Departments

;

populism

  • SOURCE: Boston Review
    10/12/2022

    Democracy v. The People: Jan-Werner Muller on Populism

    by Alberto Polimeni

    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. 

  • SOURCE: New York Times
    10/7/2022

    Obama's Lost Manuscript is Also a Lost Path to a Left Populism

    by Timothy Shenk

    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 An unpublished 1990s manuscript co-authored by Barack Obama may leave readers wondering what happened to those ideas. 

  • SOURCE: Dissent
    10/10/2022

    The Ongoing Problem of Segregation in America

    by Aziz Rana

    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. 

  • SOURCE: Washington Post
    8/14/2022

    History Exposes the Fraud of Marco Rubio's Populism

    by Sean Wilentz

    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. 

  • SOURCE: Foreign Exchanges
    1/5/2022

    The End of Mass Politics

    by Daniel Bessner

    "We are told, and we trust, that there are productive ways to channel our political desires, but in actuality this is simply not true."

  • How Democrats Lost the Great Plains

    by Ross Benes

    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. 

  • SOURCE: ZNet
    11/29/2020

    Is the Nationalist Tide Receding?

    by Lawrence Wittner

    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.

  • 11/22/2020

    The Devil and Mary Lease

    by Alan J. Singer

    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.

  • SOURCE: Public Books
    10/23/2020

    Thomas Frank On How Populism Can Save America

    "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."

  • SOURCE: Jacobin
    9/8/2020

    Centrists Are Pining for a Golden Age that Never Was (Review)

    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. 

  • SOURCE: Washington Examiner
    3/12/2020

    The Russian Historian Predicting Chaos

    by Angela Nagle

    All the way back in 2010, Turchin warned that the historical patterns were lining up to indicate a coming period of instability and violence in America, which he expected to peak in the 2020s.