The New Republic
May 10, 2008
Clinton Has Become A Conservative Populist
by Jonathan Chait
The dying days of the Hillary Clinton campaign have brought the
breathtaking spectacle of a candidate la****ng out at every element of
public life that has nourished her career. The =FCber-wonk has
disparaged economists and expertise. The staunch ally of black America
has attacked her opponent for lacking sup****t of "working, hard-
working Americans, white Americans." People who thought they knew
Hillary Clinton have gazed in astonishment: What has she become? The
answer is, a conservative populist.
Conservative populism and liberal populism are entirely different
things. Liberal populism posits that the rich wield dispro****tionate
influence over the government and push for policies often at odds with
most people's interest. Conservative populism, by contrast, dismisses
any inference that the rich and the non-rich might have opposing
interests as "class warfare." Conservative populism prefers to divide
society along social lines, with the elites being intellectuals and
other snobs who fancy themselves better than average Americans.
Consider this analysis recently offered by Bill Clinton in Clarksburg,
West Virginia: "The great divide in this country is not by race or
even income, it's by those who think they are better than everyone
else and think they should play by a different set of rules." This is
precisely the dynamic that allows multimillionaires like George W.
Bush and Bill O'Reilly to present themselves as being on the side of
the little guy. A more classic expression of conservative populism
cannot be found.
Historically, the conservative populist's social divide ran along
racial and ethnic lines. In recent years, overt racism has all but
disappeared from mainstream political life, and even racial hot button
appeals like the 1988 Willie Horton ad have grown rare. What remains
is a residue of nostalgia about small towns--whose residents are said
to have stronger values and work harder than other Americans, and who
also happen to be overwhelmingly white. In 2004, after John Kerry
declared that some entertainers sup****ting him represented "the heart
and soul of America," George W. Bush embarked upon a national tour of
small- and mid-sized cities, where he would say, "I believe the heart
and soul of America is found in places like Duluth, Minnesota," or
other such places.
Likewise, Bill Clinton recently declared, "The people in small towns
in rural America, who do the work for America, and represent the
backbone and the values of this country, they are the people that are
carrying her through in this nomination." The corollary--that strong
values and hard work is in shorter supply among ethnically
heterogeneous urban residents--is left unstated. Hillary Clinton's
statement about "hard-working Americans, white Americans" simply made
explicit a theme that conservative populists usually keep implicit.
Liberal populism is mostly harnessed to a concrete legislative program
aimed at broadening prosperity. Al Gore's "people versus the powerful"
campaign focused on his differences with Bush over issues like
regulation of HMOs and progressive taxation. Conservative populism, by
contrast, is a way of exploiting the grievances it identifies without
redressing them. It has an ever-****fting array of targets =97 Michael
Dukakis's veto of a law requiring students to recite the Pledge of
Allegiance, or the rantings of Jeremiah Wright =97 but no way to knock
them down.
Conservative populists sometimes ape liberal populism by promising
material benefits to average people. But the promise is structured so
as to pose no threat to any wealthy economic interest. George W. Bush
offered tax cuts to the middle class, but paired them with far larger
tax cuts for the rich, so that, ultimately, the middle class bore a
larger pro****tion of the tax burden.
Hillary Clinton's embrace of the gas tax holiday is a miniature
example of the same pattern. Her plan, which rests upon the political
principle that high gasoline prices are unacceptable and that the
federal gas tax is a burden on hard-pressed Americans, is highly
congenial to the interests of oil companies. Yet she presents it as an
assault on Big Oil, much as Bush presented his tax cuts as a way to
force the rich to pay a higher share of the burden of government.
If economists or other social scientists dispute the conservative
populist's claims, that is only because they, too, are elitists. Bush
would dismiss objections to the upper class tilt of his tax cuts by
picking a middle class family (in this case, the Muellers) and saying,
"Oh, some of the sophisticates will say that $2,700 doesn't matter to
the Muellers. 'It doesn't sound like a lot to me.' It's a lot to them.
That's what counts."
And so, when Tim Russert said that economists believe the gas tax
holiday won't lower prices at the pump, Clinton campaign chairman
Terry MacAuliffe replied, "Maybe for Barack Obama and for many of your
economists, Tim, who you may talk to, you know what, maybe an extra
hundred bucks for them isn't a big deal. But I can tell you this, it
is a big deal for most Americans."
Social science analysis is the mortal enemy of conservative populism.
The liberal populist sees politics as a series of quantifiable trade-
offs between competing interests. The conservative populist offers an
appeal that can't be quantified: Who shares your values? Who is more
manly? (James Carville: "If she gave him one of her cojones, they'd
both have two.")
If a liberal populist cites experts or numbers to back his position,
that only proves to the conservative populist that he is out of touch.
It's the intellectual equivalent of buying arugula from Whole Foods. A
Clinton endorser addressed a rally last month, "You didn't go to
Harvard! You weren't born with a silver spoon in your mouth!" (Never
mind that Clinton graduated from Yale Law School and had a far more
stable, middle class upbringing than Obama.) In the liberal populists'
world, the locus of evil is K Street. In the conservative populists'
world, the locus of evil is Cambridge, Massachusetts.
In Clinton's defense, she obviously does not believe her own social
conservative rhetoric. But neither do Republican social conservatives.
She is not running for president so she can suspend the gas tax any
more than George H. W. Bush sought the office on order to increase the
rate of flag-saluting.
One conceit of the conservative populist style is that its
practitioners are "real," while its targets are "fake." For years,
Hillary Clinton put herself forward as the earnest liberal policy wonk
she actually is, while conservatives lambasted her as a phony. Since
she started campaigning as the enemy of all she once held dear, some
conservatives have started to appreciate her, even lauding her
authenticity. The Weekly Standard's Noemie Emery gushed that after
March 4, Hillary "began to seem real." Indeed, she is now real in
exactly the same way the conservative populists imagine themselves to
be.
---------
Jonathan Chait is a senior editor at The New Republic.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/05/09/opinion/main4085277.shtml
|
