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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
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