Neal's Workshop

In an editorial titled, Dobbs: I'm a populist, deal with it, Lou Dobbs claims that he is a "damn proud populist" after defining a populist as being "a supporter of the rights and the power of the people". Dobbs then obfuscates these allegedly populist underpinnings by asserting his staunchly Statist fundamentals:

I have never blamed the poor of Mexico, China or India for corporate America's avarice and our political elites' cowardice. I blame us for forgetting that the United States is first a nation, and secondly a marketplace or an economy, and I blame us for being taken as fools by both political parties for far too long. It is not nationalism by any stretch of the imagination for me to remind those in power that our political system, our great democracy, makes possible our free-enterprise economy, and not vice versa as the elites continually propagandize.

Dobbs fails to realize that he can't support "the rights and the power of the people" and put the State first. But for the individual, the fundamental source of human interaction and economy, there would be no State, no democracy, no nation and no "people"!

This is not a chicken-or-egg argument.