Constituent disservice
by digby
“What created this mess,” Walsh said, leaning forward and jabbing a finger at his constituent, “is your government, which has demanded for years that everybody be in a home, and we’ve made it as easy as possible for people to be in homes. All the marketplace does is respond to what the government does. The government sets the rules. Don’t blame banks and don’t blame the marketplace for the mess we’re in right now. I am tired of hearing that crap! I am tired of hearing that crap!”
Having raised his voice to a shout, Walsh didn’t really have anywhere left to go when another constituent started to ask him about banks “exploiting the situation” through predatory lending and derivatives trading. Just plain yelling while his employers heard him out hadn’t worked, so he stepped closer to her, cranked the volume knob to 11, and cut her off mid-sentence “because this pisses me off!”
Most politicians are able to finesse these unfortunate little disagreements a bit better than the crude Mr Walsh. But make no mistake: he is expressing what most right wing ideologues truly believe: the problem was caused by the government making banks loan money to the wrong people. (And I think you know who those people are…)
This is probably as good a juncture as any to reprint this little piece from Chip Berlet on some of the characteristics of Right wing populism:
One of the staples of repressive and right-wing populist ideology has been producerism, a doctrine that champions the so-called producers in society against both “unproductive” elites and subordinate groups defined as lazy or immoral.
Kazin points out that as it developed in the nineteenth century,
…the romance of producerism had a cultural blind spot; it left unchallenged strong prejudices toward not just African-Americans but also toward recent immigrants who had not learned or would not employ the language and rituals of this variant of the civic religion. . . . Even those native-born activists who reached out to immigrant laborers assumed that men of Anglo-American origins had invented political democracy, prideful work habits, and well-governed communities of the middling classes.
In the 1920s industrial philosophy of Henry Ford, and Father Coughlin’s fascist doctrine in the 1930s, producerism fused with antisemitic attacks against “parasitic” Jews. Producerism, with its baggage of prejudice, remains today the most common populist narrative on the right, and it facilitates the use of demonization and scapegoating as political tools.
Walsh isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed and didn’t realize he had a “teachable moment.” But I’m sure others, faced with similar questions, are handling it more smoothly.
Update: Walsh “exasperates” the problem.
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