Episode 147: The GOP's 'Rightwing Populism'  Rebrand (Part I) - How Billionaire-Backed Charlatans Pick Off Disillusioned Lefties

“It’s not about right vs left, but the people vs the elites,” “Wall Street and the media are leaching off hard working Americans like you and me who play by the rules.” “Our elite have sold us out to China.” American media consumers are routinely fed, a particular, and often confusing brand of so-called “rightwing populism” –– nominally taking on “elites”, “the media,” and “bankers” and standing up for the every man but with a suspicious mix of xenophobia, self-help audience flattery, anti-Semitic dogwhistles and a semantics cup-and-ball game about how exactly, the speaker defines “elite” or “the media”.

With the rise and eventual presidency of Donald Trump there’s been no shortage of pontificating and reporting about the appeal of “rightwing populism” but one aspect worth dissecting is the way in which wealthy Republican-funded media deliberately seeks to win over confused and sometimes lefty media consumers with a clever mix of faux class warfare, vague appeals to post-partisanship and piggybacking off legitimate discontent with the Democratic party to sow nihilism and suppress voter turnout.

From President Andrew Jackson and Alabama governor George Wallace to today’s billionaire-backed charlatans like Tucker Carlson, Saagar Enjeti, JD Vance and Josh Hawley, there is a longstanding effort to take the working man and insist the author of his suffering isn’t a class of people marked by a concentration of wealth and power, but a deliberately ill-defined “elite” of snot-nosed, overeducated liberals, immigrants, Jews, secularists, women and academics out to undermine their culture and way of life.

On this first part of a two-part episode, we focus on the many ways that “rightwing populism” operates to confuse and distract, to pick off independents, liberals and even leftists, exploiting real failures of the Democratic Party and use fake class war to muddy the waters of real class war.

Our guest is Daniel Martinez HoSang.

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Guest

Daniel Martinez HoSang is Associate Professor of Ethnicity, Race and Migration, and American Studies at Yale University. He is the author and editor of numerous books, including Producers, Parasites, Patriots: Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity, which he co-wrote with Joseph Lowndes. His most recent book is A Wider Type of Freedom: How Struggles for Racial Justice Liberate Everyone, published just last month, September 2021, by University of California Press.

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Show Notes

“Parasites of Government”: Racial Antistatism and Representations of Public Employees amid the Great Recession [PDF]

Daniel Martinez HoSang and Joseph Lowndes | December 2016 | American Quarterly

The Populist Pundits

Daniel Guastella | February 23, 2020 | Jacobin

Isn’t “Right-Wing Populism” Just Fascism?

Nathan J. Robinson | June 18, 2020 | Current Affairs

Andrew Jackson, America’s Original Anti-Establishment Candidate

Harry Watson | March 31, 2016 | Smithsonian Magazine

It Happened Here: Trump’s movement is a uniquely American fascism, built on a century of American imperialism.

Jonathan M. Katz | January 9, 2021 | Foreign Policy

The John Birch Society Is Back

John Savage | July 16, 2017 | Politico

The John Birch Society is still influencing American politics, 60 years after its founding

Christopher Towler | December 6, 2018 | The Conversation

Trump Has Left the Building, but the Foundations Are Still in Place

Rafael Khachaturian | January 21, 2021 | The Nation

Teamsters Won’t Endorse Buchanan

November 28, 1999 | Associated Press

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Transcript

For a full transcript of this episode, go here.

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