"Let's Find Out Why"

"The English language provides a great many solid choices for someone wishing to describe a leader who plays on mob psychology or racial intolerance. 'Demagogue' is an obvious one, but there are others—'nationalist,' 'nativist,' 'racist,' or 'fascist,' to name a few. They are serviceable words, all of them. In the feverish climate of the Democracy Scare, however, none of those will work: 'populist' is the word we are instructed to use. 'Populists' are the ones we must suppress."

Thomas Frank at Harper's Magazine looks at the original Populists compared to how the description is used today.

"Tariffs Are Rigged Against Them"

"In the 1920s, Republicans returned to power and resumed their protectionist agenda, but when crop prices fell, Midwesterners again turned on the party. Chastened by Taft's experience, President Herbert Hoover promised to aid farmers by raising agricultural tariffs. The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 did protect crops, but it also radically increased the duties on manufactured goods, provoking a trade war with Europe at the worst possible time. As the Great Depression spread misery across the country, voters blamed Hoover's tariff. In 1932, they elected FDR in a landslide and pummeled the GOP.
"Reduced to a perennial minority, Republicans finally abandoned their protectionist doctrine and embraced free trade. The ferocious tariff debate that had dominated American politics since the nation's founding slipped into the shadows, remembered only by historians and economists.
"Until Donald Trump."

At The Atlantic, Michael Wolraich discusses taxes on imported goods, past and present.

"Complex, Unstandardized, and Vulnerable to Corruption"

"In the 19^th-century viva voce system, people went to local polling places and swore an oath that they were voting in good faith. Then, out loud and in front of anyone who cared to cluster around observing, the voter told the election judges his choices. The counting took place by hand; judges entered voter choices in poll books, keeping running totals of numbers of votes for each candidate. There were no paper ballots to tally.

"In other locations, 19^th-century voters used paper ballots issued by parties—a practice that became increasingly common as the century went on. Voters brought their own ballots to the polls, and although they could write their choices on pieces of paper, parties found that providing printed ballots with the names of their candidates was a convenience that nudged voters toward voting 'straight ticket.' Parties printed their tickets on colored paper, and the ballots went into glass boxes, so that anyone observing a vote could clearly see which party a voter had chosen. The atmosphere at the polls was raucous, and party members lobbied for voters’ favor right up to the moment when they arrived at the ballot box."

Rebecca Onion in Slate looks at the changing voting processes in the nineteenth century.

And she notes that the "first congratulatory telegram" between candidates was in 1896.

"An Unexpected Historical Parallel"

"Both men joined their economic ideas to a cultural message that appalled and frightened their political opponents. Bryan disdained the new urban America: 'Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic. But destroy our farms, and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.' Bryan led a party that defined and applied its Jeffersonian ideals for white people only. Trump—well, we all know about that."

David Frum in The Wall Street Journal compares Donald Trump to William Jennings Bryan.

"Jeffersonian Socialists"

"Finally, the leading representatives of American socialism may have been too American for their own good. The Jeffersonian elements Ross prizes were most appealing to middle-class Midwestern Protestants. As Lipset and Marks have pointed out, anti-statist themes were less exciting to a working class composed of new immigrants, particularly Catholics. They responded to Father Coughlin, not Norman Thomas.

"It is possible that better luck and more skillful tactics could have overcome these obstacles. But it is not clear how much that would have mattered in the end. Despite their antimilitarist beginnings, socialist parties in most of Europe supported both World Wars and then embraced much the same blend of social welfare, economic corporatism, and militarized internationalism that has defined the Democratic Party at least since FDR.

"Perhaps America is not exceptional after all."

Samuel Goldman in The American Conservative reviews Jack Ross's The Socialist Party of America: A Complete History.

Bending Toward Justice

"In 1908, when Democrats first gathered in Denver, African-American activists asked the party to make a place for them--inside the convention, in the platform and in the campaign to come. At the very least, they asked, Democrats should take a stand against lynching.
"William Jennings Bryan, the Democratic nominee for president , vetoed even that modest outreach -- fearing that to do so would weaken the party's hold on what was then referred to as 'the solid south.'
"One hundred years passed. A civil rights movement rose. A new generation of political leaders--most, though not all of them, Democrats--stepped gingerly toward the future.
"And on Wednesday afternoon, at around 4:50 p.m., the Democratic party nominated an African-American man for president."

John Nicholas reports in The Nation as the former party of white supremacy nominates Barack Obama for President.

Things Older than John McCain

"During an interview Thursday with USA TODAY, McCain also made it clear that he would emphasize his steadiness and experience—particularly on national security issues—to counter the vibrancy and oratory skills that have made Obama a sensation on the campaign trail.
"'I believe that people are interested very much in substance,' McCain said. 'If it was simply style, William Jennings Bryan would have been president.'"

In an interview with David Jackson in USA Today, John McCain positions himself as the twenty-first-century William McKinley.

The Great Commoner's Revival

"Imagine the ideal democratic nominee for president. He’s twice won election in Nebraska, one of the reddest of states, and is just as popular across the South and Midwest. He’s a charismatic, energetic orator. He’s also a stalwart progressive who has taken tough stands against corporate crime, to aid labor organizers, and to raise taxes on the wealthy. His marriage is loving and cooperative, and his three children long to emulate their father. Although a war veteran, he’s an eloquent advocate of peaceful solutions to international conflicts. Most significantly, he’s a devout churchgoer and lay minister who preaches that every true Christian has a duty to transform a nation and world plagued by the arrogance of wealth and the pain of inequality."

Biographer Michael Kazin pitches William Jennings Bryan as a model for today's Democratic Party in The American Prospect. But historian Kevin Mattson is skeptical.

And Ed Kilgore in The Washington Monthly reviews Kazin's book.