populism

Contemporary Pundits Need a Refresher on Populism's History

by Steve Babson

"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."

Confronting the Roots of American-Style Fascism in One Family's History

by Julie Carr

What led Populist Party founder  Omer Madison Kem, the author's great grandfather, on a path from economic radicalism to eugenics? 

The Anti-Populist Dilemma

by Jan-Werner Müller

From Turkey to Hungary to Israel, forming a lasting coalition of parties against a right-wing authoritarian populist has proven easier said than done. 

In a Final Act, Can Bernie Sanders Make Senate Hearings a Catalyst for Left Populism?

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? 

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. 

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 An unpublished 1990s manuscript co-authored by Barack Obama may leave readers wondering what happened to those ideas. 

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. 

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. 

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."

For 2022, the Democrats Don't Have an Alternative to Embracing Left Populist Energy

by Wallace Hettle

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? 

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. 

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.

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.

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."

Why Americans Fall for Grifters: A Warning From a 1957 Film

by Jake Tapper

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. 

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. 

A Coup of "Clerqs"?: Anne Applebaum's "Twilight of Democracy" Reviewed

by David O'Connor

Anne Applebaum's new book looks with concern at the rise of right-wing populism in Europe and the loyal party functionaries who enable its march. 

The Guardians: Does "The Resistance" Actually Want More Democracy, or Less?

by Samuel Moyn

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. 

The Origins of the Republican Party’s Plutocratic Populism

by Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson

With concentrated wealth has come unprecedented investments in politics by billionaire donors and business organizations, mostly on the right.

The Social Psychology of Popular Right-Wing Conservatism

by Daniel Burnstein

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.