How Big Money Keeps Populism at Bay {long read}

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http://www.alternet.org/economy/big-money-and-populism



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Reality Check

Three facts are crucial in understanding what is happening. Firstly, the national Democratic Party is in deep trouble as it faces the 2014 Congressional elections. The strong media framing of “populist” tendencies reflects a prior White House determination signaled by the President himself to move left to reenergize voters turned off by the serial disasters of 2013, including the economy’s continuing doldrums, public revulsion against surveillance, and the healthcare rollout debacle. Not for nothing has John Podesta, Bill Clinton’s one-time chief of staff and the key figure in the Center for American Progress, returned to the White House, even as he was being touted as Hillary Clinton’s likely adviser on handling inequality as a political issue.

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Campaign $$ More Concentrated Than Ever

Despite all the commentary about super-PACs, the situation is even worse than you think. Our analysis of political money in the 2012 elections confirmed that it’s not simply that the apparent relation of money to votes in congressional elections appears to be shockingly direct – indeed, almost a straight line. The larger problem is that campaign donations turn out to be far more concentrated than even we imagined.

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Populism and Big Money Don’t Mix

We are now in the sixth year of prolonged austerity following a major financial collapse. If you step back and assess the see-saw pattern of American electoral behavior since 2008, it is plain that many voters are responding rather like voters in many countries did in the Great Depression: their first response is simply to vote the outs back into office. When that doesn’t work, they try again, voting back in the outs. When things still fail to improve, they drift to extremes, and begin exploring strange new alliances that signal deeper desperation. Both the Tea Party and the Occupy movements represent early forms of this pattern; the dismay driving them remains potent.

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History Lesson

This is not the first time in world history that alert leaders of a declining empire dominated by a giant financial sector have been tempted to juryrig political coalitions with organized workers and hard-pressed groups that are coming under pressure to organize in their own defense. In Great Britain just before World War I, “Lib-Lab” (Liberals and Labor) coalitions emerged; after the war, Keynes and Lloyd George famously tried to revive that alliance to end furiously maintained austerity policies and an over-valued currency that were crushing living standards. In 1931, those efforts failed calamitously. Britain abandoned the gold standard, the British navy threatened to mutiny, and most liberals split from labor, as a conservative “National” government headed by a former labor Prime Minister took power. It was a big setback for “populism,” though in the longer run those tumultuous events were clearly stages in the birth of an independent Labor Party.

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1. kick

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2. 1 last kick. nt