Let Them Eat Tweets describes an idea, a dynamic, that you call the “conservative dilemma.” How has that dilemma shaped our current politics? The basic challenges that a conservative party faces in a democratic system lead them to increasingly push claims about white identity and divisive cultural issues that can allow them to recruit and mobilize the kinds of voters that they need, even as they’re backing the big winners from the growth of inequality. Inequality is growing, and the Republican Party has chosen to embrace the winners from that growing economic inequality and to make them a core constituency of the party. Paul Pierson: Trump, in many ways, is the end point in a long process that has been running through American society, but really running most directly through the Republican Party, over the last 40 years. Paul Pierson (Photo courtesy of Tracey Goldberg) Berkeley News: You’ve written that Donald Trump is not so much the cause of the current tensions and conflicts in our political culture, but a symptom of a long-term evolution. The result is a governing alliance the authors call plutocratic populism. In highly unequal societies, that means persuading white working class voters to focus not on financial self-interest, but on race, conservative religious values and other perceived identity threats. As the Republican Party becomes more worried about its ability to appeal to voters, it is more drawn to pursuing strategies based on cultural and racial identity and division.”Īt the core of Let Them Eat Tweets is a thesis: Conservatives in a democratic society cannot win elections by protecting only economic elites. “The threat to our democratic institutions has clearly grown. “We see a very considerable danger to American democracy in the current period,” Pierson said in a recent interview with Berkeley News. From Richard Nixon in the 1970s to Ronald Reagan in the ’80s to House Speaker Newt Gingrich in the ‘90s, across a modern landscape wracked by vast economic inequality and escalating culture wars, the authors offer a scholarly, but vivid, analysis of how we arrived at this troubling moment. Norton & Co.), distills the political, economic and cultural dynamics that have shaped U.S.
Let Them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality, (Liveright/ W.W.
Hacker at Yale University offers a compelling, far-reaching explanation for this strange marriage - and they warn that it is putting democracy at risk. Hacker say in their new book, “Let Them Eat Tweets.” (Photo courtesy of Gage Skidmore/Flickr)įor anyone who wants to understand the rise and reign of Donald Trump, one question may be paramount: Why have laid-off industrial workers, hardscrabble farmers and ranchers, and millions who lack health care embraced a conservative movement that expressly serves the economic interests of America’s wealthiest 1%?Ī new book by University of California, Berkeley, political scientist Paul Pierson and his colleague Jacob S. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight.The presidency of Donald Trump is the culmination of a 40-year effort by the Republican Party to advance the interests of the super-rich in the United States, co-authors Paul Pierson and Jacob S. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to everyone that fair is foul and foul is fair for foul is useful and fair is not. The love of money as a possession - as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life - will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease.īut beware! The time for all this is not yet. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value.
We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues.
PEASANTS FOR PLUTOCRACY CODE
When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals.
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