Wow, the Warren campaign has taken a hard ‘angry’ populist turn over the last couple days.
Got a fundraising email last night with ‘Stick it to the billionaires who are fighting against our movement’ as the opening line.
Got a text this morning, ‘Companies like Exxon shouldn’t be able to pour money into junk science and use or to lie to fed regulators.’
I assume she’s trying to grab any of the Bernie supporters that are still gettable. Still, I’m not sure this is a great strategy. She’ll have a fervent army of Twitter warriors but most us don’t wake up in the AM wanting to smack Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg in the face.
It looks like the primary strategy is for her to knock out Bernie and then for Biden or Buttigieg to emerge as her competition. The drawback from this strategy is that I’m not sure Bernie will drop out when it becomes hopeless. Bernie went scorched earth in 2016 even when his campaign was all but mathematically eliminated. Whereas, I do think Biden or Buttigieg would drop out once it becomes clear that they’re not going to be the nominee.
“Goes full blown populist”? What are you referring to? Policies that she has been fronting all along and/or that are consistent with her promoted platform?
Or that she uses relevant current media buzz antithetical to those policies as a jumping off point for promoting them and herself?
We should. We’ve got people working two jobs who still have to beg for insulin money on the internet. Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos could burn a hundred billion dollars and still be one of the richest billionaires in the world. That shit ain’t right.
I don’t for a moment believe Warren is sincere, but the sentiment is a righteous one.
Yes, they are. I went back just a bit more than a month to get past the debate and post debate fundraiser emails. The one on October 8 was about pregnancy discrimination.
I’m well aware that plays well on college campuses and liberal urban blue bubbles. But, perhaps she should read a chart of soybean prices and spend some time telling voters about how awful Trump’s trade wars have been.
Warren is believed to be a bigger hawk on trade than Trump in many ways. So she hasn’t challenged him much on it except to say she has a plan and he doesn’t.
Sounds riveting. Wh doesn’t like a good commodity price chart. The problem is that only means anything to farmers and economists, and the administration is propping up farmers to keep from getting too upset.
Although it seems weird to me to use “populist” to refer to criticism of an elite as tiny as the approximately 750 individuals who now control more wealth than the bottom 50% of all Americans, that seems to be a thing now, so OK?
But I remain baffled as to what’s “populist” about objecting to corporations generating junk-science propaganda and lying to federal regulators. I mean, everybody except swindling crooks and liars is opposed to that kind of behavior regardless of their income level, right?
Does “populist” now just mean “in the interests of literally everybody except a minuscule minority of unbelievably wealthy power-abusing oligarchs and scofflaws”? If so, sign me up for the populist movement.
Not AFAICT. The original self-described Populists of the late 19th-century People’s Party pitted tenant farmers against local landlords and merchants, for example. And self-identified Trumpian “populists” are mad at a huge variety of so-called “elites” including pretty much all Democrats, schoolteachers, journalists, academics, etc.
The OP is the first time I’ve ever seen such tightly targeted criticism of such a minuscule bunch of super-wealthy and corporate bad actors labeled “populism”.
Going after “those fat cats in Washington” is a pretty common populist refrain. That’s a pretty small group of people. Afaik, populism is merely positioning yourself as the defender of the common man against the elite.
Well, as a supporter of Buttigieg, I’m happy for Warren’s campaign to make mistakes.
But, Democrats should be focusing their ire on Donald Trump and the Republican Party. I get the impression that some of Warren’s supporters would happily take 4 more years of Trump in exchange for the opportunity to bend Bezos or Zuckerberg over their knee, take the belt off and give them a good hard spanking.
Her strategy is not appealing to me. Yes, I think Bezos and Zuckerberg and other very wealthy folks should be paying more in taxes. A lot more. Because for whatever reason, they benefited the most from the society we all built and all pay into. They need to give back and I think there are institutional problems that occur when individuals are allowed to accumulate the kind of wealth associated with nations, like wealth corrupting the political system.
But I don’t hate or even particularly dislike these people. In fact, many of them have qualities that I admire. I know many of these ultra-wealthy people personally and they are people. Some are assholes and some are genuine and kind. And I don’t want to “stick it to them”. I just want them to pay their fair share, which is way more than they pay now.
I also hate the term “economic inequality”. I don’t think it adequately describes the issues and I don’t think it’s inherently wrong that some of us have more than others. I prefer the term economic injustice when addressing the systemic problems