Kick in the face.

Editor,

Thomas Frank explored this phenomenon thoroughly in his year 2000 book "One Market Under God."

What he calls "market populism" turns the Populist movement of the 20's and 30's on its head, transforming into heroic outsiders the very CEO's who pay themselves 400 times the wages they pay their serfs and shamelessly lay off the ones they don't need to maximize their profits.

The wheelers and dealers responsible for the ever-accelerating dismantling of everything that was good about the United States inveigle their way into the popular mind as "mavericks" standing bravely in opposition to supposedly hide-bound government traditions that in fact used to make life good for working people. And it is these rip-off artists, not our government at all, who have been sowing more and more misery for workers here and everywhere.

The trick is to convince workaday people that you, too, can be rich as hell if you just vote to get that bothersome government off the backs of business and let entrepreneurs, just like you would like to be, "innovate." So government goes away, the rich get richer, and everybody else gets what we are getting now, a swift kick in the face.

Re: "More of the Rich Run as Populist Outsiders" (7/23/2010)