I'll give co-populists John Edwards and Mike Huckabee credit for at least one jolly-good thing in this election cycle: They have upset the normally unflappable George Will, and by extension, I presume, all like him, as they sit in their gilded cages and contemplate the destruction of privilege -- oh, the unfairness of it all.
Actually, to say George is upset is to understate things. He is beside himself, foaming with seasonal rabidity; the poor man is right on the edge of the hysterical precipice -- the populists are coming, the populists are coming, and one would think they have George's personal number.
Yesterday he unleashed a fusillade in print that scorched the paper. Having pondered the existential threat that Edwards and Huckabee seem to represent to the steady-as-you-goers, Will fumed that "each overflows with and wallows in the pugnacity of the self-righteous who discern contemptible motives behind all disagreements with them, and who therefore think opponents are enemies."
Sounds more like George Bush and Dick Cheney to me.
Will must be reading his Hegel again. I too am guilty of thinking of opponents as enemies, rather than would-be friends in the whole thesis-antithesis-synthesis thing, but only because the enemies of progressivism have been screaming "UnAmerican!" at us for so long that I came to believe they didn't really like us. But I stand corrected, and I accept George's guileless friendship.
What does continue to puzzle, however, is why George became so exercised over Edwards and Huckabee's populist strategies, which only seem par for any political course that follows the likes of many an agonizing year of corporate-Republican rule. Here, Will emphasizes the North Carolinian's complicity in populistic shallowness:
"Edwards seems unaware that the world market sets the price of oil. He says a $100-a-barrel price is evidence of -- surging demand in India and China? unrest in Nigeria's oil fields? No, 'corporate greed.' That is Edwards' explanation of every unpleasantness."
True on both counts. But what I can't understand is why it upsets Will so much. No pol can rally the masses without easily digested, readily understandable bumper-sticker sloganeering. And that's mostly what the bloody shirt of Edwards' "corporate greed" is. Obama's is "change." Clinton's is, was, and is again "experience," or "experience for change," or "change through experience," or some such thing. I'm not sure, but neither is Hillary, and that's Hillary's problem.
Mr. Will does indeed explain why it upsets, but I thought him a trifle more sophisticated. Writes George in a phobic, Cato-institutional froth: "Populists want to sharply increase [government] by expanding the regulatory state's reach and enlarging its agenda of determining the distribution of wealth."
Ah, the socialist bogeyman. But give me one of those famous breaks for which kids plead. This is a conservative nation, George, and no one is going to appropriate your second summer home. All Edwards has advocated is banning lobbyists -- one assumes only corporate lobbyists; there are, after all, others -- from White House conclaves. But he's also gone out of his way to note that he would, of course, work and play well with the legislative children on Capitol Hill.
Now, George, stop and think. The legislation that trickles up to the president's desk will continue to be filtered through the influence, demands and outright graft of corporate lobbyists. Edwards could, I suppose, sit there in the Oval Office and veto corporate-friendly bill after bill, only to encounter congressional overrides or executive-legislative gridlock. What either would accomplish is largely in the eye of the beholder; but one thing it most decidedly would not accomplish is the equitable "[re]distribution of wealth."
That, I'm sorry to say, awaits a fundamental reworking of human nature; a vastly consensual, democratic socialism that is centuries or millennia down the road, if ever, of this historically conservative country.
So George, chill out, to borrow yet another cliche from our youth. Even should Edwards somehow miraculously make it to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue -- which I happen to think he will, but as vice president -- the sky won't fall; the unprivileged villagers won't march on your affluent digs; and the lobbyists, as you correctly point out, will merely redouble their efforts.
If the next president and the elected officials on the Hill don't rise out of the D.C. bubble long enough to realize that the peasants are wising up to corporate written policy and what it is doing to them and their country George Will and his ilk may find themselves surrounded by pitchforks and torches and their second homes in ashes. Does old George really believe that those angry peasants are waiting for a populist president to lead them? It is a populist president and a fearful congress that will save him and his ilk. One more corporatist president and one more arrogant congress and all hell may well break loose.
Populism is just politics, George. That's all it is. Edwards sells his crackerjack brand, Huckabee sells another, and Ron Paul sells yet something else. But in the end, each surprise in the box comes out looking pretty much like the others. Because money hires the pols and writes the rules. And until that system is reduced to rubble, ain't hardly nothin' gonna change.
Reducing it to rubble will be the beginning of the change. Only the beginning!
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The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.
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