Gilded Age Politics

by digby

It isn’t just that the very,very rich are gobbling up more and more oftheir share of the nation’s wealth just as the did during the Gilded Age. The political cross currents are depressingly familiar as well.

This unfortunately explains why Rahm Emmanuel is telling the candidates that they should hammer on the Mexicans — Stan Greenberg has run some new focus groups and discovered … the new Reagan Democrats! (This time they hate Mexicans instead of blacks, but hey, it’s all good for our purposes.)

I’m not entirely surprised. When the rich get richer, uninformed people blame those who are below them on the economic scale. It’s a strong feature of right wing populism. (See: Dobbs, Lou.)

The difference this time is the growing and influential population of Hispanic citizens who are not going to allow this reflexive ignorance to become the easy demagogic tool it once was. The Democratic strategists had better find something better than this unless they want to spend another two decades fighting over the same diminishing electoral terain they’ve been battling over for the past two decades.

*Jack Balkin has written a fascinating discussion of populism and progressivism, and the pitfalls of each, in this paper. It’s a good time to study up if you haven’t cracked your Hofstadter lately.

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