Back in the 1930s, Huey Long, Louisiana’s flamboyant governor and later U.S. senator, explained himself this way to reporters. “I am sui generis (one of a kind), just leave it at that.”
Indeed, Long was a one-man revolution in Louisiana politics, wresting control from the ruling oil barons and other so-called Bourbons, upending their arch-conservative dominance and giving the common man and woman finally a piece of the pie in their oil-rich state.
Long taxed the oil companies, gave the people free textbooks for their children in school, paved countless miles of roads in their dirt-patch state, built bridges, and erected a new skyscraper state capitol in Baton Rouge. And he made a lot of enemies along the way—the patrician press, the ensconced rich, and finally a doctor who assassinated Long in 1935.
Huey Long remains today perhaps the best-known challenge to establishment politics in American history. His is a long lineage that includes fellow left-wing Louisiana populists like his own brother and three-time governor Earl Long and later four-time governor Edwin Edwards. He’s often compared to other Southern demagogues like Strom Thurmond of South Carolina and Gene Talmadge of Georgia, but unlike them Long didn’t rule from the right or even more importantly race bait.
With Donald Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance making a strong bid for the White House in a few weeks, taking a look at politicians like Huey Long and their appeal might be instructive.
Like Long in his day, Trump today is generally dismissed by an equally patrician mainstream media as a dangerous demagogue who threatens the nation’s very democratic foundation. Certainly the national Democratic Party and even some politicians in the national Republican Party despise him and desperately hope for his failure in November.
Like Long, Trump looks beyond party leaders and their subservient press to what they scorn as “the deplorables” (what used to be known as “the great unwashed”), people who get dirty at the workplace, who struggle to pay for a roof over their head, who wince at their grocery bills. Most of them would agree that Trump is a big mouth whose delivery often doesn’t match his wind-up, but at least he acknowledges their pain. “Brie and Chablis” Democrats are too busy touting “Bidenomics” to even see the pain.
Still, the comparison only goes so far. Yes, like Trump, Huey Long indeed craved power, and he ran roughshod over his political enemies. However, he also delivered the goods to the people. He gave them hope as well as a true share in the economy. In contrast, Trump peopled his administration with the same kind of Wall Street types who helped create the “Swamp” in Washington, D.C., that he decried on the campaign trail.
Trump tried to gut the National Labor Relations Board and more recently praised Elon Musk for firing union workers. So much for standing up for the working stiff.
Joe Biden proudly proclaimed himself the nation’s most pro-union president even as he continually diverted the nation’s resources into wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. Plus he betrayed railway workers who simply wanted basic rights like sick leave. Kamala Harris struggles to find an issue in which she disagrees with Biden.
Regular working class folks don’t have much of a choice when they go to cast their ballots in November. Mine is going to Jill Stein, a third-party candidate with no chance to win but at least one who stands strong against Harris and Trump warmongering (Trump is as blindly pro-Israel as Biden and Harris) and she seems to have a genuine care for the well-being of average Americans.
This is one voter who is tired of voting for the lesser evil.
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