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>> 175 7 Moral Populism in the Twenty-First Century As long as “the people” remain united more by what they wish to consume than by their grievances as producers, resentment of the new world order will probably not alter the centrist course of American politics. For most citizens, global capitalism is not a visceral danger but, at worst, the symbolic marker of a reality they cannot hope to control. —Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion The joke goes something like this: A union member, a member of the Tea Party, and a corporate CEO are sitting around a table looking at a plate that holds a dozen cookies. The CEO reaches across and takes eleven cookies, looks at the Tea Partier, and says, “Look out for that union guy, he wants a piece of your cookie.” Circulated on political blogs and social networking sites in early 2011, this wry story betrays a core assumption of much progressive politics: at best, that poor and middle-class conservatives simply misunderstand reality, or at worst, that they are duped by the subversive powers of manipulation wielded by big business. The political left’s seeming inability to convince middle Americans on such economic issues—particularly matters having to do with unionization and tax policy—was what led pundits like Thomas Frank to ask, in exasperation, just “what’s the matter with Kansas?”1 Middle American conservatives, Frank argued, lean Republican because they prioritize social issues—abortion and same-sex marriage, for instance—over and above their economic self-interests, which would presumably be better served by Democratic economic policies. I believe that such views of the American political landscape fundamentally misunderstand both the empirical and the moral foundations of conservative populism. To begin with, much of Frank’s argument has been tested 176 > 177 empathize with “real Americans.”5 In the moments when Democratic candidates did attempt to address middle-class economic angst, Kazin argues that their efforts were too far removed from the kind of grassroots activism that might have infused this rhetoric with a vocabulary truly capable of resonating with the white middle class. Instead, Democrats’ language “remained a strategy hatched by candidates and their consultants,” which as a result “was not connected in any organic way to the ‘working men and women’ whose sentiments candidates ritually invoked.”6 Instead, progressives at the end of the twentieth century set their sights on a new villain in the form of American corporations that both exploited the global marketplace and abandoned American workers; for a new coalition of progressive activists, led by organized labor, “‘the people’ was a rich, multicultural abstraction and could only be represented as such.”7 However, this conception of “the people”—and thus, of progressives’ audience—ultimately missed the mark. Kazin argues that in celebrating the worker (and concurrently denigrating the new economic order), progressive activists simply misunderstood the present reality, in which unions’ power had diminished, and with it the economic fortunes of middle Americans. This book’s study of recent Wal-Mart debates helps to continue this analysis of populist politics by exploring how and why such political rhetoric succeeds or fails; in the process, I have offered an interpretive portrait of conservative economic discourse that attempts to move beyond superficial progressive interpretations that portray conservative Americans as either hoodwinked by big business or woefully unaware of their economic selfinterests . Most important, a central argument of this book is that “the family ” is not just a flashpoint in the culture wars—a topic to be debated with regard to same-sex marriage, the boundaries of abortion, or regulations on sexual activity and behavior. Rather, the family is also a discursive context that shapes how conservative and progressive organizations talk about economic issues. Understood in this way, the family is not just a moral project , but also an economic one that has deeply moral significance. To that end, Wal-Mart’s own discourse emphasizes not just “the family” but “the average working family,” discussing economic issues in a moral framework that brings the family and the economy together. Thus the family is a powerful rhetorical construction in economic debates precisely because so many of our everyday economic actions—most notably the ritual of consumption —take place within the bounds of this social institution.8 A key contribution of my analysis of recent Wal-Mart debates has been to emphasize how this concept—along with the related discourses of individualism, thrift, and freedom—creates a broader moral framework for evaluating the...

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