If any more proof was needed that the Republican Party has drifted so far to the right that it has completely lost its moorings, the recent Tea Bag protests put the case to rest.
It’s clear now that Republican heavyweights and party icons alike have lost the ability to think rationally, let alone critically. The Republicans can’t remember what happened on election night last November let alone what happened in 1932 or 1964. When John Boehner crows that, “the people have spoken and they don’t like what’s happened the past three months,” he simply erases any doubt that the hours he’s spent in a tanning bed have fried his brain.
The central Republican idea that Americans are over-taxed isn’t supported by fact, particularly when one studies tax rates for the wealthiest Americans or compares tax rates in the United States with those of other industrialized countries. Republicans talk a lot about “socialism” and the evils of transferring wealth from the productive rich to the slovenly poor, but they’re oblivious to the fact that for nearly 30 years, the transfer has been in the opposite direction – from the working class and the middle class to the wealthy.
I give the Republicans and their corporate clients credit for seizing absolute control of the terms and norms that govern economic discourse in the United States. The Republicans and the corporate class took over the mass media (scrapping the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 helped) and use its enormous power to promote their viewpoint, focusing zealously on investors and Wall Street, and paying lip service, if that, to working Americans, wages, and middle class buying power.
Here’s a case in point: every weekday morning on the local news, the news reader dutifully reports the opening numbers on Wall Street, as if those numbers have any significance for the people rushing out the door to work for wages that have remained stagnant for decades; for people up to their asses in credit card debt or struggling to hold onto their homes; for people who long ago realized that the American Dream is a fantasy beyond their reach. Even with Wall Street disgraced and in ruins, the mainstream media follows the stock numbers, day in and day out.
The other thing I gave Republicans credit for is convincing working Americans that small government, privatization, outsourcing, and the “free” market actually make them more economically secure. It took many years to sell this notion, and there’s little doubt that an inept, weak and defensive Democratic party aided the Republican cause. By the second Clinton administration, it was difficult to tell Democrats from Republicans, so chummy had Democrats become with corporate America.
The conservative wing of the Republican Party had a genius for propaganda – because it takes no less than genius to convince millions of voters to support ideology and policy that actually work against their self-interest; to convince voters that all taxation is bad; to convince voters that effective government is impossible; to convince voters that the free market is always right, just and self-correcting; to convince the average working person that unions are bad for workers; and to convince the public that the wealthy have no obligation to anyone but themselves. Karl Rove dreamed of a permanent Republican majority, and this might have come to pass if George W. Bush hadn’t been such a bumbler. Bush’s abject failure exposed conservative ideology as empty, immoral and corrupt.
The American public knows something is fundamentally out of whack in the way the nation is organized. The public finally grasps, I think, that plutocracy masquerading as democracy cannot address pressing problems or satisfy human needs. The political class – particularly on the Republican side – doesn’t get this at all, but the majority of citizens do because they are living through the effects.
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