Whose Populism is it Anyway?

So, you're an eternally boyish right winger whose increasing slips into espousing white supremacist propaganda has caused advertisers to start fleeing your show, what do you do? Why, turn to economic populism of course! Just as republicans flocked to the banner of a no talent hustler and failed reality TV star who promised them a herrenvolk democracy where their white families and communities would be protected from the hell he would rain down upon the darker-skinned Americans, Tucker Carlson unleashed a monologue recently that would make Bernie Sanders or William Jennings Bryan proud (if they only glanced at the non-conspiracy theory side).

“Any economic system that weakens and destroys families is not worth having. A system like that is the enemy of a healthy society.”

Vox posted an extensive in-depth article about the heresy to the free market faith that utterly and absolutely defines what it is to be "conservative" in America posited by Carlson and some of the debate sparked on the right by his statements. It is worth reading in full and I will try to highlight some of the salient points but you should really go check it out for yourself, because I could be completely wrong in my analysis.

My first thought was, "has Tucker Carlson ever expressed a populist thought in his preppy, bowtied life?" But I guess "the people versus the elites" is kind of his schtick.

“Look, it’s really simple,” Carlson says. “The SAT 50 years ago pulled a lot of smart people out of every little town in America and funneled them into a small number of elite institutions, where they married each other, had kids, and moved to an even smaller number of elite neighborhoods. We created the most effective meritocracy ever.”

“But the problem with the meritocracy,” he continues, is that it “leeches all the empathy out of your society … The second you think that all your good fortune is a product of your virtue, you become highly judgmental, lacking empathy, totally without self-awareness, arrogant, stupid—I mean all the stuff that our ruling class is.”

 My, my, does this remind you of anyone?

In [Thomas] Frank’s view, liberal policy wonks are part of the problem, members of a well-educated elite that massages its own technocratic vanities while utterly missing the big question of the day. To Frank, that question hasn’t changed much over the last few centuries. “It is the eternal conflict of management and labor, owner and worker, rich and poor — only with one side pinned to the ground and the other leisurely pounding away at its adversary’s face,” he writes. Today, polite circles tend to describe this as the issue of “inequality.” Frank prefers an older formulation. “The 19th century understood it better: They called it ‘the social question,’ ” he writes, defined as “nothing less than the whole vast mystery of how we are going to live together.”

As Frank notes, today some people are living much better than others — and many of those people are not Republicans. Frank delights in skewering the sacred cows of coastal liberalism, including private universities, bike paths, microfinance, the Clinton Foundation, “well-meaning billionaires” and any public policy offering “innovation” or “education” as a solution to inequality. He spends almost an entire chapter mocking the true-blue city of Boston, with its “lab-coat and starched-shirt” economy and its “well-graduated” population of overconfident collegians.

I guess Carlson's is a perfect corollary to Dr. Frank's scathing analysis of the technocratic elite liberals who:

In one sense, I guess, we can finally say that Americans understand this. Among the bien pensant theorists of the liberal “Resistance,” everyone talks about “populism” today, and everyone is against it. For the high-born and the well-graduated, the word is perfect—in one drive-by slur, it brings together all that is not-them: the racist and the rural; the uneducated and the left-behind; the clueless billionaire president and his adoring proletarian throngs. Today it is the dread of populism that causes the foundation dollars to flow and the murmurs of agreement to sweep the well-heeled audience at Aspen or Davos or SXSW.

But of course, Tucker Carlson is not a populist. He is at most like Otto von Bismarck, sniffing the warning smoke of impending revolution and enacting paternalistic Prussian social programs to cool the socialist ire of the people. Or maybe just an outsider, desperately trying to get his well-bred republican colleagues to cool it with the destabilizing class warfare. I don't expect this "most interesting debate in conservative politics" to actually amount to anything. We Americans could not work up the energy to mount a rebellion against the Koch brothers or Doughfacedonny that would actually cause them to worry. Carlson is inadvertently telling the truth, the MAGA hat-wearing proles really did want a Caudillo to put them back at the front of the line and put the brown people back in their place. But that 25-33% of Americans is so brainwashed at this point that they cannot connect dots, they will write Doughfacedonny off the same way they powered up the Bush-Off machine (h/t Driftglass). After all, conservatism can never fail, it can only be failed. The next wannabe Caudillo will not be as stupid as donny.

So what the hell is populism anyway? And who owns the genuine version? Even a cursory study of revolutions in history supplies a great deal of evidence that radical change doesn't come from the bottom. It confirms Orwell's theory that revolutions are simply the ambitious middle displacing a calcified upper class. In America race is always at the heart of reaction. So the New York Times can quote a republican secretary, the kind who would really benefit from Bismarck-style social insurance programs (the kind that can really only be done in the public sector), as saying:

“I voted for him, and he’s the one who’s doing this,” she said of Mr. Trump. “I thought he was going to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”

But, "conservatism" as understood by these reprogrammable meatbags who fall for every authoritarian trope in the book, is much more informed by John C. Calhoun than Bismarck. Thus the absurdity of tea party republicans demonstrating in the streets in favor of deregulating the banks and against decent health insurance.  That was passed along by serious media commentators with straight faces as "populism" too.