Sam Smith – It was disappointing to see the Pope joining the media and elite liberals in misinterpreting populism. According to the Washington Post:
Pope Francis denounced the “sirens of populism” on Sunday as he called for a renewed commitment to helping the poor, homeless and migrants amid Italy’s latest migration debate.
Francis celebrated the Catholic Church’s World Day of the Poor by inviting hundreds of poor and homeless people and migrants into the Vatican for a special Mass and luncheon. He denounced the indifference the world shows them as well as the “prophets of doom” who fuel fear and conspiracies about them for personal gain.
“Let us not be enchanted by the sirens of populism, which exploit people’s real needs by facile and hasty solutions,” Francis said.
In fact, if you go back to the late 19th century, when populism was created as a movement, you would have found it was, as the Pope is now, calling for “a renewed commitment to helping the poor, homeless and migrants.” It helped inspired the labor movement and the some of the best aspects of the New Deal.
As Wikipedia notes:
The Ocala Demands laid out the Populist platform: collective bargaining, federal regulation of railroad rates, an expansionary monetary policy, and a Sub-Treasury Plan that required the establishment of federally controlled warehouses to aid farmers. Other Populist-endorsed measures included bimetallism, a graduated income tax, direct election of Senators, a shorter workweek, and the establishment of a postal savings system. These measures were collectively designed to curb the influence of monopolistic corporate and financial interests and empower small businesses, farmers and laborers.
Now, thanks in part to the media and liberals who have become wealthier and more educated, populism is seen as resistance to elite Democratic politics and is even presumed to include the likes of Donald Trump. The grassroots goals of the Populists, the New Deal and the Great Society have become considered too controversial. Thank God we got social security when we did. It might not pass today even in a Democratic Congress.
Meanwhile, even Merriam-Webster still defines populist this way:
a member of a political party claiming to represent the common people especially, often capitalized. A member of a U.S. political party formed in 1891 primarily to represent agrarian interests and to advocate the free coinage of silver and government control of monopolies ... believer in the rights, wisdom, or virtues of the common people.
In short, populism is a wise and decent movement that has been responsible for many of the great improvements in our society over the past century. Don’t let media or liberals with grad school degrees tell you otherwise. And don’t let them call Donald Trump a populist.
2 comments:
Ex president Toxic Dump is an elitist fascist. I too find the use of populism to define right wing politics of grievance to be weird.
As Sam writes, the use of the word "populist" to describe the right-wing is a historical perversion of the use of the term by the Populist movement at the end of the 19th century in the U.S. This movement was as close as the United States has ever gotten to being a country in which the government's first concern was the lives of most Americans, as opposed to the ultra-rich and big corporations.
There is an amazingly good history of the rise of the Populist Movement, and its tragic fall--Lawrence Goodwyn's "Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America," first published in 1976. When Goodwyn started his research, the Populist Movement was either ignored, or mocked, in mainstream accounts of American history.
Goodwyn shows how this mocking version of history was created by a generation of historians who despised the progressive/liberal/radical politics inherent in the populist movement.
Goodwyn started at the bottom, touring old court houses, libraries, and family attics, to find out what the Populists actually said. (At the peak of the movement, around 1890, the Populists were publishing an estimated 5,000 weekly newspapers. 5000! Think about that as an "alternative press.")
And lo and behold, what Goodwyn found was that later historians had either ignored all this writing, or had systmatically distorted it.
The movement led to the creation of the Populist Party. Like so many movements, the decision to move directly into the political arena was controversial within the movement.
Goodwyn shows how the two major parties, faced with this challenge, maneuvered desperately to figure out how to co-op this energy. And so you had people running as Democrat-Populists, or Republican-Populist. And for those of us who were taught that William Jenning Bryant was a populist, Goodwyn shows how Bryant's first run for the Presidency happened after the powers-that-be had managed to bring the Populist Party, and the movement, to a tragic end.
The book is a challenging read. Goodwyn's account is very fine-grained. There is a condensed version of the book out there, which I recommend against, primarily because it is missing the 87 pages of the most wonderful footnotes I have ever read. The footnotes allow you to share the excitement of some of Goodwyn's archival digging. And he uses the footnotes to share his thoughts on the relevance to this history to politics in the late 20th century.
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