On Jun 30, 2006, at 5:07 PM, Carrol Cox wrote:
> Not "exactly true," but true enough to be important to keep in mind.
> What would the 1890s have been if confined to the native born? And the
> movement was loud and vigorous but rather thin in the '60s.
Scared the bejeesus out of the bourgeoisie, though. Somewhere in the McCracken report on inflation published by the OECD was the observation that "inflation" didn't mean only rising prices - it also meant people in the streets. That's a lot different from today's inflation scare.
If confined to the "native born" it wouldn't have been much. They were the ethnic carriers of the dominant ideology of Protestant individualism. And much of our native radicalism has been petit bourgeois populism, which longs for a return to some allegely pure competitive capitalism that must have existed somewhere, somehow. But part of the populist movement was more radical than that, and we also had socialists - even Marxist ones. We shouldn't be complicit in writing them out of history.
Doug