News Flash: Populism Is Popular

[laststeamtrain]

News Flash: Populism Is Popular
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090423_newsflash_populism_is_popular/
Posted on Apr 23, 2009

By David Sirota

In 2006, journalist Christopher Hayes wrote a little-noticed article for In These Times magazine about a proposal in Oregon to crack down on predatory lending. The initiative had become so popular that conservative legislators supported it out of fear that if it were put on the state’s ballot, the resulting gusher of grass-roots support would not only ratify the measure but depose the bank-allied Republican Party, too.

Hayes’ piece was titled “Economic Populism Proves Popular,” the headline a sarcastic middle finger flashed at a political and media Establishment that portrays policies “supporting the rights and power of the people”—i.e., the dictionary definition of populism—as somehow anathema to the people.

That depiction, of course, continues today. But now, populism isn’t just popular in America; it is becoming the dominant paradigm, and that has the Establishment frightened.

For years, the country watched its populist desire for health-care, tax, trade and financial reform run into the reality of elite politicians handing out trillions of dollars in corporate welfare and bank bailouts as the economy collapsed. Not surprisingly, a new Rasmussen poll on attitudes toward government and corporations shows 75 percent of the country “can be classified on the populist or Mainstream side of the divide” while just 14 percent “side with the political class.”

As if to confirm the chasm, this “political class”—consultants, politicians, lobbyists and commentators—has been denigrating populism as too overwrought to be taken seriously. Listen to a typical pundit defending AIG’s bonuses or criticizing demands for a new trade policy, and you will inevitably hear the word populist accompanied by the word rage and/or dangerous, followed by tributes to the status quo.

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The caricaturing cribs from Richard Nixon’s playbook. Whereas the 37th president got himself re-elected by steering the country’s anger at the Vietnam War into anger at countercultural war protesters, today’s political class portrays the public’s outrage as the nation’s biggest problem, rather than what the public is justifiably outraged at.

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http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090423_newsflash_populism_is_popular/

[Demeter]

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