Agrarian populists were modernists blocked from speculation rather than moral critics of it

Evidence

As Postel argued, populist movements did not represent “premodern” values (family, community, church)—far from it—or resistance to the coming market revolution on the basis of Protestant morality. They had a “distinctly modernising” sensibility (Postel 2007, 9) and a special interest in the function of the economy. Arguably, then, ordinary agrarian populists did not so much begrudge speculation itself but the lack of access to insurance that would enable them to hedge their own radical uncertainties as effectively as CBOT speculators. Yet, as historian Jonathan Levy (2012) suggests in his account of that period, with access to a telegraph and a broker blocked, and without “enough cash or credit for the margin requirement” (250), such a speculative impulse had now little chance of materializing. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 131

Categorization

• XREF: Directly prefigures the reader’s core claim that financialized populism is marginalised-from-speculation rather than anti-market — connects to voting ‘against interests’ framing.
• SEED: Angle: ‘Hedging denied is what radicalizes’ — when insurance access is blocked, speculative energy turns political. Testable against contemporary retail-investor exclusion.