[Peace-discuss] Populist rage

[David Green]

In the mainstream media, the connotation of the word "populism" is a warning to the ruling class that something needs to be done to forestall the populace taking democracy into their own hands. Frank Rich exemplifies today:

"Six weeks ago I wrote in this space that the country’s surge of populist rage could devour the president’s best-laid plans, including the essential Act II of the bank rescue, if he didn’t get in front of it. The occasion then was the Tom Daschle firestorm. The White House seemed utterly blindsided by the public’s revulsion at the moneyed insiders’ culture illuminated by Daschle’s post-Senate career. Yet last week’s events suggest that the administration learned nothing from that brush with disaster."

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/22/opinion/22rich.html?_r=1

Populist rage always refers to sensational but essentially trivial outrages. The populist agenda other than one of reaction to such things can't be seriously considered; I don't think that Rich even knows of its existence.

The other way of looking at this would be to see Obama's "best-laid plans" as deserving to be "devoured" and replaced with plans that actually address the needs of raging populists, which is everyone who has to sell their labor. That's what Rich and the NYT, with the exception perhaps of Krugman (from a technocratic rather than democratic perspective) , do not want. It isn't that Rich doesn't sell his labor. It's just that he can only keep selling it if he supports the fundamental agenda of those who buy it from him.

DG


      
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