Cleveland
The Republican platform now includes a rule against shady foreign campaign donations. It’s a big agenda boost for John Pudner, the Tea Party operative who tapped Eric Cantor’s victorious challenger David Brat two years ago.
Pudner and Morris Pearl, a retired Wall Streeter who runs an income equality advocacy group called Patriotic Millionaires, came to Cleveland to lobby delegates and bend the party platform, Trump Fest being the ideal opportunity to sway the RNC further afield from fiscal reality.
Pudner lauds “a populist shock to the system.” His progressive stagemate Pearl puts it more mildly. “Our view has come more to the forefront in the last year than in some previous years, so that’s good.” Despite sworn allegiance to publicly funded programs, Pearl’s brand of populist econ makes nothing more of the pressing national debt than the Clinton and Trump campaigns do.
Public programs, like the public schooling that made his success possible, need an epic revenue influx to rebuild a strong middle class, what the Clinton campaign calls “human infrastructure.” But he’s uninterested in the wealthiest Americans’ voluntarily paying more taxes to help fund public programs, and he hasn’t done so himself.
“That’s not the right way to run America,” Pearl explained to me after his speech in Cleveland on Monday: “It’s not right to run a system where those who are more greedy keep all their money and those who have more largesse have to pay for everything.”
Pearl and Pudner’s sharing the stage showcases a peculiar, friendly friction within American populism between “fairness” that smacks of socialism and capitalist freedom tampered by populism. Pudner’s pleasant drawl mingling with evangelists’ megaphone shouts from the other side of the public square adds to the sense that there’s something in the air.
Pudner directs a group called Take Back Our Republic—from whom are we taking back our republic if not the “short-fingered vulgarian”? (You’d be forgiven for wondering.) We’re taking her back from the likes of controversial Chinese Clinton donors and from big domestic donors and their corporate interests—all of whose big bucks a certain self-reported billionaire proudly and loudly did without for a stretch.
“If you ignore the fact that people are completely fed up with an insider game,” Pudner says, “you’re going to have populists who go out in the conservative grassroots and win primaries, and we saw it in our Dave Brat race. I mean, I was called and told I was insane when I recruited Brat to run against Cantor.”
Standards of “sanity” have surely shifted since then.
