Reply #4: A sample of Frank's analysis of the election this fall

[AirAmFan]

I found this essay through Tom Frank's website at http://www.tcfrank.com :

From http://mondediplo.com/2004/02/04usa?var_recherche=thomas+frank

"February 2004

A WAR AGAINST ELITES: The America that will vote for Bush

by Tom Frank

... 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 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).

There was a time, of course, when populism was the native tongue of the American left (1), when working-class people could be counted on to vote in favour of stronger labour 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. Rightwing populism takes two general forms. ..."