The new American populist right
By Manuel E. Yepe

A CubaNews translation. Edited by Walter Lippmann.

“These are desperate times to America, and unless we have Tea Party Guardians protecting our values, we will fall. (…) The Socialists who at one time felt emboldened now feel cornered and threatened. (…) The Globalists, with all of their vast resources, are organizing to fight Conservative Patriots, tooth and nail. (…) The Army of Darkness will not be defeated easily; they lust for control of our beloved Nation. They know, if we falter on just one issue, they can win all!”

Thus begins an appeal issued by the American Tea Party organization asking its “patriot” followers for donations. Its contradictory statements are typical of the populist right and shed light on the political stance of the apparent absurdity of the U.S. political scene that the Tea Party seems to be.

For all their ability to discern Wall Street’s role in the country’s general crisis, their members put every evil and danger down to the “Socialists” –in their view the main obstacle to reduce the State’s function and give more elbowroom to the market’s “invisible hand”– rather than goad the government into putting the lid on the excesses of big business.

“Consider this: we are spending our resources faster than ever, just trying to stay ahead of the Socialists onslaught of greed. The fight is forcing us to travel to Washington to meet with decision-makers, mail countless letters and make endless presentations”, the document goes, claiming financial aid to fund the Tea Party’s tactics.

“We fight with pennies, many times marching empty-handed against immeasurable odds! All the while the Left-Wing Socialcrats bask in obese pools of booty! We no longer can stand by and watch while U.S. cities turn against law-abiding U.S. citizens because citizen victims want to protect themselves, such as in the case of Arizona”.

In theory, a populist right movement is the one that brings together an anti-elite standing and actions to prop or boost a repressive, privilege-granting social crusade largely spurred by people’s grievances against their system, trying to turn any hostile motivation toward either a petty section of the upper crust or other groups wrongly identified as part of it, mostly oppressed and socially excluded sectors standing as easy and very vulnerable targets that they can be made the scapegoat for the popular struggle and thus leave the higher class they truly protect virtually untouched.

Against the chosen scapegoats they launch successive campaigns of marginalization, demonization and dehumanization to portray them as threatening, lowly, malicious, sinful and possessed, trying to make their allegations more rational using stereotyping, prejudice, discrimination and other resources as well as no end of apocalyptic references often included in the basic narrative of the religious, secular, political and cultural discourse commonly championed by the U.S.

Fueled by fear if the left and its political progress, these right-wing repressive populist movements are always used to counteract any revolutionary, liberation or social reform current, and they go way back in U.S. history. The first one was the Ku Klux Klan, established as a counterrevolutionary force when slavery was abolished and the South entered the Reconstruction period from 1865 to 1877 that followed the Civil War, in order to resolve matters still pending, especially the social reinsertion of the freed black people.

In fact, right-wing populism is present in the mythology that says “the American people” are represented by neither the workers nor the rich, but the “middle class” or “ordinary citizens” (who are not to be mistaken by “humble people”, a term these populists themselves reject).

Even if most of its members are white, right-wing/neo-Nazi populism should not be identified as a whites-only organization, because it’s not. Some of them are just poorly educated people who work for a living, fail to understand their society, and hold a grudge against the wealthy and cultured.

For instance, the Republican candidate for governor of New Mexico is said to be a woman of Mexican extraction who identifies with the Tea Party, but as many other Hispanics in that State she denies her origins and is a hardcore conservative, racist and anti-native person, probably so that she herself is not discriminated against.

July 2010