I love the need of David Brooks and others to portray the teabaggers as "populist" and anti-big-government when there was absolutely no invasion of our civil rights during the Bush Administration -- from imprisonment without trial to warrantless wiretaps -- that these people had problems with.
But if someone like Brooks is going to call these people populists, at the very least, you'd think he'd be under an obligation to show how their beliefs help working people and if he can't show that, then who exactly their beliefs do help.
I mean, we can get a group together for liberal causes that matches up pretty well, economically speaking -- so how are they not populist?
And if we go beyond income levels, what then distinguishes someone -- anyone -- as 'populist'?
It might help to look at what the original Populists actually advocated. If you do, you'll see that much of their platform (e.g. the "Omaha Platform", 1892) required a huge expansion of government power, greater worker and labor rights, and a mighty shot across the bow of Corporate America.
There's nothing, absolutely nothing, in the current teabagger's agenda with its crazy mix of anti-statism (Dems in power), subservience (GOP in power) and knee-jerk devotion to laissez-faire that a real populist from back-in-the-day would recognize as his own.
In fact, the only similarity is something Brooks (who titled his piece, "No, It’s Not About Race") specifically won't admit to, namely, a predilection towards anti-immigrant bias bordering in some cases on racism.
But if we focus on the more positive aspects of the populist movement, it's hard not to conclude that this attempt to appropriate its name for purposes completely antithetical to everything it actually stood for is both a-historical and extremely cynical.
It's nothing but an effort to give rightwing groups a legitimacy -- or in other words, 'working class creds' -- that nothing in the agenda or activities of these groups would suggest.
You can understand why someone would want to do this -- who wants to appear, at least openly, as an apologist for wealth and power? -- but it's not something rational people ought to treat with any degree of respect.
