Misses one point, gets the other
An overlong article in Spiked reviews Thomas Frank's latest book on real Populism. It sounds like Frank mostly gets it, but misses one key point. Unlike other "leftist" authors, Frank realizes that Trump is a faker, but he makes the wrong comparison.

I've been studying and writing about real Populism for 12 years, and I know a few things. One of the things I know is that Jennings Bryan was a faker in the same way as Trump.

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Some articles are comparing 1919 with 2019 in terms of globalism vs populism. It's a weak comparison.

One important point is missing: The populists of 1890-1920 were fakers. Jennings Bryan and his equivalents in the prairies diagnosed the problems of finance-centered capitalism correctly, but offered a prescription that would INCREASE the power of banks. They promised easier borrowing and looser money. They were pluponents, not opponents.

The tools and measurements are different today. Bimetallism no longer makes sense because we abandoned ALL metals in 1971. ZIRP and QE were unthinkable in 1920. But the direction is the same.

Real populists today are NOT fakers. The non-Soros side of the world is getting out of debt and returning to the gold standard.

Among the populists in Sorosia, there's one subtle difference that I didn't notice when I was discussing this a couple years ago.

Jennings Bryan's campaign diagnosed the problems correctly and prescribed wrong. Voters who truly understood the situation had enough info to make a proper decision.

Trump's campaign rhetoric diagnosed the problems correctly AND prescribed correctly. His campaign advocated tighter money, higher interest, and less emphasis on the Dow.

He switched to pluponent AFTER he took office. His real base in NYC knew all along that he would serve them, because he's been serving them for 40 years. They kept quiet for strategic reasons.

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Frank gets FDR right. FDR was the only TRUE Populist. Instead of shutting down the productive economy and bailing out the banks, he shut down the banks and bailed out the productive economy.

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Sept 23 update: In a later discussion at Spiked, Frank deals with McCarthyISM, recognizing correctly that the ISM was just another way for the aristocrats to call populists crazy. He recognizes that the same thing is happening with TrumpISM. But again he misses the deeper connection by treating both McCarthy and Trump as spontaneous expressions of populism. In fact both are tools created and operated BY the aristocrats, and more specifically both were created and operated by the exact SAME aristocrat. Roy Cohn. This is an openly known fact in both cases, not a secret. Roy Cohn became McCarthy's "boyfriend" and used sex and blackmail to push him into drunken excesses that served Deepstate's ends. We don't know how Cohn created Trump; it appears that Trump was more of an active participant and star student, not a drunk rape victim. Nevertheless, both are the same machine operated by the same people for the same purpose.

Why does Frank miss these connections when he sees everything else with crystal clarity? Maybe it's just personality and life experience. Frank seems to be a likable optimistic extrovert who didn't spend his youth fending off bullies and beatings. He hasn't been in prison, wasn't forced to learn about intractably evil people, and didn't acquire mental immunity.

In this second piece Frank makes one HUGE point that is UNQUESTIONABLY CRUCIAL AND VALID. NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER LISTEN TO AN EXPERT. ALL EXPERTS ARE TYRANTS WHO SERVE SATAN.

Labels: Jail mode, MMT, Pluponents, skill-estate

  ¶ 2:58 AM