we'll see what mr. frank says about this, but i actually disagree - i think the populist tradition that is being referred to here was, in truth, always quite conservative and has been often misrepresented as a left-wing tradition. there's more commonality between the historical populist movement and the contemporary one than is often conceded. but, let's see what he says.
deathtokoalas
so, he just ignored the messy parts. standard.
you really shouldn't do something like this unless you're willing to talk about the centrality of eugenics in the populist movement. far from being a movement of the left, it was an inherently white supremacist movement built on standard anti-jewish banker conspiracies and puritanical concepts of religion that included an opposition to "usury" and a prohibition on alcohol. these would have been the most conservative people you've ever seen.
i tend to get uncomfortable when i see fake leftists try to gloss over this, or present this as a net historical positive. it wasn't even a worker's movement in any meaningful sense; these were landholders, property owners, bourgeois members of the middle class. and, they used every ounce of privilege they had to stamp all over the working class people around them. there's no common cause here and there never was, it was a reformist, conservative movement of the middle class from the start.
John Koester
What you have brought up is absolutely true. Now is where we are, and we will be fighting for our lives, and our families, and our neighbors. I believe that the modern progressive populist movement is trying to believe that we are a class not a race. I also don't think that acknowledging the truth of our history will divide us.
Danil Thorstensson
there will always be some people on the left with reactionary views, just like today. Doesn’t mean that the core of populism hasn’t always focused on emancipation and democracy. If you’re talking about basically any movement outside of our own time, you’re going to find some questionable social views. Doesn’t detract from populism as such
deathtokoalas
but, there's a tendency to badly whitewash this specific historical moment, as being the only time a left has ever existed on this continent. we seem to need to find this, to build a history around it, to say "look, this isn't so foreign to american culture". but, it's complete bullshit; this was a conservative movement, through and through, and it's just revisionist to argue otherwise. the core of this movement was not about emancipation or democracy, it was about trying to run the country out of the back of a bible.
David Franklin
If the populists were so reactionary, why did over a million African Americans join the Farmers Alliance by the 1890s? You're echoing Richard Hofstadter's dismissive interpretation of the populists as bigoted reactionaries, which has since been refuted by historians such as Lawrence Goodwyn, Norman Pollack, and Omar Ali.
deathtokoalas
well, why did millions of black people vote for joe biden? people don't always make sense. but, lesser evils can be complicated things, too. i can't tell you why any specific person voted any specific way, or if they voted in their self-interest or not. but, i hardly think such a thing has been refuted - it's a point i've been pushing for a while and intend to push louder as i think it's necessary to realize it to rebuild the left.
i can tell you that the populist movement, as a whole, held some pretty horribly racist views, though - and that they legislated a fair amount of them, too.
jomilkman
But, when we talk about popluists of that era, we're talking about a movement sprung from a U.S. population that was largely what most of us would be considered to be racist to begin with. Respectfully: Frank is careful to note this repeatedly in his analysis in The People, No, and I don't think it's white-washing or otherwise intellectually dishonest to not spend a great deal of ink excoriating a movement for a flaw it wasn't uniquely possessed of as a constituency.
Then again, perhaps there's evidence that Populists were uniquely racist that I just happen not to have seen yet. I'm open to being proven wrong.
deathtokoalas
well, the point i'm drawing into question is whether that movement back then was different than this one right now. if you're willing to apply those arguments to those populists in the 1800s, why not apply them to trumpists? i mean, i was a kucinich supporter that never endorsed obama because i opposed his healthcare plans because they were right out of the heritage institute, and people were still calling me a racist when they rolled out romneycare more or less in tact. it was perfectly preposterous, through and through. so, there's something fundamentally flawed with looking at the racists from 100 years ago - a movement that passed laws that sterilized black and indigenous people for being "unfit" - and write them off as products of their period, yet be convinced that those kids in their maga hats are evil to their core. there's some hypocrisy there, around what racism is acceptable and what racism isn't. and, i insist that needs to stop - that this movement needs to be analyzed with clear eyes before we ultimately move beyond it.
Curly Bracket
Wait, are you trying to tell me that 1890's farmers weren't woke by 2020 standards?! O_o
deathtokoalas
fuck, they weren't woke by 1890s standards. they were only a difference of scale from fucking isis, really. we can criticize the co-op movements like this; we can do a post-mortem on the kibbutz using this language. but, these people weren't leftists at all...
jomilkman
No doubt that's some hypocrisy right there, and we certainly do need to analyze the movement with clear eyes. To that end, can you recommend any good texts that cover how racism was central to the 1890s populist coalition? That question's not meant to be rhetorical or combative -- if anything, I'm interested in learning more about the movement, and I wish to do more reading on it.
deathtokoalas
as mentioned, this kind of thing tends to get glossed over by left-leaning historians, who seem keen to identify this movement as some kind of ground zero, despite the fact that they'd hate everything you and i stand for. it just doesn't get discussed. if you sort through zinn long enough, you'll pull something out, but he's actually one of the worst culprits there is when it comes to this. if you want really critical histories of the populist/progressive movements, you ironically need to read conservative or libertarian sources, but they're coming at it from their own bizarre biases. the only reason they want you to know about the sterilization laws, for example, is because it ties into their narrative on abortion. and, this is really partly the reason i'm reacting; the left has a responsibility to get the history right here, but seems more interested in sweeping it under the rug in order to maintain a tribalist narrative in solidarity with a tribe that has only ever thrown it under the bus - we continue to lionize historical progressivism, for example, despite the fact that woodrow wilson put eugene debs in jail, or theodore roosevelt is the architect of the modern interpretation of the monroe doctrine. for some reason, we want to have this to be our tribe, to identify with it, to defend it and to uphold it's narrative.....but the facts are that it's just another wing of the ruling bourgeois party. so, you can sort through zinn & chomsky & some libertarians like antony sutton to get a grasp of some of the specifics, or do careful research in encyclopedias using carefully determined search terms, but a proper historical analysis has, to my knowledge, yet to be written - rather on purpose.
what's more useful is to study the legislative history. look at what they actually did - it's pretty disturbing.
(...)
you previously asked me for some texts, and i pointed out that it's something that is generally not written about. but, i've founded this grad student's dissertation, which is on the topic:
i wish i could be of better use, but my knowledge of this is fragmented rather than centralized. i can barely cite my own statements, besides vague references to zinn.