[pessimizer]

This heavily underestimates the influence of Ezra Pound through his disciple and biographer Eustace Mullins. Butz certainly upped the economic pressure on rural people, but the theory is regular old European conspiratorial antisemitism as revived through Dreyfus, then post-WWI central European "stabbed in the back" fantasies, and interpreted by the fascist Europhile Pound.

If the US government hadn't just completed a program of left-wing eradication in the early part of the 20c, the pressure probably would have turned rural people towards the populism that they had turned to throughout the 19c and very early 20c; the kind of populism that culminated in the 4-term FDR presidency and the New Deal.

"Populism" as you use it here (to refer to right-wing antisemitic groups), was intentionally turned into a slur that was used to attack the working-class left-wing:

> Most of the Progressives, such as Theodore Roosevelt, Robert La Follette, and Woodrow Wilson, were bitter enemies of the Populists. In American political rhetoric, "populist" was originally associated with the Populist Party and related left-wing movements, but beginning in the 1950s it began to take on a more generic meaning, describing any anti-establishment movement regardless of its position on the left–right political spectrum.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People's_Party_(United_States)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eustace_Mullins

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edit: as far as I can tell, the only two things that are characteristic across all European cultures are drinking cow's milk and conspiracist antisemitism. Although America further developed it and fed it back to Europe (note Ford's influence on Hitler), the framework is definitely European. And of course, a lot of fascism in Europe was financed by the US post-WWII.

[082349872349872]

Interesting that these memetics[0] have been ping-ponging back and forth across the Atlantic. If you wish, search my HN comments for what (little) I know about Pound — I had not realised he'd been influential, as I'd thought he'd been dismissed as a crank upon openly embracing fascism[1].

[0] The Master and Margarita is my favourite take on deicide.

[1] with the benefit of hindsight, this is perhaps the victors' history. After all, NATO (although it no longer does) had openly fascist members within my lifetime. cf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grândola,_Vila_Morena

(also: I'm not so sure about the cow's milk going all the way to the Med. Consider: "All Gaul is divided into three parts: the part that cooks with lard and goose fat, the part that cooks with olive oil, and the part that cooks with butter.")

Edit: Wow, Mullins met Pound post-WW2. ... and I guess if the goldbuggery I'd noticed earlier in Pound was coded antisemitism whose whistle I'd missed, it explains much more about how an educated, culturally open, intellectual (cf Pound's juvenilia) could embrace fascism.

[082349872349872]

I'd indeed missed it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezra_Pound#Antisemitism,_socia...

[mistrial9]

no thanks for this simplified explanation -- "regular old European conspiratorial anti-whatever" is not the same as being suspicious of debt-and-foreign-trade driven core economies. There are winners and losers -- Farmers and their communities are sometimes the losers when you get cheap fruit from 5000km away, and lend money to people for basic needs from centralized and international banking.

[082349872349872]

One may be suspicious of debt-and-foreign-trade, but: are there (or have there ever been) any successful autarkic economies?

[mistrial9]

this question is either naive or not sincere. Instead of empty symbolic theory, look at the real history of real people in place and time. All food and territory systems involve "trade" -- a specialists' word on a display shelf adds nothing to real inquiry IMO

[082349872349872]

It was naive: I agree farmers and their communities are sometimes (in times after both industrialisation and the "green revolution", even often) the losers, but the best solution to that problem of which I am aware is "take some of the benefits of development and use that to compensate losers". I know of no examples of competitive autarkic economies, so unless you have any, that couldn't be a better solution.

And of course, if you have an even better solution than autarky, I'm all ears.

(more background: I'm partial to Jane Jacobs' theory that market agriculture has throughout history been subject to the vagaries of fortunes in nearby trade centres. If you have evidence that this theory is mistaken, I'm also willing to revisit that belief)