TPM: Third Way Co-Founder Explains Op-Ed Criticizing Warren (and makes it worse)

[dhpgetsit]

24. From 2002 but still entirely appropriate:

"What's really wrong, though, are these indictments of populism. The DLCers have got political history backward. The original populists were not out to destroy capitalism but to preserve it."

"But there was a defining populist worldview that has influenced Democrats from Bryan in 1896 to Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 to Clinton and Gore in 1992. At the heart of this worldview was what the populists called "producerism." The Jacksonians, and later the populists, distinguished those who actually produced wealth from those who lived off of it -- "the idle holders of idle capital," as Bryan referred to them in his "Cross of Gold" speech. Populists believed that wealth and power should accrue to those who produced it -- "the people," properly so-called -- and not to those who lived off the people's labor."

"Such a distinction may sound Marxist, but the populists were neither Marxists nor socialists. They counted the craftsman and the businessman as members of the producing classes, but not the speculator or the absentee landlord. Many populists owned their own farms, and they saw an alliance with labor as an alliance between "capital and labor." "Capital and labor should be allies and not enemies," the Farmers Alliance, the founding populist organization, declared in 1885."

Why Democrats must be populists

I believe there is plenty of support for a true populist candidate.