When did being “populist” become a positive thing?

Crossposted at the Young Sentinel

About a week ago during a discussion I participated in on the Young Sentinel blog having to do with education the eponymous author replied to a point I made about teachers unions by saying that “Another thing: teacher’s unions (and unions in general) are a good thing for the country. We need to return to a national psyche when unions are appreciated for the good work that they do.” Coming from someone who regularly condemns corporations for being “greedy” and “only caring about their own profits” this puzzled me somewhat (not that I’m picking on the YS mind you, his attitude is just representative of many liberals.)

After all, what truly separates a corporation from a union? Both are groups of people who come together to more efficiently sell a commodity and to make the maximum amount of money possible in doing so; one group sells a product or products, while the other sells its labor. The important part is that (in theory at least; random philanthropy notwithstanding) both are essentially selfish institutions, dedicated to enriching their members at the expense of the greater society.

It is true that after 8 years of Republican rule our governments and laws have become biased towards corporations, but as oppositions are wont to do the Democrats/liberals have overcompensated, casting corporations in general as the Great Satan who exist only to greedily take the money of the common people. This mindset has spread across the country to the degree that even the Republicans are championing their VP choice’s anti-corporate credentials, with much being made of the fact that her husband is a union worker, and Karl Rove himself going so far as to call her “populist”.

Some thoughts

Some random and scattered thoughts about the Democratic Convention, the Republican VP pick, and other errata:

• Quite frankly, the Democratic Convention scared me. I think its unhealthy for any one person to have that much attention and adulation, much less someone who might be the next President. Not that this is any reflection on Obama – he can’t help it, and to his credit he has handled his celebrity rather well. But when I saw that massive cloud of Obama banners and his supporters chanting and cheering and crying shivers ran down my spine. Such mass idolization might be helpful for Obama the candidate, but it is certainly harmful for the nation over which Obama wants to preside
• Still, Obama has continued his position as the lesser of the two evils in my eyes, especially after McCain’s VP pick. I was desperately hoping for him to throw us moderates a bone and choose Lieberman, perhaps as part of a realization that the kind of pandering to the hard right that worked in 2000 and 2004 just isn’t going to cut it anymore and that if he wants to have a chance at beating Obama’s war machine he has to remember the existence of the moderates and independents he used to court. In that sense his choice of Palin as VP was more than just a VP choice. It was another stop, and a big one on the Straight Talk Express’ steady journey to the right.
• Being on vacation I had to watch the convention on Indian hotel TVs that didn’t have CSPAN, and so I was forced to subject myself to the endless punditry and jabbering that is modern political news coverage. Even the normally commendable BBC filled their “American politics special” with the same few speeches being repeated over and over, each time followed by a fresh wave of punditry and speculation. Some day the cable news networks are going to realize that they could cut costs immensely by taking two out of work actors, handing them the transcripts of a few old episodes of Crossfire and having them read random lines out loud in no particular order. The audience would never know the difference.