A Parody of Populism
July 23, 2014
No Threat on the Horizon
A Parody of Populism
by ALEXANDER REID ROSS
The Sagebrush Rebellion began in Moab, Utah, and created an upheaval in land management policy that is still felt today. Perhaps its most significant outcome can be seen just three hours away in PR Springs, yet hardly anybody knows the place even exists.
It’s an easy, hour-long drive from Moab, up the 191 and then east down Old US Highway 50—75 miles past Arches National Park and curving around the Uintah and Ouray Indian Reservation. A sharp left will send your car on a two-hour drive of just 35 miles; BLM 198, a path into the Uintah Basin and to PR Spring. A fine source of clean ground water, PR Spring lies nearly two miles away from a tar sands test site that would have been impossible without the Sagebrush Rebellion, the Wise Use Movement, and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) that helped forward the agenda of those two movements in the government.
In 1979, public officials were drawing up a proposal to transform a canyon just outside of Moab and next to Arches National Park, into a protected wilderness area. A massive outcry from the Far Right ensued, astroturfed and supported by the nascent libertarian movement generated by foundations, institutes, and entrepreneurial frontrunners like the Koch Brothers’ Silicon Valley Cato Institute, the Rand Institute, and the early tech industry. It was the dawning of the New Republican Party in the American West, brought into fruition by the rise of the ALEC and Ronald Reagan.
As he was hoisted to power, Reagan declared support for the Sagebrush Rebels, declared their intention to sabotage federal equipment, shoot BLM officials, and run amok over public lands until the “land grab” had ceased. Jean Baudrillard noted the hysterical situation in his book America: “While frequenting the rich ranchers or manufacturers of the West, Reagan has never had the faintest inkling of the poor and their existence, nor the slightest contact with them.” Yet he was able to suture the rising elite of California concentrating itself in the Silicon Valley to what Dave Foreman referred to as “the Bumpkin Proletariat,” forging an alliance between the ranchers, antigovernment libertarians, and social conservatives on one hand, and nanotechnologists, Silicon Valley elites, and venture capitalists on the other.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/07/23/a-parody-of-populism/