Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 26, 1995 TAG: 9503250022
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: G-2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Do that, he observes, and you rob the term of coherent meaning. All kinds of conflicting and even mutually exclusive ideas - George Wallace and the civil-rights movement; Joe McCarthy and labor movements of the left - get dumped into the catch-all category.
But Ladd himself offers not a content-based definition but a process-based one. Populism arises, he says, when new constellations of interests arise; it is not a reaction against old establishments but rather a conflict with new ones.
While denying the genuine populism of much that gets the tag, including Ross Perot, Ladd in using this definition doesn't deny it to all. He's willing to grant the populist label both to the agrarian movement of the 1880s and 1890s that gave rise to the term and to the Christian right of today.
The former struggled in reaction to a new order of urban, industrial ascendancy, he says. The latter struggles in reaction to the rise of secular intellectualism in the postindustrial era.
Perhaps so. Certainly, there are parallels, including the adherence of William Jennings Bryan, 19th-century populism's most prominent politician, to Protestant fundamentalism.
At its core, though, 19th-century populism was an economic and not religious movement. "You shall not crucify mankind on a cross of gold," Bryan thundered - not as a doctrinal statement, but as a call for expanding the money supply, and thus making credit easier, via the free coinage of silver.
by CNB