American populism, from the time of Andrew Jackson to the agricultural insurgency of William Jennings Bryan and through to the passage of Prohibition in 1920, won broad support by organizing around the concept of a virtuous white Protestant rural majority fighting the power of corrupt and oppressive Northeastern business elites. The concept of populism as a conflict between the average American and morally avaricious elites is embedded in American life.

The imported concepts behind anti-populism—that is, the justifications for lording over the “deplorables”—are, however, relatively little known.

But, beginning with the conflict over whether to enter World War I, populism was increasingly defined by the Midwestern opposition of ethnic Germans to World War I and World War II. The last gasp of rural radicalism came in 1924 when Wisconsin’s “Fighting Bob” La Follette, a vehement opponent of World War I, ran on a third-party populist/progressive ticket which, after expelling the Communists, carried only his home state. More broadly, he won the support of many isolationist German and Scandinavian farmers to capture 17 percent of the national vote. But by the 1920s, for the first time, the cities out-populated rural America and the populists’ sense of themselves as the true face of America was challenged by philo-German thinkers such as H. L. Mencken and Theodore Dreiser, who questioned the value of democracy. The famed Baltimorean, who coined the terms “Bible Belt” and “booboisie,” was a fount of anti-populism. He was, as he crowed to