The dominant Republican strategy today is to rely on “plutocratic populism,” which aggressively fights for the interests of major corporations and the richest 1/10th of 1% by using emotional appeals on hot-button social issues, such as race, to build a base of popular support, according to two prominent political scientists in a recent book on how the Right rules in an age of extreme inequality.
“With increasing ruthlessness, Republican elites have embraced plutocratic priorities that lack appeal even among the party’s own voters—and that embrace has only grown tighter as the party’s public face has grown more ‘populist,’” as Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson observed in “Let Them Eat Tweets.”
The connection between the increasingly active and strategic spending of the “plutocrats” and the creation of a large electoral base fed by “populist” Congressmen has generated relatively little media coverage. But the powerful linkage between the two elements of the Republican operation is shown by a new report by which documents how corporate and trade-group entities have showered over $18 million into the coffers of over 140 Republican “seditionists” – all rightist “populist” proponents — who tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
The report by the Committee for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington watchdog group illustrates clearly that even the most anti-democratic actions by Republican Congressmen are not sufficient to break the bond between the party’s plutocratic funders and its most reckless “populists.”
“Pluralistic populism brings together two forces that share little in common except their distrust of democracy and their investment in the GOP,” explained Hacker and Pierson. Especially for the plutocratic sector of Republicans, genuinely democratic majority rule carries the dire threat that the majority will vote for “redistribution-enabling institutions.”
The Republican operation essentially functions like this: Large corporations and the super-rich promote pro-plutocratic policies like tax cuts to engorge their huge profits and wealth, but these measures are so unpopular that they cannot generate the electoral support needed to succeed on their own.
This is where Congressional Republicans step in, to serve as a bridge between the unpopular plutocratic program and broader public support by filling the gap with unrelated “anger-point” political appeals phrased in “populist” anti-elite terms, with race a critical element.
The Republican “populists” have often prevailed in effectively submerging from public view the party’s plutocratic agenda, to which they are fiercely attached, by pumping up emotionally-charged and divisive issues—like the treatment of gay and transgender children, abortion, school textbooks dealing with race — especially those by Black and Latino authors, and the display of guns in public spaces. Meanwhile, genuinely popular programs, like controlling drug prices, healthcare, child tax credits, and tax fairness, have been substantially pushed off the radar screen despite showing at least 62% public backing according to Data for Progress for these.
But the “populists” can always be counted on for deflecting attention away from the real-life impacts of the plutocratic agenda, and at the same time, reliably voting for the entire agenda of corporations and the top 1%. Thus, Republican “populists” in Congress can always be counted on to hold down corporate tax rates, limit regulation of banking and corporate monopolies, and use NAFTA-style trade deals to secure intellectual property rights on items like pharmaceuticals, among other issues.
The Republicans’ sharp and ongoing shift to the right has often been attributed in the media to a sudden prairie-fire spread of socially-backward ideas of non-college voters in small towns and rural areas, rather than a decades-long push to the Right driven by the Republicans’ elite donors, ignited by President Trump and fanned by his “populist” protegés in Congress and right-wing media.
Only rarely havs there been any serious examinations in major media of the operational connection between the plutocrats and populist elements of Republican politics. The funders of the prairie fire have largely escaped media mention or scrutiny.
But an explosive new report, “This Sedition Brought to You By …” by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington helps to bring the plutocratic-populist linkage to light with startling clarity. The CREW report looks at corporations’ recent eagerness to renew their campaign contributions to the Congressional Republicans who voted futilely to block certification of the 2020 presidential election.
Initially, the action by the 147 Republicans—seeking to nullify the results of a free and fair election — was regarded as just so extreme that even many long-time corporate allies felt obliged to pledge a pause in their donations to these Republicans.
However, with the passage of time, over 75% of corporations temporarily holding back on donations have re-opened the spigot and unleashed a torrent of money for almost all of the “Sedition Caucus” members, as their detractors call them.
With news of more corporate funding sources re-entering the pipeline, a total of 717 corporate entities and trade associations have contributed more than $18 million in funding to the Seditionists via direct donations from executives, political action committees, and various party committees which will fund the Seditionists.
Now openly contributing again to the “Sedition Caucus” members are some of the nation’s largest corporations, including Boeing, General Motors, Ford, AT&T, UPS, Walmart, Toyota, Pfizer, Eli Lilly, Merck, Delta, ExxonMobil, Johnson & Johnson, and dozens of other Establishment familiar names.
This stream of largesse is paralleled by millions flowing from extreme right-wing billionaires like the Koch family empire, Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein, Diane Hendricks and the Mercer family, who have consistently embraced the Republican “populists” without reservation. Koch Industries was the second largest donor to the seditionists at $308,000, surpassed only by Boeing at $346,500.
Typical of the corporate rationales for funding the Sedition Caucus is offered by the US Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber has shown itself willing to brush aside the dangerously undemocratic votes of the Sedition Caucus as if it were like a small budgetary issue somehow blown out of proportion, rather than attempting to block the peaceful transfer of power. “We do not believe it appropriate to judge members of Congress solely based on their votes on the electoral certification,” wrote a top strategist for the Chamber.
Corporate spokespeople speak of the return to normal on donations as if the Sedition Caucus has been sternly sent a warning, while they actually imposed a less-than-severe punishment of halting donations in a off-election year.
While many major firms expressed commitments to fighting racism following the protests after George Floyd’s killing, their financial support for the Seditionists challenges the sincerity of these corporations’ proclamations on racial diversity. The populists in Congress and their allies have placed white identity at the heart of their politics, and many of the nation’s largest corporations have made long-term investments in the right-populist members of Congress.
The “populists” on the Right have specialized in rubbing raw racial divisions as their key weapon. Their initiatives include stressing “ballot integrity” at the expense of voting rights for Black and Latino voters, continuing to brand as fraudulent the 2020 election results, attacking school texts and library books touching on race as undermining faith in America, the glorification of Kenosha gunman Kyle Rittenhouse who killed two unarmed men at an anti-racism protest, and claiming that anti-COVID efforts “denigrate” white people.
Only rarely do the “populists” employ explicitly racist language, preferring to use more subtle “dog-whistle” phrasing with the intent of arousing racial antagonism while maintaining deniability of racist intent. Prof. Ian Haney Lopez, author of “Dog Whistle Politics,” notes that, “It’s using dog-whistle messages to tell whites that the basic threat to their lives is racial, that the split between races is the fundamental reality of American life.”
That ominous message of threat and division is precisely the message coming from Congressional populists, and is directly rooted in funding from the plutocratic class—major corporations and the super-rich—most of whom would react with outrage if accused of touching off racial divisions.
Yet the present-day Republican operation, based on winning plutocratic goals with divisive messages driven home by populists like the Sedition Caucus funded by Corporate America, is grounded precisely in racial antagonism. “If the vast majority of Americans fear and fight each other, they then turn their backs on the idea of government as working for us all. Once that happens, powerful elites can more easily rig the economy and hijack government for the sake of concentrated wealth,” Haney Lopez has stressed.
The donations of corporations and the ultra-wealthy belie their messages of concern about racial inequity. “Corporate leaders can tout their commitment to diversity and sustainability all they want,” observed political scientists Hacker and Pierson. “Their political expenditures mostly tell a different story. Until they invest seriously in changing the course of American politics and the Republican party, their talk is cheap.”
This calls for a sophisticated and consistent message from progressives, Prof. Haney Lopez has emphasized. In response to plutocratic populism, “We need to shape whether the nation thinks that the most fundamental conflict is over race, or that it is over the way that the top one-tenth of the 15 have hijacked government for their own ends,” Haney Lopez said in an interview.
“Racial injustice is the main weapon of the rich, and we have no hope without challenging dog-whistle politics.”
Roger Bybee is a Milwaukee-based labor studies instructor and and writer and former editor of the Racine Labor weekly. Email winterbybee@gmail.com.
From The Progressive Populist, March 1, 2022
Blog | Current Issue | Back Issues | Essays | Links
About the Progressive Populist | How to Subscribe | How to Contact Us