would Williams Jennings Bryant still be a democrat today?

If this is considered blasphemous to the DU community, let me know. For those that don't know who he is, he was the democratic presidential candidate in the late 1890s and early 1900s who was a believer in prairie populism. The reason I asked this question is because he was opposed to teaching evolution in schools, which most of us here support.

Ill go to Arlington to get an answer for ya...

today, given that the science behind it is more widely known in the general population than it was then, especially among those with advanced degrees?

Scope trial, for example

which most economists today think was a lot of hooey.

The issue behind 'free silver' was actually monetary policy, specifically control of inflation. The populist 'free silver' viewpoint was that a pro-inflation monetary policy would help farmers and workers by reducing the value of their debt obligations. There is nothing hooey about that view at all, however 'most economists' are on the other side of the fence advocating for anti-inflationary policies at all costs in order to protect the value of debt obligations owed to financial institutions, and as a side effect keeping the peasants hopelessly mired in housing, personal transportation, and consumer credit debt.

Paying off debt with debased currency in the long run stifles credit. It isn't good for people on fixed incomes either.

I understand what you are saying about consumer debt, but I don't think promoting an inflationary economic policy is the ideal answer for it. A lot of people didn't in Bryan's day either. Free Silver was a plank in the Democratic Agenda in 1896 but Bryan lost the election. It lost all its steam with the foundation of the Federal Reserve System under Wilson around...hmmm...1912 I wanna say.

Bryan was a Populist. He'd probably be a strange sort of Progressive if he were still around today.
It's hard to transplant him into the 21st Century.

Moderate inflation would help us out of the current mess we are in. Housing is way over priced in real dollars, people are swamped in debt, and our masters of the fed are hell bent on keeping it that way at all costs as they represent Goldman Sachs et al, not us.

probably. However, he'd be as disgusted a Democrat as most of the posters here are, and he'd probably be posting here, too.

Part of prairie populism, along with a distrust of big bankers and fury over what was being done to people in the name of fattening the rich, was a reverence for old time religion, which explains his opposition to what was then a new theory.

That new theory is now established science, confirmed by over a century of examining the fossil record, which is why rational populists now support it over the old time religion and biblical fundamentalism that have been co opted by the Republicans.

However, in Bryan's time, that fundamentalism was what the ordinary people trying to survive on their farms and in the factories knew, not the new fangled Darwinian theory, and that's why he supported it.

He probably also saw the flaw in the "survival of the fittest" ideal applied to human beings, in that the "fittest" were the ones who were capitalist predators.

Bryan made sense in his own time and his own place, in other words, and would probably make a great deal of sense today.

given that it was still conceived in very bloody and proto-fascist Social Darwinist terms