My daddy's populism.

• Author: Hightower, Jim
• Position: VOX POPULIST - Column

My father, W.F. "High" Hightower, was a populist. Only, he didn't know it. Didn't know the word, much less the history or anything about populism's democratic ethos. My father was not philosophical, but he had a phrase that he used to express the gist of his political beliefs: "Everybody does better when everybody does better."

Before the Populists of the late 1800s gave this instinctive rebelliousness a name, it had long been established as a defining trait of our national character. After all, the 1776 rebellion was against not only King George III's government but also the corporate tyranny of such British monopolists as the East India Trading Company.

The Keepers of the Corporate Order take care to avoid even a suggestion that there is an important political pattern--a historic continuum--that connects Thomas Paine's radically democratic writings in the late 1700s to Shays' Rebellion in 1786, to strikes by mill women and carpenters in the early 1800s, to Jefferson's 1825 warning about the rising aristocracy of banks and corporations "riding and ruling over the plundered ploughman," to the launching of the women's suffrage movement at Seneca Falls in 1848, to the maverick Texans who outlawed banks in their 1845 state constitution, to the bloody and ultimately successful grassroots struggle for the abolition of slavery, and to the Populist Movement itself, plus the myriad rebellions that followed right into our present day.

What Populism Is Not: An empty word for lazy reporters to attach to any angry spasm of popular discontent. (And it's damn sure not Sarah Palin and today's clique of Koch-funded, corporate-hugging, Tea Party Republicans.)

What Populism Is: For some 238 years, it has been the chief impulse in America's body politic: determinedly democratic, vigilantly resistant to oppressive power of corporations and Wall Street, committed to grassroots percolate-up economics.

Our nation's true political spectrum is not...