"The term *populism* refers to the hostility of the common person to concentrated power and the powerful. While public policy is not often driven by populist sentiment (for the powerful, by definition, exercise considerable political influence), populism has always been part of the core American belief system [...]
"One of the most common targets of populist sentiment has been concentrated economic power and the people who exercise it. Andrew Jackson mobilized this sentiment against the Bank of the United States in the 1830s. The Populist movement of the 1890s aimed at taming the new corporations of the day, especially the banks and the railroads. Corporations were the target of popular hostility during the dark days of the Great Depression and also in the 1970s, when agitation by consumer and environmental groups made the lives of some corporate executives extreme;y uncomfortable. Populism is a staple of contemporary conservatism in the United States with its attacks on Hollywood, the media, and academic elitists.
"Populism celebrates the ordinary person. [...] How else might one explain private-school-educated and aristocratically born-and-bred George H. W. Bush expressing his fondness for pork rinds and country and western music during his 1988 presidential campaign. It is very different in France, whee it is not considered a political liability to have gone to elite schools and authored important works of fiction, poetry, and biography as President Francois Mitterand and Jacques Chirac's foreign minister and Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin did."
(8th ed., p. 108)
-B.
Max B. Sawicky wrote:
"Gin-u-wine populism: http://www.populist.com/06.22.sawicky.html & http://www.populist.com/03.07.sawicky.html "