::Slaps face:: I just realized that the South was populist for a very long time, from William Jennings Bryan to “Alfalfa Bill” Murray. But for some reason Midwestern populism is left wing and Southern populism is right wing.
Hmmm.....food for thought, the different strains of populism.
The Mid Western form often called Prairie Populism evokes Robert Lafollette, Hubert Humphrey, & George McGovern (he & I were in Vietnam in 1972; solve that little puzzle). Nazi strongholds like Coeur D’Alene are indeed quite rare. The region was the recipient of huge amounts of New Deal largesse monumented by the enormous dams built during that time. Both the dams & the ideology surrounding them remain.
Southern populism was admittedly racist when its proponents were Eugene Talmadge & Lester Maddox, less so during the candidacies of George Wallace. Southern blacks, for whom FDR’s New Deal had done little to help as he needed those white Southern Democrat votes, were suddenly “weaponized” by the first civil rights movement & perceived as a threat to the established order of every white Southerner regardless of class. Huey Long’s relatively inclusive populism was seen as an aberration.
But nothing in the racial struggles of the past could have prepared America for the current Muslim onslaught, aided & abetted by liberals with a frankly nihilistic streak.
IOW, those Somalis didn’t get here by swimming.