Why Millions of GOP Voters Bought Into Trump's Phony Populist Act

[portlander23]

Why Millions of GOP Voters Bought Into Trump's Phony Populist Act
Conor Lynch
Salon (via Alternet)

Over the past year, the Trump has skillfully crafted his political image as a common man fighting against the elite Republican establishment, the politically correct “limousine liberals,” and, of course, the foreigners and immigrants who want to steal American jobs and impose their alien values on Jane and Joe Average.

Of course, the billionaire is not leading a working class movement in a typical progressive or socialist sense, but a reactionary one. The Trump campaign can be described as anti-intellectual and anti-internationalist rather than anti-elitist or anti-capitalist. Trump hasn’t derided the capitalist system or the billionaire plutocrats who profit so handsomely because of it (after all, he is one of them), but the technocratic experts in government, the snobby intellectuals in academia, the politically correct liberals in the media, and so on.

The campaign is in many ways a revolt against neoliberalism from the right, just as the Bernie Sanders campaign is a revolt from the political left. The latter candidate has been very critical of free market and neoliberal economics and the corrupt political process (i.e. unlimited political spending), while the former has directed his fury at the “totally incompetent” government officials (read: experts) and the politically correct elites who hate America (cultural issues have tended to dominate his rhetoric over economic ones).

This kind of right-wing populist approach is hardly novel; author Thomas Frank explained how reactionaries paint themselves as common folk while serving the interests of the economic elite in his classic 2004 book, “What’s the Matter with Kansas,” by largely ignoring economic realities.

In other words, Trump’s diatribes against the liberal and technocratic elites are not completely unfounded. Right-wing populists like Trump have been able to succeed because Democrats have become less egalitarian and more elitist over the years.

If the party can't formulate a progressive response to failed neoliberal policies, the GOP will, and we really won't like their version of it.

[tonyt53]

1. Nothing skilled about playing with people's racism and fear. Hitler was very good at it too.

[Hortensis]

2. Obama was our response to exploitive neoliberal policies,

and we are planning to build on those changes with a great many more.

The article's correct, of course, that populist anger is a reaction to being exploited and discarded by hard-right neoliberal policies. It is also correct that Democrats failed to stop the spread of neoliberalism. But empowering neoliberalism and transferring vast amounts of national wealth and power to a new, ultrawealthy class was the American people's choice in election after election from about 1978 to 2004 and again in 2010. We couldn't stop it.

"We have to get off the backs of business," "we have to cut government waste," and "we must destroy big government before it destroys us" were the reform mantras a majority of American voters embraced for 30 years. They watched the destructive effects of neoliberalism grow and grow and still chose it.

Democratic leadership was not all we needed it to be during this period, but the way the neoliberals got power was by convincing people to vote for them and, above all, against the Democrats. Under their guidance, the ideology and intellectual underpinnings of many conservatives became so degraded that that became it in a nutshell: They must stop the Democrats.

One guess why.