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Huey Long in the Age of Donald Trump—and Zohran Mamdani
Politics
Huey Long in the Age of Donald Trump—and Zohran Mamdani
The best way to spread the wealth is for there to be more of it.
Happy Birthday, Huey Long. August 30 marks 132 years since the Kingfish came into the world. And while he’s been gone for 90 years—he was shot by an assassin on September 8, 1935 and died two days later—his spirit abides.
Most obviously, he lives in popular culture. Robert Penn Warren’s 1946 novel, All The King’s Men—a negative portrayal of a Long-like figure—stands both as great literature and as an enduring touchstone of political machination. Another work, Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here (1935) is an even harsher portrayal of a Long-ish dictator. To this day, the title serves as a steady hook for commentary: It can’t (or can) happen here. Needless to say, the mainstream media has often cited Donald Trump as the malignant “It.”
Comes now a new biography: Thomas E. Patterson’s American Populist: Huey Long of Louisiana. It’s a perfectly fine work of scholarship, detailing Long’s brief, wild life: up from a hardscrabble farm in Winn Parish—where he memorized Bible verses even as he smoked and drank and schemed—to his days as a traveling salesman, as a successful lawyer (he argued, and won, a case before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1922, drawing praise from Chief Justice Taft), to his election to statewide offices (including governor and senator), to his burst to prominence as a nationwide populist crusader, to his pending presidential bid—until he was gunned down by a killer.
The author provides plenty of color along the way: Meeting the staid Calvin Coolidge, Long introduced himself as “a hillbilly, more or less, like yourself.” Of course, not everyone liked Huey’s act. A sitting member of Congress, a former governor, and many other Pelican State luminaries attended the 1935 funeral—of Long’s assassin.
As a master of the soundbite and populist provocation, Long seems akin to, well, you know. Indeed, both Long and Trump shared a sense of vast possibility, playing out on the national stage. Yet in the end, as we shall see, the differences prove greater.
Yet for now, in his book, Patterson is happy trashing Trump, asserting that his “incompetence in dealing with the COVID crisis, and solicitude for the wealthy distinguish him from Huey.”
In a 2025 promotional interview, the author added gamely: “Huey Long and Donald Trump are opposite sides of the same populist coin. If you want to understand Donald Trump, you’d do well to read my book.” Warming to bookselling, he continued, “If you want to learn how to defeat Donald Trump, you’d do well to read my book.” Game on.
So while Long and Trump both played to the masses, Patterson maintains that “Huey”—his preferred term of endearment—did so by championing tax increases on the rich, the monies from which presumably transferred to the poor, while Trump does the opposite. To put it mildly, not everyone sees that as a fair accounting of Trumponomics.
But for the moment, Patterson has the floor: “Huey’s humor, enthusiasm, optimism, perseverance, resilience, intelligence, energy, originality, and dedication to a worthy cause of helping 99 percent of the people are admirable.”
Indeed, the author has a specific policy mission: He aims to resuscitate the economics of the early 1930s, when the Depression had caused the unemployment rate to rise to 25 percent. In those bleak years, many Americans—as a matter of desperation or opportunism—looked to extreme political nostrums, from communism to fascism. Somewhere in between was Long-style tax-and-spend redistributionism.
Pledging to make “every man a king,” the energetic Long established thousands of “Share Our Wealth” clubs across the country. He offered free memberships and also sold newspapers, magazines, and a total of four books.
To watch Long speak is to see him boiling down his arguments into demotic simplicity: He personalizes the targets, “Mr. Rockefeller” and “Mr. Mellon.” Thanks to progressive taxation, he promises every American a homestead, an automobile, and a radio. Then he summarizes with a kind of Bible-meets–Karl Marx pithiness: “None shall be too rich, none shall be too poor. None should work too much, none should be idle.”
Long’s intention was to run for president in 1936, challenging the incumbent Franklin D. Roosevelt from the left—perhaps to defeat FDR for the Democratic nomination in the summer of ’36, or maybe to cause him to lose to a Republican that November, so that Long could then run for the presidency as the Democratic nominee in 1940.
Of course, Long never lived to do any of that, and so author Patterson devotes much attention to what might be called “Hueynomics.” Specifically, Patterson cites economic mavens from the early 1930s, even reprinting three charts on income and income transfers (via taxes) from a 1934 Brooking Institution tome, America’s Capacity to Consume, which argued that money transferred from the rich to the poor was more beneficial to the economy, because the poor would be quicker to spend it—an orthodox Keynesian thought. Patterson himself calculates that such a transfer back then would have boosted the economy by a quarter.
Such economic number-crunching is, of course, unusual in a political biography, and yet Patterson has a plan for the here and now. He seeks to redeem Huey’s idea that big tax increases on the rich, with the money moved to the poor, would boost the economy today. To further bolster his economic arguments, the author cites contemporary lefty redistributionists, including Thomas Piketty, Rutger Bregman, and Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
In his life, Long’s left-pushing impelled Congress to pass the Revenue Act of 1935, which FDR, eyeing his left flank, was happy to sign. The bill raised the top personal income tax rate to an eye-watering 79 percent. As the historian Charles A. Beard commented in 1938, “As a revenue producer, the Act worked no wonders. As a stick to beat off the storm troops of Senator Long and [the radio preacher] Father Coughlin, it was not without force.”
So the mission was accomplished, politically, but not economically, as the nation confronted the basic problem with excessive taxation and attempted wealth transfer: Namely, the rich (and the middle class), as well as the economy itself, won’t play along with “soak the rich.” People will either work and invest less, or avoid and evade more.
In the short run, it might be possible to conceal the misalignment of incentives under an avalanche of borrowed and printed money—that was the story of the U.S. economy in the Second World War—and yet in the long run, the realities of production (and inflation) prove dispositive.
Recalling the counterproductive tax policies of the 1930s, the economist Arthur Burns wrote in 1958,
People were unprepared for tax measures of such severity. The new taxes encroached on the spending power of both consumers and business firms at a time when production and employment were seriously depressed. Worse still, they spread fear that the tax system was becoming an instrument for redistributing incomes, if not also for punishing success.
More recently, economist Alan Reynolds documented that revenues from taxpayers in the upper brackets actually declined in response to the higher rates.
Of course revenues declined: Between pushing down economic activity and encouraging tax avoidance, a fall-off in receipts to the Treasury was yet another vindication of the Laffer Curve—the paradoxical truth that too-high tax rates drive tax revenues down, not up. Indeed, back in the taxatious late ‘30s, the economy staggered again, unemployment rising to 19 percent. Every man was most definitely not a king.
We should have known this all along, but by now, any honest observer knows for sure: High tax rates don’t share the wealth, they depress the wealth. Yet memories of past economic failures grow dim, and some people are never interested, anyway, in learning. Indeed, a scheming few see covetousness as a path to power, economic consequences be damned.
In fact, we are seeing a surge in “democratic socialism,” vanguarded by Sanders—still barnstorming in his mid-80s—and now bolstered by that new kid on the block, Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee to be the next mayor of New York City.
The heterodox centrist Claire Lehmann suggests Mamdani is part of a “vibe shift” on the left, which is deemphasizing (although still retaining) cultural wokeness and reemphasizing income redistribution and outright collectivism. This new focus, she writes, is “aimed squarely at our economic order.” In fact, Mamdani appears to be a member of the Red Star Caucus within the Democratic Socialists of America, a faction describing itself as “Marxist–Leninist,” aiming to “abolish capitalism, and ultimately, to achieve communism.”
It’s a shame that after more than a century of failed experiments—socialist poverty and communist tyranny—we still have to argue the basics of liberty and private property, but if we must, we must. To avoid going down the road to serfdom, we need to read their books, including biographies of their heroes, in order to refute their arguments.
As Milton Friedman argued six decades ago, it’s capitalism and freedom that make people happy—and the two must go together. And yet, through carelessness and intellectual neglect, we have allowed the clear-channel signal of capitalist abundance to be muddled.
For instance, even within our mostly free enterprise system, the steady encroachment of green regulators and NIMBYs has made it hard for young people to buy a home and get going with family formation and the American Dream. So for the naive and ahistorical, the siren song of socialism seems sweet.
Meanwhile, the ideology of climate change—that all-purpose growth-snuffing message with roots in Malthus, not Marx—puts a dead hand on all economic activity.
The antidote to this malaise is economic growth. We can start by making housing cheaper, which requires deregulation, including the liberation of the most obvious input, the land itself. So we should be opening up federal lands to development and, at the same time, looking to peacefully acquire land or actually create new land.
Creativity is what we need. If California, for instance, doesn’t want new development on its scenic coastline, maybe we should simply create a new coastline, out in the Pacific Ocean. Other countries are busy building islands in the Pacific—so why not the U.S.? Why not a Trump Riviera? A Trump Tahiti? Realistically, it might be cheaper, as well as cooler, to build new resorts, on new vistas, out in the ocean than to litigate against entrenched coastal plutocrats.
Yes, new thinking is the true path to abundance. The idea of abundance made Huey Long an immensely popular figure in the ’30s—although he died, of course, before people realized that the gigantic tax increases at the heart of his agenda would diminish what wealth we had.
Today we should realize that we don’t need tax increases; we need human ingenuity. Which, as the late Julian Simon wrote so persuasively, is “the ultimate resource.” With the human mind as the first mover, we can unleash natural resources, then mobilize the infinities of AI, biotech, and space travel, such that we can all be kings—and queens—on this, or maybe some other planet.
To be sure, plenty of conservatives have trepidations about go-go capitalism and creative destructionism, and yet they should realize that if growth is slowed for the sake of a more sedate Edmund Burke–to–Russell Kirk social order, the young and the restless will look to neo-Hueys, such as Mamdani, for immediate gratification. It’s simple, really: If the golden goose isn’t laying its gleaming eggs fast enough, the impatient and the power-hungry will hack the goose apart in quest for their “fair share.” Yes, such ravenousness will lead to impoverishment for many, but to a predatory few, it’s a path to notoriety and power.
So while the historical Huey had the wrong road map to abundance—we can best get it by tapping genius, not confiscating wealth—he did have an effective way of describing the fruits of abundance, which contemporary politicians might do well to study, even as they explore different routes to that abundance.
“Huey was an event-making or creative leader. If events failed to occur naturally, he produced them,” Patterson writes. “Huey smashed the environmental limits in which he operated in Louisiana and was forming public opinion to do so nationwide.”
With that in mind, in 1935 Long wrote—the book was published posthumously—My First Days in the White House. In that work, he imagines many bold things; for instance, he calls in the founders of the Mayo Clinic into the Oval Office and tells them,
Your new patients are to be 130,000,000 people, living in the United States and called Americans. I would like to have you prescribe for them the preventive measures and curative, medicinal treatments which they need. I would like you to help me in stamping out a number of diseases that take a terrific toll of human life and human effort from the American people every year.
Continuing this big-think, President Long adds, “I would like to enlarge, under your supervision, the present, insignificant federal laboratory here in Washington into the finest laboratory on the face of the globe. I should like its scientific experimental work extended to include every known disease for which there is not a known cause or a satisfactory cure or preventive.”
Those are the sorts of promises that only abundance can pay for. Admittedly, a few details of this cure strategy would need to be ironed out, and yet they could be ironed out. In fact, a certain contemporary president is all about that sort of ironing. Trump might not be loved by scholarly Long-lovers, and yet he combines Huey’s populist improv with his own art-of-the-dealing, grounded in the deep-grained realization that wealth comes not from taxation, but from production.
The post Huey Long in the Age of Donald Trump—and Zohran Mamdani appeared first on The American Conservative.
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