Two nights ago (September 14), Rachel Maddow, on MSNBC, during coverage of the DC tea baggers demonstration against health insurance reform, played a satirical clip called “Billionaires for Wealthcare,” in an attempt to give the alternative point of view to the demonstration. After commenting on it, she brought in Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont for an interview. The subject of tea baggers’ free floating anger and rage became the central focus of discussion. Bernie Sanders said:
“The truth is that people have a right to be angry. The fact that Wall Street has plunged this country into such a deep recession that 17% of the people are either unemployed or underemployed. People are angry and they have a right to be angry. And what disturbs me very much is that you see many of these right wing folks, they’re not angry at the insurance companies that are ripping us off. They’re not angry at the drug companies that are charging us the highest rates in the industrial world. They’re not angry at the Wall Street guys who have made hundreds of millions of dollars, and then, through their and illegal behavior, have caused this deep recession.
”What the Republicans have managed to do is to turn that anger against what? Social Security, Medicare, the attempt to make sure that every person in this country has health care as a right?
”That’s a pretty sad state of affairs, and I think we’ve got to get a handle on that and say to people: You’ve gotta be . . . You have a right to be angry. But take your anger out against the people who have caused the economic distress this country is now experiencing.”
Now, this is a nice statement by Bernie Sanders, one of the relatively few old school honest public servants of principle left in the United States Senate. It’s not perfect. It has a few problems of vagueness or small misstatements of fact that I won’t bring up, but its central point, that somehow people have been led to focus their anger on the wrong things that have not caused their distress is right on and stated in a very straightforward way.
But why has this happened? Well, certainly it is in part due to the tea baggers’ acceptance over a period of many years of slogans, bad theories, and false ideologies that make them susceptible to political movements that focus their rage in a way that is not in their interest. This is not the first time this has happened. All through American history we see things like this. Perhaps the classic case is the way “Southern Bourbons” focused populist anger on issues of race and maintenance of the southern caste system in order to break apart the economic populist movement in the South that encompassed both Whites and Blacks during the 1890s and early 1900s. We see a similar tactics in successful Republican attempts to garner poor and middle class white votes in the South, and other areas of the country, by playing the race card from Nixon’s time up to the present. We see a similar dynamic in their use of symbolic divisive issues of various kinds to prevent focusing on the issues of economic and social justice raised by the Democrats. The Republicans and their allies always seek to focus anger and resentment on the Government and its activities. That’s just what they do. But, I think the primary reason why these tactics of populist misdirection are working again now is actually the fault of this Democratic Administration and its allies.
I think that Democrats other than Bernie Sanders know very well that populist anger is widespread in the country, but nevertheless, led by the President’s steadfast intention to stand between the banks, the insurance companies, the drug companies, the energy companies, Wall Street, and “the pitchforks” of an angry citizenry, they have refused to appeal to populist rage, anger, frustration, and discontent, to gain support for programs that will benefit Main Street and improve the lives of people.
I think this is a great and short-sighted mistake by the White House and its Democratic supporters. The Democratic Party is the party of the people. Its symbolic foundation is populism, the belief in popular sovereignty. The Democratic Party is supposed to trust the people. It should turn to the people for strength and for inspiration. As Bernie Sanders says, people have a reason to be angry. They should be angry. They have been f__ked over for 35 – 40 years now by their political system. But, also, as Bernie says, they ought to be angry at the right things, the right institutions, and the right people. And why are they not? At least in part, because the political party and the leader whose function it is to mobilize and then focus popular discontent and anger in back of constructive change are not doing their jobs. They are not advocating for and passing legislation that will really help people and ease their problems. They are not gaining the trust of people who have been getting “the short end of the stick.” They have not been expressing the anger of people at the institutions that have been systematically impoverishing them over a period of years, and destroying their dreams. And they have not been acting in a way that can deliver justice and bring hope back to the people who have elected them in the past and who might, if they represented people again, elect them in the future.
Populism is a multi-edged sword. The big companies have been using their edge to defend plutocracy and to introduce elements of fascism into US politics. But the Democrats and progressives have not been using the democratic edge of populism, the edge that cuts for equality, and for economic and social democracy.
If the Obama Administration and the progressive movement continue to stand between the pitchforks and the interests, the change we were promised will never occur, because in a Democracy, the driving force for change has to come from the bottom. It cannot come from the top, simply because an elitist movement of progressives doing nothing to mobilize its potential populist support is no match for an elitist movement of plutocrats constantly riding the wave of inchoate populist anger to block any change that would bring the theft of the plutocrats under control.
You can’t ignore widespread populist anger and rage arising out of real underlying grievances. You can only learn to use it, or you will lose to it. It’s up to the President to decide what he will do. Let’s hope he decides to be a real Democrat and to follow in the footsteps of Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon Baines Johnson.
(Also posted at firedoglake.com where there may be more comments)