Whine and Wine: Post-election Group Therapy with Professor Postel

IN DEEP WITH ANGIE COIRO -- Professor Charles Postel of San Francisco State University is an historian of political thought and social movements. His study of the populist movement of the 1890s, “The Populist Vision” (Oxford, 2007), received the Bancroft Prize and Frederick Jackson Turner Award. He is a fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center. The day after the presidential election, Postel participated in a panel discussion. “We’ve always had a brutal, racist, exclusionist, xenophobic, nationalist strain in American democracy. We’ve had it since the founding,” Postel said, “and sometimes it’s stronger than others. “In the 1920s we had a very strong presence of the Ku Klux Klan in national politics and state politics. We're having a very strong strand of this right now, in the form of this xenophobic nationalist politics.”