BFT Pod: Right-Wing Media Exposes The Bad Faith Of Right-Wing Populism

Only in the surrealist hellscape that is capitalist acceleration in the third decade of the 21st century could people – everyday working people – be expected to fear free childcare and a livable wage and affordable groceries.

But that's exactly what is expected of fear-mad audiences of right-wing cable news networks. Every time a progressive candidate runs for office in a high-profile race, their petrifying far-left ideas are splashed across the screen of Fox News or NewsMax or any other propaganda outlet as a warning to viewers: Hide your kids, hide your wife; this person wants to improve society somewhat.

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The latest example of left-wing boogeyman politics comes from Wisconsin, where progressive Democrat Francesca Hong is making a little headway in the race to replace Tony Evers as governor. Like Zohran Mamdani, Hong's entire platform is geared toward easing the drudgery of modern American life and making the government work for folks who trade their labor for a little cash every week. Hong's economic proposals, like all progressive economic proposals, are family friendly in the most explicit ways possible. This, according to Fox News, is to be perceived as a threat to the American way of life, defined by the aforementioned drudgery and financial precariousness that keeps workers in line, afraid to ask for anything more than the bare fucking minimum.

Class Dealignment Is Real, And It’s Spectacularly Bad

It’s the most romantic political notion: A working class coalition putting aside their cultural and racial and religious differences to elect legislators who will ram through explicitly pro-worker policies and save us from the yawning darkness of creeping fascism in the United States. I get the appeal, truly.

Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter

You would think policy proposals designed specifically to lower the crushing cost of living in the United States and keep working families above water would have broad appeal over the faction of Republican voters who have been so taken with the so-called populism of their incredibly sleepy sovereign. It was Trump's bludgeoning of the mainline conservative members of the GOP that vaulted him atop the party hierarchy, after all. It was his pledge not to act like a Republican that won the backing of working class and middle class (white) Republicans who had despised Republican economic policy as much – or more – as they loathed Democratic economics, or the version of Democratic economics that they hear about from the good looking people on the fear machine.

You would be wrong about all that, naturally, because the right-wing version of populism has nothing whatsoever to do with addressing the basic economic needs of working people. They talk the talk while running for office – both in the US and elsewhere – and deliver precisely nothing when they're put into power. A right-wing populist is someone who sees the desperation of the worker and understands intuitively how to exploit it, how to ride that desperation into power. This, I think, explains the deeply confused Bernie-Trump voters of 2016 (and 2020, to some extent). The right-wing populist will speak the language of the working person; there's nothing else to it.

Capitalism Is Enclosing On Everyone And Everything

We see it every day and don’t notice it. In our digital lives, where Twitter Blue offers to artificially inflate your reach, for a monthly fee. On vacation with our families, where theme parks allow you to skip long lines, for a price. In our political lives, where bad

Bad Faith TimesAnthony Reimer

That right-wing populism has nothing to do with working-class economics doesn't stop big media outlets from lazily equating this dishonest brand of populism with what you might call left-wing populism (this doesn't really exist in the US). All populism is populism, according to mainstream media outlets. Good and bad things are precisely the same.

Way back in May 2023, I wrote about this dynamic – all populism being the same – and how it had created a popular vision of Trump as the defender of the everyman. Without this bad faith I don't know if Trump would have ever been president. He might be the owner of a UFL team in Saudi Arabia today if the newspaper had been honest about his plutocratic agenda.

Any sort of pro-worker babble from Republican lawmakers is merely pretext for achieving a fascist vision of society in the 21st century: One defined by fear and paranoia, one in which you work or die, one in which the worst living humans reap the spoils of late-stage capitalism and all its deadly inequalities, one that has no place for Bernie Sanders' good faith. ...  If right-wing populism had even a droplet of good faith, it would gravitate to Bernie Sanders and his politics of economic struggle and hope.

Bernie’s Gleaming Good Faith Exposes the Right’s Wretched Bad Faith

In a political landscape ruled by good faith, Bernie Sanders’ almost adorably earnest political messaging would draw MAGA freaks to him like a tractor beam. Sanders, after running the two most important presidential campaigns in American history, is still the only major political figure (politely) raging against our brutal, soulless

Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter

Political press granting the presumption of good faith to right-wing populism over the past decade has served as jet fuel for class dealignment, that thing where poorer voters without a college degree gravitate toward the Republican Party and richer voters with a college degree cuddle up to the Democratic Party, creating awfully uncomfortable political bedfellows and complicating Democrats' efforts to position themselves as a party interested in the needs of working people. This presumption of good faith has created the ultimate absurdity: The GOP as a workers party.

That's enough of that. Below is this week's Bad Faith Times podcast, in which I talk about Pete Hegseth's pitiful masculinity and Americans' near-total lack of understanding about what constitutes economic populism and what does not. Check out last week's BFT pod here, along with a new Stray Thoughts video for BFT subscribers.