The conservative capture of popular anger has been a preoccupation of the left for the last year or two. In a speech at Harvard this evening, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka addressed it directly, warning that appropriate economic anger was being transformed into dangerous "hatred" by the right, making this moment a dangerous one that he compared to Dallas in 1963.
>From his prepared remarks:
Our politics have been dominated by greed and the forces of money for a generation. Now, amid the wreckage that came from that experiment, we hear the voices of hatred, of racism and homophobia.
At this moment of economic pain and anger, political intellectuals face a great choice—whether to be servants or critics of economic privilege. And I think this is an important point to make here at Harvard. The economic elites at JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and the other big Wall Street banks are happy to hire intellectual servants wherever they can find them. But the stronger the alliance between intellectuals and economic elites, the more the forces of hatred—of anti-intellectualism—will grow. If you want to fight the forces of hatred, you have to help empower the forces of righteous anger.
And at this moment, the labor movement is working to give voice to the justified anger of the American people. We need help. We need public intellectuals who will help design the policies that will replace the bubble economy with a real, sustainable economy that works for all of us.
http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0410/Trumka_embraces_anger_warns_of_hate.html?showall