Populism in Alberta as a synonym for political party members controlling party elites died on the first weekend in May when United Conservative Leader Jason Kenney overruled his membership’s 57 per cent majority vote on Resolution 30.
Kenney says he’s building a big conservative tent, but if you support school disclosure to parents of a student joining a gay-straight alliance, called for in Resolution 30, or the defunding of abortion, your place in that tent is on the margins with your mouth shut.
Populism was born in the Long Depression of 1873-1896 and led to the formation of the U.S. People’s Party, as an alternative to the elite-dominated Republican and Democratic parties of the Gilded Age.
The Gilded Age saw industrialists like J. D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie and the Vanderbilt family amass great fortunes in the economic boom that followed the Civil War.
But millions of Americans lived in poverty and the concentration of wealth became a political flashpoint.
The populists courted William Jennings Bryan, the Nebraska orator who dominated the Democratic Party for two decades and was its presidential nominee three times.
Bryan was never elected, but under his leadership the Democratic Party became the 20th century force for liberalism in American politics.
The People’s Party had a bigger tent, and affiliated with Republicans in several states as well as the Democrats nationally.
William Aberhart’s populism in the mid-1930s started as a reforming force after young Christians from his Prophetic Bible Institute went in teams of three to investigate the ravages of the Great Depression in rural and small-village Alberta.
His campaign and first term as premier is dismissed as a “funny money” folly, but if you drill deeper, you find his anti-bank, anti-railroad, anti-Ottawa, anti-newspaper politics was, in sum, classic populism because it was anti-elite.
Scholars who study populism point to the dislocations of the Long Depression and Great Depression and the resulting political antipathy to elites as essential to the development of populism.
Fast-forward to 1973 and the foundation of what was to become Alberta Report magazine and the anti-elitism of Ted Byfield and his family who drove the magazine’s successful influence in Alberta politics.
The Byfields and Alberta Report were fearlessly antagonistic to the Liberal elites of the federal government. They had an uneasy relationship with the elites of the Lougheed Progressive Conservatives when political pragmatism overrode principle.
Safe to say that Preston Manning’s political success owed its start to Alberta Report and Ted Byfield who used their influence to sell the Reform Party brand that “the West wants in.”
It’s also safe to say that in the early years, Preston and his party were populists that the elites of Alberta scorned.
Preston never attacked party members who advocated social conservatism. He had the knack of disagreeing with extreme ideas without being disagreeable to the spokespeople for these ideas.
It wasn’t the populism of the People’s Party or William Aberhart, but it was an openness to hear from his fringe.
Preston’s political trajectory may have stalled in the cross-currents of social conservatism.
Jason Kenney is afraid of that fate; he fears populism and has driven a stake through its heart.
– Frank Dabbs is a veteran political and business journalist and author.
