There are now two stylish things to say about Populism. One is that the Populists were bad guys, the other that the Populists are again among us in such figures as John Lindsay and George McGovern, on the one hand, and George Wallace on the other. Unfortunately, the intellectuals talking about Populism know very little about it. Even Jack Newfield and Jeff Greenfield, in their wellintentioned but superficial little book, A Populist Manifesto, shudder at the nineteenth-century Populist reality which, they say, was “afflicted” with “paranoia and racism.”

The Populists, it will be remembered, were members of the People's Party, which existed from 1889 through the election of 1896.