Hoover's little catalogue (11/14, 9:12 am) neglects the most progressive strain of U.S. populism, which is labor-based and properly concerned with money and trade. Phillips is close to this in some respects, Hightower and Perot in others. Boyte is not. A survey of what passes for the U.S. left would reveal that the most consistently populist formation is . . . Americans for Democratic Action.
Carroll cautions against messing with money but not production. But pops are prepared to mess with nearly everything. If the platform was money or trade-obsessed (the latter applying to Buchanan, neither applying to me), there would be more grounds for criticism.
Katha responds to my gentle correction of her evident gross misinformation about populists and gold by tying WJ Bryan (and me, implicitly) to anti-semitism. Nice. Now I have a taste of what some black people feel like when they are called 'oreos' for straying from a white notion of orthodoxy.
Defining the state as capital leads to either no politics (Heartfield), revolution in the sweet bye and bye (Carroll), or the endless critique of reformism and w/no proposed alternative (Doug).
This gross inflation of unionized prison guards and other bad stuff associated w/unions bespeaks the fundamentally booshwah, anti-working class orientation of the speakers. The working class is great in idealized form, rotten in real form. And somehow blacks and women are exempted from all said rottenness, as if they would construct fundamentally different trade unions.
In summary, populists offer the following points of superiority relative to some would-be marxists:
they do not cede monetary policy to elites; they do not oppose free trade with futile,
imaginary internationalist rhetoric; they do not fetishize "capital" in a way that
narrows the working class; they acknowledge the legitimate role of enterprise
in a social economy; they recognize trade unions as works-in-progress,
not things that are essentially this or that. they are comfortable with a notion of class that
encompasses race and gender, rather than
being somehow co-equal with them; they would rather err on the side of pragmatism
than on the side of doctrinal purity.
Thanks for clarifying these things for me.
mbs