Frank at harper's on the history of populism:
" “Populism” is the word that comes to the lips of the respectable and the highly educated when they perceive the global system going haywire. "
"Ordinary people are agitated—everyone knows this—but our concern must lie with the well-being of the elites whom the people threaten to topple."
" if the people have lost faith in the ones in charge, it can only be because something has gone wrong with the people themselves."
" Populism was also said to be the mysterious force that had permitted the self-identified outsider Bernie Sanders to do so well in the Democratic primaries. Populism was also the name of the mass delusion that was leading the United Kingdom out of the European Union. Indeed, once you started looking, unauthorized troublemakers could be seen trouncing rightful ruling classes in countries all around the world. Populists were misleading people about globalization. Populists were saying mean things about elites. Populists were subverting traditional institutions of government. And populists were winning."
"Foreign Policy expressed it more archly: it’s time for the elites to rise up against the ignorant masses."
"His [Trump's] victory that November happened thanks to the Electoral College, an anti-populist instrument from long ago, but this irony quickly receded into the background. "
"the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, an organization whose website announces that populists “can pose a real threat to democracy itself.” "
" In the fertile valley of the Kansas River ... somewhere in this bucolic setting that the controversial word “populist” was invented ... in May 1891.
"Could they have peeked into the future, that group of Topeka-bound passengers would have been astonished by the international reach and malign interpretations of their deed. That they were inventing a noun signifying “mob-minded hater of all things decent” would have come as a complete surprise to them. By coining the word “populist,” they intended to christen a movement that was brave and noble and fair—that would stand up to the narrow-minded and the intolerant."
"The People’s Party was the official moniker of the organization these men nicknamed, and it was one of America’s first great economic-political uprisings, a quintessential mass movement, in which rank-and-file Americans learned to think of the country’s inequitable economic system as a thing they might change by common effort. The party offered a glimpse of how citizens of a democracy, born with a faith in equality, could react when the brutal hierarchy of conventional arrangements was no longer tolerable."
"It was also our country’s final serious effort at breaking the national duopoly of the Republicans and Democrats."
"This bid for reform came during a period of unregulated corporate monopolies, in-your-face corruption, and crushing currency deflation"
" they had a platform, a cause, millions of potential constituents, and the ringing Jeffersonian slogan “Equal rights to all, special privileges to none.” "
"At the time of its premiere, “populist” was a term without ambiguity."
"it protested poverty, unbearable debt, monopoly, and corruption, and it looked ahead to the day when these were ended by the political actions of the people themselves. "
"Up until then, mainstream politicians in America had by and large taken the virtues of that system for granted—society’s winners won, those politicians believed, because they were better people, because they had prevailed in a rational and supremely fair contest called free enterprise. The Populists were the ones who blasted those smug assumptions to pieces, forcing the country to acknowledge that ordinary Americans were being ruined by an economic system that in fact answered to no moral laws."
" There was Populism as its proponents understood it: a movement in which ordinary working people demanded democratic economic reforms. And there was Populism as its enemies characterized it: a dangerous movement of groundless resentment in which demagogues led the disreputable."
" the insults and accusations with which Populism was received in 1891 are alive and well. You can read them in best-selling books, watch them flashed on PowerPoints at prestigious foundation conferences ... Populist movements, they will tell you, are mob actions; reformers are bigots; their leaders are blatherskites; their followers are mentally ill, or ignorant, or uncouth at the very least. They are cranks; they are troublemakers; they are deplorables. And, yes, they still have hayseed in their hair."
"a highbrow contempt for ordinary Americans—is as virulent today as it was in the Victorian era."
" the Populists believed in progress and modernity as emphatically as did any big-city architect or engineer of their day ... the era’s great champions of protectionism were in fact big business and the Republicans. It was William Jennings Bryan’s Democrats who were the true-believing free-traders of the period. "
"The Pops did not fear government, as we are often told populists do; they wanted it to grow big and strong. The Pops did not hate ideas; they meant to spread knowledge to the farthest corners of the land. The Pops were not socially regressive; they were unique among the major parties of their time in boasting numerous female leaders. Again and again, upon investigation, the hateful tendencies that we are told make up this frightful worldview are either absent from historical Populism or are the opposite of what it stood and stands for, or else far more accurately describe the people who hated Populism and who have opposed it ever since the 1890s."
"Populism in its original formulation was profoundly, achingly democratic; it was also, by the standards of the time, anti-demagogic, pro-enlightenment, and pro-equality. "
" denunciations of populism like the ones we hear so frequently nowadays are part of a long tradition of pessimism about popular sovereignty and democratic participation. "
"The Republicans ... prevailed. They contrived to crush Bryan’s challenge and, in so doing, to build a lasting stereotype of reform as folly. The word with which they expressed that stereotype: “populism.” "
"Then as now, consensus among elites was the primary weapon of the anti-populist resistance ... the harmony with which the nation’s press came together against the Democratic challenger. Similar unanimity reigned in fashionable churches and in prestige academia."
"“Populism” was a word used to express the horror of seeing hierarchies collapse and the lowly clamber to places where they did not belong. "
"anti-populism is always a brief for elite and even aristocratic power, an attack on the democratic tradition itself. "
"The larger message of anti-populism, regardless of where it comes from on the political spectrum, is always one of complacency. Elites rule us because elites should rule us. They are in charge because they are the best."
"the real task before us today: to rescue from the enormous condescension of the comfortable the one political tradition that has a chance of reversing our decades-long turn to the right."
https://harpers.org/archive/2020/04/how-the-anti-populists-stopped-bernie-sanders/sidd
