This is not the first time that the US “common man” has embraced populism. Who said the following? “What are the real issues that exist today in these United States? It is the trend of pseudointellectual government where a select elite group have written guidelines in bureaus and court decisions… looking down their noses at the average man on the street … the auto workers, … the little businessman…” (quoted in Cowie: http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1919&context=articles) This was George Wallace, in 1972, the year he scored a victory in the Democratic primary in Michigan, due primarily to “working-class” opposition to school busing on the heels of white flight to the suburbs. His “populist” message of “anti-elitism”, “anti-crime” and anti-busing wasn’t openly racist, but that was its content. Dewey Burton, the young male symbol of the 1970s (white) working class followed for years by the US media (as told by Cowie, above) was not a racist in his personal attitudes, but his alienation from ossified New Deal politics within a Fordist economic model that provided “only” high-wage job security (and for fewer and fewer people) manifested itself in a form that is fairly indistinguishable from the suddenly new “revolt” of the white working class in the rust belt in 2016 – and this well before Fordism entered into its terminal crisis later in the 70s.

“In spite of the high cost of rescuing the banks and the rising inequality across society revealed by the recession, the shrinking of the state has continued, led by the vain hope that markets will find a way of bringing a miraculous revival if left to themselves. History has shown that this is the wrong moment for that. Yet the current economic orthodoxy, incapable of explaining the crashes, holds on to an interpretation of how the economy functions that ignores the role of technology and the accumulated learning of the other social sciences. It has taken refuge in increasingly complex mathematical models, as if economics were more closely akin to physics. Worse still, these economists and many of their critics are still waging the ideological battles of the 1960s and 1980s, without realising that we are now in a completely different context—one that has more in common with the 1930s … If the advanced world governments stay on the current austerity path, they will wait forever for the market to do the right thing for growth and social well-being …

Structural adjustment and its results as another source of wealth transfers to US capitalists in the 1980s