Thomas Frank and Matt Taibbi are speaking warmly of late-19th-century American populism for its economic and financial vision, which was good at wedding traditional American values to a more collectivist set of structures (e.g., the Sub-Treasury plan), but both tend to downplay or ignore another aspect of that era's populism that will feel familiar in the present: It's culture was hospitable to conspiratorial thinking that could verge on paranoia. It was a short step from the populist's denunciation of "the interests" (or more specifically, "the bankers") to warning against "the international Jew" characterized by the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Taibbi, echoing Frank, notes that some populist efforts promoted cooperation across racial lines but few such efforts got off the ground and, this being the era in which the legal framework of segregation was being constructed, reversion to the Jim Crow mean was overwhelmingly the most common result. Elements within populism were looking for ways to promote cooperation across race and ethnicity, but by and large the populist masses were as susceptible as the white Protestant population in general to racist and nativist appeals.
And today here we are, discussing another iteration of populism in which we overwhelmingly emphasize its economic virtues or its cultural shortcomings depending on whether we feel ourselves for or against (respectively) "populism." It's a political sensibility that gives both lefties and righties something to love and something to hate.
