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Can the Populist Moment Last?

Newly elected Senator Jon Tester, reports the New York Times, is “your grandfather’s Democrat—a pro-gun, anti-big-business prairie pragmatist whose life is defined by the treeless patch of hard Montana dirt that has been in the family since 1916.”

Virginia’s new senator, Jim Webb, is an ex-marine who served as Ronald Reagan’s secretary of the navy and writes novels celebrating the fighting heritage of the Scots-Irish. He writes that “The most important—and unfortunately the least debated—issue in politics today is our society’s steady drift toward a class-based system, the likes of which we have not seen since the 19th century.”

Pennsylvanians elected Senator Bob Casey, who is as much anti-abortion as he is pro-union. Former National Football League quarterback Heath Shuler of North Carolina won election to the House on a similar program, and joined the next day in a press conference with the new Ohio senator, Sherrod Brown, to denounce unfair trade agr...

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