Digby: Right-wing populism is just another aristocratic con game.

[marmar]

from OurFuture.org:



Populist Monarchs and Subjects
Submitted by Digby on December 2, 2007 - 6:38pm.


American right-wing populism is an interesting phenomenon that's coming to the fore once again in its usual nativist and racist form, but also as smooth misrepresentation of "tax reform"; clever, misleading public relations messaging about fair trade; and some fairly outlandish paranoia about conspiracies to erase the borders. Various permutations of these fairly common right-wing themes abound among conservative politicians and thinkers alike. But conservative populism is an oxymoron.

As Phil Agree wrote in this much discussed article about the definition of conservatism, "Conservatism is the domination of society by an aristocracy ... is incompatible with democracy, prosperity, and civilization in general. It is a destructive system of inequality and prejudice that is founded on deception and has no place in the modern world."

Modern conservatism's most successful strategy was to merge public relations and politics into a seamless operation in which it could use modern marketing methods to convince people to vote against their own interests. In that sense, right-wing populism is just another marketing campaign for the aristocrats. And it's working:

South Carolina has embraced foreign investment, with companies from BMW to Michelin transforming a state once dominated by the textile industry. Another aspect of the global economy hasn't gone down as well: immigration.

While an influx of money from overseas has made free trade palatable even as thousands of mill jobs have vanished, voters are growing increasingly hostile to undocumented foreign workers, polls and analysts say. As a result, illegal immigration is a top economic issue in the state's Jan. 19 Republican primary, a key test for the candidates since it's the first in the South.

"Trade is all right as long as everybody goes by the same rules," said David Robinson, 65, who recently retired from a job at a Michelin tire factory in Spartanburg and whose son works in a Hitachi Ltd. plant nearby. Illegal immigration, on the other hand, "is a big problem, and that's one you can get a handle on," he said.

South Carolina only has about a 3 percent Latino population, both illegal and legal. It isn't actually a problem at all, much less a big one. The sad truth us that no matter how much "foreign investment" comes into their state, South Carolina manufacturing workers are still on a race to the bottom and they know it. But the conservatives have successfully misdirected them away from the real culprits by stoking latent (and not so latent) racism as an explanation for their insecurity. In a time of rising income inequality, a housing and credit crisis, and the ever more obvious fact of conservative corruption of epic proportions, the Republican party has worked their rank and file into a frenzy over very poor people who work for next to nothing in hot, dirty fields, blood-soaked poultry plants and steaming restaurant kitchen sinks. It's quite an accomplishment. ....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://commonsense.ourfuture.org/populist_monarchs_and_subjects?tx=3

[Mythsaje]

1. Which is exactly why they need to be introduced to REAL economic populism

so they'll understand that their REAL enemies aren't immigrants who are generally worse off than they are.

[unpossibles]

2. this is not terribly shocking

but good luck trying to convince the RW voters.

[Uncle Joe]

3. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, marmar.

[mzmolly]

4. Recommended. This is very nicely summed up.

Now to open the eyes to these fools regarging the - marketing methods to convince people to vote against their own interests...