"After Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Most Significant Political Personality of His Day"

"Throughout American history, he says, populist voters have felt 'a sense of a loss of control about what was going on in their society. Things were happening and things were changing, and the change was unsettling, but they couldn't do anything about it. It was almost like they were being acted on from above.' That feeling has engendered the rise of parties and leaders, conservative or progressive, that promise to fight the system on behalf of average Americans."

Annika Neklason at The Atlantic compares Donald Trump to Huey Long.

"America’s Way of Expressing Class Antagonism"

"All of which suggests a different answer to the question with which we began. Why is our traditional left failing? It is true that the other side doesn't play fair any more, but it’s also true that the Democrats are lost in a fantasy of white-collar benevolence. For all their algorithms and their lavishly detailed position papers, their leaders have little personal sympathy any longer with the travails of working people."

Thomas Frank at The Guardian defends "populism."

"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.

The Populist Evasion

"This is what he said to me in an email:
"'In the history of the modern right, producerism (which is the core of populist ideology) has almost always been linked with racism. Wallace and Reagan (and many others) appealed to white wage-earners by attacking pro-busing judges and liberal pols who they charged were taking the people's money and wasting it on lazy minorities. The racial undercurrent never lay far from the surface.'"

Adam Serwer at The American Prospect asks Michael Kazin to respond to David Brooks's defense of anti-Obama protesters.

"Communitarian Populism"

"There are no pitchforks in this populism. No 'self-serving and undemocratic' elites. They're just part of the same America. And yet, there is, in both the language and policies, a deep and profound commitment to 'ordinary Americans,' to their security and their chance to get ahead. And while the attack on Wall Street is muted, the sense that it has obligations beyond short-term profits is loud.
"This inclusive, communitarian populism is characterized by few enemies and very little talk of 'rights.'"

Mark Schmitt in The American Prospect explores Barack Obama's old-school progressive rhetoric.

The Paranoid Style in American Politics

The Jon Swift blog outlines the right-wing embrace of what Richard Hofstadter described in 1964 as "the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy."