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5 The Failed Alternatives to Democratic Rule: Movement-Party Disjunctions in Populism A core premise of this book has been that the fit between patterns of social relations and mechanisms of political mobilization and established institutions is central to processes of power making. If patterns of social relations, which may or may not conform to preconceived social categories such as race and class,change significantly and powerholders fail to adapt to such changes by either altering the ways in which they mobilize support or changing the institutional rules by which that support gets translated into institutional control, the powerholders will likely face stiff challenges from marginal groups better placed to tap into those relational changes with innovative mobilization strategies. Even racist rhetoric in a very racialized milieu may not save the day for powerholders if it is not buttressed by race-based organizational and policy strategies that engage the interests of racial identity. As described in chapter 2, the vertical organization, localist policy programs , and county government rules developed by the Democratic party matched fairly well with existing patterns of social relations among whites in the antebellum and early post-Reconstruction period.On this basis Democrats mobilized consistent electoral majorities in the state prior to the early 1890s,except during the brief Reconstruction era.The underlying patterns began to change in significant ways, the cumulative result of Emancipation, postwar transformations of the agricultural economy, and new horizontal, identity-based political organizing by blacks and Populists.In the face of these changes, locally oriented Democratic elites proved unable and unwilling to change the organizational, policy, and institutional strategies that had been at the center of their rule from the county seats of the state. Even significant doses of racist rhetoric could not pull enough disenchanted whites back into 94 making race, making power the Democratic fold to stave off defeat. It took the massive political defeats of 1894 and 1896 for locally entrenched Democratic elites to change and for new mobilization and institutional strategies to develop. This chapter focuses on the inability of the fusionists to build and sustain their marginal innovations into a basis for lasting power. In accounting for internal reasons for the failure of North Carolina political fusion, historians have made much of the inherent tensions between the two parties that composed it, noting that two somewhat weak parties did not necessarily add up to a whole strong one. Whatever their common interests against Democratic rule and for fair elections and electoral reform, the two parties differed widely on a host of other issues, including whether and how toincorporateblacksintoofficialleadershippositionsand,atthenationallevel, whether to adopt monetary reform to provide relief for indebted farmers.1 The deterioration of the agricultural economy in the late 1880s and early 1890s played a significant role in the rise of populism. Nonetheless, most political movement scholars now agree that economic crises and their attendant grievances and deprivations are often necessary but never sufficient causes of mass collective protest. If, as I have argued,the increasing commercialization of agriculture under conditions of declining farm commodity prices gradually eroded the local social relations undergirding elite power, in many counties the Farmers’ Alliance provided an alternative relational structure for those cast adrift. To the extent that movement relations provided an alternative to traditional social relations, they became a basis for political power in North Carolina in the early 1890s. There have been other studies of third party formation; the institutional impediments to such efforts in the United States are well known, for example .2 The impact of movement-party dynamics on the viability of these efforts remains unclear, however, as studies of such movements have left this relationship largely unanalyzed.3 Most analysts agree that the key to the relative political success of the Populists in North Carolina and elsewhere was the Farmers’ Alliance.4 Such assumptions seem intuitively plausible; after all, one would expect that people who devote time, effort, and money to a movement will support the political party that embodies the movement’s ideals.Moreover,whereas prior third party and independent efforts had gained only scattered support, the Populists were the first to gain real power. If the key to early Populist party success was its movement origins,however,the later party failures may be traceable to the fate of the Farmers’ Alliance as well. Other works cast doubt on the equation of movements and parties. Schwartz, for example, argued that the Alliance’s move to politics involved [18...

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