Beat on the Brat

Unbelievably, Ryan Lizza at The New Yorker has fallen for Ayn Rand economist and dime-store Ezekiel David Brat’s positioning of himself as a Tea Party Populist:

From what I’ve observed, Brat has not talked like a forty-seven-per-cent conservative complaining about how tax dollars are being shovelled [sic] to the undeserving poor (although maybe he does believe that and didn’t emphasize it in the campaign). He comes across, instead, like a ninety-nine-per-cent conservative who sees the real villain as corporate America and its addiction to government largesse. One of his biggest applause lines is about how bankers should have gone to jail after the 2008 financial crisis. Brat is the Elizabeth Warren of the right…

Of course, Brat is hardly the first Republican to articulate a conservative-populist case against big business—that element has been present in the Tea Party since its inception. But it’s important to note that his astonishing victory last night over the sitting Majority Leader was not just about amnesty. As far as I have seen, it was not an anti-immigrant campaign specifically capitalizing on nativist sentiment. Brat ran an anti-Wall Street and an anti-corporate-welfare campaign, and it won’t be the last one.

I’m sure that when Corporate America gets wind of this, it will be off to the re-education camps for Brat.

But just as a thought exercise: when did the Tea Partiers ever make Crony Capitalism a top issue? Name one concrete action that any of them has taken to bring on the Ayn Rand Revolution? Anyone? Bueller?

By: Tengrain

Fully caffeinated with twice the sugar, unabashedly liberal. Award-winning Americans United blogger, blogs at Mock Paper Scissors, and sometimes at Crooks and Liars.

You can follow @Tengrain on Twitter, or you might see him enjoying coffee somewhere in Seattle at any given moment of the day.