Watching for Pitchforks: corrosive anti-establishment rage brewing across America

[wyldwolf]

Walter Shapiro says that angry public may be a greater threat to President Obama's agenda than Republicans. "A corrosive anti-establishment rage that does not fit into any pre- existing political category" is brewing across America.

Seventy-three years after a white-suited Huey Long was assassinated in Baton Rouge, the iron-fisted Louisiana governor is all the rage in Barack Obama's Washington. At a time when a crash course in the New Deal has supplanted Watergate studies as the capital's requisite history lesson, attention is suddenly being paid to the Kingfish, as well as radio priest Father Charles Coughlin, the two leading 1930s tribunes of little-man economic anger. When you sit down with Obama insiders, Long's name pops up in one conversation, Coughlin's in the next. "You have to remember," says one Obama adviser, "Huey Long and left-wing populism were a much bigger problem for Franklin Roosevelt than the Republicans."

Comments like this underscore the historical reality that tough times can create irrational politics. Obama is obviously not graying or praying over the threat of a third-party challenge like the one that Long was preparing to mount against FDR in 1936. In fact, the real threat to the Obama administration may come from a corrosive anti-establishment rage that does not fit into any pre- existing political category.

Long--who dabbled at being a United States senator when he wasn't home running Louisiana from the floor of the state legislature--was the Pied Piper of class-based resentment, Hugo Chavez with a Southern accent. A large part of it was the easy-money allure of his "Share Our Wealth" plan. Long called for confiscatory taxation of all personal wealth over $8 million and outlandishly claimed that this swag from the Mellons and Rockefellers would finance a generous $5,000 grant to every U.S. household augmented by annual payments of at least $2,000. Father Coughlin (whose anti-Semitism was still muted during the early New Deal period) represented something even more potent--anti-banker, anti-Wall Street, conspiracy-theory-driven anger. Breaking with FDR in late 1934, Coughlin's radio-broadcast sermons from the Shrine of the Little Flower in Royal Oak, Michigan, offered little in the way of coherent economic theory (his anti-capitalist ideal was vaguely akin to Mussolini's Italy), but was masterful at channeling the rage of his listeners at the shadowy international bankers.

This time around, demagoguery does not have to be particularly creative in concocting economic villains, since Central Casting has obligingly provided a rogue's gallery from the executive suites at Citigroup, AIG, Merrill Lynch and Bank of America. The kindling is there for a bonfire (or is it a bond fire?) of Wall Street's vanities. All it takes is a match. As Bob Borosage, the co-director of the left-of-center Campaign for America's Future, points out, "If the Roosevelt era is any parallel, you'll get both a left-wing populism and a right-wing populism. It was not just Huey Long, it was also Father Coughlin. There is an anger out there that is populist and will take right-wing and left-wing forms. And politicians on each end of the political parties--aided by populist rabble-rousers--will start to stoke this anger and move it."

Normally, the party out of power would be poised to exploit the undertone of uneasiness in the public mood. But, as Democratic pollster Mark Mellman points out with audible satisfaction, "When you have a populism that is anti-bank, anti-Republican and anti-business, it is hard to see what the right-wing component of that is." The punch-drunk Republicans (who only command the allegiance of 26 percent of the voters in a recent New York Times/CBS News poll) may prove as irrelevant to the national debate over the next few years as Alf Landon and company were during FDR's first term.

More... a very fascinating piece: http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=9b2152b7-07fc-4503-9f33-4e2d222161d8&p=1

This is similar, though much more intense, the the anti-establishment wave that swept GW Bush out of office in '92 and then the Democrats out of Congress in '94 - detailed in this piece by Philip A. Klinkner called “Court and Country in American Politics: The Democratic Party and the 1994 Election.”

Klinkner explains the circumstances surrounding the 1992 election provided ample evidence of a radically changed political environment. Several observers have commented on the growing volatility of the electorate since the late 1980s (Greider 1992; Phillips 1990, 1993, and 1994; Germond and Witcover 1993; Greenberg 1995). By most accounts, this phenomenon reached a new high in 1992, as voters expressed growing disgust with the federal government, elected officials, special interests, and politics in general, and a greater willingness to support outsider candidacies, even those of such diverse figures as Jerry Brown, Pat Buchanan, and Ross Perot.

The author continues by writing that current American politics is best understood in light of the “Court versus Country” dynamic that has been a recurring theme in Anglo-American politics over the last 300 years. The label was first used to describe the intense political conflict in English politics from the Revolution of 1688 until the mid-eighteenth century. Historians have also used the Court versus Country framework to describe the politics of America ’s early national period, roughly from the Articles of Confederation to the election of Thomas Jefferson.

[dkf]

1. I've been worrying about this.

Obama needs to run a really really tight ship with the bailout funds. If he doesn't he will lose the trust of the people who will revolt when he asks for more funds to bailout yet more institutions.

I can see the public distaste for what has been done already. Obama was right when he said AIG was the guy with the bomb tied to himself. Nobody really wants to save the guy, but he'll take us all down.

[laststeamtrain]

2. New headline: Elitist pigs fear the people. Good. That's a start. n/t

[Life Long Dem]

3. Yeah... when there are more than 10 protesters,

MSM will be sure to be there. Yep... like the big outcry during the campaign when shown had no more than a dozen crazy protesters. :think:

[MannyGoldstein]

4. Good Article, Thank You

As long as Obama acts like an actual Democrat he should be OK. Hopefully he'll get real about the banker bailout soon, that's probably his only weakness at this point.

[Dr Fate]

5. I see elected, Conservative obstructionists from both parties as the bigger threat.

If Bayh, Joe and the other conservati- er I mean "moderates" and their GOP "coalition" mates get out of his way and let him do this thing, maybe it wont get to the point where people are fed up with nothing getting done.

As others mentioned, if Obama can just get this bail out mess ironed out, he will be fine.

I think most voters are going to continue to trust Obama and give him a chance...

Interesting predictions, but I dont see voters and people on the ground as the problem at this point.

[ProSense]

6. The people are angry: danger, danger

The people are angry at being ripped off for years by a corrupt system, losing their homes and life savings to the likes of Enron, Maddoff and the other Wall Street worms. From the OP article:

Still, while it is a safe bet that neither Michael Steele's hip-hop Republicanism nor far-left anti-capitalist demagoguery is the wave of the future, that is about all we know with confidence about voter attitudes. The lasting psychological ramifications of the economic collapse cannot yet fully be understood because the loss of traditional financial cushions (retirement savings, the appreciated value of a home, the time-honored annual raise) is simply too raw and recent. Republican pollster David Winston, who has watched more than his share of focus groups from behind one-way glass walls, captures the way that the political world has tilted off its axis: "What you're seeing in the public right now is not anger but terror. They don't know who to believe. They just know it's bad." Winston adds, "The political system is still learning how to respond to an electorate that is terrified."

But terror may be turning gradually into fury. A sense of the growing ire of voters toward Wall Street comes from the Harris Poll, which has been charting public attitudes toward the financial community for more than a decade. Asked in late February whether "most successful people on Wall Street deserve to make the kind of money they earn," only 30 percent of those surveyed said yes, as opposed to 51 percent in 1997. Moreover, only 26 percent of Americans in the February 2009 Harris Poll believed that "people on Wall Street are as honest and moral as other people." (In the 1997 survey, that figure was 51 percent.)

<...>

That other 74 percent are the Americans to whom Obama spoke when he warned in his address to Congress, "We cannot afford to govern out of anger" and pledged, "I will not spend a single penny for the purpose of rewarding a single Wall Street executive." The public view in the Obama camp is that the voters--with the help of a little inspirational leadership from the president--recognize that the twin lions of patience and fortitude are required at this time of national testing. As Obama pollster Joel Benenson says, "Every piece of polling data I've seen--public or internal--shows that the American people understand the complexity of the problem and how it will take a longer time to fix than we're used to."

People need to stop writing BS articles conflating the average person working on Wall Street or for financial institutions with the greedy executives that caused this crisis. AIG has 116,000 employees; Citi has over 300,000.

You don't need to be an economist or wait for a full investigation or history to understand that the economy is in crisis and people are hurting.

People have every right to be angry. Anger is what focused politicians and the media on the festering economic sore. For eight years and longer, the media offered nothing but excuses for why everything Wall Street does is "special" and beyond the grasp of most Americans. They were and still are condescending.

I love this part from the OP article:

But the reality is that apolitical populism--a spasmodic outpouring of ideologically incoherent rage--could easily drown Obama's inevitable request for more bank bailout funds.

More condescension.