The Rise of Market Populism: America's New Secular Religion

[LBJDemocrat]

This is an excerpt from Thomas Frank's book, published in 2000. It's relevant today as we decide what the Democratic Party should stand for. http://www.thenation.com/doc/20001030/frank

Here are some highlights. Tell me what you think:

"From Deadheads to Nobel-laureate economists, from paleoconservatives to New Democrats, American leaders in the nineties came to believe that markets were a popular system, a far more democratic form of organization than (democratically elected) governments. This is the central premise of what I call "market populism": that in addition to being mediums of exchange, markets are mediums of consent. With their mechanisms of supply and demand, poll and focus group, superstore and Internet, markets manage to express the popular will more articulately and meaningfully than do mere elections. By their very nature markets confer democratic legitimacy, markets bring down the pompous and the snooty, markets look out for the interests of the little guy, markets give us what we want."

"Since markets express the will of the people, virtually any criticism of business could be described as an act of "elitism" arising out of despicable contempt for the common man. According to market populism, elites are not those who, say, watch sporting events from a skybox, or spend their weekends tooling about on a computer-driven yacht, or fire half their work force and ship the factory south. No, elitists are the people on the other side of the equation: the labor unionists and Keynesians who believe that society can be organized in any way other than the market way. Since what the market does--no matter how whimsical, irrational or harmful--is the Will of the People, any scheme to operate outside its auspices or control its ravages is by definition a dangerous artifice, the hubris of false expertise."

"How did populism ever become the native tongue of the wealthy? Historically, of course, populism was a rebellion against the corporate order, a political tongue reserved by definition for the nonrich and the nonpowerful. It was a term associated with the labor movement and angry agrarians. But in 1968, at the height of the antiwar movement, this primal set piece of American democracy seemed to change its stripes. The war between classes somehow reversed its polarity: Now it was a conflict in which the patriotic, blue-collar "silent majority" (along with their employers) faced off against a new elite, a "liberal establishment" with its spoiled, flag-burning children. This new ruling class--a motley assembly of liberal journalists, liberal academics, liberal foundation employees, liberal politicians and the shadowy powers of Hollywood--earned the people's wrath not by exploiting workers or ripping off the family farmers but by contemptuous disregard for the wisdom and values of average Americans."

"The thirty-year backlash brought us Ronald Reagan's rollback of government power as well as Newt Gingrich's outright shutdown of 1995. But for all its accomplishments, it never constituted a thorough endorsement of the free market or of laissez-faire politics. Barbara Ehrenreich, one of its most astute chroniclers, points out that the backlash always hinged on a particular appeal to working-class voters, some of whom were roped into the Republican coalition with talk of patriotism, culture war and family values. Class war worked for Republicans as long as it was restricted to cultural issues; when economic matters came up the compound grew unstable very quickly. Lee Atwater, an adviser to Presidents Reagan and Bush, is said to have warned his colleagues in 1984 that their new blue-collar constituents were "liberal on economics" and that without culture wars to distract them "populists were left with no compelling reason to vote Republican.""

"Fortunately for the right, as the culture wars finally began to subside in the aftermath of the impeachment fiasco, a new variation on the populist theme was reaching its triumphant zenith. Market populism was promulgated less by a political party than by business itself--through management theory, investment literature and advertising--and it served the needs of the owning community far more directly than had the tortured populism of the backlash. While the right-wing populism of the seventies and eighties had envisioned a scheming "liberal elite" bent on "social engineering"--a clique of experts who thought they knew what was best for us, like busing, integration and historical revisionism--market populism simply shifted the inflection. Now the crime of the elite was not so much an arrogance in matters of values but in matters economic. Still those dirty elitists thought they were better than the people, but now their arrogance was revealed by their passion to raise the minimum wage; to regulate, oversee, redistribute and tax."

"There are critical differences between market populism and the earlier right-wing dispensation, of course. While the backlash was proudly square, market populism is cool. Far from despising the sixties, it broadcasts its fantasies to the tune of a hundred psychedelic hits. Its leading think tanks are rumored to pay princely sums to young people promising to bring some smattering of rock-and-roll street cred to the market's cause. And believing in markets rather than God, it has little tolerance for the bizarre ideas of the Christian right or the Moral Majority. Market populism has also abandoned the overt race-baiting of the backlash: Its "Southern strategy" involves shipping plants to Mexico or Guatemala and then describing this as a victory for the downtrodden Others of the planet. Market populists generally fail to get worked up about the persecution of Vietnam vets (they sometimes even equate new-style management theories with the strategy of the Vietcong); they have abandoned the "family values" of Reagan; they give not a damn for the traditional role of women or even of children. The more who enter the work force the merrier."

[Rydz777]

1. Very apt. "...shipping plants to Mexico or Guatemala and then

describing this as a victory of the downtrodden Others of the planet." Yes, in this new-think, we should all be delighted at the de-industrialization of America since the machinery migrates to sweat shops in other countries.

[LBJDemocrat]

2. It's like how they say that protectionism is racist

I heard this in college. They think that if we were to put trade barriers back up, China and Mexico would lose jobs. Asians and Latin Americans would have a harder time finding work. Therefore we're racist.