Populism's Power: Radical Grassroots Democracy in America

Historians may be put off initially by an analysis of populism that leaps, breathlessly and without a great deal of connective history, from the People's party and the 1890s to the civil rights movement and the 1950s and then onward to the twenty-first century. Laura Grattan is a political scientist, and she introduces herself as the daughter of “parents whose families worked on the railroads and in the auto factories in Detroit” (p. v). She is an empathetic observer of American democracy's steep decline, struggling to give us a fresh angle of vision. Populism's Power is burdened by too much jargon. But here and there she succeeds admirably and deserves our gratitude for the effort. Unfortunately, this is a book so much about ideas and the author's restatement of her strategies for pursing them that a close view of history's details often seems elusive. The abundance of theoretical phrases does not help. Grattan gives us “aspirational” democratic traditions, “horizontal” mobilization, “coalitional institutions,” and “translocal organizing” on the same page (p. 87)! Persist, dear readers. An interpretation of populism's internal contradictions brings her points forward, even if it does not move us to a new conceptual space sufficiently beyond Richard Hofstadter's familiar negatives and Lawrence Goodwyn's closely documented rejoinders.