The Populists are ruining everything.
You know the type: wanna-be hippie, Whole Foods environmentalist, own at least one Che Guevara T-shirt (and skinny leg jeans), grew up in a reasonably nice but modest home. Angry.
They are mostly of the donkey mold, and when they take to the streets with their Greenpeace T-shirts, they head right for the large corporate buildings and yell with such venomous rage at the institutions that now hold our financial system horrifically suspended in midair.
Despite our revolutionary past, our British friends are the experts at protesting the power the masters of the universe hold. As world leaders all exchanged high-fives and toothy grins in Buckingham Palace last Thursday at the start of the G-20 summit, renegade anarchists stormed the Royal Bank of Scotland in the London financial district. The London protesters weren't of a populist zeal, but a revolutionary one. Forget British Prime Minister Gordon Brown's suggestion at the G-20 summit of restructuring the global financial marketplace, the revolutionaries wanted to burn the whole system down.
For a while, it wasn't just the far-left fringe of the more liberal political parties in the world who were sounding the clarion yell of populist outrage. It was the stalwart Republicans in this country, who didn't take to the streets in army fatigues or hand-me-down Patagonia rags, but took to the airwaves instead, in business suits and leftover wardrobe off the set of "The Sopranos."
The Republicans, traditionally a party of men and women whose idea of a good protest is boycotting a Rotary Club president nomination, suddenly found their inner populist when President Barack Obama came out with his budget. CNBC commentators went ballistic, decrying the president's plan to raise taxes back to the rates under President Bill Clinton. Bill O'Reilly, who fancies himself the last bastion of truth, couldn't wipe the arrogant grin off his face every time the stock market worsened. Glenn Beck, who finally figured out that CNN doesn't stand for Conservative Nutty News, finally made the switch to FOX News and called the president a socialist, later apologizing and saying he got it all wrong - the president isn't a socialist, he's a fascist. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the punchline to a joke that's taken eight years to tell. An unquestioning right-wing social group, that pledges allegiance to one leader and demands the same from everyone else and goes as far as labeling you an unpatriotic treasonous heretic if you disagree with its ideas and policies, is the very definition of fascism.
There's nothing wrong with partisanship or party loyalty. There really isn't much wrong with painting your political opposition unpatriotic and calling upon your television viewers to rise up against "them" and "take back your country" as Glenn Beck has called for. Actions like those only make politicians like Obama all the more savory.
It's just a pity, though, that the Republicans in Washington and on television have only now summoned the courage to question their president.
They came to the party eight years too late.
Matthew Christ is a political science freshman. His column appears on Mondays.
