[Peace] [Fwd: The America will vote for Bush] (fwd)

[parenti susan rose]

The America will vote for Bush
___________________________________________________________

The US is currently going through the peculiar
process of deciding which Democratic presidential
candidate will stand against George Bush in
November. The aversion to Bush, at home and
abroad, makes us forget how many people support
this spokesman for another America sure of its
superiority and its values.

By TOM FRANK * ___________________________________________________________

THERE was a commercial that aired on Iowa
television in which the-then front-runner for the
Democratic Party's presidential nomination,
Howard Dean, was blasted for being the choice of
the cultural elites: a "tax hiking,
government-expanding, latte-drinking,
sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York
Times-reading, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving,
left- wing freak show" who had no business trying
to talk to the plain folk of Iowa.

The commercial was sponsored by the Club for
Growth, a Washington-based organisation dedicated
to hooking up pro-business rich people with
pro-business politicians. The organisation is
made up of anti-government economists, prominent
men of means, and big thinkers of the late New
Economy, celebrated geniuses of the sort that
spent the past 10 years describing the low-tax,
deregulated economy as though it were the second
coming of Christ. In other words, the people who
thought they saw Jesus in the ever-ascending
Nasdaq, the pundits who worked himself into a
lather singing the praises of new billionaires,
the economists who made a living by publicly
insisting that privatisation and deregulation
were the mandates of history itself, are now
running television commercials denouncing the
"elite".

That's the mystery of the United States, circa
2004. 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's populism is for
real. His resentment of the East-coast snobs is
objectively ridiculous, but it is honestly felt.
The man undeniably has the common touch; his
ability to speak to average people like one of
their own is a matter of public record. And they,
in return, seem genuinely to like the man. 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. What
we saw the most of during the 1990s was the
populism of the market, which has its origins in
the PR strategies of Wall Street. Here the basic
idea is that the free market is in essence a
democracy. Since we all participate in markets -
buying stock, choosing between brands of shaving
cream, going to movie X instead of movie Y -
markets are an expression of the vox populi.
Markets give us what we want; markets overthrow
the old regime; markets empower the little guy.
And since markets are just the people working
things out in their own inscrutable way, any
attempt to regulate or otherwise interfere with
markets is, by definition, nothing but arrogance
(2).

When times are good, as they were a few years
ago, this idea expresses itself in all manner of
lurid evocations of the common man at one with
his corporations. Television viewers in the 1990s
saw constant mini-dramas of the stock market as a
maker of revolution; of little old ladies
swapping investment tips; of bosses becoming one
with the ancient rhythms of acquisitiveness; of
little kids realising their true selves through
products; and of ordinary people basking in the
glow of all the fine new millionaires their
investments were producing. Even Enron got into
the act, comparing its campaign for electricity
deregulation to the Civil Rights movement of the
1960s (3). During the boom, politicians of both
parties reached consensus on the idea that
privatisation and deregulation were the correct
way to let the people have their say over matters
economic; and newspaper columnists of every
persuasion came to agree that every time they
busted a labour union, a worker somewhere cried
out for joy.

But market populism doesn't play too well in hard
times. It slowly retreats to the wings and yields
centre-stage to the old, reliable populism of the
backlash, the collection of gripes that faults
leftists not because of their lack of faith in
the free market, but because of the cultural
monstrosities they have imposed on the good
people of middle America: they have legalised
abortion, stamped out prayer in the public
schools and are now threatening to sanction gay
marriage. Again the enemy of the common people is
the liberal elite, and again they are identified
as a class of intellectuals whose trademark sin
is hubris, thinking they know better than
everyone else. Again it is the little guy against
a sneering, disdainful, cartoon version of the
upper class; and again the main beneficiary is
the Republican party.

This populism, ever present on the radio and on
Fox News (4), is obsessed with the symbolism of
the consumer culture. Instead of rebuking the
powerful directly, it vituperates against the
snobbish and delicate things that the powerful
are believed to enjoy: special kinds of coffee,
high-end restaurants, Ivy League educations,
vacations in Europe, and always, always, imported
cars.

Against these maddeningly sissified tastes,
backlash populism posits a true-blue heartland
where real Americans eat red meat in big slabs,
know all about farming, drink Budweiser, work
hard with their hands and drive domestic cars.
(In November 2000 the Democrats lost in the
heartland but won in cosmopolitan California, New
York and Massachusetts.) Why the focus on
consumer goods? It switches the political
polarity of class resentment: the items
identified with the elite are also identified
with people who have advanced degrees, a reliably
liberal constituency. Liberals become the snobs,
and Republicans become the plain people in their
majestic millions. That rightwing oil
millionaires in Houston or Wichita might also
vacation in Europe, drink fancy coffee and drive
Jaguars is simply not considered, as if contrary
to nature.

The all-Americans despise the affected elites,
with their highfalutin ways and that's why they
vote for plainspoken men like George Bush, or his
dad, or Ronald Reagan, or Richard Nixon, that
ultimate victim of East Coast disdain. Each of
whom, once elected, did his level best to shower
the nation's elite with policy gifts of every
description.

The massive distortions and contradictions
between these two rightwing populisms should be
plain to anyone with eyes. (The founding conceit
is the preposterous assertion that the upper
class is a collection of leftists.) One populism
rails against liberals for eating sushi and
getting pierced; the other celebrates those who
eat sushi and get pierced as edgy entrepreneurs
or as consumers just trying to be themselves. One
despises Hollywood for pushing bad values; the
other celebrates Hollywood for its creativity and
declares that Hollywood merely gives the people
what they want. And yet the same organisations,
often the same individuals, are advocates of both.

Why aren't these contradictions crippling for the
right? Partly because liberals refuse to take
backlash populism seriously. They simply don't
bother to answer the stereotype of themselves as
a tasteful elite, seeing it as a treacherous and
obvious deceit mounted by the puppetmasters of
the right. A smaller coterie of liberals don't
bother with it because they believe that
conservative populism is merely camouflage for
racism, which they believe to be epidemic in the
US. The problem, they think, is neo-Nazis or
right-wing militia types like Timothy McVeigh.
That's the real expression of middle America, the
thing we ought to be investigating.

I encountered a spectacular version of this
pathology at a leftist gathering in Chicago.
After listening to a devastatingly accurate
critique of the media business, I stood up and
pointed out that dozens of regular, church-going
people across the Midwest shared the premises of
the critique without knowing it - they simply
mistook "liberalism" for the economic and
corporate forces that actually do control things.
I encouraged the speaker to make an effort to
connect with those regular people and to try to
turn their class resentment right-side up. I was
corrected almost immediately by another audience
member, who angrily said that she wanted no part
of any effort to make an outreach to the Ku Klux
Klan.

There is a grain of truth in the backlash
stereotype of liberalism. Certain kinds of
leftists really do vacation in Europe and drive
Volvos and drink lattes. (Hell, almost everyone
drinks lattes now.) And there is a small but very
vocal part of the left that has nothing but
contempt for the working class. Should you ever
attend a meeting of a local animal rights
organisation, or wander through the campus of an
elite university, you will notice that certain
kinds of left politics are indeed activities
reserved for members of the educated upper-
middle-class, for people who regard politics more
as a personal therapeutic exercise than an effort
to build a movement. For them, the left is a form
of mildly soothing spirituality, a way of getting
in touch with the deep authenticity of the
downtrodden and of showing you care. Buttons and
stickers desperately announce the liberal's
goodness to the world, as do his or her choice in
consumer products. Leftist magazines treat
protesting as a glamour activity, running photos
of last month's demo the way society magazines
print pictures from the charity ball. There is
even a brand of cologne called Activist.

Then there is that species of leftist who
believes that being on the left is an inherited
honour, a nobility of the blood. There is little
point in trying to convert others to the cause,
they will tell you, especially in benighted
places like the deep midwest: you're either born
to it or you aren't. This species of leftist will
boast about the historical deeds of red-diaper
babies or the excellent radical pedigree of
so-and-so, son of such-and-such, utterly deaf to
the repugnant similarities between what they are
celebrating and simple aristocracy.

Leftists of these tendencies aren't really
interested in the catastrophic decline of the
American left as a social force, in the drying up
and blowing away of leftist social movements. If
anything, this decline makes sense to them: the
left is people in sympathy with the downtrodden,
not the downtrodden themselves. It is a charity
operation.

For them, having fewer people on the left isn't a
problem that might one day affect their material
well-being, cost them their healthcare or their
power in the workplace. Those things aren't on
the line for this species of liberal. Quite the
contrary: having fewer people on the left makes
the left more alluring to them. Superficial
nonconformity is what the creative white-collar
class values above all else, and the lonelier you
are in political righteousness the more
nonconformist, the more rebellious you are.
Standing up against the flag-waving masses is the
goal for this variety of liberal. Being on the
left is not about building common cause with
others: it's about correcting others, about
pointing out their shortcomings.

Like the American left, many Europeans also
misunderstand American conservatism, and by
assuming that politics in the US works the same
way as it does elsewhere - that material issues
are important, that reason matters - they step
blithely into the minefield of political
symbolism and are promptly blown up. The most
spectacular recent instance of this came during
the UN debate prior to the war against Iraq. You
will recall that the French foreign minister,
Dominique de Villepin, clearly believed he was
making progress every time he slapped down some
US misrepresentation or pointed out some US error.

Here he was, a well-dressed and accomplished man,
soundly refuting the arguments of the Americans,
speaking several different languages, even
receiving open applause from the UN
representatives of much of the world as he
berated the US Secretary of State, who stoically
endured the abuse of his social superior, for
this obvious error or that.

What the brilliant De Villepin missed utterly was
that American conservatives don't care when their
arguments are refuted. The US is the land of
militant symbolism, the nation of images, and in
the battle of imagery Bush played De Villepin for
a sucker. For Bush the task at hand was obviously
not winning over the UN, but rallying domestic
support for the war, and in doing so Bush
couldn't have asked for a more convincing
populist drama. Saddam Hussein was a monster
right out of central casting, and for opposing
him the poor unassuming Americans were being
castigated by this foppish, over-educated,
hair-splitting, tendentious writer of poetry (De
Villepin's dabbling in verse was much reported in
the American media). And a Frenchman to boot! The
French are always characterised in American
popular culture as a nation of snobs: they drink
wine, they eat cheese, they're polite. This man
was the hated liberal elite in the flesh: all
that was missing was the revelation that he wore
perfume or carried a handbag.

In his erudite, principled opposition, De
Villepin thus sold the war to Americans far more
effectively than did Bush himself. Indeed, had
the foreign secretary of any other nation led the
fight against the US, the war might not have
happened. If Bush is really smart, he'll engineer
a repeat confrontation with De Villepin just
before the elections.

Meanwhile the genuine cultural power of the
backlash goes unplumbed and undiscussed by
political commentators. It returns promptly every
four years, to deliver landslides out of nowhere
and rightwingers where there should be
leftwingers and grassroots anger where there
ought to be contentment. Until the American left
decides to take a long, unprejudiced look at
deepest America, at the kind of people who think
voting for George Bush constitutes a blow against
the elite, they are fated to continue their slide
to oblivion. For Europe and the world the failure
is costlier still, dooming them to the wars and
the policy impositions of an America they refuse
to understand.
________________________________________________________

* Tom Frank is the author of One Market Under
God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism and the
End of Economic Democracy (Doubleday, New York,
2000)

(1) See Serge Halimi and Lo=EFc Wacquant, "United
States: politics without the policies", Le Monde
diplomatique, English language edition, November
2003.

(2) See Tom Frank, One Market under God: Extreme
Capitalism, Market Populism and the End of
Economic Democracy, Doubleday, New York, 2000.

(3) See Tom Frank, "Enron: Elvis lives", Le Monde
diplomatique, English language edition, February
2002.

(4) See Eric Alterman, "United States: making up
news", Le Monde diplomatique, English language
edition, March 2003.



Original text in English


________________________________________________________

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED =A9 1997-2004 Le Monde diplomatique

<http://MondeDiplo.com/2004/02/04usa>
--=20


Ron Herrema, PhD
Lecturer in Music, Northeastern University
Boston, MA
http://www.msu.edu/user/herremar