> By the way on the issue of antisemitism and racism and its relation to
> Populism, the following should be made clear. The main party of white
> supremacist racism at the time was not the Populist party but the
> Southern based Democratic party. If anything indicates the racism of
> the Populist movement and its leaders it is that they catered to and
> merged into the Democratic party. I would also venture to say that
> virulent antisemitism was probably more likely to be found in the
> Republican party at the time than in the Populist party. But to point
> this out is not to say very much. It is only to say that the
> Populists were part of their time and place. A question that is
> ignored by most historians of Hofstadter's generation are the
> occasional fights against racial divisions (for black-white political
> unity) inside the Populist movement. Were there analogous fights
> inside the Democratic party of the time? No, not that I know of. But
> there were a few inside the Republican party and this too is usually
> ignored.
I would go further than that on the issue of racism. If you lived in the South in 1892, the conformist thing to do was vote for the Democratic Party. Taking the step of breaking with the "party of the fathers" was an act of enormous political significance, it was almost unthinkably radical. The *main reason* it was radical is precisely that the Democrats succeeded in depicting themselves as the defender of white supremacy; voting Populist was coded as acquiescing in 'nego rule.' Everyone who voted Populist had to grapple with this question - they had to decide whether voting Populist meant that they were against white supremacy. Obviously not everyone came to the same conclusion, but one thing is clear: The "more" Populist you were - the more steeped you were in Populist ideology and organization - the *more* likely you were to explicitly challenge the premise of white supremacy (although numerically, of course, relatively few southerners advanced that far).
Populism exerted a kind of "civilizing influence" on rank-and-file farmers - much like the KDP or the SDP did for rank-and-file German workers. And not just on race. It was the same with conspiracism. The more you read the leading Populist pamphlets and tracts, the less likely you were to believe that the country's money was literally controled by a secret cabal, and the more likely you were to see the question in structural terms.
I think that the "paranoid style" exists, but it really does boil down to a rural vs. urban issue. The paranoid style always came most heavily from rural areas. Historically, it can be traced back to the philosophers of the English "country party" - the gentry and aristos who lived far from the sophistication of the court. It was most vociferously taken up in America by farmers who lived in pre-market communities. Since the founding fathers had based a lot of their criticism of London on those country-party spokesmen, it acquired a certain stamp of American authenticity - even though a major section of the FF's were actually sophisticated quasi-urbanites who were just using those arguments instrumentally.
But the point really has to be stressed: Populism was an *antidote* to that strain of thought.
Seth