Scott Brown

Needing to vent a bit. When fascism comes to america, it will be driving a pick-up? The campaign focused on his "beat-up pick-up truck," which is a 2005 GMC--whoah, a car that is more than 3 years old? Surely such a thing has never been seen and certainly not being driven by a politician. Guess I should run for office driving around my '88 Corolla. Anyway, another rhetorical device in the campaign was referring to the seat vacated by Ted Kennedy as "the people's seat." The headline over at Fox News is "Boston Tea Party." The point is that this is a man of the people, fighting for the people. And what does that mean today? Apparently it means: 1. Support for waterboarding. 2. anti-immigrant sentiment 3. opposition to the health plan. And probably some rhetoric in there about fat-cat bankers and handouts. Also, Martha Coakley apparently doesn't know anything about baseball.

So, what do democrats do? Race to the middle. Instead of articulating populist sentiment in a more progressive way, they move to reject the health plan...For example, Jim Webb (D-Virginia), quoted in the Wall St. Journal is 'calling the race “a referendum not only on health care reform but also on the openness and integrity of our government process” Webb said Democrats need to hold off on further action until Brown is formally sworn in to the chamber.' And this is exactly what pisses people off about democrats. They have no principles. As soon as the political winds seem to be blowing in a different direction, they give up their ideas. But of course, they cannot be against the fat-cat bankers, except rhetorically. They're just the other wing of the corporate party. Goldman was Obama's biggest contributor. From Ostertag at the Huffington Post:

I noted that that, by the end of June, Wall Street had already given Obama $9.5 million, that four out of his top five contributors are employees of financial industry giants, with Goldman Sachs at the top of the list. Even conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks was appalled: "Over the past few years, people from Goldman Sachs have assumed control over large parts of the federal government. Over the next few they might just take over the whole darn thing."

But really, this sort of thing is just a populist, practically conspiracy theory, perhaps even a veiled anti-Semitism. So, Scott Brown may not quite be a fascist, and the democrats may not be much better. But in the tendency to blame "the speculators" about oil prices and the middle men about the economy lurks something both puzzling and ominous. Adorno and Horkheimer were on this back in the 40s: "Just because the psychology of the individual can construct itself and its content only from the synthetic schemata supplied by society, contemporary anti-Semitism takes on its empty but impenetrable character. The Jewish middleman fully becomes the image of the devil only when economically he has ceased to exist" (Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 171).
It is not the middleman that has ceased to exist, of course, but rather his/her having any real freedom in relation to the economy. But, this makes for an excellent scape-goat and then to link these folks to Obama and the democrats makes for excellent strategy. There is something pathological going on here.