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Alan Brinkley knows a thing or two about people tilting at windmills. He has written several books on the difficulties of that long-suffering institution of American political culture, liberalism, and his work on Coughlin and Long has earned him a reputation as an expert on populism. During the 1996 presidential campaign, for instance, Brinkley was often consulted by the media for his insights into the phenomenon of Patrick Buchanan, the fiery Republican who railed against free trade and cultural decadence.

Although Buchanan sometimes compared himself to Huey Long – which his critics were also happy to do – Brinkley pointed out that Buchanan may have had more in common with a fellow Catholic dissident, Father Coughlin. Much of the coverage on Buchanan characterized him as a reactionary in the fullest sense – someone who pined for a bygone era not just in culture and politics, but also in economics. Buchanan decried the human cost of the American manufacturing sector’s decline in an age of globalization and “Third World” industrialization, and observers grouped this critique with the original Populists’ crusade for the American farmer as well as Long and Coughlin’s movements against centralized power. In short, the media called upon Alan Brinkley to analyze a man whose ideology was considered at best irrelevant, at worst delusional – largely by the book he wrote about Huey Long and Father Coughlin.

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