How Should Progressives Challenge Right-Wing Populism?

[Tippy]

Read an interview with progressive activists Suzanne Pharr, Loretta Ross, and Chip Berlet
.
Suzanne Pharr: There is fairly strong organizing throughout . We have it written about in the newspapers each time they get together. We are in the center of Appalachia. It’s a conservative region, so a large number of people have begun to organize here. I’d say its 100 percent white and mostly middle class, although I understand almost everyone who is white identifies as middle class.

I don’t know if it has enough traction yet to affect the political landscape here, but it has provided a place for people to talk about government. There is always a piece of it that is coded racial language or overt.

These are very good research sites:

http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=6156cc8e4be86fb4777b681aaea58b1b

http://www.publiceye.org/right_wing_populism/index.html

[timtom]

1. One challenge:

Where the hell were they in the past 8 years when our Constitution was being shredded ("It's just a goddamned piece of paper.")

[frazzled]

2. Stop mimicking them ...

by spouting anti-government slogans all day long. Stop having simplistic explanations for complex issues. Stop having scapegoats and using incendiary language. Start thinking.

[slackmaster]

3. Have a bake sale

I like cookies.

[DBoon]

4. "raise less corn and more hell"

Women are not often thought of in association with the Populists, but the best-known orator of the movement in the early 1890s was a woman, Mary Elizabeth Lease. Born in Pennsylvania in 1850 to Irish parents, Lease became a school teacher in Kansas in 1870. She and her husband, a pharmacist, spent ten years trying to make a living farming, but finally gave up in 1883 and settled in Wichita. Lease entered political life as a speaker for the Irish National League, and later emerged as a leader of both the Knights of Labor and the Populists. Lease mesmerized audiences in Kansas, Missouri, the Far West, and the South with her powerful voice and charismatic speaking style. In hundreds of speeches, she apparently never said the one phrase most often associated with her name—the injunction that farmers should “raise less corn and more hell.” Regardless of who called explicitly for more hell-raising, Lease was a powerful voice of the agrarian crusade.

http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5304/

Populists were once considered left-wing. I think even Frederick Engels had some good things to say about the original American populist movement.

[Clio the Leo]

5. One of the greatest grass roots efforts was nurtured through it's infancy in the hill of Appalachia.

... on a mountain in Tennessee, Union organizers met in the 1940s and 1950s to promote adult education programs and union causes. The Highlander School, despite being located right smack dab in the middle of Tennessee, invited people across ethnic lines to it's grounds. And people came from all over the country. For the first time blacks and whites lived and worked together as God's children, equally. Something they'd always desired to do, but never thought possible.

This would inspire them to take that spirit back home to their communities and challenge the existing social order. One young woman in particular was especially moved. She went back home to Alabama and decided she was tired of being treated like a second class citizen. Tired of being welcomed into white people's homes (through the back door of course) but not into their restaurants. Because of the training and education she got at the Highlander School, she decided one day that, no, she would NOT give up her seat to the white man that demanded it from her.

She was tired .... not just from a long day's work, but from a lifetime of oppression.

I know this because it was at Highlander that my father came to know Rosa Parks.

And where he came to be involved in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee because it was to that mountain in Tennessee that a young preacher from Montgomery would travel .... and students from all over the south would travel.

Someone once said that a voice can change a room and a room can change a world.

And you can find those rooms in the oddest places.



It must be something about this neck of the woods that fosters that kind of thing.

Any of y'all wanna come visit me and help me push back the teabaggers?

(I'm sorry, I realize this doesn't answer your question, but your post got me to thinking.)

[WhiteTara]

6. I read the comments from the TPers

I can never see that acronym without thinking Toilet Paper...but I digress

The comments were all negative and filled with racial epitaphs and misspellings of common words. Their violence drips from the words on the page, reminding me of slavering beasts packing in for the kill. The only thing that keeps them from the final attack of death is the light that the target shoves into their raging faces.

Keep up shining the light DUers and thanks for being the beacon of light in my life.
:patriot:

[Romulox]

7. I say we give a ton of money to bankers then imply that the populists are racist.

Sound good? :shrug: