Agrarian populists sought pacts with finance, not clashes
Evidence
It is useful to recall here some of the historical struggles of homo speculans and, specifically, the dramatic entry of agrarian populism into the US politics of the Gilded Age. Populist Party members generated a complex speculative imagination against the political establishment of the time. Then, just as now, nativism, racism, and antimigrant sentiment were often part and parcel of such imagination (among both antigambling crusaders in the pits and agrarian populists in the farmland). At the same time, for all their great historical differences, fin de siècle populists and Hochschild’s Tea Partiers ultimately sought a pact and not a clash with finance, articulating a desire for harnessing the markets’ laissez-faire dynamism to the benefit of their hinterland constituents. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 286
Categorization
Category: Factual Claims
- XREF: Useful historical lineage for the reader’s homo speculans thesis — Gilded Age populism had already sought to harness laissez-faire dynamism.
Related
- American populists historically sought a pact with, not a clash against, finance (similarity 0.95)
- Gilded Age agrarian populists combined speculative imagination with nativism and racism (similarity 0.87)
- Grassroots populist speculators understood modern financial fictions deeply (similarity 0.84)
- Agrarian populists sought access to hedging, not the abolition of speculation. (similarity 0.82)
- Financially excluded groups sought socialized risk, not a return to older risk regimes. (similarity 0.81)
- Agrarian populists were modernists blocked from speculation rather than moral critics of it (similarity 0.80)
- Financialization reawakened homo speculans, forging false-binary populist alliances. (similarity 0.79)
- Regressive populism and speculative finance are forming new alliances. (similarity 0.79)
- Populists promised rival sectors opposing economic remedies simultaneously (similarity 0.79)
- Progressive politics can weaponize speculative methods against finance capitalism (similarity 0.79)
- Populist passions animate rather than oppose financial rationality (similarity 0.78)