"Opulist," oops. It is glorious to grow rich.
Historical populism has that small producer cast and a nasty dose of racism. Tom Watkins was a virulent white supremacist. But I think the word has acquired a looser tone of being on the side of the little man, Frank Capra, Mr Deeds, etc. I wouldn't use it myself, but I think what what is meant is that we should express our class analysis in American tones rather than German or Russian ones. --jks
There was no more racism in historical populism ("HP")(pre-1910) than in any other movement, except possibly abolitionism. You could find the counter-part of Watson (not Watkins) in the SP, among other places. Watson underwent a process of change, from good to awful, incidentally; in his earlier incarnation he was quite a positive figure. Emphasis on the Watson good-to-bad saga should be read as capitalist ideological discourse on genuine American radicalism. Ah yes, another radical movement or person that started on the high road and degenerated; how typical; blah blah blah.
I would suggest that HP has a great deal in common with market socialism, and that HP is in fact a precursor of it. HP, after all, began as a coop movement and at the height of its economic thinking, looked forward to a cooperative banking system.
A new, modern populism informed by the best in HP would emphasize cooperatives and labor-managed firms as valuable, experimental encroachments on unregulated, individualistic markets.
Cockburn and now apparently Hitchens have seized on the nuttier aspect of contemporary, rightist populism, instead of looking to the tradition of HP. And your Capra reference alludes to the bourgeois cultural deflation of HP to cliches about small town/little people virtues.
mbs