The Modern Independent

Tea Parties and Populists: Revisiting the 1890s

Two pieces of news struck me last week and got me thinking about all the historical parallels between the politics of today, with the voter anger and rise of the Tea Party movement, and last great populist movement in this country.  The last great movement to which I am referring, of course, was the emergence of the People’s Party in the 1890s.

The first article came from the pages of the The New York Times. Written by Matt Bai, it suggested that voter anger in this election cycle isn’t about issues per see; rather, it is symptom of a larger social malady, namely the breakdown of civil society as traditionally understood.

This conclusion came from a series of focus groups developed not by political operatives or pollsters, but by consultants who specialize in corporate marketing. What they found, Bai writes, was that the “dominant theme of the discussion, in which jobs and taxes came up only in passing.” Instead, their focus “seemed to be the larger breakdown of civil society — the disappearance of common courtesy, the relentless stream of data from digital devices, the proliferation of lawsuits and the insidious influence of media on their children.”