With not too many changes this paragraph could very well be said of many politicians from Goldwater, Nixon, Reagan and Thatcher. Even Tony Blankly used to engage in the rhetoric of resentment, when his usual political bluster was exhausted: as an instrument of an Oakeshottian dismissal of the political aspirations of the Lower Orders. Perfect territory for Mr. Luce to extemporize upon Trump, the mentee of the utterly loathsome Roy Cohn, not to speak of Game Show host with an unforgettable tag line: ‘Your Fired‘ , that established his Leadership in the minds of Americans who consume the snack-food of Television. Murdoch a Press Lord whose fortune was made by reactionary politics ,scandal mongering and an a trove of bribe money, spiced up with soft-core pornography. His Tabloid journals set the stage for ‘Fox News’ Empire of Un-Reason‘. With its Know-Nothings Beck, O’Reilly and Hannity, and his collection of Stepford Wives, under the care of his gargoyle Roger Ailes.
Today’s great electoral skill is the ability to harvest resentment. The psychology is simple. Identify with a large demographic that feels looked down on. Fuse your anxieties with theirs. Always be entertaining. Above all, treat voters as a delivery mechanism for your ends: power, status and more money. Policies are for wonks. Celebrity is for winners. Those who find a way to tap mass insecurity have struck political gold.
Here Mr. Luce’s narrative begins to take shape:
It was Cohn who introduced the US president to Rupert Murdoch in 1976 after he bought the New York Post. Mr Trump’s antics helped sell newspapers, which, in turn, gave him the celebrity he craved. Their relationship changed the west’s democratic course. But it was Mr Murdoch who made it possible.
This may be true, but the proximate cause of Mr. Trump’s political rise was his Apprentice television show where his ‘leadership abilities’, or rather his bulling tactics passing as leadership, were established in the television viewers minds, that eventually voted for him.
There is much more of Mr. Luce’s potted history of the Murdoch/Trump Alliance, brimming with the tales of Corporatist maneuvering ,deal making and other points of near prurient interest, all of it framed by the ‘politics of resentment’ .With not one mention of Mr. Trump’s racist campaign against the Central Park Five:
But in 2002, a convicted rapist named Matias Reyes confessed to the crime, saying he had acted alone. While police were unable to connect DNA from any of the Central Park Five to the scene of the crime, Reyes’s DNA matched that in semen found on the victim’s body. The five were exonerated and paid a $41 million settlement in 2014.
The rise of Populism is about the abject failure of Neo-Libralism to deliver the goods. The failure to produce the long promised Prosperity, that was to be the end point of its Still-born Revolution. Never will the advocates/apologists, for this catastrophically failed economic experiment admit their culpability. While they condemn the Populism that is the end point of that failed social/economic experiment. ‘The Road to Serfdom’ is the title of the biography of this age!
Almost Marx
https://www.ft.com/content/d860a116-4de1-11e8-97e4-13afc22d86d4
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