Bluesky

Congress adjourned in August without making any further progress on President Donald Trump’s signature second-term legislative crusade: the grossly restrictive SAVE Act, a thoroughly MAGA-besotted effort to suppress ballot access in the name of subduing a wholly fabricated epidemic of voter fraud. (House Speaker Mike Johnson vowed to revive a watered-down version of the legislation this fall, but the prospects that it will make any more headway on Capitol Hill on the eve of the midterms are remote.)

The Oval Office bluster around the SAVE Act indicates that the legislation is yet another example of Trump’s ever-fickle authoritarian hubris; in time, he’ll no doubt revert to his other pet obsessions, like remaking the Washington, DC, cityscape, imposing more capricious tariffs, and pursuing old vendettas under flimsy new legal rationales. Yet as farcical as the SAVE Act drama may be, the underlying logic of the bill—that the success of the right-wing political project in America rests on minimizing mass participation in elections at all costs—remains foundational to conservative governance. It’s also, far from incidentally, why no facet of the MAGA agenda deserves to be called populist.

As a Beltway-bred political descriptor, populism is close to meaningless: It’s pundit shorthand for strongman-style evasions of constitutional restraint that are usually steeped in bigotry and xenophobia. This crude misreading of America’s capital-P Populist movement stems largely from the misleading and tendentious work of the historian Richard Hofstadter; it’s become infinitely dumber and more useless in the hands of a legion of cable hosts, clueless academics, and elite journalists.

The actual Populist movement, which was rooted in the economic plight of farmers and workers during the Gilded Age, was a campaign to expand American democracy into the marrow of our productive lives. This ambitious undertaking entailed everything from the formation of agricultural cooperatives to initiatives devoted to mass literacy and political education, to the establishment of a new currency system designed to reward workers directly for their labor and penalize unproductive financiers who exploited their monopoly hold on the means of production to confine most Americans to a glorified state of debt peonage.

At the core of the Populist reform agenda was the move to put more governing power into the hands of the people, once it was wrested from the moneyed interests. The term populist is indeed derived from the movement’s political vehicle: the People’s Party. The people’s power was to be redeemed and secured by the expansion of their voting rights—the most effective means of curbing the power of money in a formal democracy. That meant the Populists were early supporters of women’s suffrage (even though party leaders kept it out of national party platforms for tactical reasons) as well as Black voting rights after Reconstruction (with the same glum proviso holding for some key state Populist groups in the South). It also meant that Populists were among the first national figures to call for the direct election of US senators, rather than their selection by state legislatures, and to propose ballot initiatives that would prevent state legislatures from being captured by the era’s ascendant plutocracy.

Nothing in the present-day MAGA movement meets the basic definition of populism—and the vote-suppressing provisions of the SAVE Act aren’t even the half of it. Consider MAGA’s war on the ballot initiative. Since the Supreme Court’s overthrow of abortion rights in the profoundly antidemocratic 2022 Dobbs ruling, many states—including several deep-red redoubts in the South and the Midwest—have passed ballot initiatives that protect reproductive rights. The response of GOP governors and legislators in these states has been to hamstring the initiative process itself, either by passing legislation to supersede it or by imposing new requirements for supermajorities of 55 or 60 percent, in order to keep such popular positions as Medicaid expansion, minimum-wage increases, and guaranteed employee sick leave out of the ballot box. Florida was an early adopter of this counter-majoritarian strategy when it mandated 60 percent approval margins for initiatives in 2006—even though the referendum approving the change was passed by a majority smaller than that. When Florida’s 2024 abortion-rights measure won by a 57 percent majority vote, it therefore couldn’t become law, but it came close enough to spook Governor Ron DeSantis and his prostrate state Legislature, which then enacted a bevy of referendum and voting restrictions, imposing new ID requirements on petition gatherers and prohibiting out-of-state residents, felons, and other powerless political out-groups from collecting petitions for ballot initiatives.

Then there’s the gerrymandering. Trump’s scorched-earth mid-census-cycle campaign in 2025 to coax as many gerrymanders as possible out of GOP state legislatures was an extension of the strategy the right adopted after the 2010 census in its infamous Operation REDMAP drive, which vastly expanded the number of impermeable safe red seats in the country and led to the Tea Party’s takeover of Congress. But unlike in 2010, Democrats have responded in kind to this latest push, securing blue-friendly counter-gerrymanders and more or less leveling the playing field for the midterms. Yet here, too, the right’s minoritarian political imperative carried the day in key instances: After Virginia voters endorsed a redistricting map that favored Democrats, the state Supreme Court’s right-wing majority simply threw out the referendum result, on dubious legal grounds.

Meanwhile, the Republican governor and Legislature in Utah became determined to invalidate an impartial commission’s redistricting plan that was poised to flip one seat into the Democratic column. And when a growing number of citizens joined a popular movement to rescind their signatures on a GOP-led ballot initiative that would have reinstated the earlier Republican-dominated map, the state passed a law to stop them. In other words, the initiative-petitioning process that has been held to be so irredeemably corrupt in red-state jurisdictions suddenly became sacrosanct with the panicked stroke of Governor Spencer Cox’s pen.

Rarely has the machinery of formal democracy operated so completely, or so baroquely, in reverse. Yet this is what our brain-dead political press sees fit to grace with the name of populism.