Matt Taibbi: The peasant mentality lives on in America

[MikeWB]

The peasant mentality lives on in America

Matt Taibbi
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Conservatives and the Right
by Matt Taibbi | April 14, 2009 - 4:16pm
It took a good long while for news of the Teabag movement to penetrate the periphery of my consciousness — I kept hearing things about it and dismissing them, sure that the whole business was some kind of joke. Like a Daily Show invention, say. It pains me to say this as an American, but we are the only people on earth dumb enough to use a nationwide campaign of "teabag parties" as a form of mass protest, in the middle of a real economic crisis.

What's next? The Great Dirty Sanchez-In of 2010? A Million Man Felch? (Insert Rusty Trombone joke here).

This must be a terrible time to be a right-winger. A vicious paradox has been thrust upon the once-ascendant conservatives. On the one hand they are out of power, and so must necessarily rail against the Obama administration. On the other hand they have to vilify, as dangerous anticapitalist activity, the grass-roots protests against the Geithner bailouts and the excess of companies like AIG. That leaves them with no recourse but to dream up wholesale lunacies along the lines of Glenn Beck's recent "Fascism With a Happy Face" rants, which link the protesting "populists" and the Obama adminstration somehow and imagine them as one single nefarious, connected, ongoing effort to install a totalitarian regime.

This is not a simple rhetorical accomplishment. It requires serious mental gymnastics to describe the Obama administration — particularly the Obama administration of recent weeks, which has given away billions to Wall Street and bent over backwards to avoid nationalization and pursue a policy that preserves the private for-profit status of the bailed-out banks — as a militaristic dictatorship of anti-wealth, anti-private property forces. You have to somehow explain the Geithner/Paulson decisions to hand over trillions of taxpayer dollars to the rich bankers as the formal policy expression of progressive rage against the rich. Not easy. In order to pull off this argument, in fact, you have to grease the wheels with a lot of apocalyptic language and imagery, invoking as Beck did massive pictures of Stalin and Orwell and Mussolini (side by side with shots of Geithner, Obama and Bernanke), scenes of workers storming the Winter Palace interspersed with anti-AIG protests, etc. — and then maybe you have to add a crazy new twist, like switching from complaints of "socialism" to warnings of "fascism." Rhetorically, this is the equivalent of trying to paint a picture by hurling huge handfuls of paint at the canvas. It's desperate, last-ditch-ish behavior.

It's been strange and kind of depressing to watch the conservative drift in this direction. In a way, actually, the Glenn Beck show has been drearily fascinating of late. It's not often that we get to watch someone go insane on national television; trapped in an echo chamber of his own spiraling egomania, with apparently no one at his network willing to pull the plug and put him out of his misery, Beck has lately gone from being a mildly annoying media dingbat to a self-imagined messiah who looks like he's shouldering more and more of the burdens of Christ with each passing day. And because he's stepping into a vacuum of conservative leadership — there's no one else out there who is offering real red meat to the winger crowd — he's begun to attract not professional help but apostles, in the form of Chuck Norris (who believes we have to prepare for armed revolution and may prepare a run for "president of Texas") and pinhead Midwestern congresswoman Michelle Bachmann, a woman who is looking more and more like George Foreman to Sarah Palin's Joe Frazier in the Heavyweight Championship of Stupid. Down goes Frazier! Down goes Frazier!

This new Holy Trinity of right-wing basket cases has been pushing all sorts of crazy hallucinations of late, from Bachmann warning that the Americorps program would eventually be turned into a regime of forced re-education for American youth, to Beck's meanderings about Obama creating FEMA-run concentration camps to warehouse conservative dissidents, to Norris and Beck stirring up talk of secessionist movements. And a lot of people are having fun with this, because, well, it's funny. It's like a Farrelly Brothers version of right-wing political agitation. But it's also kind of sad.

After all, the reason the winger crowd can't find a way to be coherently angry right now is because this country has no healthy avenues for genuine populist outrage. It never has. The setup always goes the other way: when the excesses of business interests and their political proteges in Washington leave the regular guy broke and screwed, the response is always for the lower and middle classes to split down the middle and find reasons to get pissed off not at their greedy bosses but at each other. That's why even people like Beck's audience, who I'd wager are mostly lower-income people, can't imagine themselves protesting against the Wall Street barons who in actuality are the ones who fucked them over. Beck pointedly compared the AIG protesters to Bolsheviks: "[The Communists] basically said 'Eat the rich, they did this to you, get 'em, kill 'em!'" He then said the AIG and G20 protesters were identical: "It's a different style, but the sentiments are exactly the same: Find 'em, get 'em, kill 'em!'" Beck has an audience that's been trained that the rich are not appropriate targets for anger, unless of course they're Hollywood liberals, or George Soros, or in some other way linked to some acceptable class of villain, to liberals, immigrants, atheists, etc. — Ted Turner, say, married to Jane Fonda.

But actual rich people can't ever be the target. It's a classic peasant mentality: going into fits of groveling and bowing whenever the master's carriage rides by, then fuming against the Turks in Crimea or the Jews in the Pale or whoever after spending fifteen hard hours in the fields. You know you're a peasant when you worship the very people who are right now, this minute, conning you and taking your shit. Whatever the master does, you're on board. When you get frisky, he sticks a big cross in the middle of your village, and you spend the rest of your life praying to it with big googly eyes. Or he puts out newspapers full of innuendo about this or that faraway group and you immediately salute and rush off to join the hate squad. A good peasant is loyal, simpleminded, and full of misdirected anger. And that's what we've got now, a lot of misdirected anger searching around for a non-target to mis-punish... can't be mad at AIG, can't be mad at Citi or Goldman Sachs. The real villains have to be the anti-AIG protesters! After all, those people earned those bonuses! If ever there was a textbook case of peasant thinking, it's struggling middle-class Americans burned up in defense of taxpayer-funded bonuses to millionaires. It's really weird stuff. And bound to get weirder, I imagine, as this crisis gets worse and more complicated.
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[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Thanks MikeWB,

I really enjoy Taibbi.

Made me think of these real American populists that saw the problem pretty clearly. In fact, they first proposed the idea of a central bank (non-Jew of course) off the Gold Standard... but Warburg took their ideas and created the Federal Reserve based on the Populist idea for it anyway as part of the Rothschild empire.

Anti-Semitism was not something which was confined to the early history of the movement, or to its rank and file. William Jennings Bryan was adept at switching between coded anti-Semitic language, and preaching people's need to get past racial prejudice. The most notable example of Populist anti-Semitism can be found in the novel A Tale of Two Nations, written by the Populist thinker "Coin" Harvey, who was also the author of Coin's Financial School, one of the most popular pro-silver arguments to be published during the Populist period. A Tale of Two Nations was the story of a wealthy London banker, Baron Rothe, who engineers a plot to keep the United States from ever using a silver as currency. In the novel Rothe sends a henchman to the US to `encourage' congressmen and economists to support the gold standard. The henchman, Rogasner, falls in love with an American girl, who is in love with a Nebraskan congressman of the pro-silver variety. The characters in the book are either thinly disguised historical figures or thinly disguised racial stereotypes. Rogasner, the dark European was clearly a Jewish villain out to ruin the Caucasian race. His love was a shixa goddess, protecting herself from the threat of miscegenation by falling in love with the literary equivalent of William Jennings Bryan. And the Rothe character was a symbol for the Rothschild House. All of this fit neatly into Harvey's Populist theory of history which saw the Jewish banking houses, and therefore the Jewish race, as the source of the common man's problems.
http://projects.vassar.edu/1896/antisemitism.html

Grover (Soliloquizing): "How happy I could be with either were the other fair charmer away."
(Gold Maids from New and Old England): "Don't look at those brazen Silver Hussies, Grover, we are the stuff!"
Silver South and West: "Don't you like our style? Come, Grover, throw off that hypnotic spell and flirt with us."

Populists jumped all over the issue, shouting that it was yet another example of Washington being in league with the international banks and Wall Street. To the Populists it was the perfect example of a conspiracy against the common man. There was an Anti Semitic thread to their argument as Populists railed against the Rothschilds House (a bank which was a member of the syndicate) as the source of the conspiracy, trying to suggest that Washington and Wall Street were in the hands of the Jewish banking houses of England, and that soon all of America would be as well.

Moral of the Story... Jew puppets like Glenn Beck are frankly Mormon-Jew corrupters... insane and stupid to boot... Populists would have beat the crap out of Jew puppet doofuses such as  Glen Beck if he was around in the 1890s.

 Hell, I want to beat the crap out of all the TV-Radio J-puppets today from Dimbulb to Glenn Doofus Beck... all of them are corrupters!