According to Merriam-Webster online, populism is defined as:
1 : a member of a political party claiming to represent the common people; especially often capitalized : a member of a United States political party formed in 1891 primarily to represent agrarian interests and to advocate the free coinage of silver and government control of monopolies
2 : a believer in the rights, wisdom, or virtues of the common people
I've looked it up a number of times in the last few years because I noticed that any time populism was mentioned in a newspaper it was with a decided journalistic slant of derision. Believing the idea that journalists were at least hoping for impartiality, that always struck me as strange.
The class war that the Republicans have been engaging for the last 30 years really pisses me off, and the thing that makes me the most angry is that we the middle class are told that we aren't supposed to talk about the class war. It isn't proper etiquette to notice that the middle class is disappearing, or that while George W. was singing the praises of a robust economy, the middle and lower classes are experiencing yet another jobless recovery. The hostility towards populism has always seemed like part of this no-talk rule to me.
Matt Taibbi sheds a little light on that today in a blog post about David Brooks:
But leaving aside any discussion of Brooks the human being, this latest column of his is something that has to be discussed. The propagandistic argument he makes about the dangers of “populism” is spelled out here as clearly as you’ll ever see it expressed in print, and this exact thing is a key reason why so much of the corruption that went on on Wall Street in the past few decades was allowed to spread unchecked.
That’s because this argument is tacitly accepted by almost everyone in our business, and most particularly is internalized in the thinking of most newspaper editors and TV news producers, who over time develop an ingrained habitual fear of publishing material that seems hysterical or angry.
This certainly has an effect on the content of news reporting, but perhaps even more importantly, it impacts the tone of news coverage, where outrages are covered without outrage, and stories that are not particularly “balanced” in reality — stories that for instance are quite plainly about one group of people screwing another group of people — become transformed into cool, “objective” news stories in which both the plainly bogus version of events and the real and infuriating version are given equal weight.
The idea that the middle and lower classes of this country are most of the population and that federal spending should benefit us instead of exclusively benefitting the people at the top who don't need help seems like a no brainer to me. And it's an idea that can't even be discussed if we disparage the idea of populism in the places we discuss the day's events.