Plutocratic Populism

Huh? That sure looks like an oxymoron, but dig a little deeper into the concept. Ever wonder how a minority party – representing about 25% of registered voters – has been able to create a majority in well over half state legislatures, electing more than half the governors and gaining control of the presidency and the US Senate? How a party that pretty much rewards the one-percenters with lower taxes, deregulation, lucrative government bailouts, “quantative easing” (where the Federal Reserve takes out bad corporate debt), low interest rates for the rich, tons of tax loopholes that only benefit the rich (like that “carried interest rule”) and lots of delicious government contracts that turn millionaires into billionaires… at the expense of everyone else… and gets away with it?

I’m sorry, liberal friends, but there is sheer brilliance working here. After fiscal conservative and states-righter Barry Goldwater, the Republican presidential nominee in 1964, was crushed by Lyndon Johnson, the GOP woke up. Their problem was how to represent a program of fiscal conservatism and federal laissez faire minimizing of federal authority, elements that literally only benefitted less than 5% of the country, to generate at least 51% of the popular (or district) vote. It was always about the money, but voting more money to rich people is not an easy sell.

Lots of theories were tried, like the dramatically disproven “trickle down” supply-side economic theories (a vestige of the Reagan era) that linger still, but the core realization was based on social values. More significantly patriotism and Christianity. The Dems had dominated the Southern States from Reconstruction on, embracing expanded Jim Crow laws and creating a corrupt political machine that ran roughshod over state and local politics in that region. The Republican Party figured out that if they could blend their image with all-American values and a mantle of evangelical faith, giving social and religious conservatives what they wanted, they could rip power away from those Southern Democrats and take the vote. By the onset of the 1970s, that evangelical base – never less than 25-30% of the national constituency – solidified as the cornerstone of the reconfigured Republican Party. Effectively, the South tossed out the Dems. Rich Republicans rejoiced.

But it was the charismatic voice of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s that seduced the socially conservative masses in a modern era to support the otherwise unpopular desires of fat cat Republicans. And it all began with “a 1983 memo by the late Lee Atwater, the hardball political operative who conceived of the infamous Willie Horton ad used against Michael Dukakis in 1988, which is now considered an exemplar of the use of the race card to win elections. 

“In 1983, Atwater was a young aide to Reagan when he wrote a memo to the president’s campaign essentially arguing that the president’s agenda appealed to country-club Republicans, but wasn’t going to be popular with enough voters, particularly in the South, to guarantee his reelection. Atwater argued that the party needed to attract what he called ‘populists’ — voters who were to the left on economic issues, but to the right on social issues. By social issues, Atwater meant cultural issues like the Equal Rights Amendment and abortion, but also racial issues and civil rights. 

“Atwater’s vision for the party wasn’t fully embraced at first. Reagan started moving in that direction, but much of the party was still fairly mainstream. When Atwater masterminded the Willie Horton ad, he was working for George H.W. Bush, who represented the old guard of the Republican Party and famously raised taxes, despite a campaign promise not to do so, to reduce the budget deficit in 1990.” Jacob Hacker, Yale University’s Stanley Resor Professor of Political Science in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences in the July 27^th YaleNews.

Cut to the current political reality, as the November election looms. As a deeply unpopular American President, with autocratic desires, faces a likely political demise. Just four years ago… “The 2016 election was a thrilling victory for the Republican Party, which seized the White House while maintaining majorities in both houses of Congress. Yet many of the economic and health policies the party champions in Washington have limited public support. 

“How has the GOP managed to hold power despite its unpopular positions? Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker argues that an unlikely but extremely effective alliance between plutocratic economic interests and right-wing populist forces allows the party to secure working-class votes while championing policies that favor corporations and the wealthy… In their new book, ‘Let Them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Inequality,’ Hacker and co-author Paul Pierson of the University of California-Berkeley draw on decades of research to explain this political phenomenon and the threat it poses to American democracy.

“Hacker… discussed the book with YaleNews. [Interview condensed and edited:] Plutocratic populism describes how the Republican Party has combined organized money and organized outrage to win elections, tilt the playing field in their favor, and govern for the top 1%. In a nutshell, the party responded to skyrocketing inequality by siding with those at the top and, in the process, embraced a set of economic policies beloved by its big donors and big corporations but unpopular among voters, and even many Republicans. To pursue those unpopular priorities, the party created an infrastructure of outrage to attract voters in election after election. It partnered with organizations like the National Rifle Association (NRA) and Christian Right along with the increasingly powerful organs of right-wing media. Those two sets of forces — organized money and organized outrage — form the two sides of the contemporary party. It’s why we say that the party has come to exemplify plutocratic populism…

“This is not a book about Donald Trump. Most of these transformations took place before he came to power. Indeed, we think these transformations made the party uniquely vulnerable to a leader like Trump. He has essentially doubled down on both the party’s plutocratic and right-wing populist sides. I’m reminded of the famous scene from ‘Spinal Tap’ about the amplifier that goes up to 11. Trump turned the dial to 11 on plutocratic populism. But it was there before he ran for president.” YaleNews. Look what happened and where we are right now. The chickens have come home to roost.

As income inequality has soared to the highest level in the developed world, taxes plunged, medical bankruptcies have reached staggering levels, as pollution levels are rising with deregulation, job loss in obsolescent industries met with impossible dogwhistle pledges of “Making America Great Again,” as housing and college tuition costs have exploded as social mobility became relegated to the history books, universal healthcare is conflated with socialism and fought tooth and nail all the way by the GOP… look who is in power.

But when an elite has so distorted the entire social and political system that it can no longer deal with national emergencies like the instant pandemic, when that pandemic reveals how close to economic death tens of millions of paycheck-to-paycheck Americans are, the system either implodes… or there is an internally generated philosophical regime change… the Big Reset.

            I’m Peter Dekom, and sometimes when you are living in the middle of an explosive life-altering moment in history, it is hard to look at the big picture of how we got here and the Big Reset (transition) we must face.