The Elitism Myth and Right-Wing Populism

By Thomas Frank, TomPaine.com. Posted March 25, 2004.

February 2004: A commercial airs 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 organization dedicated to hooking up pro-business rich people with pro-business politicians. The organization 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 themselves into a lather singing the praises of new billionaires, the economists who made a living by publicly insisting that privatization 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 W. Bush, a former Texas oilman, a Yale graduate, the son of a U.S. president and a grandson of a U.S. 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 percent of black Americans voted Democrat in 2000).

Right-wing Populism

There was a time, of course, when populism was the native tongue of the American left, when working-class people could be counted on to vote in favor of stronger labor unions, a regulated economy and various schemes for universal economic security. Back then the Republicans, who opposed all these things, were clearly identified as the party of corporate management, the spokesmen for society's elite.

Republicans are still the party of corporate management, but they have also spent years honing their own populist approach, a melange of anti-intellectualism, promiscuous God-talk and sentimental evocations of middle America in all its humble averageness. Richard Nixon was the first Republican president to understand the power of this combination and every victorious Republican since his administration has also cast himself in a populist light. Bush is merely the latest and one of the most accomplished in a long line of pro-business politicians expressing themselves in the language of the downtrodden.

This right-wing populism works; it is today triumphant across the scene; politicians speak its language, as do newspaper columnists, television pundits and a cast of thousands of corporate spokesmen, Wall Street brokerages, advertising pitchmen, business journalists and even the Hollywood stars that the right loves to hate.

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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