I must comment that I find this exchange on us populism to be the most interesting and rewarding stuff I have read on the list yet.  I have a writing project on the late 19th century right now that is requiring a lot of reading on the time (just cracking open age of reform), and being able to watch a number of different left political perspectives parse out details of this moment of history is great. And I have a question for the many amateur experts on 1890s us populism here.  Bryan (far from synonymous with populism, I know) lost a totally regional national vote to that primordial version of Bush, McKinley.  Bryan got all the south and west and rural states in their first matchup; McKinley won the more populous northeast and industrial midwest.  Given the populists' attempts to link up to workers issues in such a time of undisguised class warfare, why then did McKinley get the votes of most industrial workers?  Was it catholic immigrant distrust of bryan's prot evangelicalism?  Bryan's unwillingness to campaign on workers' issues?  Was Hannah's bread and circus campaigning successful?  Were the threats by owners to close factories if bryan won what did it? Given the parrallels between McKinley's time and our own right now, I find the question of industrial workers voting for him an interesting reversal of Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas question. Kevin Phillips thinks it was partially due to workers' liking the lower prices for food commodities status quo economics was producing then, and partially because McKinley was actually somehow a labor-friendly moderate in his heart (Phillips also thinks this about a number of other republicans like Nixon and Reagan, casting doubt on not just his thesis but on whether or not he writes when he's shitface drunk).  I find these suggetions dubious at least.  Any others? <div>Jim <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> Where social democracy succeeded, as in Sweden, success generally came from workers' and farmers' alliance: "With the advent of universal suffrage, the social democratic parties were able to increase their parliamentary representation substantially, and in some cases had formed short-lived minority governments before 1930. But the real breakthrough came in the 1930s, when all five Scandinavian social democratic parties were able to negotiate compromise agreements with agrarian parties, and thus secure the parliamentary support necessary to allow them to form majority governments, and introduce welfare reforms and some degree of counter-cyclical economic policy" (The Encyclopedia of Contemporary Scandinavian Culture, <<a href="http://www.routledge-ny.com/enc/scandinavian/social.html">http://www.routledge-ny.com/enc/scandinavian/social.html</a>>). Populist farmers in the USA did organize cooperatives and offered solidarity to wage workers, so social democratic potential existed. In the Omaha Platform (at <<a href="http://www.historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5361/">http://www.historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5361/</a>>), they </blockquote></div>