How RightWing Faux Populism Exploits The Myth of Liberal Elitism

[cryofan]

Some excerpts:
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Right-wing populism takes two general forms. What we saw the most of during the 1990s was the populism of the market, which has its origins in the PR strategies of Wall Street. Here the basic idea is that the free market is in essence a democracy. Since we all participate in markets—buying stock, choosing between brands of shaving cream, going to movie X instead of movie Y—markets are an expression of the vox populi. Markets give us what we want; markets overthrow the old regime; markets empower the little guy. And since markets are just the people working things out in their own inscrutable way, any attempt to regulate or otherwise interfere with markets is, by definition, nothing but arrogance.
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But market populism doesn’t play too well in hard times. It slowly retreats to the wings and yields center stage to the old, reliable populism of the backlash, the collection of gripes that faults leftists not because of their lack of faith in the free market, but because of the cultural monstrosities they have imposed on the good people of middle America: they have legalized abortion, stamped out prayer in the public schools and are now threatening to sanction gay marriage. Again the enemy of the common people is the liberal elite, and again they are identified as a class of intellectuals whose trademark sin is hubris, thinking they know better than everyone else. Again it is the little guy against a sneering, disdainful, cartoon version of the upper class; and again the main beneficiary is the Republican party.
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This populism, ever present on the radio and on Fox News, is obsessed with the symbolism of the consumer culture. Instead of rebuking the powerful directly, it vituperates against the snobbish and delicate things that the powerful are believed to enjoy: special kinds of coffee, high-end restaurants, Ivy League educations, vacations in Europe and always, always, imported cars.
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Here the article speaks of the arguments Bushco made for getting into Iraq, and how De Villepin of France argued against them, and how Bushco used Rightwing cultural populism to cast De Villepin as liberal elite:

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What the brilliant De Villepin missed utterly was that American conservatives don’t care when their arguments are refuted. The United States is the land of militant symbolism, the nation of images, and in the battle of imagery Bush played De Villepin for a sucker. For Bush the task at hand was obviously not winning over the UN, but rallying domestic support for the war, and in doing so Bush couldn’t have asked for a more convincing populist drama. Saddam Hussein was a monster right out of central casting, and for opposing him the poor unassuming Americans were being castigated by this foppish, over-educated, hair-splitting, tendentious writer of poetry (De Villepin’s dabbling in verse was much reported in the American media). And a Frenchman to boot! The French are always characterized in American popular culture as a nation of snobs: they drink wine, they eat cheese, they’re polite. This man was the hated liberal elite in the flesh: all that was missing was the revelation that he wore perfume or carried a handbag.
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As always, tompaine.com delivers in a huge way. The above article is fairly detailed and contains some great analysis of both the left and right. More here:

http://www.tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/10070

[trotsky]

1. What a great article.

Thanks for posting the link.

[no_hypocrisy]

2. Dems aren't "liberal elitists". They defend our system as a constitutional

democracy. The Republicans keep getting confused and believe this country is a MAJORITARIAN democracy wherein the most amount of hands raised wins the argument.

The Constitution is supposed to protect the minority within American society from the whims, passions, and the bullying of the majority. In other words, to protect from Social Darwinism that develops from free market ideas being applied to social policies.

Without these protections, forced religious prayer would be mandated in public schools and punishment for anyone who didn't go along with the program. Or women would be forced to bear children and relinquish them were they unmarried. Or imprisonment for sex between two consulting adults of the same gender in the privacy of their home.

This country would resemble a dictatorship under the guise of democracy if it were a majoritarian format.