Can 'Berniecrats' win in Appalachia

Mason Adams 100 Days in Appalachia
Democrats should be running on their own wedge issues and saying look, the Republicans want to take Medicaid away from your family, from your neighbors, from your friends. If you’re here in Appalachia and say you don’t know someone covered by Medicaid, that’s not true. Democrats should be using that issue like a damn cudgel and beating Republicans with it in 2018.

The Populist Fight Against Corporate Power Circa 1892

John Collins In These Times
Populism is an ideological chameleon—often supplemented with whatever authoritarian, nationalist or socialist inclinations held by those leading the particular movement—populist victories can (and often do) manifest in all manner of terrible ways around the world. Other times, they change the political realm for the better.

Fighting Faux Populism

Joseph M. Schwartz Democratic Left
Brexit has come to the United States. For thirty years now, in Europe and the United States, a bipartisan neoliberal consensus has embraced the benefits of globalization and the rise of the "knowledge economy." If only workers would go back to school, retrain, and send their children to college, the good jobs that disappeared would somehow return. But those good jobs did not arrive, and voters have opted for a faux populism that promises to reverse globalization.

The Disturbing Dawn Of The Alt-Right - The Rise Again of White Nationalism

Heather "Digby" Parton Hullabaloo
Trump's nationalism is absolutely about ethno-purity and an element of populism as well, although it's clearly a misdirection...it's largely about wounded national pride which has been a potent motivating force on the American right for a very long time. The reason Trump is now playing the conservative anthem "Proud To Be An American" at his rallies is: Good old fashioned jingoism - the one thing that brings the old right, the new right and the alt-right together.

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
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