Populism and Populist Discourse in North America

Book Overview

This book examines the origins of populism in Canada and the United States and its development into a powerful and at times disturbing political force. Focus is on five historical periods: The Populist Party of the United States in the 1890s, Prairie Populism in Canada during the early and mid-20th century, the Reform Party of Canada in the 1980s and 90s, the ‘left’ and ‘right’ populism of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump in the early 21st century, and the phenomenon of Ford Nation in modern day Ontario, Canada.

The author extends Ernesto Laclau’s analysis of populism as a ‘logic’ in On Populist Reason (2005) to explore how a ‘people’ come into being in their conflict or clash with an ‘elite,’ defined by Chartists in the 19th century as “idlers,” providing a contrast between ‘producers’ and ‘non-producers.’  The author examines the linguistic media (speeches, books, radio, twitter, Facebook) used in populist discourse to convey a political message and to articulate the needs, wishes and will of a newly born ‘people’ in their numerous guises and expressions, from “the plain people,” to “the little guy,” or to “brothers and sisters.” This volume will be of interest to researchers in an interdisciplinary range of fields, including discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, pragmatics, rhetoric and stylistics, political communication, social movements theory, media studies, and Canadian and American history.