US populists were profit-seeking businessmen who overlapped with bucket-shop speculators

Evidence

Sociologist Sarah Quinn (2019) notes that farmers of that period included “property owners, product sellers, and speculators” (51–52, my emphases) and thus they “generally identified as profit-seeking businessmen,” but, “in their indebtedness, [they] could also identify with laborers as fellow producers similarly subordinate to a more powerful class.” I adopt here Charles Postel’s (2007) approach to populism “as a national movement, focusing on farmers but also including wage earners” (viii), labor organizations, women groups, “urban radicals, tax and currency reformers, prohibitionists, middle class utopians, spiritual innovators, and miscellaneous iconoclasts” (13). It is crucial to note that this broad constituency often overlapped with the denizens of bucket shops—who were themselves drawn from a widely diverse demographic that included not only the urban middle class but rural and farming constituencies too (Levy 2012). — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 131

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the demographic-meaning claim that populism’s constituency and bucket-shop traders were the same diverse class.
• XREF: Feeds reader’s argument that homo speculans was never an atomized professional trader — the constituency was always the broad middling public now visible in retail trading apps.