> I'm no scholar of populism, but it's mainly struck me as deeply petty
> bourgeois politics - not against capitalists, just big capitalists;
> not against money, just big money; not against a system of private
> property enforced by money, but just for easy credit. Sometimes it's
> pro-worker, sometimes it's not; and it's often xenophobic and
> anti-urban. It denounces finance, without noticing the connections of
> finance to ownership, or the fact that the whole end of capitalist
> production is not the satisfaction of needs or the making of neat
> things, but the accumulation of capital. It's a shallow form of class
> politics that can often see poor people as being just as parasitic on
> virtuous producers as Jewish bankers in New York.
>
>
It's occurred to me that populism fulfills a rôle in the United States rather like what Gramsci said anarchism fulfilled in Italy -- that it is "the elementary subversive position of any oppressed group." With emphasis on the "elementary," meaning shallow and unthinking, just as Doug describes.
It would be populism here, rather than anarchism because the absence of pre-modern cultural and political institutions means that the oldest form of anachronism one can pseudonostalgically idealize is the small capitalist producer, whereas in countries with a premodern peasantry (like Gramsci's Italy was) the peasant commune could serve as a fantasy-ideal.
In both cases the slide to the right is a constant risk.
Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema