home prices in this country” (a transparently ludicrous explanation for the post-COVID rise in home prices, which was produced not by a mass influx of foreigners but by the dislocations of the pandemic). One week, Trump and Vance are roiling Springfield, Ohio, with preposterous lies about immigrants eating pets; the next, they’re inventing fables about the government diverting disaster-relief aid to undocumented workers and ranting about immigrants bringing “bad genes” into the country. Occasionally Trump or Vance pays lip service to a policy idea for a few hours—not even their most fervent supporters pretend to care—before getting back to the campaign’s main business of bashing immigrants.

Why on earth would such madness get political traction? For many liberals, the answer is simply that the country is riddled with racism, a response that is both true and trivial. Racism has bedeviled this continent for centuries, but demagogues who seek power through raw resentment fail all the time. New York Mayor Eric Adams has been trying to pin the city’s troubles on migrants for years now, and everybody hates him. Pat Buchanan and David Duke tried to do the same thing in the 1990s and couldn’t win over their own party. Watson’s story shows that, for a time, the right leader could inspire even ex-Confederates to literally fight on behalf of Black voting rights.

Something important happened at the end of Trump’s presidency and the beginning of Joe Biden’s. Nobody wants to talk about it—not even conservatives bring up masks and school closures anymore, and much of the discourse surrounding inflation studiously avoids reference to the massive economic disruption of COVID-19. But one of the most important cultural artifacts of the period is the sudden spread of vaccine skepticism to the cultural mainstream. The anti-vaxxer delusion that vaccines cause autism has lingered at the fringes of the autism community in no small part because it provides narrative meaning to a difficult and random experience. There is tremendous joy in the life of a special needs parent, but there is also a great deal of fear and pain. Fear, because you do not know how the world will respond to your child, and pain, because you must watch your child struggle for no fault of their own. For many, it is more comforting to believe that their child’s hardships are not a random act of fate but a product of deliberate malfeasance. The idea that bad things happen for bad reasons is more palatable than the belief that they happen for no reason at all.

It is not only anti-vaxxers who seek such comfort. Americans on both the left and the right avert their eyes from the story of Tom Watson not only because the story is ugly and violent but because we insist on being able to control our own destiny. From Huck Finn to Indiana Jones, American mythology tends to write its heroes as variations on the story of David and Goliath—tales of underdogs who secure unlikely triumphs against an overbearing order. Even when that order is part of America itself, individual heroism soothes the audience with the promise that the world’s wrongs can be righted with enough derring-do. Horatio Alger’s novels of children born into poverty could be read as an indictment of the Gilded Age social order, but the romance of these stories always lies in a boy taking fate by the horns. Watson disturbs us not only because he turns to evil but because an extraordinary leader’s earnest, Herculean attempt to right the world’s wrongs comes up short. To win, he assents to the dominion of dark forces beyond his control.

By the time the peak of the pandemic had passed, Joe Biden was too old to provide his country with the leadership that might have helped it process the tragedy it experienced in 2020 and 2021. One of Biden’s unique gifts as a public communicator has always been his ability to translate his experience with personal tragedy into public consolation—at his best, he is a remarkably empathetic orator, capable of connecting with people from wildly different walks of life through the common experience of pain. But he didn’t, or couldn’t, do that in his 80s. By the end of his presidency, Biden was holed up in the White House with his family, assiduously denying both political reality and his own fate.

We all lost something in the pandemic, but the nation has never mourned those losses in any meaningful collective manner. A politics of anger is not a particularly clean fit for an era of fear and pain, but for millions of Americans, it is a more comforting substitute than a politics of hope.