American Greatness: The Long Shot

Do you really want to “own the libs’?

If you think the political establishment was out to get Donald Trump, they feared and loathed Huey Long so much that after years of threatening him they killed him.

American Greatness:

“Socialist, fascist, populist—Huey Long defied these labels with a grin. Known as “The Kingfish” in his time, Long served as a Democratic governor and then senator for Louisiana in the early 20th century. Though the assault he waged against the industrial world and political establishment on behalf of everyday Americans came from the Left, his model offers a blueprint for the Right today. The Kingfish actually was what Donald Trump only pretended to be.

“Impudent, intellectually gifted, daring, careless of the opinions of his colleagues, self-assertive, forgetting nothing and forgiving no one, he forged ahead to political leadership on the errors of his opponents,” explained columnist George Sokolsky of Long in 1935. “Those who sought to ignore Huey Long or to condemn him as a clown erred because neither his crassness nor his impertinences offended his own following.”

Reared in the ugliness of “poor white” environments, Sokolsky wrote, Long “raised himself up by almost superhuman efforts to become a lawyer.” It was while practicing law that Long would establish himself as an enemy of oligarchy. …

Long rapidly consolidated power by firing opponents at every level of the state bureaucracy and replacing them with supporters. Like Louis XIV, Long used the power of patronage to control his court. “When politicians or institutional leaders opposed his agenda, he blocked funding and authorization for programs they wanted, ousted their family members from government jobs, and targeted them with retributive legislation,” writes Annika Neklason in The Atlantic.

Long beat the state legislature into shape alright, declaring, when an opponent questioned his familiarity with the state constitution: “I’m the Constitution around here now.” And when stung by the press, Long simply created his own newspaper.  …”

Huey Long was the greatest of all American populists.