In his alarming Ideas piece, “Walls against the wave’’ (July 31), Joshua Macht gets it wrong, especially his shallow understanding of populism.

The populist movement of the late 1800s was an attempt to build a democratic movement large enough to confront the overwhelming power of corporations, big banks, monopolistic railroads, and wealthy individuals who controlled the economic and social life of the country with an iron fist. It built a movement in a democratic manner, each person having a say, and eventually had several hundred thousand members in its organization and affected millions of people.

In its final flowering as a third political party, known as the People’s Party, it was a grand coalition of farmers and industrial workers who tried to organize the people against the organized money interests that controlled the economy, state and federal government, the newspapers, education, foreign policy, and the very rules of the American political process itself.

It was this corporatized state that the populists attempted to bring under democratic control. They realized that democracy was a missed revolution in America. The populists did not triumph, but they did show the promise of democracy, and what organized people could do when they worked together.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because the same conditions exist today.

What we don’t need now is a new management system or a charismatic leader. What we do need is a true populist movement, one that will educate Americans about what a democratic country could really be like.

Len Solo

Marlborough