The New Yorker's George Packer has an interesting blog post about Progressives and Populists, comparing President Obama (the Progressive) to Democratic Congressman Tom Perriello (the Populist).

In political terminology that goes back more than a century, Obama is a Progressive, and Perriello is a Populist. Progressives came from the successful ranks of American society, they identified with the interests and aspirations of the educated and well-off, but their sense of civic responsibility was scandalized by the corruption of political machines and the evils of corporate capitalism. They were driven by moral conscience and pragmatic concern to crusade for a range of reforms, from the primary election to the income tax. Their impulse, individual and ethical in nature, was to cleanse and restore. Their model was the disinterested, public-spirited citizen who brought expert knowledge to solving social problems.

. . . A hundred years later, the scale of powerful institutions is taken as more or less a given by contemporary Progressives like Obama, who appointed an architect of the bank bailout as his treasury secretary. Their quarrel isn’t with bigness itself, but with the unfair advantages that political influence has conferred on corporations, insurance and drug companies, and banks against the consumer, the taxpayer, and the small businessman.

This is where distance between Obama and Tom Perriello begins to open. For Perriello is less a Progressive than a Populist. The Populists were agrarians, and when Perriello told an audience at a grant-giving ceremony in Martinsville, Virginia, that farm jobs could be the jobs of the future, he was sounding a very old chord in American discourse. In his language and sympathies, his frequent use of the word “elite,” his vilification of Wall Street bankers, Perriello is carrying the banner of the laid-off seamstress, the struggling truck-stop owner, the hard-pressed tobacco farmer. These were the constituents of the original Populists. They looked with anger upward rather than with sympathy downward. They didn’t come from the professional middle class, though some of their champions did, and they didn’t put their faith in the training and education of experts. If anything, expertise was suspect as a cover for the interests of the powerful. Hofstadter described the “dominant themes in Populist ideology” as “the idea of a golden age…the dualistic version of social struggles; the conspiracy theory of history; and the doctrine of the primacy of money."

It's interesting to consider that while Parker looks at the Populist vs. Progressive divide, the Progressives were themselves split both by geography and by partisanship. Some Northeaster Progressives first flirted with the Democratic Party while incarnated as "Mugwumps" focused on civil service reform and later joined with the Democratic Party under President Woodrow Wilson. But even within the Republican Party, progressives had two geographic wings. Nicol C. Rae explains in "The Decline and Fall of the Liberal Republicans" the divide:

If a fundamental conservatism inspired the more patrician progressives of the East, this was certainly not shared by their western brethren. Western progressivism, embodied in the figures of Robert LaFollette in Wisconsin, George Norris in Nebraska, and Hiram Johnson in California, was a genuinely radical movement, reflecting its populist antecedents and the continuing economic plight of the western and farm states. While the eastern reformers sought to alleviate the social conditions of the poor, and mitigate the excesses of big business and the machines, the westerners launched an assault on the entire political structure in their states and on the vested interests--notably the railroad companies--that had previously controlled that party structure. In pursuit of the extirpation of business influences from politics, the western progressives instituted the direct primary for all public offices, abolished all forms of political patronage, introduced nonpartisan elections and the city-manager system at the local level, and established the initiative, referendum, and recall procedures. In the western and plains states, with their large numbers of discontented small farmers and small businessmen, this assault on corporate control of the political process aroused enthusiastic electoral support. While the western radical and the urban progressives of the East had a common desire to improve living conditions and curb the excesses of big business and the political machines, the eastern progressives were highly suspicious of agrarianism and the fervor of the radicals' attack on the eastern corporate and intellectual elite.

Western Progressivism within the Republican Party tended to merge with some of the Populist sympathies the region had developed, but tempered by a Republican partisanship that distrusted a Democratic Party that represented "Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion." It's probably not a coincidence that the great Democratic Populist William Jennings Bryan had strong appeal in the West; he was a moral crusader who supported Prohibition, was an evangelical Christian, and was not from the South. And it's not a coincidence that years later many of these Western Progressives ended up supporting FDR. Northeastern Progressive Woodrow Wilson had a window of opportunity in courting these Progressives, but this failed for a variety of reasons (mostly the fault of Wilson).

While FDR came, geographically, from the Northeast he shared a lot in common with the Populist sympathies of the Democratic Party in its bases of the South and West. Parker is absolutely right when he says, "They looked with anger upward rather than with sympathy downward." This anger wasn't just upward, but Northward and Eastward. The economy of the post-Civil War Era favored not a random dispersal of bigness, but a geographic concentration of big business in the Northeast. Populists in the South and West were angry at a regional elite in the Northeast. While aspects of the New Deal have been interpreted as class-based conflict between the have's and the have-not's, there was a regional component between the have region, the Northeast, and the have-not regions, the South and the West.

Today's politics creates a confusion not found in the older political eras. The Republicans today are the party of the have's, but their base of support is in the have-not regions. The Democrats are the opposite, they are the party of the have-not's but are strongest in the wealthiest regions. It adds an unusual twist to politics today as the Democratic advantage in the wealthiest regions comes from the middle to upper class activists that are most similar to the Northeast Progressives of the bygone era. But instead of the party of William Jennings Bryan having a few Northeast Progressives grafted on, it's the party of Northeast Progressives with only a few William Jennings Bryan's.