Campaign 2016: Hillary Clinton's Fake Populism Is a Hit - Matt Taibbi/RollingStone

[BainsBane]

159. Populism has nearly always been fake

Huey Long, William Jennings Bryan, George Wallace,Getulio Vargas and Juan Person. None were of the people they sought to incorporate into their movements. Long was a craven opportunist who used populist rhetoric for his own wealth and advancement. Wallace an overt racist who capitalized on popular opposition to civil rights to advance his own career. Bryan, while a true believer, was not of the rural folk whose interests he championed. Vargas and Person used populism to incorporate workers and peasants into the state in a way that co opted the very real revolutionary potential of those classes. Populism is a movement from above that appeals to those below. A politician in the populist tradition uses rhetoric that appeals to ordinary people and incorporates just enough of the people's concerns to maintain the status quo.

People ought to be careful what they wish for. In Europe and Latin America, populism came to be associated with fascism or quasi-fascism. Both were characterized by the corporatist state, which co-opted the populace into the state through sectors and is among the reasons that Peron is sometimes referred to as fascist.

Fascism and Populism

Scholars have argued that populist elements have sometimes appeared in far-right authoritarian or fascist movements.[21][22][23][24][25][26] Conspiracist scapegoating employed by various populist movements can create "a seedbed for fascism."[27] National socialist populism interacted with and facilitated fascism in interwar Germany.[28] In this case, distressed middle–class populists during the pre-Nazi Weimar period mobilized their anger at government and big business. The Nazis "parasitized the forms and themes of the populists and moved their constituencies far to the right through ideological appeals involving demagoguery, scapegoating, and conspiracism."[29] According to Fritzsche:

The Nazis expressed the populist yearnings of middle–class constituents and at the same time advocated a strong and resolutely anti-Marxist mobilization....Against "unnaturally" divisive parties and querulous organized interest groups, National Socialists cast themselves as representatives of the commonwealth, of an allegedly betrayed and neglected German public....Breaking social barriers of status and caste, and celebrating at least rhetorically the populist ideal of the people's community...[30]

In Argentina in the 1940s, a local brand of fascist populism emerged known as Peronism, after its leader Juan Perón. It emerged from an intellectual fascist movement in the 1920s and 1930s that delegitimized democracy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Populism#Fascism_and_populism
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