> Much of their ideology is out of American radical populism --
> anti-statist, individualistic, petit-bourgeois. Unlike fascists, they
> don't eroticize the nation - state. A visit to the Patriots' Internet
> site <ftp://tezcat.com/patriot> takes one to a world very different
> from crypto-fascism. Their economics is classic populist (except for
> their love of a gold standard, because gold is non-state money);
> their politics, Jeffersonian and decentralist; and they study the
> ruling class with obsessive contempt. They claim to renounce racism.
Where are you getting this stuff about American populism??? Not Richard Hofstadter I hope. The radical current (or any current for that matter) within the People's Party was not anti-statist -- it called for the federal government to build a government warehouse in every rural county in America where farmers could store their crops at the end of the season and receive federally guaranteed loans against them (the sub-treasury system), thereby facilitating an end run around the debilitating debt-peonage of the crop-lien system. Nor can populism be described as "individualistic;" historical populists called their vision of a better society a "cooperative commonwealth." I guess the "petit-bourgeois" appellation does fit the populists. For the most part participants in the agrarian insurgency of the 1890s either owned their own land or were tenant farmers, but were not farm laborers. But this fact can't be used as some sort of deterministic guide to the quality of the populist's politics -- that is, populism couldn't have been properly progressive or radical b/c the populists were not members of the proletariat.
mark
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