anti-immigrant policies."
The past two decades have witnessed mainstream white American men exploding like never before in our history. They draw their ranks from the middle class (office workers, salaried salesmen) and the lower middle class (the skilled worker, small farmer, or shopkeeper). They're the "pa" in the ma-and-pa store, Richard Nixon's "silent majority," and "Reagan Democrats." They're "Joe Lunchbucket," and "Joe the Plumber," and just plain Joe. They feel they've borne the weight of the world on their backs, and they can't hold it up any longer. And now, suddenly, some of these regular guys are reinventing the American Revolution with Tea Party, Minutemen, and Patriot organizations, while others are further out there, organizing militias and joining survivalist cults, waging war on "feminazis," rampaging through their workplaces, promoting protectionist and anti-immigrant policies.
They sneer at presidential candidates like John Kerry who speak French, eat brie, and drink Chardonnay. They see nothing but feminized wusses who actually support global environmental policies and negotiation and diplomacy instead of "my way or the highway" unilateralism.
And you'd see the same thing at all the other rallies across the country, rallies where newly formed groups of mostly white men evoke the spirit of the American Revolution - Minutemen, Patriots, Tea Party - to express their contemporary rage at immigrants, health care, and taxation. Populist movements have swept across America before - most notably at the turn of the last century, with similar contradictory politics, a combination of agrarian socialism and racist nativism. Then, as now, populism combined anti-Wall Street sentiment and anti-immigrant sentiment; together, they fueled an agrarian anger at their "enabling" government bureaucrats.
Populisms are always contradictory, because populism is more an emotion than it is an ideology. And that emotion is anger.
Nice find, Triana. Thanks for posting.
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