Donald Trump Is Not a Populist. He's the Voice of Aggrieved Privilege.

[applegrove]

Donald Trump Is Not a Populist. He's the Voice of Aggrieved Privilege.

By Jeet Heer at the New Republic

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/122590/donald-trump-not-populist-hes-voice-aggrieved-privilege

"SNIP...............



If the original populists were not particularly bigoted, subsequent bigots were not particularly populist. In a 1955 essay for a book called The New American Right, Hofstadter blamed the rise of Joseph McCarthy on the fact that “in a populistic culture like ours, which seems to lack a responsible elite with political and moral autonomy... it is possible to exploit the widest currents of public sentiment for private purposes.” But the political scientist Michael Rogin, in his 1967 book The Intellectuals and McCarthy, showed that Hofstadter and other 1950s scholars were simply wrong in their understanding of the anti-communist demagogue. Using a sophisticated public polling data and a reexamination of McCarthy’s career, Rogin proved that far from being a product of a populist mass movement, McCarthy’s locus of support was the traditional Republican Party base of business owners, particularly those in small and medium-sized cities. McCarthy appealed to the business elite because his anti-communist crusade promised to roll back the New Deal and newly empowered labor unions. He, no less than Donald Trump, was the voice of aggrieved privilege, not the champion of the common person.1

What’s true of McCarthyism is also true of subsequent movements and figures like the John Birch Society, David Duke, Sarah Palin, the Tea Party movement and Donald Trump. As Chip Berlet and Matthew N. Lyons noted in their 2000 book Right Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort, the Birch Society uses “populist rhetoric” but “Birchites distrust the idea of the sovereignty of the people and stress that the United States is a republic, not a democracy… Birchites want to replace the ‘bad’ elites with ‘good’ elites–presumably their allies.” Among the big backers of the Birch Society were the Koch family, who later underwrote the Tea Party movement. Members of the Tea Party, often described as populist, tend to be wealthier and better educated than most Americans, as well as being predominately white.

The word populist causes too much confusion when used to describe movements like McCarthyism, the Tea Party, or Trumpism. These are not mass movements of the people hoping to make a more democratic society. Rather they are political factions of authoritarian bigotry, backed by the rich, and designed to protect aggrieved privilege. Trump is best described not as a populist but as an authoritarian bigot, a quality best seen in his callous response to the news that two men evoked his name when they beat up a homeless Mexican man. "I will say that people who are following me are very passionate,” he said. “They love this country and they want this country to be great again.”

Richard Hofstadter was both a historian and a product of his times, and his dark view of the populists was a product of his own political evolution. He had been a leftist radical in the 1930s, but became a Cold War liberal after World War II. Traumatized by the rise of Stalinism and Nazism, he rejected his youthful Marxism as a mistake and became suspicious of mass movements, instead putting his faith in elite-guided consensus politics. This led him to misunderstand populism and rightwing authoritarianism—an understandable mistake, but one that we need to stop repeating today.



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[onecaliberal]

1. He a racist, hateful, bigoted asshole.

[Senator Tankerbell]

2. The author of this piece

had a great discussion with Sam Seder about this subject yesterday:

?t=8m8s

[Fred Sanders]

3. White peivilege was never going to die a quiet death, that was always a given....so here we are

at th cusp of a great loss for these folks...of course they are desperate after seeing the Clown Car the only viable party in a two party nation could pretend they are members of.

"Republican Party" is now just a shell name, a evolutionary relic, like tonsils, for what lies now at the core....American neo-fascism.

They are literally slapping a stunned nation in the face with their adherence to fascist principles.