Neal Gabler, Politico: Mitt Romney and the myth of GOP populism

[highplainsdem]

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0912/81567.html

In fact, while most Americans liked and benefited from many of the policies developed by the New Deal, the Fair Deal and the Great Society, they came to despise the cultural nimbus within which these operated — that some pointy-heads from on high thought they knew better than ordinary folks about how to run their lives.

That is how “They hate you” became a key subtext of the Republican Party from the 1960s on — except when it was the text. “They hate you” was the implicit message of Ronald Reagan’s attacks on government, George H.W. Bush’s and George W. Bush’s studied folksiness, and the congressional Republicans’ cultural warfare. It was explicit in Sarah Palin’s declamations about “real Americans” versus phony ones. It remains the foundation on which much of right-wing talk radio is built: “They hate you!”

-snip-

So what Romney did at that Florida fundraiser matters because he ripped off that Republican populist mask to reveal the elitist underneath. In effect, he outed himself by demonstrating the same contempt for ordinary Americans — at least the half that he essentially described as lazy, non-taxpaying moochers — that Republicans had for decades successfully accused Democrats of exhibiting.

With this, he may not only have sabotaged his own candidacy, he may also have undermined the Republican populist ethos that McCarthy, Nixon, Reagan, Bush and others had put so much sincere effort into creating. What Romney showed is that, at least rhetorically, he seems to hate a whole lot of us.

And that might just change the political geology again — separating the populist from the reactionary.

Interesting two-page piece (the quotes are from the second page).