"Hard-working Americans" is John Birch Society rhetoric

I just posted what follows on a thread about Hillary Clinton's turn towards conservative populism -- which denies the existence of class warfare and plays up social divisions instead. But that thread's already sinking out of sight, so I thought I'd try giving what I wrote a thread of its own:

The roots of conservative populism go back to the Nazis, who denied the relevance of class warfare and depicted German society as an organic whole, with all its members cheerfully working together, each knowing and accepting their proper place. Instead of battling their bosses, Germans were encouraged to turn their resentment against "parasites" -- outsiders who fed on the social organism without being a part of it -- which mainly meant Jews.

This "parasites" model later got picked up by the John Birch Society types and slightly modified in the process (emphases mine):

http://books.google.com/books?id=Md1aRhWNk1QC&pg=PA175&lpg=PA175&dq=%22john+birch+society%22+parasites&source=web&ots=HnO96sGKOa&sig=rivifB3ylI0SOPyVkOtwnfGATFw&hl=en

The John Birch Society and the Liberty Lobby are the two pillars of the Hard Right that evolved in the late 1950s and grew in the 1960s. Both groups blend populism, nativism, and conspiracism in the classic model of producerism. Like all producerist movements the Birch Society and the Liberty Lobby consider the "real" patriotic Americans to be hard-working people in the middle-class and working class who create goods and wealth while fighting against "parasites" at the top and bottom of society who pick their pockets.

http://www.publiceye.org/rightist/milnatbl.html

This temper tantrum is fueled by an old tenet of conspiracy theories: that the country is composed of two types of persons - parasites and producers. The parasites are at the top and the bottom; the producers are the hard-working average citizens in the middle. This analysis lies at the ideological heart of rightwing populism. The parasites at the top are seen as lazy and corrupt government officials in league with wealthy elites who control the currency and the banking sector. The parasites at the bottom are the lazy and shiftless who do not deserve the assistance they receive from society. In the current political scene, this dichotomy between parasites and producers takes on elements of racism because the people at the bottom who are seen as parasites are usually viewed as people of color, primarily black and Hispanic, even though most persons who receive government assistance are white.

And after all, Hillary is a Methodist. Calvinism is deeply ingrained in Mid West, Methodist values.

How many times have liberal politicians talked about hard-working Americans???

You're reaching.

I guess Obama must be a member....


"The United States is one of the wealthiest nations in the world, yet more than 45 million Americans have no health insurance. Too many hard-working Americans cannot afford their medical bills, and thus, health-related issues are the number one cause for personal bankruptcy. Too many employers are finding it difficult to offer the coverage their employees need."

http://obama.senate.gov/issues/health_care/


Searching Obama's own site turns up a surprising number of times he uses this phrase. How high in the Birch Society do you think he must be?


http://obama.senate.gov/search/index.cfm?q=hard-working+Americans+&btnG=Go&site=obama&num=10&filter=0

In the Obama statement you quote, you could substitute "Americans who work hard" and the meaning would stay the same. "Too many Americans work hard but can't afford their medical bills."

But when a politican refers to "hard-working Americans" as a voting bloc, or a demographic category, that's something else entirely. It becomes code -- and Clinton's following it immediately with "white Americans" makes that fact all the clearer.

As we know with Bush's use of coded religious references, the purpose of that sort of language is to fly under the radar -- to have a specific meaning to one segment of the population while sounding like just the usual political boilerplate to everyone else.

I can't prove that Clinton consciously intended to speak to covert Birchers in their own jargon. It's more likely that she was simply tossing out phrases she knew would appeal to a particular audience and not thinking much about what they actually meant.

But there was clearly something very "off" about her words -- and I do believe that it's because they come directly out of the Nazi and Bircher tradition of regarding certain people as "real" Germans/Americans and others as useless parasites.