Tom Frank has an essay in Le Monde Diplomatique addressing the right
wing populism that confuses and attracts many.
I'll paste the first paragraphs here:
A WAR AGAINST ELITES
The America will vote for Bush
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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 *
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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.
http://mondediplo.com/2004/02/04usa
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