Defending Populism Against the Tea Party Movement

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http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2011/01/12/3111126.htm?topic1=home&topic2

Michael Kazin, in his book The Populist Persuasion, identifies four themes that shaped the original Populist movement and all on-going forms of populism, of which the Tea Party is the latest iteration:
- the first is Americanism (identified as an emphasis on understanding and obeying the will of the people);
- the second, producerism (the conviction that, in contrast to classical and aristocratic conceptions, those who toiled were morally superior to those who lived off the toil of others and that only those who created wealth in tangible material ways could be trusted to guard the nation's piety and liberties);
- the third, the need to oppose the dominance of privileged elites who are seen to subvert the principles of self-rule and personal liberty through centralizing power and imposing abstract plans on the ways people lived (elites were variously identified as government bureaucrats, intellectuals, high financiers, industrialists or a combination of all four); and
- the fourth, the notion of a movement or crusade that engaged in a battle to save the nation and protect the welfare of the common people.

This contrasts with Richard Hofstadter's Age of Reform. Writing in the 1950s in reaction against McCarthyism, Hofstadter's argued that the Populists were nostalgic, backward-looking petit bourgeois businessmen who were insecure about their declining status in an industrializing America. Hofstadter claimed that they were provincial, conspiracy-minded, and tended to scapegoat others, a tendency that manifested itself in nativism and anti-Semitism.

Part of the what makes the Tea Party so confusing to elite commentators is that populism can be democratic or authoritarian and often combines elements of both: Huey Long, the populist Governor of Louisiana from 1928-1932, is an example of the integration of democratic and authoritarian elements.

Populism always contains political and anti-political elements, and sometimes these elements receive a greater or lesser emphasis within particular expressions of populism. We can contrast the various expressions of primarily anti-political populism, such as the Ku Klux Klan, Father Coughlin and the Coughlinites of the late 1930s, McCarthyism, Ross Perot, and latterly the Tea Party activists, with the primarily political populism of Alinsky's Industrial Areas Foundation and other broad-based community organizations such as PICO and National People's Action.

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1. Oooooo! THANK! you for this! Very useful! nt