A Distant Mirror: Nineteenth-Century Populism,Nativism, and Contemporary Right-Wing Radical Politics

Nineteenth-century America witnessed two major waves of populist mobilization. The first started in late 1840 in response to the massive influx of immigrants, predominantly from Catholic Ireland. The second occurred in the 1880s and 1890s, provoked by large-scale structural changes affecting rural America. Both movements promoted a far-reaching social and political reform agenda, which they believed would restore the country to its foundational roots: evangelical Protestantism directed primarily against the Catholic “invasion” in the first case, Jeffersonian republicanism directed against the collusion of money and politics in the second. Although both movements failed to realize their goals, they had a profound and lasting impact on the evolution of American identity. Nineteenth-century American populism thus offers a useful model for understanding present-day populist mobilization in Western Europe.