But as I understand American Populism, from its beginings to the present moment, it is an expression of hostility to state power and those who exercise it or seek to exercise it.  It is no surprise then that most Populists have looked to Thomas Jefferson, the great original American critic of consolidated power, as their patron saint, and that the history of Populism is closely connected to the concept of the American Constitution as a restraint on power rather than a grant of power.  Populists regard state power as always corrupt and corrupting, which is an inheritance, I believe of the English “Country” ideology or opposition value system which the Americans absorbed deeply in the colonial period and which underlay the American War of Independence.

Populism in the strictest historical sense refers to the People’s Party which flourished in the later 19th century, in certain regions of the American Union.  Which brings us to another part of my definition of Populism.  It has always been, in this country, a regional and not a class phenomenon.  I take this idea, as well as my title “Up at the Fork of the Creek,” from an early essay of the late M.E. Bradford.

The People’s Party is often spoken of as a Midwestern phenomenon.  Midwestern is actually a vague term.  “Heartland” is a little better perhaps.  But Populism was not a phenomenon of the “Heartland.”  It was a phenomenon of the far western fringes of the Heartland, and equally or more so of the rural South.  (And also of the mining regions of the Far West, which gave it the peculiar counter-productive tangent of the Free Silver movement.)  There were no Populists in Ohio and they were a minority in Iowa.  In the Heartland one has to go west of the Mississippi to find a Populist and even all the way to the Missouri to find very many. ~Clyde Wilson, “Up at the Forks of the Creek: In Search of American Populism,” delivered December 2, 1994 at conference on “Populism and the New Politics” in From Union to Empire: Essays in the Jeffersonian Tradition (2003)