Rightwing Populism, or Anti-Populism Writ Large

One hundred and twenty-four years ago the Populist Party collaborated with the Democratic Party and ran the young radical William Jennings Bryan for president of the United States on the Democratic ticket against Republican William McKinley. His platform: “There are those who believe that, if you will only legislate to make the well-do-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through to those below. . . . if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up through every class which rests upon them.” This, of course, turned out the entire business class against him—journalists, academics, clergy, and vast amounts of Republican money—and McKinley won the election.

In 2016 Independent Party member Bernie Sanders collaborated with the Democratic Party and was screwed by not only the entire business class but by the Democratic Party as well. Bernie’s platform: support the working class by unending an economic system that supposedly “leaks to those below”—in today’s parlance called “trickle down economics”—with one that yes, makes the masses prosperous.

In between, we had the New Deal with FDR, which conquered the Great Depression, discredited capitalism around the world, established a safety net, strengthened unions, and created a middleclass America, where auto workers and construction workers could afford to buy the things they built.

Today, the only time the word “populism” is used is to describe the populist right, signified by Donald Trump. Instead of reflecting a progressive economic agenda to empower the working class, it’s associated with authoritarianism, bigotry, anti-immigration, deregulation, and tax cuts for the rich.

On the campaign trail, Donald Trump was planning a similar game to the one Steve Bannon cooked up: citing the financial crisis and the bailouts as the “inciting incident” for the global populist rebellion he wanted to lead (Thomas Frank, The People, No: a brief history of anti-populism). On the issue of trade, for example, Trump took an unusual stance for a Republican, constantly criticizing NAFTA and trade with China, the bêtes-noires of organized labor, and reaching out to alienated white, working-class voters, the rank and file of so may historical protest movements. He said he cared so very much about the people of the deindustrialized zones and their sufferings. He claimed to feel for the victims of the opioid crisis.

And then . . . the working-class hero in the Oval Office delivered a landmark tax cut for the rich. Trump deregulated Wall Street banks, too. With his attacks on Obamacare, the president did his part to make our capitalistic system just a little more brutal and Darwinian for ordinary people. He turned over the judiciary to the elites of the Federalist Society. He turned over the economy to the Chamber of Commerce. He turned the EPA over to polluters. He ran the US government in a way designed to enrich and empower himself. The one leadership task to which Trump took with enthusiasm—rolling back the regulatory state—is essentially an attack on one of the few institutions in Washington designed to help working-class Americans. If this is populism, the word has truly come to mean nothing.

Now that Trump is banished to Mar-a-Lago we have senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz ready to pick up the populist cause claiming Republicans represent the “party of the working class.” It’s enough to make you an anarchist: Republicans and Democrats alike spinning their claims like Rumpelstiltskin spinning straw into gold.

Nineties Feel Good Movies

When the pandemic hit in March of 2020 my son Max, 31 at the time, was living in Santa Fe. Just as so many other Gen X and millennial livelihoods and lifestyles (I don’t like to use that word but I’m afraid it does kind of apply to many in these age groups) were severely impacted by the stay-at-home restrictions and shutdowns, so was Max. He made it through the summer, riding his bike, meeting a small group of friends at outside parties, hanging with Jakob, Lulu, Marcos and me in the park, and playing poker on a few websites that still exist (online poker was shut down in the U.S., forcing Max to play at casinos).

But as winter came on bringing renewed shut downs, he started coming up to El Valle to stay with me for a few days to decompress. Max, raised as was Jakob, in an environment where the main forms of entertainment were hiking and backpacking in the summer and skiing in the winter, substituted these activities as an adult with city ones: going to the gym, movies, parties, restaurants and bars. To my surprise, he discovered that he actually liked being here, walking my dogs, whom he loves (he desperately wants a dog of his own), bringing in the wood, then cross-country and downhill skiing with me once the snow fell (not enough yet).

We also found an indoor activity in which we could indulge: watching 90s feel good movies. I’ve often watched these movies, geared to a general audience before the onslaught of super hero movies (only Star Wars), as an antidote to the blues, with their familiar movie stars, their funny/sad narratives, their blur between the ordinary and extraordinary. Max, jangled enough by the events of the day, found that they worked wonders on his nerves as well.

We started with High Fidelity. There may be no greater comedic role than the one Jack Black creates as the clerk in the vinyl record shop who doesn’t let customers buy any music he thinks is crap. If he had his druthers, it wouldn’t be in the shop in the first place, but the boss of the shop is John Cusack, who also has impeccable musical taste but is a little less judgmental. Max kept calling him a jerk as he meets up with former girlfriends to explore the demise of their relationships as a means of parsing the one he’s just fucked up. But I love John Cusack, not only for the quirky roles he plays in the movies but the role he plays in real life: he went with Arundhahti Roy and Daniel Ellsberg to interview Edward Snowden stuck in Moscow after his release of National Security Administration documents revealing the extent of national surveillance and war crimes. The sound track of the movie, is, of course, straight out of my playlists, which Cusack makes endlessly, like I do, of songs that are the records of our lives.

We next watched Moonstruck, which apparently thousands, if not millions, of other people in America were also watching during the pandemic. There were articles in the New York Times Magazine (Wesley Morris) and in the New Yorker about the joy of watching Cher kick the can down the streets of Brooklyn after going to the opera with Nicholas Cage (they are both stunningly beautiful). It’s basically an Italian soap opera that plays fast and loose with reality: Cher agrees to marry Johnny Cammareri, whom she doesn’t love, and then agrees to marry Ronny Cammareri, his brother, after knowing him for two days. But it seeps right into your heart as scene after scene is exquisitely played by the likes of Vincent Gardenia, Cher’s father, who makes a very good living as a plumber by convincing clients they need copper pipes; Olympia Dukakis, Cher’s mother, who wants to know why men cheat on women (her husband is having an affair); and John Mahoney as the clueless NYU professor who keeps getting drinks thrown in his face by young students he’s trying to seduce.

We went onto the The Paper, Michael Keaton’s best movie, IMHO, with the wonderful Marisa Tomei, and Groundhog Day. There’s not much I can add to the latter’s position in the movie canon: “Fantasies work because at some level they act as a metaphor and help us relate to the real life. And the best way a fantasy could work is to be subtle and allow the viewer to make his own metaphor. Groundhog Day is in that way, a great movie. It plays like a comedy while giving a feel of philosophical undercurrents which resonate deeply within us.” (Nallasivan Valasubramanian). There are many more movies to be had: Crimes of the Heart, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and An Ideal Husband, to name a few. I have them all on VHS if you can’t find them on Netflix or Hulu or Criterion or wherever. There’s something to be said for keeping your own video library. Let me know if you want to borrow one.

Good Old Democracy Now!

Amy Goodman’s been at it a long time, and while lately she’s been driving me kind of crazy with sloppy editing (they always have to cut people off mid sentence when they run out of time at the end of the program), too much introductory talk that should be given to the interviewee, and a too strident tone, this week’s shows reveal how relevant and incisive she continues to be.

This, of course, was the week after the mob of white nationalists and neo-Nazis stormed the Capitol and set off alarm bells that have been ringing for years on deaf ears. The ensuing media frenzy had everyone and his or her uncle trying to put their finger on how this could have happened, too often ending with the sigh, “This isn’t who we are.”

Amy and Juan Gonzalez, her co-anchor, brought together the journalists, sociologists, and historians to contextualize and deconstruct our arrival at this stunningly complex moment. They started off with Allan Nairn, a longtime contributor to Democracy Now who covered the horrendous killings in East Timor along with Amy, who immediately addressed the “This isn’twho we are” meme: “Well, it’s always been the case that the U.S. establishment was willing to use terror and kill civilians overseas, either to do things like seize oil, seize political power, or basically on whim. The presidency of George W. Bush was a prime example of that.”

He also reminded us that as we take on the white supremacists who stormed the Capitol we can't let the establishment use this, as Bush did after 9/11, to further erode our civil rights, first amendment rights, and rationalize even more money for a bloated military budget: "don’t let this Trumpist movement coopt the idea of rebellion. Rebellion against injustice is a good thing. The problem is that they — and the U.S. system is indeed unjust and murderous."

A few days later the Filipino author Walden Bellow, whom I’d never heard of (Counterrevolution: The Global Rise of the Far Right), succinctly laid out the struggle between the left and right over late state capitalism, or a dying neoliberalism on a global scale. After the global 2008 financial crisis, the Dems failed to take steps to control the banks, save homeowners, and bring outsourced industrial employment back to the U.S. So the neoliberalism model continued to exacerbate economic inequality, and with the eruption of Covid-19, conditions were ripe for the ultra right to exploit them with racism and “dog whistle-type Republican politics that started with Richard Nixon with the Southern strategy.” The white working class could no longer see the Democrats as the party that represented their interests, but only as elites who were giving away what was theirs to minorities: “And let me just say that with respect to Trumpism, you know, that Trump is as much a creature as the creator of that base. There’s this synergy that’s taking place there." While the left was able to mobilize under the campaign of Bernie Sanders, it was never able to sustain a mass movement as the establishment Dems took over, once again.

Finally, Yale historian Timothy Synder was interviewed about the article he wrote for the New York Times Magazine, “The American Abyss: A historian of fascism and political atrocity on Trump, the mob and what comes next.” The white supremacists who invaded the Capitol were emboldened by Trump, who when he speaks about voter fraud essentially means allowing African Americans to vote, and Ted Cruz, who compared what he was trying to do in 2021 with 1877, when Congress essentially initiated a century of Jim Crow, or American apartheid.

Snyder also laid out the make up of the Republican Party and where its future may lay. The largest group is the gamers, the “ones who work the system with the gerrymandering, with the dark money, with the voter suppression, who are in favor of the, quote-unquote, ‘democracy’ that we have in America now, the unfortunately very limited democracy we have, because they know how to work it.” A smaller fraction, the breakers, is represented by the likes of Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, “who have understood that one could actually come to power in the United States by entirely nondemocratic means, by way of the mob, by way of throwing an election and lying about it.” And the smallest group is constituted “an honorable few who believe in the rule of law and telling the truth.” Snyder thinks—hopes—that a coalition of the “gamers” and “honorable few” will take back the party. I’m not so sure.

I’ve been somewhat surprised that Amy hasn’t had either Glenn Greenwald or Matt Taibbi on her show in a while. Both are frequent Democracy Now guests who recently left their media organizations and joined the new platform Substack. Throughout the Capitol attack fallout their focus remained on where it’s been for the recent past: intense criticism of the Dems for aligning with the cancel culture movement, which they see as an abrogation of first amendment rights (Greenwald was a constitutional lawyer before he became a journalist) and the censorship of far right sites by big tech, which they see as a harbinger of indiscriminate censorship. I don’t know if their absence reflects a judgment by Democracy Now on their journalism or just that they don’t see this focus as their priority right now. I guess we’ll see what the future brings, in more ways than one.