By Kindler
Words matter, and there are few more severely abused words in American politics today than “populist” – today more than ever as rich Republican hucksters use it to fool working class folks into voting against their economic interests.
That term originally applied to the US Populist Party of the 1890s, whose platform included, as Wikipedia explains:
“…collective bargaining, federal regulation of railroad rates, an expansionary monetary policy…a Sub-Treasury Plan that required the establishment of federally controlled warehouses to aid farmers…bimetallism, a graduated income tax, direct election of Senators, a shorter workweek, and the establishment of a postal savings system. These measures were collectively designed to curb the influence of monopolistic corporate and financial interests and empower small businesses, farmers and laborers.”
To my immense frustration, this term, despite its positive progressive vibes, has been increasingly hijacked by the right wing – with the assistance of the clueless and the cowardly in media and academia who are desperate to find any way to avoid referring to fascists as, well, fascists.
Instead, anyone in a political setting who claims to be against some sort of poorly defined “elites” in favor of “the people” is cast as a populist, as if all campaigns that label someone “elite” were the same even when they support radically different policies. So even rich, corrupt, exploitative elites like Donald Trump, J.D. Vance and their cynical donors are thereby given a hand to achieve their con job against the American people.
Ultimately, the Populist Big Lie could be what determines the 2024 election – either by being widely exposed or widely swallowed. Indeed, it may be the only advantage Trump gains from his running mate, J.D. Vance, an elitist posing as a man of the people who, unlike Donny, had sufficient gray matter to write a best-selling book to spread this right-wing mythology.
Like clockwork, soon after Trump chose Vance, we were treated with headlines like “J.D. Vance pick unnerves GOP’s business elite, thrills populists” (WaPo) and “In J.D. Vance, Trump is going all in on populism — and elevating an heir apparent” (Politico). In fact, it doesn’t take a whole lot of shoe leather journalism to find tons of evidence that the corporate elite are not by any means abandoning Republicans. Quite to the contrary, choosing former Silicon Valley venture capitalist Vance seemed to act as a kind of bat-signal for a gang of tech billionaires – Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen etc. – to announce that they will be dumping millions into the election to try to buy it for Trump. How very populist of them!
The nicest thing you can say about any media outlet trying to tell you how sad the GOP’s plutocrat donors are because of the Trump/Vance ticket’s phony populism is that they don’t understand how coalition politics works. Surely many of the right-wing billionaires would prefer a Mitt Romney as the face of the party, but for 7 years now, they have made their bed with Trump because they don’t know how else to market their agenda of tax cuts for the wealthy and ending government regulation to their increasingly rural, blue collar, evangelical base. To put it bluntly, they stopped running Romney types because they couldn’t sell them anymore to the yokels.
The part of the story that is genuinely underreported is how much the plutocrats are still getting for their big bucks. The MAGA Supreme Court throttling the power of federal agencies to regulate gives away the story as does the Project 2025 blueprint to weaken the agencies and civil servants even further. Project 2025 proposes a castrated federal government under cover of a strategy best described 20 years ago in journalist Thomas Frank’s book, What’s the Matter with Kansas? As Frank described – focusing on then-prominent propagandists like Rush Limbaugh – wealthy Republican elites convince working class whites to vote against their economic interests by distracting them with all-out cultural warfare.
You could call this “cultural populism”, but a more descriptive, if less polite, term for it would be…fascism. It’s about whipping disaffected white people into a frenzy against a scary Other – immigrants, “the Left”, LGBTQ people, etc. Yes, that’s the “populism” that they’re going with.
The increasingly infamous Project 2025 manifesto for a second Trump administration seeks to hypercharge this political bait-and-switch by pushing to decimate the government and civil service, which will free corporations and the wealthy to do whatever the hell they want to us. But they’re not openly making the case in the name of corporate interests but rather to protect the poor masses against so-called “liberal elites” imposing “wokeism” on us – whatever the hell that non-word actually means.
Project 2025 makes clear its goal is to “take on the Administrative State and reform our federal government” but rarely does it describe that endpoint as the windfall for corporate America that it would represent. Rather it deflects attention from its plutocratic goals with over the top, comic book pronouncements like:
“The long march of cultural Marxism through our institutions has come to pass. The federal government is a behemoth, weaponized against American citizens and conservative values, with freedom and liberty under siege as never before.”
Yes, fellow citizens, that is why Exxon Mobil needs more tax cuts and less regulation!
In case you had any doubts about Trump’s lack of interest in ever doing a damn thing to help the common man, take a look back at what he actually did as president. He appointed one of the richest Cabinets in history, including the likes of billionaire Betsy DeVos and millionaires Wilbur Ross, Steve Mnuchin, Linda McMahon and quite a few more.
He passed only one significant piece of legislation – namely, a tax cut that overwhelmingly favored the wealthy. He appointed three members of the Supreme Court and many lower court judges who are now doing everything they possibly can to give massive corporations more “liberty” to have their way with workers, consumers, the environment, you name it.
This is not a “man of the people” – he is a huckster who gained his status as a wealthy elite by exploiting others through every means he could think of, from running a fake university to refusing to pay contractors to creating decades worth of false valuations for property to fool both the government and investors.
If that’s what you want, vote for the bastard – but don’t try to sell him and his cronies to us as populists. A narcissist is the exact opposite of a populist. They don’t work for the forgotten man, they only work to endlessly boost their own egos, wealth and power.
So please call the media to account every time you see them trying to promote the Populist Big Lie. And don’t let the Republican con men get away with selling this snake oil to any more people than they’ve already suckered.
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