And a special hello to all of you in this room who have known and loved me for many, many years. It’s true. The politicians. They’ve had me to their homes. They’ve introduced me to their children. I’ve become their best friends in many instances. They’ve asked for my endorsement and they’ve always wanted my money. And even called me really a dear, dear friend. But then suddenly, [they] decided [that] when I ran for president as a Republican, that I’ve always been a no-good, rotten, disgusting scoundrel. And they totally forgot about me.
– Donald J. Trump, The 2016 Al Smith Dinner
In a rare occurrence at Advanced Citizenship, we’re actually going to tip our hat to The New York Times for a recent piece it published titled “Why Is Every Young Person in America Watching ‘The Sopranos’?” The article highlights (but doesn’t say out loud) the recent phenomenon of The Sopranos seeing a resurgence in “leftist” circles (if anything, The Sopranos is not only a right-wing populist show, but easily the least “woke” show ever made), but it intentionally misattributes the logic behind this trend as being a left-wing phenomenon as opposed to what it really is – a populist one.
While the quasi-postmodern undercurrents of The Sopranos may make a couple of boomercons uncomfortable (again, why the current establishment GOP ultimately always loses – the biggest victory it could have seized on in the past fifty years only happened because an individual named Donald J. Trump became the first President to ever turn postmodernism against itself), but Chase himself has repeatedly reiterated that the comedic engine of the show was that America’s ruling class had become so selfish and narcissistic that even the mafia couldn’t stomach it, as “everything that the Mafia had done was nothing compared to what was going on around them.”
The populist tone was set in the opening lines of the pilot episode. Our antihero protagonist, Tony (a Republican), explains to Dr. Melfi, “The morning of the day I got sick, I’d been thinking: It’s good to be in something from the ground floor. I came too late for that. I know. But lately, I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end. That the best is over. I think about my father. He never reached the heights like me, but, in a lot of ways, he had it better. He had his people. They had their standards. They had their pride. Today, what do we got?”
Americans rooted for Tony not because he was a puritan (he’s neither a hero or a villain), but because, unlike our Globalist American Empire elites, he at least had enough self-awareness and stuggots to be honest about who he was rather than pretending he was a choir boy. You might even say Trump “culturally appropriated ” one of Tony’s most powerful weapons – his ability to call bullshit on sanctimonious enemies of his whose destructive actions and decisions were farther reaching than anything he ever did or could ever be in a position to do.
What separates right-wing populism and left-wing populism apart is the reaction to Tony’s declaration. The former ideology accepts the premise, but believes that history is the best textbook ever created, and that the country can get out of its current rut with a little elbow grease and some imagination from talented individuals working in tangent to, one might say, “Make America Great Again”. The latter ideology similarly accepts the premise, but has a totally different notion about what implications this has for the future (and what can practically be done about it now).
If you enjoy the challenge of having your thought provoked, read the piece here.