Thank you so much for having the acuity to both note and remark on the Huey Long reference in the article, since I got all carried away on some other, larger point. The fact that Lind probably doesn't get Huey Long (except perhaps through the ridiculous Sean Penn remake of "All the King's Men") is important, since Long represented something completely different from what we're discussing here and from what we've seen since his short public life. I guess the closest we've come to Long was Bill Clinton, and he fell quite a bit short of what was The Audacity of Being Owned by No One.

Appreciated.

is priceless! Yes, nasty retrograde politics always lurking just around the corner and just over the hedge that is our congress...

He's glib. He's knowledgeable. He's highly articulate. Yet beneath it all Michael Lind is your standard model lefty. A man whose political attitudes are expressed not as political attitudes but as immutable, self-evident verities, implying that Americans who demur from his righteous politics are either deluded, deranged, or arrant evildoers of the Jesse Helms stripe.

Man, I get tired of this crap. Guys like Lind give the impression of believing that all of America's problems could be alleviated if only we all embraced his political mindset. His words would draw a smile from Plutarch, that savvy Greek who wrote "They are wrong who think that politics is like an ocean voyage or a military campaign, something to be done with a particular end in mind."

He's welcome to his opinions. It seems unlikely that he will ever comprehend how officious his demeanor strikes those of different political beliefs, and that's probably just as well. Insights are not always beneficial.

Says the homophobic bigot. Oh, but I guess that's YOUR sickness.

My point is that, by adopting Helms' methods of media demagogy and fundraising, progressives tend to ratify the structure of Helmsian America.

What? By using successful methods to put in place a structure of Amercia that is NOT Helmsian, progressives would be ratifying Helmsian America? Yeah, let's just keep being on being impotent so as not to impugn our purity of thought. Let's not use tactics that actually are proven to work, let's just quietly wait for America to change. Very concern-trollish sounding to me.

Olberman's editorials are very similar to the messages Murrow gave on McCarthy and the plight of farm laborers. I wonder what your evidence is that the media is mostly liberal.

Corporate Republicans often support drives against illegal immigrants because they want to discourage labor organizing among them and therefore it is the corporate politicians who are behind the anti-immigrant drive. The immigrant rights movement is allied to labor movement and an attack on one is an attack on both. Immigration would decrease if NAFTA which liberal Democrats oppose was repealed. Moveon is a good way to get involved ina ctivism and has nothing in common with the methods of the Conservative movement. Huckabee is a corporate Republican who wants to wants lower taxes on the wealthy by instituting the FAIR TAX, Perot was the first Welfare Billionaire, and Dobbs is a demagogue. None of them are populist insurgents who deserve liberal support.

An excellent post on an excellent article. You made me start thinking.

Long is important as you rightly point out. But the main points of the article are still basically correct. Long scares business today as an anti-monopolist, etc. He took advantage of real issues with business corruption and horrible elite behavior.

Another poster called Populism "popular" ideas versus effective. The problem with that is that the populsit movement grew out of the Agrarian reform movement, a movement meant to allow farmers to push back against corrupt business and plantation interests, and to impose small town values elwhere. It is the antithesis of the "Southern System", because it was meant to rein in corrupt planter monopolies on credit and use of government and business to sock it to debtor farmers. The silver issue was meant to address the debt peonage of the sharecrop system, where landowners used fake math and bad conditions to put poor people, regardless of race, in debt forever.

The people here who dismiss populism ignore that this is the one movment that brought poor people together across race to oppose rich plutacracy. That makes it the most dangerous movment in Americato business . Businesses are coopting it today, because divide and conquer by racial fear is less effecive with the younger generations. That is the most ironic and scary development to date in this history.

His genius was to neutralize race and tap into class. He tapped the anger of poor whites who were victimized by the corporate ownership of Louisiana by Standard Oil, the paper mills, the sugar business, etc. At the same time, he neutralized the racial bogeyman used to distract poor whites from their economic victimization by the rapacious SOuthern business elite (although not by being progressive). Boll weevils still tried, but a starving person needs the chicken in every pot more.

Bill Clinton was similiar, but he never had charm. I grew up in Louisiana, and the stories of the charm, the charisma, still resonate.

I meant Huey Long. I was commenting on your insightful post on him. I should not post and run!

"Populism, which properly speaking is the fusion of socially conservative beliefs with economically liberal policies, must always defy logic in order to thrive."

Dukakis was self-described as "fiscally conservative" and "socially liberal". An oxymoron -- which played out in a predictable way --

As governor he signed legislation creating social service agencies -- the "socially liberal" thing to do -- then withheld the funding appropriated for them -- the "fiscally conservative" thing to do. Thus one had social service agencies, for which he took credit with the voters, which were able to do only the bare minimum.

And the withheld funding went to building up a state "budget surplus" as the "perfect" ground on which to run for president based upon being a "fiscal conservative" "able to balance a budget".

"Social liberal" + "fiscal conservaitve" = irrational nonsense. But it does tend to appeal to both the socially liberal, and to the fiscally conservative, voters. And especially to "liberals" who are often genuinely socially liberal, but -- bottom line -- vote on the weight of their wallets, the latter usually defended with rationales borrowed from the "screw everyone else" "socially conservative".

Is politics a legitimate form of entertainment?

And what liar put "candid" in the word "candidate"?