Posted on 02/19/2004 7:24:01 PM PST by quidnunc
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).
-snip-
(Excerpt) Read more at mondediplo.com ...
No,thanks.
I'll have an RC.
LIES! Everyone is much richer than almost anyone in the 1920s. The rising tide HAS raised all boats. People on welfare have 40" TVs, computers and decent cars.
workers have less power over the conditions under which they toil than ever before in our lifetimes;
LIES! Workers are far more mobile. Most have several employers in a decade. Benefits are more transferable.
and the corporation has become the most powerful actor in our world.
LIES! "The corporation" is a leftist myth. There are tens of thousands of corporations, everything from small individual proprieterships to the giant liberal media conglomerates. They do not think the same, or support the same politics. Corporations ARE people, so this is an absurd and untrue statement.
What a hoot that was! Wheaties spewing everywhere the morning I heard that commercial.
Unfortunately his own insights are fatally flawed by the very same preference for the superficial that is killing the left at the moment. For example, he cites the "brilliant" M. de Villepin knocking down position after U.S. position in the UN and that he speaks five languages, but we are not told what a single one of those positions were so that we might judge for ourselves, only that M. de Villepin is smarter and hence must have been right. That is the sort of smug superiority complex that sends the eyes rolling in anyone who actually does care to consider these matters on their merits and not on the basis of who is proposing them.
It is a sad but not uncommon thing to see an otherwise intelligent person succumb to a deliberate self-blinding in order to maintain his sense of superiority to those whose opinions differ. That is one malady of the left that Mr. Frank did not mention, being a victim of it himself.
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.
I call it the 'Jesus Christ Complex'.
It's simply pronounced, "France."
Excellent observation. His self-blinding extends to the myth that the American left is or should be of the proletariat. I suspect that he would learn something if he were to read de Tocqueville and find out what a bunch of Jeffersonian liberals Americans are. (That way he would get a French source and a "liberal" label.)
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