Populists feed off people’s grievances and seek to exploit them. In the case of the United States, the grievances were manifold and posed considerable danger to the future of American democracy as well as the American dream. The country had become dangerously divided after decades of postindustrial decline and the loss of mining and manufacturing jobs, economic crisis, shrinking opportunity, and the lack of socioeconomic mobility for many Americans, as well as more recent and rapid demographic change. The haves and have-nots in America essentially lived in and experienced two different
...more
