If you’ve been following the buildup to next year’s US presidential election, you have almost certainly come across an article that describes Donald Trump and his campaign as “populist.” At first glance, there appears to be nothing wrong with this observation. After all, populism has become synonymous with unscrupulous leaders who prey on the voting public’s worst impulses.

However, populism has a progressive history which these narratives ignore. As the former labor educator and union activist Steve Babson shows in his book, Forgotten Populists: When Farmers Turned Left to Save Democracy, populism actually used to mean the complete opposite of what it has come to mean. In the 1890s, populism was an umbrella term for different political movements organized by America’s working class. Far from threatening democracy, their goal was to limit and reduce the power of the country’s monied elite.

The rural United States, one of Trump’s biggest bases of support, writes Babson, would have been his greatest enemy at the turn of the last century. Exploited by millionaires and billionaires from the East Coast, its residents were deeply suspicious of wealth — and rightly so, as many lived on the very edge of poverty while robber barons like John D. Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Andrew Carnegie hoarded fortunes of hitherto unseen proportions.