I was at a seminar a few weeks ago with an ambassador from a former USSR
country who has been a professor of political science for most of his
career in the US and the issue of populism came up with respect to US
condemnation of Chavez and (I can never remember how to spell his name)
the prime minister of Iran because they were 'populists' and I asked him
how it was that populism, that was a generally a positive description in
19th and early 20th century US and Canada popular movements, mainly of
agrarian interests, had become a negative appellation for 'demigods' in
the 21st C, at least to Americans. His answer, I think deserves some
serious consideration.
His point was that populist leaders related to the general
population directly, without the intermediation of the elite, whether
the 'elite' were financiers, politicians, or labour leaders. This, in
his view, was what made them most dangerous to the US powers that be,
because they bypassed the 'moderating' effect of the elite and the
bureaucratic superstructure that supported them since they gained their
power directly from the people and not from a political structure.
This seems to make sense to me since it works across borders. My
reference is to the agrarian movements in the US and Canada in the late
19th C and into the 20th C. Perhaps I might illustrate from Canadian
experience in the 20th C with the farmers' movements against the power
of financial/commercial capital which controlled the grain trade. The
response was both direct at the economic level with the formation of
farmer co-ops, wheat pools, and other direct democracy economic
institutions, but also support for 'non-partisan' political movements
behind charismatic leaders which had some, though limited political
success. As the agricultural crisis continued into the 1930s, two wings
of the populist movement emerged. One was left-wing (the CCF which was
moderately socialist), the other was Social Credit which was right-wing
but quite virulently anti finance capitalist (ie. anti banks). In their
opposition to finance capitalism, however, they were quite united and at
one point contemplated merger. However, their leaderships were
incompatible and their populist appeals sufficiently different that they
developed separately and ultimately made compromises with the existing
parties, the CCF with the social democrats, ultimately forming the NDP,
the Social Credit (abandoning any pretense of populism)with the
conservatives, ultimately being incorporated into the current socially
reactionary Conservatives. Here populism has degenerated, as so often
it has in other cases, into racism, sexism and other forms of xenophobia
though it still retains its 'anti-elitist' allure by rejecting the elite
pressure to curb its extremism.
Paul P
Charles Brown wrote:
What is populism? Is there any definition of populism that works
across borders?
--
Yoshie
^^^^^^
CB: Isn't "populism" a particularly United Statesian term ?
