Does the Rise of David Brat Signal A Revolt Against the GOP's New Gilded Age?

I will be candid.  I find David Brat, the Tea Party hero who defeated Eric Cantor last week in the GOP primary, in many ways to be down right scary.  He's in bed with the Christian Right - the Tea Party is after all 85-90% far right Christian - and certainly is no friend to gays or anyone who isn't a white heterosexual conservative Christian.  But, as a piece in Politico notes - he also is no friend of those in the GOP who are striving to return America to the Gilded Age of 100+ years ago.  In fact, a some of his economic positions almost sound liberal when he is condemning wealth disparity and rapacious big business. Thus, Brat may well be the unexpected leader of a revolt against the agenda of the Koch brothers and others of their ilk within the GOP who see themselves as a reincarnation of the robber barons of old.  Here are some article highlights:

All of these explanations [as to why Cantor lost] may be at least partially true. But perhaps the enduring significance of this election will be that Brat’s campaign was a textbook example of the new right-wing populism. It also revealed affinities with populist campaigns going back to the 19th century as well as curious similarities with left-wing populism in more recent years.

The most striking aspect of Brat’s core stump speech is that while he is caustically critical of politicians from both parties, his main target is business and the “gazillionaires” who suck up a disproportionate share of America’s wealth. He blasts his opponent for having voted for TARP (thereby rewarding the big banks, Wall Street and America’s Chinese creditors) and the farm bill (enriching huge agribusiness), as well as for watering down the STOCK Act, which would have prevented members of Congress from engaging in insider trading. But Cantor’s real puppet-masters, according to Brat, are the “crony capitalists” on K Street and nefarious business organizations like the Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable. Cantor is “completely beholden to corporate interests” and seeks “to sell America to the highest bidder.”

There’s some truth to this critique. As one Wall Street Journal headline on his big-money ties succinctly put it, “Eric Cantor’s loss a blow to Wall Street.”

But Brat goes further. Business influence is so entrenched and widespread on Capitol Hill, he says, that “There is just one party up in D.C. right now”: the money-and-power party. While the “donor class” has easy access to Congress, the business-controlled government is not just indifferent to average citizens but actively despises them and wants to take away their freedoms. The government is actively persecuting ordinary people through NSA spying, IRS investigations and regulations that force families to spend their money on expensive light bulbs rather than food. And the public has no voice, since business controls the media while establishment Republicans like Cantor silence voters through “slating”and other machine-politics tactics. The result is that the United States has become a ruined, broken country . . . . .

[A]lthough Brat depicts illegal immigration as the No. 1 national problem, he focuses his ire not so much on the immigrants themselves as on the corporate interests that require their political lackeys to vote for open borders and amnesty. The “big guys” thereby get to enjoy cheap immigrant labor while also benefiting from immigrants driving down wages for American workers.

Much of Brat’s rhetoric could have been lifted directly from the 1892 platform of the People’s Party, better known as the Populists. Like Brat, the Populists of old declared that they were living in “a nation brought to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin.” At the root of this corruption were big businesses and great fortunes that dominated both parties, silenced public opinion and “subsidized or muzzled” the media.

I suspect that the so-called GOP establishment does not want to see too many more David Brats come to the fore.