Populists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were left wing (but not quite socialist) on economic issues, and were also disproportionately religious and prohibitionist. They were broadly the rural counterparts of the labor unions and socialists in industrial areas. The current right didn't descent from the populists - the populists folded into the Democratic Party with the three-time loss of
my favorite creationist around the turn of the 20th century. Despite his failure, the sorts of things he advocated - with fiat money (domestically, anyway) in place of free silver - would eventually be adopted by the Dems under FDR, years after Bryan's death immediately following his Pyrrhic victory in the Scopes Monkey Trial.
The word "populist" is really nebulous nowadays - it's a useful word despite its vagueness, but it can be used to describe just about anything that sets up a "the people vs. the elites" dichotomy and takes the side of "the people", whether Trump or Sanders or Perot or whatever.
US right-wing populists break with neoliberal right-wingers (e.g. Reagan and both Bushes) in opposing globalization and high levels of immigration, and they have a strong emphasis on "law and order" and are generally socially conservative (or at least pretend to be, in Trump's case). It must also be said that they are disproportionately racist; it's not necessarily that most right-wing populists are racists, but most racists are right-wing populists. On the flip side, there is generally a skepticism of foreign interventionism for "responsibility to protect" and "nation building" reasons, which is a welcome break from the neoconservatives and liberal interventionists. But they also believe in responding ruthlessly to perceived threats, which is why Trump's foreign policy is a crapshoot - it would take a single significant incident to make the difference between better than Obama and worse than Bush, whereas Hillary Clinton was virtually guaranteed to be worse than Obama and better than Bush. But on most issues (excepting trade) that matter to the Republican Randroid elite, Trump et al. are willing to go along with the party line. That's why Ryan and Trump have a functional (if uneasy) working relationship right now.
Ever since the neoliberal revolution in the 1980s and 1990s, our politics have become obsessed with social issues. The Democrats do support the existence of a reasonably functional welfare state while most Republicans are ideologically opposed to having much of one, but until the start of this year we really hadn't seen much in the way of a debate on economic issues - it was Third Way Clintonism all the way, with debates focusing on social issues, even though the Democrats actually in power took moderate-to-conservative positions on these until they perceived that things had shifted enough that they could get away with being social liberals (see, e.g., Obama and both Clintons mysteriously "evolving" on same-sex marriage right after Gallup started reporting majorities in favor of it). In communities of educated liberals, you see the bleeding edge of social liberalism in the form of SJWs and whatnot, and then it slowly creeps into the mainstream liberals' worldview until it's finally adopted by the mainstream center-left parties of the world. Economic issues, except as they relate to race/gender/sexuality, are always conspicuously absent.
One of the political developments of the last few years that I find both insane and unremarked upon is how the left-wing opposition to the institutions of global capitalism (the EU, NAFTA, the TPP, TTIP, the WTO, etc.) collapsed across the Western world in the last decade or so, and the void was filled by right-wing populists. The thing is that neoliberal globalism is, for all its flaws, multicultural and anti-racist. As the left has turned its back on the "basket of deplorables" in their native countries, the multinational capitalist institutions have started appealing to them. That's why globalization has appeared to flip across the political spectrum. I agree with you that it's actually a left-wing concern, but you wouldn't know that to read political pieces in the UK before the Brexit vote, or the US before Trump's election.
Ultimately, the problem comes down to the fact that national borders and the enforcement thereof really are a bulwark against the reduction of developed country working classes to Third World conditions. Once you expose them to truly international competition, the fact that the planet is full of desperate people looking to make $2-10/day is a huge threat to workers hoping to hold onto jobs paying $10-15/hr in the developed world. And yet, in the paradigm that appeals to modern leftists and businessmen alike, there is no good reason that national borders should result in Gary from Gary, Indiana earning many times what his counterpart in Vietnam or Bangladesh makes. So there's no justification to not let the entitled people across the US Rust Belt, northern England, and Wales rot. California, NYC, and London are all doing great, so there's no excuse for those burdens on society. Right?
There's this mostly-accurate perception in the Rust Belts and Little Englands of the world that the left has sold out the working classes, crucifying them on a cross of multiculturalism. They then bury the sword even deeper by calling them all racists and bigots, which actually helps to bring about further racism and bigotry among these people. This also helps to deepen zero-sum thinking, so that they end up opposing welfare systems, in large part because they're perceived (this time less accurately) to result in disproportionate benefits to poor minorities at the expense of blue-collar workers. The opportunists in the Republican Party and their counterparts worldwide are all too eager to fan those flames, crushing the welfare state far more than a strict self-interest perspective would imply, and leading the Democrats to further write them off as idiots who clearly don't see what's best for them.
Within the US, the picture looks something like this. The old Democratic base in the working class had been broadly left of the Democratic mainstream on economic issues but right on social issues, and were induced to defect to the Republicans in a long process starting with Nixon's Southern Strategy and running all the way through Trump and the loss of the Rust Belt. The Democrats (inadvertently?) collaborated with them by favoring the technocratic-managerial upper middle class from the 1970s on, more or less voluntarily suffering electoral losses to push their interests. This would evolve into the Democratic Party's version of neoliberalism in the 1980s and 1990s and is typified by the Silicon Valley, Manhattan, Cambridge MA, and DC types today. Notably, these were the only people who were particularly enthusiastic about Hillary Clinton; she also won most minority populations in the primaries but suffered from low turnout and unexpectedly poor results from the ones who did vote in the general election. If you look at electoral maps, you'll see that they Thomas Frank's book
Listen, Liberal does a good job of chronicling how this happened, and I highly recommend to both Clintonist liberals and to left-wing anti-globalists like you.
Enter Bernie Sanders. This guy actually pulled off something very interesting, and inspiring to the likes of me and whoever thinks similarly: he united the remainder of the Rust Belt working class that was still with the Democratic Party with left-wing college types. The Democratic Party establishment clearly didn't think this could happen: Sanders was supposed to win only the college types and lose every primary outside of Vermont, which is why he was allowed to run as Clinton's supposed-to-be-token opposition. I don't know if this is a flash in the pan or if it will turn into a real movement, but there's some reason to believe it might work on the national level. If a Democrat were to come along who could connect the decline of the white working class (lots of drug abuse and suicide), with the decline of the black working class in the same area about 20 years beforehand (lots of drug abuse and homicide), with the general belief of the young of all races that they are going to be the first generation in the last 8 or so to be worse off than their parents in every meaningful way, then they would be utterly unstoppable. Sanders put two of these three ingredients together, and there is some chance that someone could pull off all three while also not saying politically taboo words like "socialist". I think that it's more likely that this doesn't happen in 2020 than that it does, but I'm willing to fight for whomever shows the most signs of pulling it off.
this is why I love CFC
