Sock the rich
Published September 15, 2015
by Gary Pearce, Talking About Politics, September 14, 2015.
In North Carolina, thousands rally for an aging lefty in his race against Bill and Hillary Clinton’s New Democratic Party. In Britain, Tony Blair’s New Labour Party picks an aging, even-leftier lefty for its new leader. What in the wide, wide world of sports is going on here?
What’s going on isn’t just on the left. It’s on the right, too. It underlies the rise of Donald Trump and Ben Carson and the fall of Jeb Bush and Scott Walker.
It’s resentment of the rich. It’s a reaction against the lingering damage from George Bush’s 2008 recession. It’s a direct result of middle America feeling doubly screwed: left behind economically and marginalized politically.
A big reason for Trump’s rise is that he tells the truth about the Republican Party: that it and all of its establishment candidates are owned by and indebted to a handful of billionaires.
When even Republicans rebel against the rich, you know something radical is going on in the body politic.
Conventional wisdom is always that campaigns will go along conventionally. Which they do, until they don’t.
This may be the time they don’t.
September 15, 2015 at 1:15 pm
Richard L Bunce says:
... and how is the Real Estate bubble bursting in 2008 the George Bush recession?
September 15, 2015 at 2:12 pm
GV Black says:
Methinks you are dreaming, Mr. Pearce, if you think the populist movement is the result of the George W Bush 2008 recession. The rise of the current populist movement can be linked directly to the Obama Administration's Executive Branch overreach. Nobody even remembers what the economy was like in 2008 except those wild lefty talking heads who continue to mislead the public with their rhetoric which has no basis in fact.
