ABSTRACT
To label a certain mistrust of the clergy and a healthy skepticism about populism as leftist, however, deprives the term of any possible political meaning. With concern for internal class struggle and equality relegated to the category of Soviet propaganda, the content of much of the dissidence within Poland between 1980 and 1989 bore a remarkable resemblance to that of earlier populism. The ideological underpinnings of populism, both historical and contemporary, constitute invented tradition. Polish populism is a specific case of a general phenomenon in that it has constituted an ideological but not a political or economic alternative to both socialist and capitalist rural development for a hundred years or more, not only in Poland but throughout Europe and the United States. Hegemony and the longevity of a state imply each other; dominant-class control of the repressive institutions of a state without hegemony in civil society is inadequate to maintain long-term power.
