joefromchicago wrote:I'm not sure what Krugman meant when he used the term "populist," and if that label can be applied to Teddy Roosevelt and Bob LaFollette (as nimh has done), then I guess it has no meaning left at all.
Huh? If you apply the label "populist" to Bob LaFollette "it has no meaning left at all"?
This is what the site FightingBob.com, established "to honor and revive the spirit and mission of our namesake, Robert "Fighting Bob" La Follette",
writes of him:
Quote:It was this militant faith in the people that enabled him to win reelection to the Senate in 1922 by an overwhelming margin. And this faith guided the Midwestern populist as he embarked on the most successful leftwing Presidential campaign in American history. [..]
La Follette's 1924 crusade won almost five million votes--more than five times the highest previous total for a candidate endorsed by the Socialists. He carried Wisconsin, ran second in eleven Western states, and swept working-class Jewish and Italian wards of New York and other major cities--proving that a rural-urban populist coalition could, indeed, be forged. [..]
The 1924 campaign laid the groundwork for the resurgence of leftwing populist movements across the upper Midwest--the Non-Partisan League of North Dakota, the Farmer-Labor Party of Minnesota, and the Progressive Party of Wisconsin.
The site identifies LaFollette as "the populist governor, U.S. Senator, and presidential candidate from Wisconsin who founded the Progressive Party and spent his career battling the corrupting, impoverishing and anti-democratic influence of big moneyed interests over government and public policy".
The
American Historical Review called La Follette "a key link between the Populist-Progressive reform movements of the early twentieth century and the New Deal innovations of the 1930s".
In her biography,
Fighting Bob La Follette: The Righteous Reformer, Nancy Unger wrote that, while back in 1896 he was still a strictly Republican party man, "LaFollette would later align himself with William Jennings Bryan on a number of substantive political issues and make many Populist reform goals his own."
It's not just a retrospectively applied label either: back in 1935, the
Quarterly Journal of Economics wrote that "the platform of the new third party [of 1924] expressed Bob LaFollette's populist philosophy".
And that's all just a quick Google away.
So what am I missing?
Like I said, the populist movement has of course a long and storied history in the US, and it reached decades on into the 20th century. It's associated with a specific brand of politics, not just as a style but in substance too. And look at how FightingBob.com identifies LaFollette to see how come I associate Edwards' current approach with populism, and Obama's, not so much.
