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Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Populism and John Dewey Convergences and Contradictions Introduction Populism is unsettling the powers of the world and John Dewey can add to the agitation. The term, populist, is most often used to describe leaders who champion “the people” and rail against establishments.

In the 1980s, Reagan was called a populist for his calls to “return power to the people,” away from “big government.” The 2006 US elections were interpreted as resurgent populism on the Democratic side. “Incoming Democrats Put Populism Before Ideology,” read the headline in the New York Times .[^1] Politicians play a role but populism is more than the rhetoric of politicians.

It is the “different kind of politics” described in my 2002 Dewey lecture, a democratic, citizen-centered politics for the 21st century that is emerging in many different settings. There is evidence that such a politics is especially attractive to the “Millennial Generation,” born after 1982.[^2] I thank the Ginsberg Center for the chance to develop these arguments. Political knowledge is importantly social and experiential, as Lawrence Goodwyn has put it.

My first encounter with deeper meanings of populism came in an unforgettable experience when I was nineteen, working as a field secretary for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in St. Augustine, Florida in 1964. One day I was caught by five men and a woman who were members of the Klu Klux Klan. They accused me of being a “communist and a Yankee.” I replied, “I’m no Yankee - my family has been in the South since before the Revolution. And I’m not a communist. I’m a populist.

I believe that blacks and poor whites should make joint to do something about the big shots who keep us divided and held down.” For a few minutes we talked about what such a movement might look like. Then they let me go. When he learned of the incident, Martin Luther King, head of SCLC, told me he identified with the populist tradition and assigned me to organize poor whites.

Experiences organizing poor whites taught me the enormous and wide impact of the new collective power of historically marginalized African Americans. Poor whites I worked with constantly remarked that blacks “had really got their act together; we should do the same thing.” For white southern students in the movement, its examples of power offered the possibility of redemption not only for blacks but also for ourselves and our families.