Ever since last November's election I've been trying to understand the role of right wing populism in our democracy. This is a movement that arguably began with George Wallace's 1968 and 1972 Presidential campaigns, began to flourish when Rush Limbaugh took to the airwaves in 1984 and perhaps reached its zenith with the rise of the Tea Party in 2010.
My question is this. Is this a real political movement or is it the most successful disinformation campaign (financed by America's financial elites) in the history of modern politics? I'm guessing the latter because if it was a true political movement the lives of its working class partisans would have improved in the last 40 years. Instead, the bottom 95% of wage earners have marched in place, while the financial elites have flourished. Look at these two charts.
The first chart shows that ever since the Right Wing Populist movement got started, the wages of the top 5% have soared while the wages of the average Rush Limbaugh listener have stayed flat. The second chart shows that while in the 1960's and 1970's real hourly wages and median household income tended to rise with productivity, by 1980 most of the gains in productivity were flowing not to workers but to the financial elites.
So what is the role of the Right Wing Populist like Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck if it is not to improve the relative economic situation of their listeners? The philosopher Walter Benjamin, trying to explain the appeal of fascism to the German and Italian masses in the 1930's had an idea: "Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves." This, in essence, is the role of talk radio and Fox News. Limbaugh, Beck and Murdoch have no interest in changing the financial status quo that had reigned since the rise of Reagan. But they are aware of the potentially volatile mixture of working class resentment and rising unemployment and so they give the masses "a chance to express themselves." How perfect to blame your current economic torpor on external forces: illegal immigrants or a President with a "Kenyan, anti-colonial" worldview.
So it's no wonder that the Koch Brothers, through their front groups like Dick Armey's Freedom Works, are anxious to finance the Tea Party movement. Because they know its just a Kabuki play. Working class anger will get vented, but the unstoppable ascent of the financial elites will continue. Calling in to Rush Limbaugh and bitching about Obama may make the worker with falling wages feel better, but it will never change her economic circumstances.