Word: populists
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Populist (or People's) Party was founded at the St. Louis Convention of 1892. Among those who came together to form this agrarian empowerment movement: the Christian Women's Temperance Union, the Farmer's Alliance, the Knights of Labor, the American Federation of Labor and the Christian Socialists. Yet almost from the outset, the Party was as negative as it was diversely constituted. Georgian populist Tom Watson, one of the Party's guiding lights, was infamous for such enlightened remarks as, "Did [Jefferson] dream that in 100 years or less...red-eyed Jewish millionaires would be chiefs of that [Democratic...
Indeed, the pernicious legacy of the populist admonition against "a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street"--business as the enemy-- can be heard loud and clear in the speeches of the New-Age Tom Watson, our friend from "Crossfire...
What Buchanan has discovered is the enduring power of the full populist litany: moral conservatism, rejection of political elites, fear of foreigners and--the one leg that Republicans have largely avoided--suspicion of concentrated economic power. In the late 19th century, populism arose out of economic upheaval, the rapid growth of large industry and powerful railroads that crushed small farmers and craftsmen. Their enemy was the "money power" of the Eastern establishment, the power of banks and big corporations. That and immigrants and the corruption of the political establishment. Sound familiar...
...Populist Party that arose from that ferment was short-lived, but the common-man sentiments that it crystallized lived on. Separately or together they ran through the presidential campaigns of William Jennings Bryan and Prohibition, through Teddy Roosevelt's Progressives, the left-wing labor movement and the right-wing radio priesthood of Father Coughlin. And the Republican Revolution of 1994. "But the Republican populism of the past generation or so has been all antigovernment," says historian Alan Brinkley. "Buchanan is putting back the anticorporate elements...
...blue-collar ethnics to the Republicans in the '60s. So what would Buchanan do? "I'm not aware that he has proposed anything that would tie the hands of corporate managers," says Phillips. "Or require a new obligation to 'stakeholders' [for instance, employees] as well as shareholders." The Populist movement at the turn of the 20th century arrayed government power to counter corporate clout. How can the party of less government do that...