There’s a lengthy post at FrumForm about the silliness of teahadist fiscal ideas, if it’s even appropriate to describe them as “ideas”. The piece is thorough and on-the-mark, if a little long for my tastes.
What intrigued me most was was the opening line:
Let’s just say it, the Tea Party movement has far more in common with the French Poujadist movement of the 1950s then it does with authentic American conservatism.
I had never heard of Poujade before, so I read the Time magazine piece the post linked to. Poujade would certainly fit right into the tea party movement:
Pierre Poujade looks like a peasant and makes the most of it. He avoids ties in favor of turtleneck sweaters or open-throat shirts. His shoes are often unshined, his pants unpressed, his nails dirty, his light beard unshaven. He prefers his country red wine to champagne, the kitchen to the living room, and he drinks his soup from his plate. He boasts that he has no book learning. “Why should I study books? I know more already than the people who wrote them.” He tells crowds: “I’m just le petit Poujade, an ordinary Frenchman like you.”
[….]He explains his new theory on Algeria: “Big Wall Street syndicates found incredibly rich oil deposits in the Sahara, but instead of exploiting the discovery they capped the wells and turned the Algerians against us.” He discourses on France’s alliances: “All this is a great diabolic scheme to dismember France. Already the Saar is gone, and soon the Italians will want Corsica.” He adds slyly: “As for those who are against us, I need only say: let them go back to Jerusalem. We’ll even be glad to pay their way.”
My sense, though, is that there are also fundamental differences: Poujade attempted to court unions (I don’t know how successful he was) and, from what I can tell, the movement had a “revolt of the shop-keepers” flavor to it that would be a bit out of place in the big-corporation-friendly tea party. There also seems to little-to-no Ayn Rand influence on Poujade and his followers. On the other hand, in terms of sheer anti-tax stupidity and misguided pseudo-patriotism, it’s about the closest thing I’ve seen elsewhere to the teabagger stuff.
Do any of you know more about Poujade? I found the Time article very interesting, but obviously I feel stupid discussing a political movement I had never heard of until yesterday.
Update. The Times had a column comparing tea partyers to Poujadists a months ago, too.
licensed to kill time
French Poujade is some kind of mustard, like Dijon. amirite?
Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle
I wish I remember who(Frank Rich, maybe?) brought up Poujade like a month or two ago.
Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle
Never mind. Thanks to “Teh Google”, I found where it was mentioned. It was in the NY Times, but guest columnist, not a regular. Here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/03/opinion/03zaretsky.html
marc
That’s why you’d never make a good Teabagger. Discussing with authority things about which they know little or nothing is a requirement,as far as I can tell.
valdivia
Should it not read lengthy instead of length in that first sentence?
JGabriel
licensed to kill time:
I don’t think so. Isn’t it some kind of hair product, like pomade?
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licensed to kill time
@JGabriel: From the quote above, Pierre Poujade does not sound like the kind of peasant who would put pomade in his hair. He would, however, smear mustard on his soup plate before slurping.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle:
Robert Zaresky made the same comparison in February in the NYT.
Poujade lives on in that one of his followers was Jean-Marie Le Pen, who tea bags for France.
And no, despite what you hear Le Pen didn’t “almost win the election” back in 2002, he got 16.86 percent in the first round of votes, which officially put him in second place, but Chirac won the second round by 80-something percent.
I mean it was a shock to be sure, but it was largely because the voting rounds system means that everyone uses the first one to vote to make statements, strategic voting, and so on, and the vote gets fragmented. The real surprise was that Lionel Jospin, the sitting soçialist Prime Minister, came in behind Le Pen in the first round and was thus not in the second.
I see him riding his bike around the banks of the Seine these days, or in the newspaper shop.
JGabriel
@licensed to kill time: Maybe it’s both! A mustard AND a pomade!
Poujade!
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Fern
@JGabriel: Or a loathsome food like poutine?
SiubhanDuinne
Also too, Richard Cohen over to WaPo:
http://www.thinkatheist.com/group/currentevents/forum/topics/sarah-palin-finally-a-fallen?commentId=1982180%3AComment%3A224371&xg_source=activity&groupId=1982180%3AGroup%3A206318
Omnes Omnibus
I think there are real parallels between two groups with respect to the sense of grievance, the anger, and the slogan driven discourse. Some of the specifics necessarily differ, we are not in France in 1955, but Poujadists and Teabaggers are kindred souls.
licensed to kill time
@JGabriel: Pardon me sir, do you have any Grey Poujade?
DougJ
@Omnes Omnibus:
That is my general take as well.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Omnes Omnibus:
@DougJ:
I think there’s one major difference, in that the French version really was pretty much a spontaneous populist right wing movement of a sort, whereas I’m firmly convinced that the “Tea Party” is almost entirely a manufactured PR effort on behalf of the Republican Party by FOX News, CNBC, and various other groups organizing it.
No one saw anyone orchestrating them at the time in France the way we saw FOX blatantly choreographing their Tea Bagger “protests”, caught right on camera. Plus all the rest, the 24/7 promotion and so on.
Bill Murray
I thought a Poujadist was a type of poultice. Poutine is not loathsome, unless you were using that to mean delicious in an artery clogging way
JGabriel
@Fern, @licensed to kill time, @Bill Murray:
Eat it or wear it on your head! Or both! Poujade!
Endorsed by Sarah Palin: “Also, it’s good for your complexion, too.” (Cut to photo of Sarah, face smeared with Poujade.)
Available at Walmart for $6.99 per 15.5 oz. jar.
.
slag
@Omnes Omnibus: Beyond which, their fries are french. Ours are freedom.
zhak
Oh dear. I’m thinking the teabaggers would not enjoy being compared to some French movement.
Good thing they are insular and selective in their media preferences and are unlikely to stumble across this perfidy.
Cat Lady
Can we call the teabaggers the Poujahideen? It kinda rolls off the tongue, with the added benefit of evoking the Talibangelicals.
DougJ
@valdivia:
Thanks.
Violet
From the NYT article:
and
Rapid social and economic change. Nostalgia. Longing for a simpler time. That’s why these two groups are similar.
Things are changing at a rapid pace. People are nervous about what it means and where their place in society will be. In 1950’s France it was change from a rural agrarian society to a more urban one. Here it’s more of a demographic fear (imho): black President, “illegal” brown people, where does that leave white people?
It’s the fear of change and looking backwards with nostalgia that unites these groups.
Omnes Omnibus
@Bill E Pilgrim: One of the the differences between France in 1955 and the US in 2009-10 is the issue of corporate sponsorship/organization of politics. I think the people out there with their poorly spelled signs are America’s poujadists; the big money boys have just figured out how to manipulate them.
matoko_chan
The thing that confuses people about what the Tea Party stands for…..is that there are TWO tea parties.
The one that gets sampled in national polling actually has fiscal conservatives in it…the Paulites, for example.
The tea party that self-selects to attend rallies, ie the VISIBLE tea party, is a white conservative christian grievance movement that only uses fiscal conservatism as cover for nativist, racist, and reactionary sentiments.
DougJ
@Omnes Omnibus:
That is more or less exactly what I think. But I do think that makes them quite different in some ways.
Corporatism is such a huge factor in American politics that it’s hard to imagine American politics with out it.
El Cid
The class which consistently backed populist fascist movements in Europe was that of the petit bourgeois, the self-exploiting small business owners, who really have more in common with workers but have the responsibilities and self-regard of capitalists.
MattF
FYI, informative Poujade obit in the Guardian.
MattF
OT, does anyone want any of my $1000 Wal-Mart gift cards?
Mark S.
The Frum Forum post states “conservatism is not populism” and posits that when conservatives do try to go the populist route they cater to the paranoid wing of the faction. I find it interesting to juxtapose that with what Broder vomited last night:
Broder, of course, thinks the way to deal with the debt is to slash Social Security and Medicare, something that won’t be popular with, well, anyone who isn’t rich. That’s why he longs for “a credible populist Republican” who will put one over on the rubes.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Omnes Omnibus: Yes but those people existed all along. The Americans that is.
Which is sort of what you’re saying, but my point was that there would be no “party” or “movement” without FOX.
People were scared of all of the changes during every Presidency since Nixon, and probably long before that. The corporate organizers didn’t invent the fear, but they did invent the movement. Otherwise they’d just be right wing Republicans. I mean, they are already, but that’s what we’d be calling them and no one would be comparing them to Poujade.
Omnes Omnibus
@DougJ: There is always a danger in taking historical analogies too far. One does have to do both the compare and the contrast from college essay questions to get a full picture. One of my favorite how to books, Thinking in Time, is quite useful on the subject.
Bill E Pilgrim
@slag: @Omnes Omnibus:
They get very touchy about that. They don’t get touchy about much, but that one, they do.
Omnes Omnibus
@Bill E Pilgrim: It is a little bit chicken and egg. I don’t disagree with with you, but now that they are here and they see themselves as separate from the Republican party, they are poujadistish( try saying that three times quickly).
Michael
A friend of mine is an emergency services director of my exurban county. He’s a bit wingnutty (cops, firefighters and paramedics sometimes tend this way), but he recently reached his limit. Seems that a teabagger is running for the county executive slot, and the bosses of the local cops, firefighters and paramedics met with him in advance of the primary, a courtesy extended to all candidates. As my right wing buddy described it, the teabagger was “a piece of shit who is dangerous in what he doesn’t understand about emergency services.”
Apparently, he was trying to come up with a way to privatize them.
KRK
“Then” erroneously used for “than” in the opening sentence? Yikes. No teaching job in Arizona for you, Mr. Murphy!
Bill E Pilgrim
@Omnes Omnibus: Huh, that’s interesting, I see a very large difference between a populist movement and what’s basically a manufactured public relations effort.
There is a similarity in that the Poujadists basically folded back into the right once election time came, and I’m fairly certain that’s what’s going to happen in November in the US. As far as them “seeing themselves as separate from the Republican party” I mean. I doubt that will last beyond October.
Carrie
@Fern: Oh come on now, poutine is yummy.
And yes, i actually typed yummy….for the first and last time ever.
Mike in NC
I read more and more of the preposterous nostalgia for the 1950s in the Letters to the Editor section of the local paper. Granted, there are a lot of old farts around here who’d gladly return to a time when they were young and running the show.
The fact that everyone feared demagogues like Joe McCarthy back then, and there were no uppity minorities wanting to vote or Commie homosexuals to deal with, is icing on the cake.
jake the snake
Poujadine certainly sounds a lot like Glenn Beck so far as the conspiracy theories and paranoid national/nativism.
wag
Atlas Shrugged wasn’t written until 1951, and I doubt there was a french Translation within 4 years. I don’t think you could expect an anti-intellectual like Poujade to actually read something in a foreign language, just as I doubt any of our anti-intellectuals (Beck, Palin and comapany) would read anything challenging, either.
Martin
@jake the snake: Crazy respects no national boundaries.
Nellcote
@Michael:
Wasn’t that Eric sonofEric’s plan?
Sm*t Cl*de
There also seems to little-to-no Ayn Rand influence on Poujade and his followers.
You are unlikely to find an Ayn Rand influence on anyone outside the US. In the rest of the world she’s a niche author, shelved in the “Unreadable cult SF” section, and it does not do much for our opinion of the US when we find out about her and discover that “glorification of psychopathy” is taken seriously there as an influential political platform.
aimai
This thread is just delicious–poutine, poujade, or whatever. Really, I’ve just enjoyed all the comments so much. I’ve got nothing to add except that I think one of the biggest differences between previous social movements and the teabaggers is that the teabaggers arrived at the tail end of a very long period of intellectual demagoguery and paid political manipulation by large corporatist interests. The heritage foundation, cato, all the others have spent years offering a randian rationale for a dog eat dog world. The teabaggers are just the suckers they have convinced to carry the banner forward electorally just at the moment that a large portion of the US has been willing and able to tke baby steps away from the romance of conservative laissez faire economics and jingoistic militarism. All social movements are of their time, and arise out of (or match) real felt needs among the populace that respond to them. But the teabaggers, more than most, are sucking down some serious fantasy and that fantasy isn’t spontaneous or locally generated it is clearly dictated from large corporate interests. Death Panels, for example, or the rumor that the banks failed because of “giving money to black people” were not grassroots rumors, they were astroturfed. I don’t see that element in poujadism.
aimai
frankdawg
@JGabriel:
It Its a floor cleaner AND a whip topping!
SNL Aykroyd & Radner I think – wish I could remember the name of the product.
licensed to kill time
@frankdawg:
;-)
Quiddity
About 20 years ago, someone at The New Republic tossed out a casual reference** to Poujadism. In the weeks that followed there was a (bemused) discussion of why it was obscure and what it was about.
Without going into all the details, I’d say the parallel is apt. Not perfect, but pretty close.
The “shop-keepers” of old are the “small businesses” of today – look at how often Palin and other conservatives use them as the fulcrum to get big-business-friendly talking points across and legislation enacted.
Don’t know what you’d make of it, but in France, Jean-Marie Le Pen was an early Poujade (though the latter later disavowed him).
On the whole, I thought the FrumForum essay was sensible.
@aimai: Much of what you say is correct, but I still think there is a substantial, latent, Poujadist-like element in this country.
** IIRC, because of anti-Semitism that was considered part of the movement
CalD
This is why you can never be a highly paid American political pundit. Doesn’t take any particular talent to speak with authority on subjects you actually know something about. Anyone who knows about anything about anything can do that.
aimai
Quiddity,
Sure, there’s a “latent poujadist” movement or sentiment in the country–here we call it jingoism, nativism, etc…etc…etc… But I don’t see the Poujadists as having been organized from above–and certainly their anti tax backlash was rooted in their actual tax situation. Whereas the teabaggers are fighting for lower corporate taxes–taxes which they don’t pay–and lower taxes on the very wealthy–a group they don’t belong to. If you read the article on Poujade he started as a tax resistor, and there have certainly been plenty of those in American history. But he specifically focused on actual taxes and tax related bankruptcies. In this country you have to go back to the depression to see organized groups of farmers resisting foreclosure. And you notice that modern day teabaggers are not protesting their own impoverishment so much as they are the imaginary enrichment of the lower classes. They have totally steered away from true populism or any kind of group effort (unless you count the occasional cries of “lets go galt”) to organize for real group action that would affect anything.
aimai
Jim, Once
@efgoldman:
Wurd. I, for one, could not WAIT to get out of the Fifties.