In his book, The Populist Persuasion, Michael Kazin defines populism this way:

a language whose speakers conceive of ordinary people as a noble assemblage not bounded narrowly by class, view their elite opponents as self-serving and undemocratic, and seek to mobilize the former against the latter.

America has, of course, been rife with this stuff from the beginning, when we kicked out the Brits, through such stump stompers as Huey Long to the current exponents of the craft like Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck and, yes, even Barack Obama. The us-against-them view, in which the powerful are swindling the powerless, is both clearly anchored in historical fact and easily exploited to justify ideas that are not clearly anchored in historical fact.

But the times are also changing. There is a good graduate thesis to be written about the effect of a changing media landscape on populism. The Internet itself–with its empowerment of the rabble to the detriment of the powerful, e.g. any Swampland comment thread–is an inherently populist medium. At the same time, the ideological polarization of corporate-owned journalism–see Fox News, MSNBC–plays heavily on populist themes. And so we get breakout stars of Congress like Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., and Rep. Alan Grayson, D-Fla., who are new media populists to their core.

In the current issue of TIME magazine–subscribe here for $1.99–Jay Newton-Small and I look at how Bachmann and Grayson have exceeded expectations.