Excerpt from “One Market Under God”
“To speak of pro-corporate populism is to raise one of the great political enigmas of the last thirty years. Hisotrically populism was a rebellion against the corporate order, a political tongue reserved by definition for the non-rich and the non-powerful. As historian Michael Kazin summoarizes it, populism contrasts an immensely idealistic conception of the nation and the common people with visions of a malevolent, scheming elite. As the “common people” were once easily defined as managers of industry, populism first arose as the vernacular of a series of insurgent labor movements (the Farmer’s Alliance, the CIO). Populism was the American language of social class.
But beginning in 1968 this primal set piece of American democracy seemed to change its stripes. The war between classes had somehow reversed polarity: It was now a conflict in which the patriotic, blue collar “silent majority” (along with their employers) faced off against a new eliete, the “liberal establishment” and its spoiled flag burning children. the new ruling class – a motley assembly of liberal journalists, liberal academics, liberal foundation employees, liberal politcians, and the shadowy powers of Hollywood-earned the people’s wrath not by exploiting workers or ripping off family farmers, but by showing comtemptuous disregard for the wisdom and the values of average Americans. The backlash erected an entire new social hierarchy according to which the “normal Americans” were at the bottom as usual, but the people at the top weren’t the millionarires or the owners, they were those sneering kids who dodged the draft, along with their liberal parents and the various minorities and crimianls those parents seemed so determined to pamper. Enunciated memorabley in the speeches of Spiro Agnew and in the movies of Clint Eastwood, backlash populish proved immensely powerful and for 30 years Ameircan politics seemed mired in the same imargery and cultural questions, with rightwing populists forever reminding “normal Americans” of the hideous world that the “establishment” had built, a place where blasphemous intellectuals violated the principles of “Americanism” at every oppotrunity, a place of busing and crime in the streets, of unimaginable cultural depravity, of epidemeic disrespect for men in uniform, of judges gone soft on crime and politicians gone soft on communism. The backlash became a fisture of the American scene as our never subsiding mad as hellness elected wave after wave of conservative politicans who warred on the liberal media, the welfare queens, and the “countercultural McGoverniks”
DAMN! written 7 years ago too
I hate to see Chris and Dave in the nude like this. Please cover them back up for me.
Thanks!
this type of thought alludes them, don’t worry, they won’t even know they are naked.
Yes, and they elected those who all subverted your fundemental liberties in the process. What everyone needs to do is take a deep breath, and have the courage to be accept the fiscal disciple and moral courage of living up to the Constitution of the Uniteted States of America in the Spirit and the Letter of the Law, and defend that Justice and liberty of the individual citizen from every enemy foreign and domestic without apinging the words. So get out your history books kids. Pick up Jefferson, Lincoln, Adam Smith, Read the Declaration of Independence and declare your own; see what they are doing polarizing the country along class lines and race lines and all these other lines becuase it is easy to do, the consitution says we derive our rights from our creator, and they are inaleinable, and enumerated. I wish every lawyer out there in Blogsphere had the courage to take on every single bill passed by this congress that does damage to the public good.
Brian,
Did you vote for George Bush thinking that you were striking a blow for fiscal discipline?
just because you write a lot of words Brian doesn’t make your point more valid.
you think I should pick up a history book on Adam Smith…
Lassiez Faire is working so well isn’t it Bri?
look at how well deregulation is working…
Only about 20 million product recalls from China. Only a few dead from EColi Last year. Just a few MILLION pounds of hamburger meet recalled, Enron, Tyco, Anderson Consulting
Yep, Adam Smith and the other sure had it right, let the market decide.
woohoo Free market.
I am sorry, guys have not read Adam Smith sufficently enough. You are thinking of the invisible hand quote….from the wealth of nations….that is only one book of hundreds and hundreds of papaers and writings….Lazzie faire can only work when mercantilism is destroied to its core. Mercantilism is state sponsorsed corporate socialism through subsidies etc. Only then can free cooperative associations that Smith wrote about occur, and that is exactly what the Quakers here in Delaware did for about 150 years with no problems while advocating universal sufferage, abolition, women’s rights, etc…so no, there is a fundemental difference, first you have to destroy corporate socialism and reserve the right of the people to vote for progressive programs to help and tax corporations for the common good (Smith’s humanitarianism). That is hardly lazzie faire…and that is a case 100% against the false free markets of neo-liberal wackos like Milton Friedman and their neo-conservative shit-tank thinkers. Local economies based on a real monetray policy that the founders designed, are based on real currency in gold or silver.
The shame is that you guys have only been taught a limited amount of Smith’s works.
I only vote my conscience and it usually leans democratic/libertarian/Jeffersonian.
First we need to recognize that the supply chain from China belongs to China, not to us, we need a supplky chain of our own. Only empires have supply chains that belong to someone else and put their citizens at risk of foreign imports, second, corporations are the only thing that the state has the legitimate power to regulate and control for the common good, not the Liberty of the individual human person which is the sole end of Government- to provide the maximum of benefit and liberty to we the people, not to the corporation, that must be seen for what it is a charter of the state to be controlled as per Smith’s doctrine and the founder’s advice to keep them in control.
I am saying in some sense to peacefully get rid of the whole thing make it reinstitute the Constitution again on its democratic and republican ideals- start over from where we started- and make Liberty as the basis. Jefferson said we could do this, must do this from time to time, to ensure that the exact mess we are in now, stops befroe it implodes the nation or turnes us into an real empire with all the aparatus of an empire. What most people do not know, is that the Constitution has safeguards built into it, so when we went off the policy of real money, there is no way to prevent us from spirally out of control in one direction or the other- either corporate socialism or generalized socialism leading back to tyranny. The new system of government we created was new precisely because it is different. Tyranny is as old as the world and it always ends poorly.