> As Margaret Canovan observed in her book, Populism, "like its [earlier]
rivals,
> Goodwyn's interpretation has a political ax to grind."
I don't see how this is significant. Some of the best histories ever written have had political and historiographical axes to grind, and all historiography is written from a specific point of view. It's no revelation to say Goodwyn has a specific point of view as well. As long as we're throwing out citations, see Peter Novick's excellent _That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession_.
> This is not a matter of me not doing enough reading, it is a disagreement
over
> what populism is.
Exactly. I cited Goodwyn not because I thought you were unfamiliar with his work, but because I question any definition of populism that gets the historical populists so wrong (e.g. "[populism] lacks any structural analysis"). After all, the word populism entered the American lexicon in reference to the late 19th century agrarian insurgency.
> So you can just imagine how--frustrating--it is to be constantly told that
if I
> only read Goodwyn I would understand my mistake; or how--annoying--it is
to be
> told my analysis is "silly."
What I find frustrating are contemporary definitions of populism that don't seriously challenge the widely held presumption that populists are provincial rubes who don't clearly understand the real world. This is what New York Times and The Nation's E. L. Godkin believed in the 1890s, and scholars like Richard Hofstadter thought in the 20th century. While this view has been challenged by historians such as John Hicks, Vann Woodward, Larry Goodwyn and Robert McMath, it still informs contemporary political discourse today. That's why I find definitions of populism that try to reduce the phenomena to mere anti-elitism so lacking; they fundamentally miss what was historically significant about the social movement of the Farmers' Alliance and the People's Party. The fact that the historical populists tried to radically restructure the agrarian economy along more democratic lines is far more important than the fact that they employed terms like "the people" and "elites."
mark