No man should receive a dollar unless that dollar has been fairly earned. Every dollar received should represent a dollar’s worth of service rendered-not gambling in stocks, but service rendered. The really big fortune, the swollen fortune, by the mere fact of its size, acquires qualities which differentiate it in kind as well as in degree from what is possessed by men of relatively small means. Therefore, I believe in a graduated income tax on big fortunes, and in another tax which is far more easily collected and far more effective-a graduated inheritance tax on big fortunes, properly safeguarded against evasion, and increasing rapidly in amount with the size of the estate."
~ Theodore Roosevelt, 1910.
You can't, can you?
The "true conservative" of today is the radical reactionary of 1910, the Gilded Age plutocrat to whom the very idea of taxing unearned inherited wealth is horrific, and to even suggest to the unwashed masses that they should be the "master" of property and "control the mighty commercial forces" is worse than the worst collusion with hostile foreign powers.
Just your daily reminder that these people are your enemies. They are not "fellow citizens", they are not "Americans" in the sense that the ideals of this nation define citizenship. They are the ci-devant aristos, the allies and minions of the malefactors of great wealth. They see you as their cattle, their prey, and will gleefully use your stupidity, venality, racism, and more than anything else, your fear, to prey on you.
For the promise of this nation to be realized the GOP must be destroyed.
It's really that simple
"The real contested ground is the upper left or populist quadrant (29 percent of the electorate), where social conservatism meets economic liberalism...where there are persuadable voters — those who might choose either candidate — that’s where they’re mostly located. The battle for those votes will likely shape the race.Here's the thing; that racism, xenophobia, and hate is a hell of a drug. The fascist parties of Europe have been using it to slam the economically populist parties successfully over the past decade.
Democrats will go after them by arguing that Trump pulled a con on them in 2016, an argument that has the benefit of being perfectly true. Trump has been more eager to do the bidding of the wealthy and corporations than any president in modern times, and has run a spectacularly corrupt administration.
Trump’s strategy to hold on to them will be simple: race and immigration. He ran a campaign of xenophobia and hatred in 2016, tried unsuccessfully to do the same thing to save Republicans in 2018, and he’s going to do the same thing in 2020."
A LOT of Americans are racist shitheels. The Trumpkins are counting on that, and I'm not convinced they're wrong.
Destroying the modern GOP is essential to the American Dream.
Doing it is going to be somewhere between "damned difficult" to "virtually impossible".
4 comments:
The original Progressives. What happened? How did the party of Teddy and Old Abe get taken over by monsters?
But the more important question: How did they convince working people to vote against their own interests? And how do we win those voters back?
"How did they convince working people to vote against their own interests?"
By convincing them that Those People were more dangerous than the plutocrats. The same way the plantocracy convinced the white small farmers to support slavery; by convincing them that the only thing that kept them from being utter trash was that they were better than the n*****s.
So it was really simple; you convinced racist white people that their racism and nativism was more important. That hurting brown people was more important than keeping rich people from picking their pockets.
And win them back? We can't, frankly. There's no way that these people, utterly bought and sold by forty years of lies and bullshit, utterly invested in Being White and Not Being Liberal, are going to suddenly wake up, slap themselves on the forehead shouting "What a FOOL I've been! What the fuck was I thinking!"
All you can do is put out, in the most brutal terms, how the plutocrats and theocrats are screwing them, and that they're JUST as screwed as the n*****s. If they want to drop their racist, xenophobic stupidity and vote their "interests", fine.
But here's the thing; racism IS an interest. Hating foreigners and liberals IS an interest. And, to many, perhaps even most of these people, THOSE interests are more powerful than having a cleaner, smarter, richer (for them and their fellow working people) country. They'd rather rule in Hell than serve alongside Messicans and negroes and homos and liberals in Heaven.
Back in 2016 a bunch of the folks at MilPub kept talking about how Trump was this New Thing, how he was an iconoclast and a fresh face in American politics...and I kept repeating that he wasn't. But it wasn't until his reign that I realized why I kept saying that.
And it's because I'd seen him before. He was George Wallace. He was Curtis LeMay, and Barry Goldwater, and every other goddamn racist Republican (or Dixiecrat) CHUD I'd seen growing up in the Sixties.
Reagan and his generation or Republicans so abandoned their sort of openly vile rhetoric that We the People had forgotten it. It was all dogwhistles, all "welfare queens" and "forced busing" and "immigration". Trump's dark genius - or, rather, his rank stupidity - was to ignore that change and just shart out the old insults and racist crap openly.
He wasn't anything new. He was something very old and vile that we thought was gone forever, gone so long we barely recognized it.
But that old thing had power, was the key to power, in this country for many, many years. And it took a revolution that almost broke the country - the Civil Rights revolution - to turn it back in on itself. But it never truly died and never truly left, and Trump and his Trumpkins have dragged it back into the light to grow and flourish.
Nixon's Dixiecrats responded to the racist dogwhistles. As did some of the Reagan Democrats. But the majority of Reagan's support from former Democratic voters were responding to his economic messages. Those messages were BS but they worked well in the Rust Belt. Reagan's optimistic tone in his speeches helped, as did the fact that he was a former Democrat.
Many of those Reagan Dems were union workers. And they returned to their political roots when Reagan devastated unions. Those that did not return had bought his anti-union rhetoric, or were pissed anyway at crooked union bosses and mob influence.
Cadet Bone-Spurs during his 2016 campaign borrowed much from Reagan. And also from Bernie. Trump's win in WI, MI, and PA came primarily on his promise to deep-six TPP and NAFTA, which he borrowed directly from Bernie. The guy is a shape-shifter - and not in a good sense. After the election he turned again to his lycanthropic self.
The thing was...anyone who WANTED to see through Trump's "populist" schtick could, easily. His GOP platform was boilerplate plutocracy. What few ideas he had - like 86ing the free trade agreements - were obvious shams, as you learned listening for ten seconds to the crickets where his supposed "plans" for replacing the globalized trade regime he would notionally smash.
What's more, most Trump voters weren't really the fabled "economically anxious" "Reagan Democrats". The average Trump voter is a middle-manager in a white suburb, the owner of a small business, a farmer getting federal subsidies, or a retiree double-dipping his pension and Social Security.
These people weren't the one's worrying about making $15 an hour, or getting offshored by companies looking for a Mexican workforce. Those people were there, but they were massively outnumbered by the people who were less worried about the TPP and more about having to press 1 for English.
Because what WAS visibly, irrefutably on offer was his hatred of gays and women and browns and blacks.
And that, to a great extent, was what his voter went for.
The "populist economics" trope has turned out to be a canard, both here and in Europe, where leftist parties trying to soak up these "economically anxious" people have been losing ground to the openly fascist anti-immigrant parties who are offering half the equity only with 100% more racism.
I'm not saying the the Left SHOULDN'T take these economic positions; they're correct on the merits. But "economic populism" versus "lying about economic populism plus racism and homophobia and anti-immigrant hate and Gods and guns"? Sorry...the latter is what the deplorables LIKE about Trump; he gives them the red meat they crave.
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