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RE: "If the American press were to use simple and clear labels like this, it would save us all a lot of political confusion and America’s voters would be a whole lot smarter." Never happen.

Why does our media refer to #GQP lying fascists as populists?

Because the media is owned by fascist sympathizers who want what the GQP promises: lower taxes and fewer regulations.

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In your reportage heaven, Thom!

We need it, alright,  However, we might as well also look-up the words appropriate and colloquial, because that is what would happen to these "babies" after the "adoption".

Betrayal is going to be the word in June. Much of what happened to this country during the reign of the psychopath was in plain sight and is burned onto our retinas. Time to hear the rest of the story of January 6th, who betrayed our democracy, and who still is by refusing to talk.. 

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This is a significant and timely analysis by Mr. Hartman; indeed, we need leaders that are sufficiently tuned to a broad array of needs and suggestions shared by a broad array of voters that cross our current US party lines.

Senator Sanders, for example, with all his gray hair, is probably wise enough by now to have expressed many of the concerns that Presidents Roosevelt identified and addressed so well almost 100 years. Many of us are no longer able to identify with the strange voting goals of the Democratic Party, or the loud switch-and-forget promises made by the Republican Party leaders since President Reagan. And while we are slightly interested in the passion of the so-radical notions of many of the New Democrats many, many voters are really tired of all their heavy breathing and urban issues.

Really, a true populist US President would probably find immediate consensus on these issues:

1. Apply Social security taxes to all income

2. Abolish all current student debt and offer a 2-year public service contract to all our young people and then pay for their education, apprenticeship or technical certificates

3. Establish a state-by-state solution to fully paid Medicare-for-All; the Covid years and the EU application of one-size-fits-every-one probably destroyed trust in all the one-size health experts.

5. Establish a minimum corporate business tax level equal to the average tax rate paid by the average individual.

Then go FIX the roads, bridges, utilities, schools and assisted living facilities so our children can experience the hopefulness that the Baby Boomers felt from 1946-70, and see a new rebuilding of our middle class.

A populist president would propose all this, and we are the voters. We can vote for candidates that will only take $29 donations from anyone.

Mr. Hardin's citation:

There is, however, plenty of real populism in America’s history.

In the last century, Theodore Roosevelt was our first populist president, followed by his cousin Franklin D. Roosevelt. FDR was reelected three times because he did the will of the people. He was followed by Harry Truman, who engaged a war in Korea that people didn’t like (not populist) and they voted for the peace candidate in 1952, bringing in Republican Dwight Eisenhower.

Eisenhower was a populist, too. He kept taxes on the rich at 91% and continued FDR‘s work on the New Deal, supporting labor unions and building a modern America for the middle class.

As Michael Hiltzik notes in his book The New Deal: A Modern History, just one of those programs used that top 91% personal and 48% corporate income tax bracket to rebuild America from top to bottom:

“The WPA produced, among many other projects, 1,000 miles of new and rebuilt airport runways, 651,000 miles of highway, 124,000 bridges, 8,000 parks, and 18,000 playgrounds and athletic fields; some 84,000 miles of drainage pipes, 69,000 highway light standards, and 125,000 public buildings built, rebuilt, or expanded. Among the latter were 41,300 schools.”

Eisenhower added an additional 47,856 miles of interstate highway and continued an aggressive program to build schools, hospitals, and public works. Instead of getting tax breaks to billionaires and cushy contracts to crony contractors, he built schools, parks and hospitals across the nation.

Presidents John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Jerry Ford, and Jimmy Carter were all populists, by and large: each promoted programs that were widely popular and help strengthen the middle class.

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How do we get this message to "the media" and drill it into the consciousness of more people? With a massive letter campaign? Feedback on their (usually user-unfriendly) websites?

I attended a media conference in Wisconsin about 20 years ago but that was put on by a liberal/progressive organization as I recall. Rachel Maddow had a booth before she joined MSNBC and Glen Greenwald conducted group sessions. Language choices are crucial. But starting with media directed toward kids and young people with accurate vocabulary and history might be most effective over the long term.

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We have a problem, Thom. The people you refer to don't read your column, I don't have the words to tell you how much I wish they did, [read your column] but they don't.

The people I run into on this site are pretty universally impressive. I haven't met one yet who did NOT teach me something.

My complaint towards you is that while this is a great and informative rant, it doesn't tell me how to fix it. I have exactly the same complaint against myself, I have no idea how to inform the misinformed.

I will say one thing, Proctor & Gamble spend about $800 million a year to pitch Tide Detergent to 8 billion people, and they really succeed, while the Democratic Party has at least $4 billion this year and I hear twice as many useful words from a Democrat's mouth on Sirius 127 than everywhere else combined.

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Thank you, Mr. Hartmann for the focus on the definitions, especially of populism and fascism.

Reference populism - I appreciate the heroic and largely failed attempt by Thomas Frank to set straight the history and meaning of the term in the American context. He wonders how the term that was used commonly by mid-West Farmers in their effort to stop being totally screwed by railroad and banking tycoons morphed into meaning an insane autocrat like Trump.

In any case seeing this term used commonly to mean the policies of right wing fascist oriented whacks that incite anger and grievance in the sweating masses is simply pathetic.

Regarding Fascism - I feel this is the literal defining term for the billionaire class of Nazi lovers that have plotted and schemed to weaken, destroy and replace this government with a combined Corporatist/Theocrat/Anglo Saxon rule that will quickly assume a global Neo-Feudal form. Game over.

In any case I’m not going to quibble with the easily recalled definition as set forth in Thomm’s post here.

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John Fetterman seems to be a real populist with a real chance to flip a Republican Senate seat in Pennsylvania.

Ergo, look for Republican liars and hypocrites to harp on and conflate out of proportion and context the fact Fetterman once confronted an unarmed Black jogger in his neighborhood with a shotgun after he heard and reported shots fired. (Whoops.) But what would the Party of Guns be criticizing exactly, that he did NOT stalk and shoot and kill a "running n****r" with "long, dirty toenails" like the three flaming racist Trumplicans did to Ahmaud Arbery?

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Thom. Regarding your thoughts on the definition of fascism, weren’t we taught that fascism was an ideology that included things like aggressive militaristic nationalism, a radical contempt for electoral democracy, a demand for political and cultural liberalism, etc.? The term always described a belief in the rule of elites, and the desire to create a kind of people’s community, or a culture in which individual interests would be subordinated to the good of the nation.

These things don’t point to what’s happening on the Right. The Trump people wanted a strong military to establish and maintain protection of the country. He simply did not believe or have the desire to maintain a strong military capability to aggressively expand or wage foreign wars. He wanted out of the neo-con military adventurism. And of course, the Right doesn’t have contempt for electoral representative democracy. Maybe contempt for voting rights but not electoral democracy.

As for the rule of elites, that seems to apply, not to Trump but more the liberal and progressive leaders. This would include the uber wealthy (never Trumpers) such as Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey, Donna Langley, George Soros, Mark Zuckerberg, Robert Iger, Jeff Bezos, Barack Obama, Dana Walden, Tim Cook, Michael Bloomberg, Jack Dorsey, Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai, Chris Licht, Larry Fink, Jamie Dimon, Klaus Schwab, the Board of Trustees of the World Economic Forum, etc. Elites on both sides desperately vie for power but the Left has amassed extraordinary power to direct and control many of the county’s most influential sectors, including government bureaucratic agencies, Hollywood media culture, corporate and investment banking, big tech initiatives, social media, immigration, etc.

And of course, the Left does not leverage power to inspire stronger individualism. The concept of American individualism, mostly continues to be subordinated to many other agendas. It gets subordinated to a politics that aggressively encourages people of a particular gender, religion, race, social background, social class, environmental, and other identifying factors to develop political agendas that are based upon these identities.

Trump is a whole lot things, but he and Republican populism do not fit the traditional understanding of fascism. That is, unless we change the traditional definitions of the term. But I certainly understand why ideologues push arbitrary labels onto their opposition/enemy. Labels simply have overwhelming power to demonize and marginalize the opposition.

In the end, your desire for a new political vocabulary makes sense but I disagree “that it needn’t be particularly complex.” If you don’t explain the complexities, your “use of simple and clear labels” will never “save us all a lot of political confusion.” It won’t make voters smarter. Maybe just the opposite. In fact, such an approach, empowers voters to justify their condemnation of all those with whom they disagree. Such labels will kill any attempts to bring healthy reconciliation. But then again, maybe your rhetoric is designed to impose a whole other kind of demanding ideological agenda.

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