What follows
here is a synopsis, simplification, and to some extent an interpretation of a
recent Truthout interview with author
Thomas Frank, who a few years back wrote the seminal book, What's the Matter With Kansas?, which is about why so many
middle-class Americans vote against their economic interests.
Now, Frank
has returned with an equally important book about how the super-rich were able to double-down on economically disastrous
policies and thereby push those policies to ever greater extremes.
Even by
itself, the subtitle of his new book says a lot: "The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right." So here we have a brilliant exposà © of the most breathtaking ruse in
American political-economic history: How right-wing multimillionaires, with the
help of hucksters like Glen Beck and astroturf organizations like the Tea
Party, were able to turn the biggest capitalist breakdown since 1929 into a huge
opportunity . . for themselves!
If you're confused about how people with ever lower incomes and ever more indebtedness, living from day to day, can be made to come to advocate for lowering taxes on the super-rich (which inevitably raises their own taxes), let Frank be your guide. For we desperately need to better understand how it is that groups like the "Tea Party" can successfully lead millions of low-information voters to embark on such insane ideation. Get this book shipped directly from Truthout, by clicking here.
Hucksters
like Glenn Beck played a huge role in the rise of the Tea Party and the broader
shift of the nation to the right. As chief huckster, with an audience of
millions, Beck was on the cover of Time as well as the New York Times Magazine; he was also the subject of two separate
biographies. Whether we liberals can
accept it or not, he was the face of a
political moment, the voice and persona that caught the public imagination. In fact, it's hard to make any sense at all
of the Tea Party movement absent Glenn Beck's weird views of history and his ridiculous
dread of the Obama Administration. Go
back and look at footage of Tea Party events or interviews with Tea Party
participants and you will find that they often echo, sometimes word for word,
the crazylessons taught by the mad "professor' Beck.
Three Main Concepts in This Analysis
Market populism is the idea that markets speak with the voice of the
people, i.e. that markets are a sort of naturally
occurring democracy, that
whoever is attuned to the holy spirit of the market is one with the spirit of
the people themselves. In a phrase, Vox
populi, vox dei. Back in the 1990s, this
was the straight-up propaganda ideology of management theorists and other
corporate shills. Today, thanks to Beck
and associates, it's everywhere.
Social conservatives are often
working-class people who are uninterested
in the grander conservative rightwing project of reversing the New Deal. Instead they are steeped in what is called
the culture wars.
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