Tag

Populism

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Southern Populism and the South’s Agrarian Identity

In what passes for political and cultural discourse today, the term “populist” is something of a pejorative, conjuring up images in the mind of the cultural and academic elite of dangerous folks with pitchforks and guns riding about in pick-up trucks looking for an uprising to foment.  This of course is nonsense.  What the tsars of public opinion describe as…
John Devanny
September 2, 2019
Blog

Lincoln, Crony Capitalism, and Populism

Lincoln’s War established a permanent, centralized regime of crony capitalism for the formerly federal U.S. In the centralized U.S., real power is in the hands of big business and big banks that use government to protect and increase their own private profit and wealth. Lincoln implemented Henry Clay’s “American Plan”, without giving it a name. At the time, however, free…
Norman Black
August 11, 2017
Review Posts

Up at the Forks of the Creek: In Search of American Populism

Editor's note: With the rise of "populism" around the world, we should revisit the history and origins of American populism. In "Populism" we are confronted with a term that raises so many different connotations in different minds that we well may wonder if the term is usable at all. It is not quite as bad, in this respect, as democracy—a…
Clyde Wilson
November 16, 2016
Review Posts

A Farewell Performance of “The Twins”

Omitting minor points of difference, it may be said that “the difference between the old Democrat and Whig parties” was the same as that which separated the schools of Jefferson and Hamilton. The old Democratic party stood for Free Trade, for equal and exact justice to all without Special Privileges to any, for a strict construction of the Constitution, for…
Thomas E. Watson
October 11, 2016
Review Posts

Two Aristocracies

Editor's note: This piece was originally printed as an unsigned piece in DeBow's Review in 1866. The author had already recognized that the deal struck between Midwestern farmers and Northeastern merchants would in short order ruin agriculture and by default a more Jeffersonian economy in the "farm belt" of America. His call for Southern and Midwestern farmers to unite against…
Abbeville Institute
October 5, 2016
Clyde Wilson Library

The Jeffersonian Democrat Rediscovered

A Review of A Plague on Both Your Houses, by Robert W. Whitaker. New York: Robert B. Luce, 1976, 208 pages. Hardly anyone has commented upon the seeming disappearance from American life of the Jeffersonian democrat. The Jeffersonian democrat was a hardy American breed, perhaps the only political type original to this continent. Outnumbering all other species between 1800 and…
Clyde Wilson
December 16, 2015