GOP’s “anti-establishment” con job: A cynical gambit to secretly talk about class

http://www.salon.com/2014/06/21/gops_“anti_establishment”_con_job_a_cynical_gambit_to_secretly_talk_about_class/


Eric Cantor, David Brat (Credit: AP/Steven Senne/Steve Helber)

Throughout this spring’s Congressional primaries, as in recent years, voters have been served one of the great misleading claims of modern political discourse: the “anti-establishment” campaign narrative. Republican candidates, in particular, love to thunder this phrase from the stump – copping a Joey-Ramone-in-torn-jeans act while sporting bespoke power suits. Reporters lap up and regurgitate the rhetoric, perpetuating a false dichotomy of terms as the simplest way to understand a given race.

This month’s thunderbolt of a primary shocker epitomized this pattern. The defeat of Eric Cantor – the first House majority leader to ever lose a primary – to upstart David Brat “shatters in one dramatic stroke the conviction of the GOP establishment that it was finally getting the upper hand against the party’s conservative rebels,” declared one Wall Street Journal analysis. Such had become the default setting for coverage of primary victories from across the country this past month – chief among them Mitch McConnell staving off a flank challenger as symbolic of the “establishment” reasserting itself and questions being raised about whether the Tea Party would “rally behind [the] GOP establishment.” Brat’s “decidedly anti-establishment campaign” changes the dynamic, but not really the narrative template.

For that frame, “anti-establishment,” represents something more than mere puffery, as its use has exploded in recent years. It speaks to anxieties about power and democracy better than any other phrase in politics today, even as it redirects that angst away from crystal-clear economic realities and toward vague socio-cultural specters. “Anti-establishment” is, in short, how the GOP talks about class – without actually talking about class. (Rick Santorum, after all, forbade as much at CPAC in March.)

Empirically, there is, quite simply, a lot more “anti-establishment” clamor to go around nowadays. An archival scan of its recurrence in The New York Times finds that the phrase was invoked in political contexts at least 400 times during Barack Obama’s first four years in the White House – that’s twice as much as in any previous presidential term since 1980.