What Is The New Populism?

By Robert Borosage, Campaign For America's Future

Truthout - Friday, 23 May 2014

These remarks were prepared for delivery at The New Populism Conference in Washington, May 22, 2014.
What is the new populism? The Princeton dictionary defines populism as "a political doctrine that supports the rights and powers of the common people in their struggle with the privileged elite."
Not bad for a dictionary.
The New Populism arises from the stark truth about today's America: Too few people control too much money and power, and they're using that control to rig the rules to protect and extend their privileges.
This economy does not work for working people. This isn't an accident. It isn't an act of God. It isn't due to forces of technology and globalization that can't be changed. It isn't a mistake. It is a power grab.
Decades of deregulation and top-end tax cuts, of soaring CEO pay and assaults on unions, of conservative myths and market fundamentalism have recreated Gilded Age extremes of wealth and power. Once more a new American plutocracy is emerging, doing what plutocrats always do – corrupting government to protect and expand their fortunes.
Americans don't tolerate self-perpetuating aristocracies easily. Opposition to aristocratic wealth is as American as apple pie, dating back to the American Revolution, to Jefferson who warned about the "aristocracy of monied corporations."
The Populist Tradition
The movement that gave populism its name swept out of the Plains states in the late 19th century as small farmers and steelworkers, day laborers and sharecroppers came together to take on the trusts, the railroads, the distant banks that were impoverishing them.

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