Peter Beinart: The Tea Partiers' Phony Populism

[flpoljunkie]

The Tea Partiers' Phony Populism
At their convention this weekend, Sarah Palin and her fans bashed big banks—and the idea of regulating them.

Peter Beinart on how Team Tea is giving populism a bad name.

That first phrase is key: “the power of government—in other words, of the people.” For the original Populists, government action was the best way to empower ordinary folks, but only if those ordinary folks actually ran the government. That’s why at the same time the Populists tried to strengthen government they also tried to democratize it, by championing the direct election of senators and other reforms. In practice, the Populists were often fervently anti-Washington because Washington was controlled by the privileged few. But their anger at Washington and their anger at Wall Street were different. They believed Washington could represent the people in a way Wall Street never could. They cursed Wall Street because it was too powerful. They cursed Washington because it wasn’t powerful enough.

The Tea Partiers also say they want to empower ordinary folk against the privileged few. But who do they mean by “privileged few?” Unlike the original Populists, the Tea Partiers don’t mean moneyed interests. After all, while they oppose bailing out banks, they also oppose more aggressively regulating them. In fact, the Tea Party crowd wants less government oversight over Wall Street. As Tea Party Convention keynote speaker Sarah Palin declared a while back, “We got into this mess because of government interference in the first place.”

By privileged few, in fact, the Tea Party crowd means government. The ordinary folks are the voters and the privileged few are the people who run Washington in disregard of their wishes. For the original Populists, the answer to this problem was more democracy: reforms that made Washington more responsive to voters and less responsive to moneyed interests. But the Tea Partiers have no interest in such reforms. They simply take it as a fact that Washington is unresponsive and self-interested. While the Populists wanted to empower government as they democratized it, the Tea Partiers want to disempower government because they don’t believe it can be democratized. And by disempowering government—by reducing its oversight of Wall Street, as Palin demanded at the Tea Party convention—the Tea Partiers actually strengthen the very moneyed interests that the Populists wanted to restrain.

The Tea Partiers, in other words, have flipped Populism on its head. They’re less Populists than anti-Populists. It’s time the media called them by their rightful name.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-02-08/the-tea-partiers-phony-populism/?cid=hp:exc

[housewolf]

1. Interesting reading

Thanks for posting

[flpoljunkie]

3. Tea Partiers are dupes--they oppose bailouts and bank regulation! GOP, Wall Street salivating!

[quiet.american]

2. Totally agree on this angle, but still think the teabagger movement boils down to this:

A bunch of folks who either don't have the sense God gave a brick, or are spitting mad that Palin did not win the presidency (even though she wasn't running for president), or are seeded and funded by Dick Armey's FreedomWorks, or are bigoted and worse, or who despise Democrats with a searing hatred, or all of the above.

Trying to make it into anything else doesn't make sense. They're frustrated and angry with government? Well, they're eight years too late and railing against a president who is doing his best to address what they say they're angry about. They scream and shout about having their taxes raised when their taxes were actually cut. They scream about "special interests," but had to pay their patron saint, Palin, $100K to come speak to them, and they didn't say "boo" about Republican Stonewall Shelby holding the national interest hostage to his earmarks. They scream and shout about healthcare reform, but when they get "hurt" at their own rallies, they think the easier way to pay their healthcare costs is to raise donations over the interwebs.

Looking at these people makes me feel like the movie Idiocracy was not fiction, but a documentary.

[flpoljunkie]

5. Totally agree with your post. 'Idiocracy' documentary comment particularly apt.

[Raine1967]

4. We need to stop allowing people rewriting history.

They are NOT populists. It's not just the Media that's pushing this false meme, it is the right in general.

Democrats and Democratic pundits and strategists need to speak out against this meme. It's orwellian.

[Cha]

6. Teabaggers for Corporate Rule..no wonder the mediawhores

pump them.:puffpiece: