How Can Populists Retain the Populace?

Despite existing on the extreme right and left of U.S. politics respectively, the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements both claim that the American dream has gone away, and that hard work alone will no longer allow common people to be masters of their own destinies. However, the means for either group to successfully defy the U.S.’s two-party system and impact change remains ill-defined. And, according to a new Pew poll, support for Tea Party policies are down by 10 percent in their former strongholds, as compared to a year ago. Anna Sale, political reporter for WNYC and its political website, It’s a Free Country, and James Morone, political science professor at Brown University, speak more about what what Tea Partiers and Occupiers can learn from nearly 200 years of populist organizations in America.