Secondly, at least in the US, 19th C populism was simultaneously isolationist and xenophobic - right wing radicalism, AND anti-capitalist and progressive - left wing radicalism.
Third, as is almost always true of populism - since it has no social theory beyond human scale = good and too big = bad - populist rurality simply swings right or left depending on who the big bad enemy of the day is. In the US, state and federal governments - and land grant universities - committed themselves to the technophilic market efficiencies of "progressive agriculture and federal and state rural development plans focused on modernization and diversification across the 20th C. These commitments, as Hightower argued 35 years ago in Hard Times, Hard Tomatoes, effectively destroyed the farmers and communities the majority of the bureaucrats and researchers thought they were defending in the name of Jeffersonian democracy. The majority of what's left in rural America - aside from isolated ex-urban pockets - is either a variation on a theme by Farm Bureau/American Legion-driven capitalist agriculture or depressed, under-educated, and parochial folks deeply committed to the isolationist and xenophobic side of traditional populist values.
On Fri, Nov 13, 2009 at 1:25 PM, Matthias Wasser <matthias.wasser at gmail.com>wrote:
>
> What is it that makes rural areas reactionary now and hotbeds of radicalism
> in the early 20th century? Beyond the actual existence of such first-world
> hotbeds back then generally.
>
> A probably unrelated thought: it's traditional to contrast the organic
> communities of the village against the synthetic community of the town, but
> in contemporary America, at least, the relationship is probably the
> opposite: think of the age, social complexity, and group identification of
> any of the five borroughs against the sterile individualist utopia of the
> exurbs.
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>
-- ********************************************************* Alan P. Rudy Dept. Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work Central Michigan University 124 Anspach Hall Mt Pleasant, MI 48858 517-881-6319