Zach Carter: belief

Transcript context

…Last question: what is your next overwork project? The current working title is called Fields of Fire. It’s a look at the Populists of the 1880s and 1890s. Right now, it looks like we’re going to tell it through the lives of two White Populists and two Black Populists from Georgia and North Carolina, but we’ll see. You kind of got to go where the research takes you with this stuff. In a lot of ways, I think what the Populists are working through in the 1880s and 1890s is very similar to what Keynes is working through. Their economic proposals are a bit different, but they see themselves as inhabiting an era of crisis in which the economic system is not working. It’s the same economic system. They’re writing about the gold standard at its outset. Keynes is writing about its maturity. They’re trying to come up with ways to reformulate politics to make the economic system work. I think there is — as with Keynes — an enormous amount of promise and also an enormous amount of danger in what they’re doing. In the same way that you talked about Keynes being enamored with the British colonial system, or at least overly enamored with it, there’s a lot of intellectual stuff happening with the Populists, this period of time, which is inspiring but also dangerous. I just find it a fascinating era. Hopefully, the book — it’s not a biography, but it will try to work with a lot of the same currents and themes that were in the Keynes book. Zach Carter, thank you very much.…

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