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Rightwing populists weaponise culture as a way to protect privilege....
.....From Trump to Boris Johnson: how the wealthy tell us what ‘real folk’ want
But when rightwing populists focus on elites they are mostly referring to culture. Their targets are filmmakers, actors, lecturers, journalists, “globalists”, spiritualists, scientists and vegans; the Clintons, Hollywood, Londoners, New Yorkers, Silicon Valley, Sussex and Berkeley. These are the people the right claim are responsible for shaping what people can see or hear, and limiting what they can say. They pillory opinion-formers for looking down on “ordinary people” as being ignorant, bigoted and uncouth. And they are always careful to invent “ordinary people” in their own image. John Kerry’s windsurfing or Barack Obama’s taste for arugula are emphasised as evidence of their lack of connection to basic values. Laying claim to “the real America” or “commonsense values”, they evoke a mythical, homogenous people and culture, only to claim it is being besieged by cosmopolitans, multiculturalists and immigrants. Through what Sarah Igo, in The Averaged American, describes as “the strange slippage between the typical and the good, the average and the ideal”, what masquerades as an embrace of “ordinary folk” is ultimately exposed as an appeal to an ethnically pure, culturally uniform “volk”.
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Finally, all too often the rightwing cheerleaders for these “ordinary folk” are more embedded in the elites than those they attack can ever be. When George W Bush, who is teetotal, is the man you’d most like to have a drink with, an Old Etonian Bullingdon boy like Boris Johnson is able to get away with posing as a man of the people, and Trump can get the modern equivalent of $140m from his dad and still claim he is a self-made man, something is seriously wrong.
Or as George Clooney put it about Trump: “I grew up in Kentucky. I sold insurance door to door. I sold ladies’ shoes. I worked at an all-night liquor store. I would buy suits that were too big and too long and cut the bottom of the pants off to make ties so I’d have a tie to go on job interviews. The idea that I’m somehow the ‘Hollywood elite’ and this guy who takes a shit in a gold toilet is somehow the man of the people is laughable.”
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Finally, all too often the rightwing cheerleaders for these “ordinary folk” are more embedded in the elites than those they attack can ever be. When George W Bush, who is teetotal, is the man you’d most like to have a drink with, an Old Etonian Bullingdon boy like Boris Johnson is able to get away with posing as a man of the people, and Trump can get the modern equivalent of $140m from his dad and still claim he is a self-made man, something is seriously wrong.
Or as George Clooney put it about Trump: “I grew up in Kentucky. I sold insurance door to door. I sold ladies’ shoes. I worked at an all-night liquor store. I would buy suits that were too big and too long and cut the bottom of the pants off to make ties so I’d have a tie to go on job interviews. The idea that I’m somehow the ‘Hollywood elite’ and this guy who takes a shit in a gold toilet is somehow the man of the people is laughable.”
[link:https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/23/trump-boris-johnson-rightwing-populists|
How long before they realise? A generation or more would be my very depressing guess
22 replies
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Nothing drives me crazier than these privileged people generalizing their ideas and forcing them on Americans as the ideas they should be supporting. I really hate it when I, who live in middle America, am told how I think by republican hacks. Call me sensitive, but I prefer speaking for myself.
