[Marxism] Republican Party populism

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Le Monde DIplomatique
February 2004

A WAR AGAINST ELITES
The America will vote for Bush

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The US is currently going through the peculiar process of deciding which 
Democratic presidential candidate will stand against George Bush in 
November. The aversion to Bush, at home and abroad, makes us forget how 
many people support this spokesman for another America sure of its 
superiority and its values.
By TOM FRANK *

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THERE was a commercial that aired on Iowa television in which the-then 
front-runner for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, Howard 
Dean, was blasted for being the choice of the cultural elites: a "tax 
hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, 
Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, 
left- wing freak show" who had no business trying to talk to the plain 
folk of Iowa.

The commercial was sponsored by the Club for Growth, a Washington-based 
organisation dedicated to hooking up pro-business rich people with 
pro-business politicians. The organisation is made up of anti-government 
economists, prominent men of means, and big thinkers of the late New 
Economy, celebrated geniuses of the sort that spent the past 10 years 
describing the low-tax, deregulated economy as though it were the second 
coming of Christ. In other words, the people who thought they saw Jesus 
in the ever-ascending Nasdaq, the pundits who worked himself into a 
lather singing the praises of new billionaires, the economists who made 
a living by publicly insisting that privatisation and deregulation were 
the mandates of history itself, are now running television commercials 
denouncing the "elite".

That’s the mystery of the United States, circa 2004. Thanks to the 
rightward political shift of the past 30 years, wealth is today 
concentrated in fewer hands than it has been since the 1920s; workers 
have less power over the conditions under which they toil than ever 
before in our lifetimes; and the corporation has become the most 
powerful actor in our world. Yet that rightward shift - still going 
strong to this day - sells itself as a war against elites, a righteous 
uprising of the little guy against an obnoxious upper class.

At the top of it all sits President George Bush, a former Texas oilman, 
a Yale graduate, the son of a former president and a grandson of a US 
senator - the beneficiary of every advantage that upper America is 
capable of showering on its sons - and a man who also declares that he 
has a populist streak because of all the disdain showered upon him and 
his Texas cronies by the high-hats of the East. Bush’s populism is for 
real. His resentment of the East-coast snobs is objectively ridiculous, 
but it is honestly felt. The man undeniably has the common touch; his 
ability to speak to average people like one of their own is a matter of 
public record. And they, in return, seem genuinely to like the man. Bush 
shows every sign of being able to carry a substantial part of the white 
working-class vote this November, just as he did four years ago 
(although 90% of black Americans voted Democrat in 2000).

full: http://mondediplo.com/2004/02/04usa

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