On Apr 20, 2007, at 9:07 AM, Ted Winslow wrote:
michael a. lebowitz wrote:
How much of the bad connotation of 'populism' comes from
intellectuals--- e.g., Hofstadter writing about Nativism in the US
(in the context of McCarthyism) or Lipset about Canada; indeed, how
much comes from social democrats?
How much comes from any rational person watching the successful
appeal of demagogues to irrationality and remembering the kind of
political outcomes to which such appeals can lead?
And how much of the critique of the critique comes from people who
haven't read Hofstadter in 35 years? He wrote at a time, and many 60s
leftists read him at a time, when the right-wing side of populism
seemed like a fading thing. Reading him today, as I just did, sounds
almost like a political history of the last couple of decades.
Doug
