"Elites who tar their critics in the U.S. with the sly pejorative of 'populist' count on our collective amnesia. They’d rather the real Populists remained forgotten, along with the potential they represented."
If the Vermont Senator has failed to win the presidency or to rally the Democratic establishment to his positions, he may yet be able to force CEOs to answer questions publicly about how their business practices harm workers, consumers, and the environment. Will it inspire a left turn in the electorate?
A leading historian and theorist of populism looks beyond psychology or brainwashing as explanations for the appeal of such movements, but still focuses on the ways elites can better lead the people instead of what people may want.
Substantive politics? Broad-based material benefits for the mass of Americans? Rejecting the rule of credentialed technocrats? Mobilizing voters and legislating instead of relying on the courts to protect basic rights? An unpublished 1990s manuscript co-authored by Barack Obama may leave readers wondering what happened to those ideas.
The thoroughness of racial segregation through the housing markets is a profound obstacle to the kind of interracial political organizing the left wants to accomplish.
The Florida senator engaged with an ingnominious tradition of disparaging expertise and knowledge as "elitist" when he condemned a meeting between President Biden and a number of historians, including the author.
The political field is tilted against the Democrats for the midterms and 2024; will the party embrace the energy of progressives and mobilize its voters the way that conservatives are successfully doing on the other side?
Ross Benes argues that the Democratic party has lost an entire political generation of influence in the Great Plains by forfeiting the region's legacy of farmer populism, making the Plains a Republican stronghold and a barrier to progressive legislation.
The author contends, with hope, that the Trump presidency was a brief blip in the long decline of nationalistic conflict that will allow international cooperation for global challenges.
Populist and feminist agitator Mary Lease advised farmers to "raise less corn and more hell." Her brand of hell-raising, however, included a strong current of antisemitism that needs to be widely known.
"The consensus intellectuals of the ’50s plucked the term from 19th-century obscurity and redefined it. It is their redefinition that is still with us today."
Journalist Jake Tapper reflects on the prescience of the 1957 Elia Kazan/Budd Schulberg film "A Face in the Crowd", which anticipated the power of inflammatory appeals in the mass media.
A review of Anne Applebaum's "Twilight of Democracy" argues that the author focuses on the role of nostalgia and personality in driving authoritarianism and breaking up the center-right coalition, but ignores the fact that that the center failed to deliver an improved standard of living to the broad public.
Samuel Moyn warns that a leading Never Trump legal scholar is less concerned with how Trump might harm minorities than with how Trump might harm the image of rule by elites.
Right-wing conservative movements are driven by a psychological complex of threat and hostility to heterodox opinion that makes them difficult to stop once they've developed.
