An economic boom is the only way to stop the populists

Two decades later, Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan seized the populist mantle. They opposed trade deals, the deficit, and ineffective government. Buchanan crusaded against immigration, against war, against the ethos of secular humanism. Perot and Buchanan badly divided the Republican Party in 1992 and 1996. Then they disappeared.

What happened? The same thing that diffused Bryan at the turn of the twentieth century and Coughlin and Long in the 1930s: Economic growth.

The oil shocks and stagflation of the 1970s and early 1980s gave way to the economic boom that started in 1982 and lasted until 1990. The fever subsided. The New Right joined the Reagan coalition. At the end of the 1970s, New Right activists were looking to begin a third party. By the end of the 1980s they were loyal Republicans.

Didn’t last. The recession midway through George H.W. Bush’s term brought the radical middle into the streets once more. Outsourcing, deindustrialization, immigration were in the headlines. The early years of Bill Clinton’s presidency did nothing to assuage the frustration. Tax increases, gun control, an expensive and convoluted health care reform—the populists wanted none of these.