The Populist Moment

Created: 2020-11-01T13:23:04-06:00

• Farmers responded to economic downturns by attempting to work harder but could not wring more blood from the stump.
• America asserts the present is better than the past, the future is always progress, and protests break out when times are hard until progress resumes.
• Using a central police force is a component but not all of pacifying the populace.
• Changing culture so that people cannot fathom anything else or are demotivated to seek change creates stability.
• Protesting is then "allowed" in the framework that elites are not truly concerned about the result.
• This 'limited' protest can be used to prove a government is 'democratic.'
• Industrial revolution has allowed ownership of land and utility to become centralized.
• Socialism: creative people being directed away to "non-political" avenues.
• Capitalism: people's opportunity being limited compared to others.
• Americans have more options than Russians yet the deference against the poor is the same.
• Massive movements require a series of growth steps to gain full power.
• Massive movements have largely been unable to materialize post-industrial revolution.
• Populism vs. Marx: Marx creates "classes" and asserts against them; populism is instead designed from landed and unlanded agrarians. That is, populism does not obey strict class boundary behaviors.
• Growth of a movement: members are recruited, educated in the doctrine and ethos, and graduate to politically autonomous entities.
• People live in heirarchial cultures which claim to be democratic ones.
• National Farmer's Alliance and Industrial Union
• NFAIU was eventually suppressed by the financial industry.
• Populists post NFAIU tried independent parties but were continually suppressed by the financial industry.
• Populism, unlike other large rebellions in the USA, attacks the entire socioeconomic structure.
• American factory workers were unable to obtain political autonomy and their unions were destroyed.
• Populism attempts to orient political parties to "the plain people," while financial instruments orient parties to making money.
• Banks pushed for a return to gold currency to deflate the dollar, while they also held bonds that increased in worth due to this.
• "voting as they shot"
• Difference between credit and cash prices in goods
• Post-civil war bond holders drove push to fiat in order to make their bonds profitable
• Plans to use cash stores to address credit/cash discrepencies were mildly successful but fell out of use because farmers did not have the cash in hand to use cash stores