American Populism, from its beginnings to the present moment, is an expression of hostility to state power and those who exercise it or seek to exercise it. Consider the Whiskey Rebellion: It was an enormity, a gratuitous act of power. Nobody likes it except the ruling elite who do not participate in it. It exists [...]
What do Eurosceptic movements, support for Donald Trump, and recent college protesters have in common? All are populist reactions to political correctness and its precondition of abolishing our common political sense of what we can do together. Such a lesson one can garner from French philosopher Pierre Manent, who is little known in America, but [...]
Americans have long mistrusted intellectuals, nowhere more so than when intellectuals have had access to power. There is considerable irony in this apprehension, for the Founding Fathers were themselves men of intellect and learning. Refined and erudite, many were well and widely read in history, politics, law, and science, and applied their knowledge to solving [...]
In the last stanza of “The Battle of Blenheim,” Robert Southey writes: “But what good came of it at last?” Quoth little Peterkin. “Why, that I cannot tell,” said he; “But ’twas a famous victory.” What did it really matter? The poet was asking of the triumph of the Duke of Marlborough — “Who this [...]
Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred, by John Lukacs. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. 248 pp. There are few scholars whose intellectual achievements are so respected that their intuitions are as highly regarded as their more formal scholarship. John Lukacs is one of these rare individuals. He brings to his work a lifetime of devotion [...]
Politics was [for Watson]… a potent magic whereby a distraught and oppressed people might conjure up forgotten, as well as imaginary, grandeurs, unite with intense purpose, and cast off their oppressors.—C. Vann Woodward Tom Watson Paul Greenberg has described the Pulitzer Prize winning historian C. Vann Woodward as the “quintessential quiet Southerner.” The [...]