TRUMP AND SANDERS BREAK THE MOLD FOR POPULIST POLITICIANS, Jonah Goldberg writes. “Populism is typically born in places like Nebraska, Louisiana, Kansas, and the other places given short shrift in that famous Saul Steinberg New Yorker cartoon showing the view of the world from Ninth Avenue. It’s not supposed to hail from Brooklyn or Queens, never mind Burlington, Vermont, or midtown Manhattan. But that’s where the two reigning populists of the 2016 cycle call home.”

But there is some overlap in the two men, who share a few of leitmotifs sounded by the left-leaning “Progressive” populists of old:

If you can ignore the fact that he’s a billionaire who brags about having been part of the corrupt political system he promises to overthrow, Trump resembles some of the great populists of yesteryear. He’s a nationalist who promises to restore the country to the greatness his followers nostalgically desire. He’s a nativist whose one core issue is stopping illegal immigration — and now any immigration of Muslims, “temporarily.” And he’s a consummate panderer — or, if you prefer, “fighter” — who channels and validates his supporters’ frustrations. As the fictionalized Huey Long character Willie Stark says in the novel All the King’s Men: “Your will is my strength. Your need is my justice.” Long promised to make “every man a king.” Trump promises to make everyone a winner.

Sanders, meanwhile, is all about populist economics — literally. With the exception of his pacifism, he is almost incapable of talking about anything else. But his worldview would be totally recognizable to William Jennings Bryan or Long or even Father Charles Coughlin. According to populist economics, the rich exploit the poor and the middle class intentionally. They leech off their hard work, and they send them to war.

The proper role for populist-run government is to make the puppet masters pay, literally and figuratively. Our economy is “designed by the wealthiest people in this country to benefit the wealthiest people in this country at the expense of everybody else,” Sanders insists. The “billionaire class” has rigged it all, and he’s so angry about it, he often seems more interested in tearing down the rich than building up the poor. (To borrow a Seinfeldian phrase, Sanders sounds like an old man sending back soup at a deli.)

This is one place where Sanders and Trump overlap. They want to make the people ruining this country pay. Sanders wants to impose a cartoonish “speculation” tax on Wall Street; Trump wants to make the Mexicans pay for the wall that will keep them out.

But as Glenn has written in USA Today, as with the rise of the populists of the late 19th and the first half of the 20th century, “Trump and Sanders are just symptoms. The real disease is in the ruling class that takes such important subjects out of political play, in its own interest.”