mbs: just so. If there's no resentment, you're doing something wrong.
"I think you're being unfair to Hitchens, possibly Cockburn, too. In No One Left to Lie To (pp. 12-13 pbk), Hitchens writes, "... In the elections of November 1998, he [Wisconsin Senator Russell Feingold] submitted himself for reelection having announced that he would accept no "soft money" donations. This brave decision, which almost cost him his seat, rallied many Wisconsin voters who had been raised in the grand tradition of LaFollette's midwestern populism-- a populism of trustbusting rather than crowd-pleasing."
mbs: testimoney to CH's confusion. LaFollette was a progressive, not a populist. Progressivism was a middle class trip. No resentment there. It was about civil service reform and other goo-goo stuff. Consumerism. Nader had and has a streak of this. Nothing bad, in and of itself, but not populism. Under progressivism, the well-off are urged to be charitable, in public and private acts. Populism is not about charity, but rather solidarity in the face of the filthy few who are ripping off everyone else. Trust-busting is common to both progressivism and populism, though the rationales could differ. A progressive busts trust to create fair competition. A populism busts them to break up concentrated power, not least for the possible market participation of coops/LM-managed firms.
". . . His later Senate vote on impeachment, which represented the misgivings of at least five other senators who were more prudent as well as more susceptible to party discipline, forever negates the unending Clintonoid propaganda about a vast right-wing conspiracy, and also shames all those who were browbeaten into complicity...."
mbs: I am more sympathetic to Hitchens' Clinton-phobia than I used to be.
"What do people think about the possible connections between Bush's selection of Ashcroft for Attorney General, the Lewinsky scandal and populism? I read the religious Ashcroft doesn't smoke, drink, or dance, but he did sing in Trent Lott's barbarshop quartet. Peter - drinker and dancer"
mbs: IMO Ashcroft is the scariest guy in the Cabinet, so far. He reflects a modern degeneration of populism into Christian fundamentalism, as deconstructed in the Kazin book.