ABSTRACT
Central to progressive populists' beliefs are the ideas of the cooperative community, democracy, and empowerment. The president of the corporation, the most vociferous advocate of community control among the leadership and a person against outsider experts sitting on the board, was out of town at that first meeting. There have been moments of community and extraordinary empowerment, and there have been moments when community was threatened and disempowerment re-established. The pluralists saw the cooperatives as they did the world, as a place of conflict where community was at best a product of compromise. The clientelist concept of community was social as opposed to the political concepts of the populists and pluralists and was akin to family. Ethnicity was also a central category, but in the clientelists' case ethnicity was more based on immigrant status than in the racial terms of the pluralists.
