Trump, the Tea Party, the Republicans and the Other
This is a long read that’s well worth the time you will spend on it.
Othering is at the heart of populism. The essence of populism is a group antipathy, profoundly felt, toward perceived elites. It is their opposition to the elites, the Other, that gives a populist movement its identity; the movement is defined by its opposition to the Other. Populists see elites as corrupt, powerful, and ideologically suspect. In American politics, populism of the left takes aim at, and defines itself in relation to, financial elites.
But populism of the right in the United States predominantly defines itself against cultural elites; above all on the populist right, the domestic Other is American liberalism, whose dominant figures are the Democratic Party and its “client base,” the “takers,” largely minorities, who support the party for its “giveaways.” But, among much else, the liberal Other includes Hollywood, university professors, urban life, and a host of patterns of consumption.
The Club for Growth is a wealthy political-action committee that, like the advocacy groups associated with the Koch brothers, has frequently supported Tea Party candidates in the name of free-market absolutist economic policies. In 2004, the Club ran a famous advertisement18)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4-vEwD_7Hk attacking presidential candidate Howard Dean that prefigured how Tea Party identity was forged by naming the domestic Other and defining itself implicitly in contrast. When a couple, white seniors, in front of their plainly nonurban house—this would turn out to be the core Tea Party demographic—is asked by an announcer their view of Dean’s tax policies, it turns into an occasion to vent on an inventory of associations with the liberal world:
Man: What do I think? Well, I think Howard Dean should take his tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading … Woman: … body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show back to Vermont where it belongs. Man: Got it?
The Tea Party was prefigured in the 2008 vice-presidential campaign of Sarah Palin. Palin’s rallies were often raucous occasions, where attendees evoked a devotion to the candidate nowhere to be found at rallies for John McCain, who was running at the head of the ticket.
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