You know more about historical populism than I do. As I say, it is not a word I would use, and partly because I don't know much about it; partly also because of the tradition's volatality, its easy slippage to the nativist right, from what I understand. If, however, there are elements in that tradition that have affinities to market socialism, I would be happy to use them. "Watkins" was a slip of the keyboard; I was thinking about something else. Don't sneer at Frank Capra. He hadn't a bourgeois bone in his body. (Lots of sentimental bones, but that's another story. I'm sentimental myself.) There are few indictments of the corruptions of power more savage than _Mr Smith goes to Washington._
Anyway, populism, schmopulism. What I was saying is that the left should talk plain American English in its activist mode. I think that was what Cockburn was getting at; if he meant more, I didn't.
--jks
>
>"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
>
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