good old boy network

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see pseudo-populism

merri ok

originally this was ivy leaguers pretending to be aw shucks man of ppl (yeager accent syndrome)

but also post Reagan revo/dems front as champion of working class, while slashing soc safety net and giving tax breaks to pluto and corps

see working class hero (disambig)

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RUNNING IN 2028?

puzzle, threat to dark money, really his problem is mcconn control pursestrings?

With minimum wage bill, news organizations help Republican Sen. Josh Hawley rebrand as a working class ally

06/16/25 MMA

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veteran economist Robert Reich, now 77, has long been sounding the alarm about income inequality in the United States — a problem that, according to Reich, has only grown worse over the years.

Economic populism has also been a recurring theme among MAGA Republicans, many of whom often rail against "woke elites" on college campuses. But Reich, in a biting opinion column published on June 11, blasts Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-New York), Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) and other Donald Trump supporters as examples of fake "populists" who don't really call out "inequality" as the major economic problem that it is.

"Trump and much of his Republican Party are deploying criticisms of the educated class to pose as populists on the side of the people," Reich observes. "Consider Elise Stefanik, Harvard class of '06 and chair of the House Republican Conference, who doesn't miss an opportunity to attack elite universities and their presidents. Or Sen. Josh Hawley, Stanford class of '02 and Yale Law '06, who calls the recent student demonstrations signs of 'moral rot.'"

Reich continues, "It's all a thinly veiled cover for their efforts to help the wealthy make even bigger bags while keeping everyone else — especially average workers — down. At this moment, Republicans are promising the moneyed class that in return for financial backing in the upcoming election, they'll get an extension of Trump's 2017 tax cuts — which disproportionately boosted the wealth of big corporations and the rich — plus additional tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks."

According to Reich, Republicans like Stefanik and Hawley failed to acknowledge that the "money class" rather than "the educated class" is "holding back the rest of America."

Reich, who served as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton during the 1990s, laments that "inequality" in the U.S. in 2024 is much worse than it was during the 1960s.

"When I graduated Dartmouth College in 1968," Reich recalls, "almost no one I knew went into finance or consulting. In those days, inequalities were minuscule compared with now. The bags at that time could have fit into a glove compartment."

Reich continues, "One of the least-discussed but most profound consequences of America's surging inequality is the number of talented young people now devoting themselves to making bags. Remarkably, though, most talented young people are not yet in the bag."

*Robert Reich's full column for The Guardian is available at this link.

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rural white voters have, in many cases, far more political power than suburban or urban voters, and they’re using that outsized power to push our nation toward disaster. While they’re only 20 percent of the country, for example, because of gerrymandering they control fully 42 percent of seats in the House of Representatives.

The authors of new book, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy point out that rural whites are measurably more bigoted and xenophobic than suburban or urban voters, 13 points more likely to hate on queer people, 15 points more likely to support Trump’s Muslim ban.

They’re also far more likely to agree that setting democracy aside for a strongman like Trump or another Putin wannabee will “fix the mess and drain the swamp.” And fully 74% of the members of Congress who voted to overturn the 2020 election represented rural districts.

The majority of rural white voters disagree with the statement (or have no opinion) that “diversity makes America stronger.” And while only 22 percent of city dwellers believe Trump won the 2020 election and Biden and Democrats “stole” it, a mind-boggling 47 percent of rural whites are certain Biden is illegitimately occupying the White House.

READ:Revealed: What government officials privately shared about Trump not disclosing finances

The astonishing paradox, though, is how Republican politicians regularly crap on their own voters in rural America. Instead of offering help or solutions to rural problems, the GOP and conservative media instead feed them a steady diet of xenophobic and racist fear and hate.

And they eat it up! The racist buffoons among them are one and a half times more likely to be QAnon followers than people who live in cities or suburbs.

Democrats created — and Republicans opposed — virtually all the programs that are keeping rural America from sinking even farther into poverty and despair. Social Security, unemployment insurance, SS Disability, Medicare, Medicaid, over 60 farm subsidy programs that funnel billions in taxpayer dollars into rural communities, food stamps, the Women and Infant Children (WIC) program, anti-addiction programs, etc.

The only real accomplishment of the Trump presidency was passing a massive $2 trillion dollar tax cut for the morbidly rich that had virtually no effect on rural voters. Nonetheless, 71 percent of rural voters cast a ballot for Trump in 2020.

There are still 11 mostly rural states where hospitals are closing and people are dying younger than necessary because Republicans in those states have refused to expand Medicaid.

Republicans in Congress fought against legislation to expand rural broadband access. They constantly try to cut or gut rural health and nutrition programs, and fought against expanding Obamacare in a way that would help rural people.

gerry SUPERMAJORITY

Most of the Red State Republican politicians in America know their seats will never be in danger, so they take millions from special interest groups to write loopholes into the tax code, vote for larger fossil fuel subsidies, and vote against efforts to lower prescription drug prices or do anything about global warming.

They get rich while the people who put them into office struggle to get by. Ted Cruz escapes to Cancun with the $600,000+ in cash he just got for his podcast, laughing at Texas voters all the way. JD Vance, a multimillionaire Wall Street guy, lives in an elite townhouse and travels by first class while people in Ohio watch Republican politicians gut their public schools and try to outlaw abortion and birth control.

Republican members of Congress representing rural states went all the way to the Supreme Court to successfully block President Biden’s first attempt at reducing student debt while rural students carry 60% more student debt than urban students by age 25.

One of the most chilling quotes from the book is about how rural voters are willing to both abandon democracy and embrace a violent rightwing coup:

“[R]ural Americans are more likely to believe that ‘it may be necessary at some point soon for citizens to take up arms against the government.’ Indeed, more than one out of four rural residents agree that Trump should be returned to office by force if necessary.”

White rural voters are more likely than any other demographic group — Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Native Americans — to be willing to overturn our democracy, and the people who represent them are in the majority of legislators who voted to overturn the 2020 election the day after the January 6th attack on our capitol.

If, say, Black people held that view, rightwing media would be trumpeting it every day from coast to coast. But because it’s rural white people, the so-called “heartland Americans,” it gets largely ignored by American media.

After all, most mainstream outlets treat rural people as if they’re an exotic species who must be listened to: going to rural diners to interview people is so common it’s become a cliché. In the past month I’ve seen dozens of such interviews played on MSNBC and CNN, but not once have I seen those same reporters go into a city and ask why people are voting for Biden.

The Biden administration has done more for rural America than any president since Lyndon Johnson rolled out Medicare, Medicaid, and food stamps. Biden’s American Rescue Plan provided specific tax breaks and credits targeted at rural poverty, subsidized mortgage payments, and provided rent assistance to tens of thousands of rural residents:

— Rural Americans are nine times more likely to lack access to affordable child care, so Biden’s program allocated $39 billion for subsidies for child care providers, with the money disproportionately going to rural communities. There was also $350 billion specifically allocated for small towns in rural areas to help them run basic government functions and upgrade their infrastructure. He even put up $198 million in funding for rural colleges and universities.

— Biden and Democrats delivered a 15% increase in SNAP (food stamp) benefits that have a huge impact in rural areas, reaching “2.9 million people in rural areas, including 800,000 children, reducing rural poverty by 11 percent and rural child poverty by 20 percent.” Biden’s USDA, over Republican objections, also put a billion dollars into rural food banks.

— Biden and Democrats “invested a historic $3 billion in the Department of Commerce’s (DOC) Economic Development Administration (EDA) to build local [rural] economies that are resilient to future economic shocks, including a $300 million Coal Communities Commitment.”

— Biden and Democrats — over GOP objections — expanded hunting and fishing opportunities on 2.1 million acres of public lands, the largest such expansion in U.S. history, and provided $1.5 billion in annual funding for wildlife and habitat conservation efforts. Another $2 billion went “for funding communities in the Rural Partners Network to spur job creation and build infrastructure.”

— They put $5 billion in “investments to help rural areas update infrastructure, boost high-speed internet access, and aid agricultural producers and small businesses in implementing climate-focused practices” and “$1.7 billion in funding to assist farmers, ranchers and foresters in adopting techniques to adapt to the changing climate, such as cover crops, nutrient management, and carbon storage.”

And that’s just the beginning: for a full list of the ways the Biden administration, over the objection of Republicans in Congress, has helped rural people click here.

Not one single Republican in either the House or the Senate voted for any of the things listed above: in fact, almost all voted against these helps to rural America.

Instead of concerning themselves with the well-being of rural people, they’re trying to block clean air standards that prevent rural communities from being poisoned, block clean water standards in rivers that supply water to rural communities, cut taxes on billionaires, and increase subsidies to the fossil fuel and banking industries.

All while taking huge campaign contributions, private jet rides, taxpayer funded junkets overseas, and the promise of million-dollar-a-year jobs when they leave Congress if only they vote the right way.

Because Republican politicians are more interested in feathering their own nests than helping out the people they were elected to represent, rural Red states are massively subsidized by urban Blue states just to keep their heads above water. As the Associated Press recently reported:

“Mississippi received $2.13 for every tax dollar the state sent to Washington in 2015, according to the Rockefeller study. West Virginia received $2.07, Kentucky got $1.90 and South Carolina got $1.71.

“Meanwhile, New Jersey received 74 cents in federal spending for every tax dollar the state sent to Washington. New York received 81 cents, Connecticut received 82 cents and Massachusetts received 83 cents.”

It’s undeniably true (and documented with each hotlink below) that Republican-controlled “Red” states, almost across the board, have higher rates of:

— Spousal abuse

— [Obesity — Smoking](https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/11/10/1994653/-Decades-of-Republican-Mismanagement-Have-Left-Red-States-Mired-in-the-Past-at-the-Bottom)

— Teen pregnancy

— Sexually transmitted diseases

— Abortion (at least before Dobbs; now it would be “forced births”)

— Bankruptcies and poverty

— Homicide and suicide

— Infant mortality

— Maternal mortality

— Forcible rape — Robbery and aggravated assault

— Dropouts from high school

— Divorce

— Contaminated air and water

— Opiate addiction and deaths

— Unskilled workers

— Parasitic infections

— Income and wealth inequality

— Covid deaths and unvaccinated people

— Federal subsidies to states (“Red State Welfare”)

— People on welfare

— Child poverty — Homelessness

— Spousal murder

— Unemployment

— Deaths from auto accidents

— People living on disability

— Gun deaths

So, why do Red state voters tolerate being conned and ripped off by their own elected representatives? Are they just stupid?

One theory is that “they hate the same people we hate.” And, indeed, for a significant and measurable cohort of rural white voters, racial fear and hatred is a primary motivating factor in their embrace of the GOP, although that’s only, according to this new book, about 20% of rural people.

Others vote Republican because the party has been so effective at branding itself with county fairs, NASCAR, country music, and the overall rural lifestyle including a faux paean to rugged individuality and independence.

Having over 1500 radio stations daily broadcasting a rightwing Republican message to literally every nook and cranny of rural America is another large factor. As is the dominance of Australian billionaire Lachlan Murdoch’s Fox “News.”

Will rural voters ever wake up to how badly they’re being screwed now and have been screwed by Republicans ever since Reagan started the whole neoliberal austerity and free trade movement that shipped over 60,000 factories and 20 million jobs overseas?

Or is the GOP’s cynical manipulation of religion, gender, and race enough to keep them voting to hurt themselves and further enrich Republican fat-cats?

So far, all indications seem like that’s the case and will stay that way for at least the next election cycle.

While the media struggles with trying to “understand” the rural white voter every election cycle, instead they should be running stories on how the very real problems and crises of rural America are daily made worse by Republicans in Congress and at the helm of their Red States.

How to break through?

Democrats need to get smart and start using the “negative partisanship” strategies Rachel Bitecofer recommends in her new book Hit 'Em Where It Hurts: How to Save Democracy by Beating Republicans at Their Own Game. They can do this by pointing out, with ad buys and media appearances, just how bad Red state Republicans politicians have been for rural people and their communities.

And they need to do it soon. As the authors of White Rural Rage point out:

“By 2040, 70% of Americans will reside in the 15 most populous states and choose 30 of the 100 US senators. Concentrated in smaller and more rural states, the remaining 30% of the population will elect 70 senators. No matter how distorted these population ratios become, each state is guaranteed its two senators — past, present, and forever.”

Our mainstream media have made it clear, for over 40 years, that they won’t expose the damage Republicans are doing to rural areas because their TV programs will fail if Republican politicians boycott them.

So, the job falls to us and the Democrats. Can we do it? I believe so; we just need to get started.

NOW READ:GOP Senators back away from MTG's 'ridiculous' speaker threat

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although 2024 GOP presidential frontrunner Donald Trump and the MAGA movement struggle in urban areas, rural areas are another matter. Much of Trump's hardcore support comes from rural areas, especially rural areas that are predominantly white.

In their new book, "White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy," authors Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman describe the link between MAGA authoritarianism and the economic and health problems plaguing rural areas. But unlike others who have written on that subject, Schaller and Waldman hold white rural voters accountable for their actions and do not pretend that rural Americans are somehow morally superior to urban Americans.

Schaller and Waldman spoke candidly during a Q&A interview with Salon's Amanda Marcotte, arguing that GOP politicians and right-wing media figures — not urban liberals and progressives — are the most overtly condescending where rural voters are concerned.

Schaller told Marcotte, "Nobody is more insulting to rural voters than the people who are giving them nothing and taking their votes. They claim Democrats are insulting, but Democrats are doing something for them and getting none of their votes. But nothing's more condescending than getting votes and doing nothing in return. J.D. Vance, Elise Stefanik and Tom Cotton — all these people were educated at Harvard and Yale. They frankly laugh behind the backs of their own voters to some degree, right? Those are the people who are really insulting."

Schaller cited Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) as another highly educated far-right Republican whose performative politics are "insulting" to rural voters.

"When Ted Cruz says: My pronouns are 'kiss my ass' or 'you can't limit me to two beers,' now he's more insulting," Schaller told Marcotte. "What he is saying is: These voters are so easily won over by performative politics. I can reduce their core urges and reflexes to this. And I don't have to deliver a thing for rural Texas."

During the interview, Schaller and Waldman stressed that rural Americans have very real problems — from health care to poverty — and that "performative" MAGA politics do nothing to better their lives.

Waldman told Marcotte, "You see it in your home state of Texas almost more than anywhere else. Republicans have carefully gerrymandered the state legislative districts, using rural areas as a kind of a leverage to make sure they stay in power. Yet there are huge problems in rural Texas that the legislature never addresses. They've got terrible infrastructure problems. They've got problem with the water systems and the electrical systems. Because they refused to accept the Obamacare expansion of Medicaid, rural hospitals are closing all over. There are people in Texas who have to drive 200 miles to get to prenatal care."

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J.D. Vance slams 'elites' despite shared backgrounds: analysis - Alternet.org

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aha pseudo populism good ol boy?

an ah 1123

mAGA Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) has been railing against the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Citizens United v. FEC and has been pushing a measure attacking the controversial 2010 decision — which, he argues, conservatives never should have defended. Hawley's measure is a rare example of a pro-Donald Trump Republican attacking a High Court ruling that has drawn more criticism from the left than from the right.

But journalist Jason Linkins, in an article published by the liberal-leaning New Republic on November 4, slams the Missouri Republican's campaign to "overturn Citizens United" is a "complete joke."

"There are many — mainly on the left — who'd like to somehow overturn Citizens United v. FEC, the execrable 2010 decision that unleashed a tidal wave of funny money into our politics and demonstrated that the Supreme Court didn't need to have a 6–3 conservative tilt to cock up the entire country," Linkins argues. "It would be great if we could pass a law and set things right, but here's the rub: Congress can't fix it, sorry!"

Linkins adds, "As MSNBC's Jordan Rubin explained, overturning the decision would require one of two unlikely events: the Supreme Court choosing to reverse itself or the successful enactment of a constitutional amendment…. The fact that Hawley, even with the assent of Congress and the president, literally cannot 'overturn' Citizens United makes this matter done and dusted."

The journalist stresses that despite all of Hawley's "posturing," his Citizens United proposals "would leave unchecked the flood of dark money" in U.S. politics.

"If you're authentically aggrieved by the Citizens United decision," Linkins explains, "this is where the profound misrule lies: Political nonprofits — mainly 501(c)(4)s — can accept unlimited donations and don't have to disclose their donors, even when the nonprofit then sends the money to super PACs, which do have to disclose donors."

:{*:{Read Jason Linkins' full article for The New Republic at this link.}:

'Despicable': DHS secretary decimates GOP Senator Josh Hawley ›

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

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an kos 2 23

The GOP continues to sling whatever trash they’ve got at President Joe Biden in the wake of his historic trip to Kyiv, Ukraine, and his total dunking on them about the debt ceiling, Social Security, and Medicare. They’re taking their talking points from Tucker Carlson, keeping up the narrative Biden is responsible for the toxic train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, because he hates white people.

Here’s the repugnant Sen. Josh Hawley doubling down on that, and throwing in some antisemitism for the heck of it: “My message to congressional Republican: you can either be the party of Ukraine & globalists or you can be the party of East Palestine & the working people of American.”

[twt w tukr]

Let’s talk about the working Americans of East Palestine, Ohio, and who is really helping them. The population of the town is 4,761 as of the 2020 census. It’s in Columbiana County, population 101,877 in 2020. In 2021, the last year statistics are available from, there were 32,077 people in the county who were enrolled in Medicaid, the joint federal/state funded health insurance program for low-income individuals and families.

So, yeah, that’s about a third of the population of the county—the smallest geographical area for which Medicaid data is available. Ohio as a whole saw a nearly 28% hike in Medicaid and CHIP enrollments during the pandemic. (CHIP is the program for children’s health.)

More than 7,500 households in Columbiana County were receiving Supplemental Nutrition Assistance, or food stamps, in November 2022. That’s 14,407 people, including 5,421 children.

This is not a prosperous place. The median household income for the county was $49,265 in 2021, the latest figures available. That’s $12,997 lower than the median Ohio household income and $20,452 less than the U.S. median household income. The minimum wage in Ohio is $10.10/hour, $5.05 for tipped employees.

At the same time, though, the unemployment rate for the county is just 4.3%, all of which means that there are a lot of working people in this place who are living in or very nearly in poverty. And yes, you hardly need to ask: Those people voted for Trump in 2020, 72% to 27% for Biden. They’re probably now lining up in diners all through the county to be interviewed by New York Times reporters.

These are the very programs the GOP always wants to destroy, the programs that truly help working people. Medicaid, food assistance—they’re all on the chopping block as far as the GOP is concerned, and always have been.

This isn’t about Ukraine, and it sure as hell isn’t about the working people of East Palestine, Ohio—where were any of them when Trump was deregulating the rails and making this kind of disaster almost inevitable? Oh, that’s right, supporting an insurrection against the government.

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an 9 22 kirk swear

Bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell recently posted some thoughts on the subject of high school sports, of all things. High schools do a good job at elevating elite athletes, he wrote, to the detriment of students of more average ability, or who lack parents who could afford to pay for soccer or baseball camps starting at age six.

Gladwell, who is a lifelong, serious runner — and can run a mile at age 55 nearly as fast as I did when I was 15 and winning races on the track team — came up with a law he named after himself: In any sporting endeavor, elite achievement comes at the cost of mass participation.

We can easily expand Gladwell's Law to the whole of society. Don't many of us view life in America as a dispiriting continuation of the ruthless, often shallow competitions of high school? And our thinking about how we relate to so-called elites can be complicated by our culturally driven feelings of envy and shame.

At least arguably, America's national sport is not played with a ball. It's electoral politics, which has always had elements of ruthless competition but used to be a lot more "sporting" than it is now. At its best, politics is about knowledge, hard work, compromise, mutual respect and some acknowledgment of shared goals, even alongside vigorous disagreement. None of those qualities are evident in the churlish zero-sum gamethat the Republican Party, with its backs against the demographic wall, has played in recent years.

This sea-change goes back at least as far as 1994, when Newt Gingrich invited Rush Limbaugh to train the incoming Republican House majority on how best to despise your political opponents and push disinformation and conspiracy theories. It was either un-American or, sadly, quintessentially American at the time, and has since metastasized into the right's embrace of false narratives, ever-wilder conspiracy theories, and authoritarianism — which is epitomized by a certain orange-hued former president, but certainly not limited to him.

We see prissy, stuck-up, wholly self-interested Ivy Leaguers like Ted Cruz (Princeton; Harvard Law), Josh Hawley (Stanford; Yale Law), Ron DeSantis (Yale; Harvard Law) andmuch of Trump's inner circle playing good ol' boys, affecting down-home dialects, and decrying the "elites" on the left who supposedly dominate American business, politics and culture. This would be merely laughable if they weren't also insisting that religious liberty means that everyone must live by the retrograde religious dogma they pretend to believe.

The Trumpist cult and other far-right political organizations around the globe continue to profitably press their pseudo-populist game planof going after elites (often the "educated elites") to inflame and enrage the mind of the common citizen.

If we know something about the role of actual elites throughout history, we know that they have understood the power of anger and contempt in motivating the masses; while a helping hand may be quickly forgotten (or even resented), an insult, real or imagined, locks itself in memory.

When the phony Wharton grad who reluctantly departed from the White House in January 2021 said they were happy not to take that as an obvious insult. How, exactly, did he intend it? Both as contempt and affection. Any con man keeps a special place in his black-hole heart for people who cannot, or will not, see how he is hoodwinking them. None of us finds it easy to deal with the cognitive dissonance of realizing we may be wrong.

While Republican politicians have for decades praised and catered to the needs of oligarchs (as well as the merely wealthy who merely dream of being oligarchs), creating the greatest income disparity since the Roaring '20s, they have simultaneously encouraged working- and middle-class Americans to resent people who went to college and quite likely graduate school and have become specialists in various fields: historians, scientists, journalists, civil servants, elementary school teachers. Somehow, in this demented narrative, those professions are part of an administrative system that thwarts ordinary people's quest for freedom, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. (And some of them asked you and your kids to wear a mask during a global health crisis.)

The "elites" despised by the actual Republican elites like Cruz, Hawley and DeSantis are, of course, the people able to expose their grifting, their disinformation campaigns, their flouting of the rules, their contempt for the rule of law (at least as it applies to them) and their determination to retain power at any cost. They and their compatriots in propagandaTV andsocial media are bringing authoritarianism to America under a marketing label borrowed from Hungary: "illiberal democracy."

Today's Christian fascists don't ask what Jesus would do; they ask what Viktor Orbán would do. Anti-immigrant "Christians" get a kick out of seeing red-state governors troll the libs by using real human beings as pawns in a deliberately cruel media spectacle.

As these beliefs begin to spread in cult-like fashion, then teachers, judges, health experts, academics and even members of law enforcement — whom Republicans have always claimed to venerate — become objects of derision, even death threats.

In this classic divide-and-conquer move,[us vs them, polarization]the right has worked hard to get Americans to believe the worst possible things about elites, those conspiratorial, secular liberals who read books, believe that science and history should be based in research rather than political agendas and maintain a naive faith in democracy and the rule of law.

Such has been the power of this slow brainwashing that the right has gleefully separated brothers from sisters, children from parents, and friends from friends. The MSNBC–New York Times side regrets the loss of political comity; theFox–Wall Street Journal side [murdoch] cries for insurrection or civil war, or just shrugs at such threats.

All of this (or at least a lot of it) has been in service of aphony,shameless,sexually predatory,pathologically insecure,malignant narcissist who somehow (surprising even himself) was elected president, impeached twice and refused to concede defeat after losing by more than 7 million votes, inciting a violent, if amateurish, insurrection.

Meanwhile, there really are elites in America — you know, the people who went to school with Hawley and Cruz and DeSantis and can afford multiple residences, exotic vacations, well-tended stock portfolios and Washington lobbyists. Those elites are still pushing discredited Reagan-era "trickle-down" economics, working to destroy the last threadbare remnants of the social safety net and gleefully eroding democracy — all while laughing at how easy it was to convince the "people" to look somewhere else.

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