Greetings, Lowdowners!
When I was down visiting with Hightower in May, I asked him a question that I’ve always wanted to know the answer to, but never put directly to him: Why did he decide to run for office? Before he became Agriculture Commissioner, he had been a legislative aide to Sen. Ralph Yarborough in Washington, the founder and co-director of the Agribusiness Accountability Project (which produced Hard Tomatoes, Hard Times), then a journalist and editor at the Texas Observer. What brought on the desire to become an elected official? And why this office?
His answer took us through an adventure of what activism can look like when you take the outside inside, and you run a real grassroots campaign based on the values of the people you’re hoping to represent.
Transcript:
Well, for me, I was born a populist. I didn’t know it. And I was taught about populism.
The essential political essence of populism is that too few people control too much of the money and power, and they use that control against the rest of us to get more money and power for themselves. So that’s the great fight of American politics, in the big scale, but also in the very local scale.
