I found the wave of pontificating about Trump’s personal obsession with crowd sizes tiresome — like him equating the crowd at his 2017 inauguration to the 1963 “I Have a Dream rally.” Who’s going to bother denying it? He is petty egomania in all its glories. The question is, what’s its role in his politics?
The answer is: it’s part of the ideology of the Strong Leader. This feature belonged pre-eminently to the 1920s and ‘30s and the rise of fascism. Nothing embodied the irresistibility of the Fuhrer or Duce like their vast adoring crowds.
Trump expresses the role by saying, “I alone can do it.” Also telling is what isn’t said: He never (I mean literally) has spoken a word in favour of democracy. The Strong Leader is a well-tested ideology to reassure people in troubled times that all will be well. He can make facts up (the oceans will only rise one-eighth of an inch in 400 years) because he is the Big Man and what he says becomes true because he said it. This also happens to suit Trump’s intellectual laziness and ignorance.
It becomes attractive in times of crisis and disorientation like the interwar years, when social structures broke down and the economy collapsed. People lose confidence and look to a Strong Leader. In our time there’s climate change and the rise of the billionaires versus the rest, along with abandonment of “the people” by ostensible progressives like former presidents Bill Clinton or Barack Obama, for their own gains.
But the Strong Leader isn’t easy to pull off. They tend to look ludicrous, even in their photos back then. That was Chaplin’s point about Hitler in “The Great Dictator.” Hitler countered that with the Nuremberg rally (and film): where vast numbers gaze up at him adoringly.
Contrast that to Trump’s recent chat on X with Elon Musk, especially when the link failed. They were lucky not to be on visual: the still photo showed an aged, overweight grump glaring futilely at his puny cellphone on a table. So Trump needs his crowds. They prove his claims. In fact, he looked genuinely impressive when he got shot in the middle of one.
But we forget the interwar years weren’t just about right wing populism and fascism, they also included left wing populism and socialism. What’s my point? Did you think Tim Walz, Kamala Harris’s unexpected Democratic running mate, just crawled out from under a rock? Hell no (he’d say), he’s from Minnesota!
In Minnesota, the Democratic party is uniquely known as the Democratic-Farmer-Labor (sic) Party. It was created by merger in 1944 but its roots are in the 1920s when its members “focused on protections for farmers and unions, changes to agrarian policy, social security legislation, and public ownership of railroads, utilities, and natural resources,” according to the DFL itself.
Walz may be folksy but he’s not rootless. The same thing was happening in Canada at the time, in the same geography: our prairies, their “midwest.” What became the NDP began as the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, its very name tended to provoke some serious thought about our society and its values.
Its leader was Tommy Douglas, a Canadian who gave the country universal health care and by 1944 he’d formed the first socialist government in North America. Minnesota’s DFL won power 10 years later. The party gave the U.S. two Democratic vice-presidents (Hubert H. Humphrey and Walter Mondale) and now perhaps a third. Do not underestimate the power of what was called prairie populism, or assume it is was just righting, though there were Canadian versions of that too.
Tommy Douglas began as a small town Baptist minister. It is not incidental that Walz spent most of his life as a high school teacher and football coach. Neither showed any sign of being an authoritarian, that’s a feature that belonged, and belongs, to right, not left populism. We miss a lot when we reduce the ‘20s and ‘30s to bios of its Great Men: Churchill, Hitler, Stalin, FDR.
Welcome back then to the interwar years.
