Leo XIII and our Populist Age

by Stephen P. White
I distinctly recall the first time I heard someone suggest in earnest that Donald Trump might make a good president. It was the late summer of 2015 and I was having my hair cut. The woman cutting my hair said she hoped Trump would win the following year's election because she liked his stance on immigration. I thought this was amusing for two reasons.
First, like almost everyone else inside the Capital Beltway back then, I thought Trump's nascent candidacy wasn't really serious. Second, the woman standing behind me with the scissors extolling the virtues of Trump's hard line on immigration spoke with a thick foreign accent. Like every other woman cutting hair in that strip mall barber shop, she was an immigrant.
Still conscious of the scissors, I gently suggested there was some irony in this. Not at all, she said! She had immigrated legally some decades ago. She was proud of her adopted country and grateful for the opportunities it afforded her and her family. And she made it abundantly clear that massive illegal immigration was simply unfair to Americans, particularly to people (like her) who had "followed the rules." Donald Trump promised to put a stop to that, and that's why she thought he'd make a good president. Simple.
I confess that I did not leave that barber shop thinking Donald Trump would make a good president, or even that he would ever be president. But I did leave with a lasting reminder that those who oppose mass immigration, or lament its consequences, are not all motivated by selfishness, any more than those who favor mass immigration are always driven by altruism. And it was the first of many hints of just how broad Trump's coalition of the dissatisfied might be.
The wave of populism that has been reshaping American politics (indeed the politics of many Western democracies) over the last decade has many causes and mass immigration is near the top of the list. More generally, there is profound dissatisfaction with the way political and economic "elites" - or, if you prefer, the "establishment" the "uniparty," the "professional-managerial class," etc. - have handled the reigns these last few decades.
Exacerbating the dissatisfaction, and thereby fueling populist sentiment, is the condescension with which the expression of that dissatisfaction has been met by the same "ruling class" on whose watch everyone has become so dissatisfied. Express objections to the status quo and one's cultural "betters" will deign to inform you that such objections stem from economic ignorance, racism, xenophobia, and unchristian attitudes in general. Unfortunately, it has sometimes been representatives of the Church doing the scolding.
Now, blaming "elites" or "the establishment" or the "ruling class" is almost always an oversimplification (and one with not a small whiff of Marx about it). But my goal here is neither to justify populism nor to bury it. Rather, the point is to highlight that, whatever one thinks of Populism as a cure to what ails us, the underlying maladies that have given rise to it are real, pressing, and not going anywhere.

In this regard, the challenges of our brave, new, globalized, world, are not entirely dissimilar to the crises of the 19th century, which moved Leo XIII to write Rerum novarum. In some ways the challenges of today - particularly the consequences and implications of our technology - are very different from those of 1891. But like today's, the crisis to which Leo XIII was responding was not merely an economic crisis, but a rapid reshaping of economic, political, and social life all at once.
Leo's unsparing criticism of the economic liberalism of his day was paired with a pointed critique of socialist alternatives, then being promoted as a just response to the "worker question," but which had not yet taken form as a political state. Socialism was a false response to a true crisis. It was, as Pope John Paul II would later write, "The [socialist] remedy would prove worse than...