Before Bernie Sanders: A 19th Century Populist’s Run for the Presidency

John Collins In These Times
Though the People's Party lost, Weaver managed to win 5 states (Kansas, Colorado, Nevada, Idaho and North Dakota) and 22 electoral votes—the most electoral votes won by a third party since the Civil War. The impressive third-party turnout illustrated the bipartisan frustration of the period and the extent to which Populist rhetoric resonated with voters at the time.

Socialism with an American Face

Gar Alperovitz Aljazeera America
Bernie Sanders calls himself a socialist, but the US needs its own version, not Denmark's. Socialism, on the other hand, historically has gone far beyond progressive welfare state measures by asserting that a democratic society can be achieved only if it includes democratic ownership of the economy. The steadily evolving localist forms of democratic ownership confront the traditional socialist questions and begin to answer them in novel ways.

Slow Burn: Bernie Sanders Ignites a Populist Movement

Rick Perlstein The Washington Spectator
Rick Perlstein noticed Republicans showing up at Bernie Sanders events. He set out to find out just how many of them there are. They don’t know they are not supposed to like Bernie Sanders. They hear what he is saying, and like what they hear. Something is happening here that reminds us that our models for predicting winners and losers in politics always need to be subject to revision.

Bernie, Donald, and the Promise of Populism

William Greider The Nation
Both candidates have been mislabeled as populists. The movement of that name was a genuine people’s rebellion that reinvigorated democracy. We can do it again.

books

Where's the Outrage?

Rich Yeselson Dissent Summer 2015 issue
The book under review examines the rise of American capitalism, the visionary attempts by workers to resist and the housebreaking of a long-running anti-capitalist ethos from imaginative, frenzied opposition to diffuse, angry, but ultimate accommodation. While a residual 19th century fight-back culture built the CIO and defended the New Deal into the 1960s, it lacked the same emancipatory charge it had earlier, and unions shifted to cautious monitors of the working class

Why the Country Needs a Populist Challenger in the Democratic Primaries

Robert L. Borosage Campaign for America's Future
There are two compelling reasons for a challenge in the Democratic primaries: We need a big debate about the direction of the country, and a growing populist movement would benefit from a populist challenge to Hillary. In fact, there are deep divides between the party establishment and the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party. All affirm, finally, that this economy works only for the few and not the many. But after that, the differences are immense.

labor

Populism and the Left: Does UKIP Matter? Can Democracy Be Saved?

Jeremy Gilbert New Left Project
There is no way of addressing the various popular desires which neoliberalism failed to fulfil without a radical programme of democratic reform. Only if publics are genuinely enabled to engage in meaningful, open-ended collective decision-making in a range of spheres can the justifiable sense that things are being done being done to them by people they did not authorise to do them actually be assuaged.

Friday Nite Videos -- May 23, 2014

Portside
Sen. Elizabeth Warren's keynote at the New Populism Conference. John Lennon: Instant Karma. Pterosaurs: Flight in the Age of Dinosaurs. Just Say No ... to the War on Drugs. Drug Tests Must Now Include Females.

What Is the New Populism?

Robert Borosage Campaign for America's Future
This new populism is not something we have to invent. It is already stirring. It is Occupy Wall Street putting Gilded Age inequality at the center of our political debate. It’s exploited low-wage workers protesting fast-food restaurants in over 150 cities. Moral Monday protests against the assault on voting rights and the vulnerable mobilizing thousands in North Carolina and are spreading to Georgia and South Carolina.
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