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Don't ask me why Sarah Palin really announced her intention to resign as governor of Alaska later this month.
My first exposure to her came last summer when she spoke
at the Republican National Convention, and I thought it was
a pretty good speech. She gave a shout-out to Hillary
Clinton, she hit on Barack Obama's thin resume, and
refreshingly for a Republican, she referred to public
schools
rather than government schools.
She
walked her talk on abortion.
As the campaign progressed, she showed she was a good
sport by going on Saturday Night Live. I kept hoping she'd
address Colorado's Republican leaders and explain to them
the virtues of taxing the hell out of the oil and gas
industry so as to lower the levies on the rest of us. She
was good at revving up crowds, and as the late Dr. Hunter
S. Thompson once observed, Every successful politician
needs a dark, kinky streak of Mick Jagger somewhere in his
soul.
But what was she using her talents for? She has been the latest incarnation of modern populism as practiced by the Republican Party -- not the economic populism of the 1890s, but the cultural populism perfected by Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace.
The old-line populists railed against the trusts and an economic elite that controlled the nation's commerce, that constricted the money supply to the benefit of creditors and the detriment of borrowers.
The populists wanted to inflate the currency. One way to
put more money into circulation was to make silver (which
the Mountain West was producing in great quantity) into
legal currency, which it had not been since the crime of
1873.' Thus the farmers of the Midwest and South formed an
alliance with the miners of the West, who were ready for
armed conflict.
They saw immigration as a tool of Eastern capitalists to
increase the labor supply and thereby depress wages. On
racial matters, there was Tom Watson of Georgia, who
addressed an integrated audience with this: You are made
to hate each other, because upon that hatred is rested the
keystone of the arch of financial despotism which enslaves
you both. You are deceived and blinded that you may not see
how this race antagonism perpetuates a monetary system
which beggars you both.
Watson, the Populist nominee for vice-president in 1896, later became as vile a racist as ever disgraced American public life. (I just started reading a biography to find out what went wrong.)
As you can see, the populists of yore were not agitating against arugula, latte-drinkers or Volvo drivers.
But some obscure salad ingredient becomes an issue with cultural populism. This is about a dozen kinds of weird when you stop to think about it.
The gay couple across the street? What possible threat
could they be to your marriage, job, religion or anything
else that really matters to you? Never mind, there's a
just like the rest of us
Republican like Marilyn
Musgrave spoiling to protect you from this non-threat.
The Coastal Media Elite? How strange that most of the attacks on that group come from places like the National Review, headquartered in the coastl city of New York, the Weekly Standard, based in the coastal city of Washington, D.C., and Rush Limbaugh, broadcasting from the coastal enclave of West Palm Beach, Florida.
This could go on indefinitely, but think how much fun it
would be if Palin used her ability to rouse crowds for some
old-time populism and started wondering why we need to give
billions of dollars to the financiers who got us into this
economic mess, instead of winking and babbling about the
real America.
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