You knew this was coming, right? There's one banker the right has no problem vilifying:
Yeah, he alone was grossly incompetent and venal. The others were all "over-regulated."
Needless to say, it's all Obama's fault because he's the one who's truly in the pockets of Wall Street bankers. Whom they love and want to protect from the marauding protesters, right?
I noticed in the debate over the week-end that the candidates were trying their best to come up with an appropriate "conservative" way to hate on Wall Street. They sounded very, very confused. As does this fellow:
This is the environment where Obama delivers his new economic agenda. Remember, this is the president who got over $10 million more than Sen. John McCain from financial firms last election cycle.
Goldman Sachs (Yes, the guys the Occupiers hate so much) was Obama’s second highest contributor. That didn’t stop him from going to Osawatomie, Kansas this week, to promote talk of class warfare.
“Their philosophy is simple. We are better off when everybody is left to fend for themselves and play by their own rules,” he said of opponents.
Now, is that supposed to be
bad according to conservatives? Or good? It's hard to tell. And it get's even more mystifying:
Osawatomie was an appropriate choice for Obama, though for different reasons than he had planned.
Obama had wanted to channel his inner Teddy Roosevelt. Roosevelt had spoken at Osawatomie in 1910 to push a progressive economic agenda. The current president (Pull date: Nov. 6, 2012) used his trip to emphasize his Kansan roots and to push class warfare.
Osawatomie was once ground zero for another type of warfare when the area was called “Bleeding Kansas” and John Brown’s abolitionists fought violently against pro-slave forces. In the 1856 “‘Battle of Osawatomie’ five of Brown’s men, including one of his sons, were killed and the town burned.”
In 2011, the class war promoted by Team Obama, the Occupiers and the rest of the radical left is only now turning violent.
It sounds as though he sees Obama and Occupy Wall Street as John Brown and the abolitionists. Ok, I get that. But that makes the Republicans and the Wall Street bankers the pro-slavery forces. Is that really the metaphor he's looking for?
One could point out that the only violence that's actually been perpetrated against any persons thus far has been
against the protesters, but that would step on a delightfully mixed up thesis. It does show how much the normal game pieces are scrambled in this debate, but this is mostly because the Democrats have the White House and the right wing has a political incentive to bash them for being friendly to Wall Street and hostile to "Job Creators" at the same time. I think we would be seeing a much clearer conservative vision if they were in power.
Right wing populism, after all, is not hostile to Big Money. It's hostile to Big Government. But it uses a specific kind of populist appeal that should be recognizable to anyone who's been watching these Republican presidential debates.
Here's how historian Michael Kazin describes it:
Populism in America is nearly as old as the republic itself. Since President Andrew Jackson's epic battle to shut down the "money power" symbolized by the Second Bank of the United States in 1833, politicians and citizen-activists have voiced their outrage about the "elites" who ignored, corrupted or betrayed the common people.
Right-wing populists typically drum up resentments based on differences of religion and cultural style. Their progressive counterparts focus on economic grievances. But the common language is promiscuous -- useful to anyone who asserts that virtue resides in ordinary people and has the skills and platform to bring their would-be superiors down to earth
During the half-century since McCarthy's remarkable rise and ignominious fall, his fellow conservatives have rarely stopped singing from the same populist hymnal.
"I had the privilege of living most of my life in my small town," beamed Sarah Palin in her bravura speech to accept the GOP vice presidential nomination Wednesday night. It was, she explained, the kind of place inhabited by the people "who do some of the hardest work in America...who grow our food, run our factories, and fight our wars." She defiantly contrasted her plain-folks view of the world to that of "the permanent political establishment" and "the Washington elite."
It may be the same old song, but cultural populism has helped Republicans win many an election and has consistently put their opponents on the defensive. Richard M. Nixon championed the values of "Middle America;" Ronald Reagan damned a tax policy that took "from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned," and George W. Bush mocked "liberal elites" for being soft on terrorism and warm towards gay marriage.
Conservatism would never have become a large and influential movement without such language; and liberals have yet to find a way to counter it.
It's possible that Occupy Wall Street is starting to do that (or the economic pitch is just more salient.) And it's obviously confusing the hell out of the conservatives. They're reduced to trying to turn the first black president into John Brown and the Republicans into angry slave-owners to make their point.
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