Compassionate conservatives and the crucible of fire
Democrats have facetiously said that Republicans think that the rich don’t have enough money and the poor have too much. But the more I think I about modern Republicanism, the more I think that the statement it is literally true. Republicans believe that the poor are too well off. The modern Republican Party honestly yearns for a cleansing fire of misery and pain to sweep the land. They believe that the nation’s problems are largely due to the fact that the poor are living in relative comfort as a result of the overall affluence of our society. America is the victim of its own success and has become a weak and lazy country slouching toward calamity.
It is clear to me that Republican want a more severe poverty in this country to clear off the tables, to burn down what they regard as the cheap, the tawdry, the transitory and false. They desire a wildfire that would consume everything not built out of stone. As the Walton family persevered throughout he great depression dug in on Walton Mountain, the Republicans believe that Americans need a trial by fire to reveal their spirit. They believe that America is built of honest bricks that are long overdue for a sandblasting. This isn’t about race. The Republican inferno is not racist. Although let’s face it, only god fearing, hetero, and mostly white families would have the endurance to walk out of the other side of the Republican inferno of righteousness. They would emerge unscathed to rebuilt America with a bible in one hand and a musket in the other. Father, mother, children, dog. All complications unwound and all things re-ordered and repaired in the eyes of God.
This notion that misery and suffering needs to be ramped up in order to get to the cleansing befits of misery and suffering explains a great deal about conservativism that most American find perplexing. It obviously explains policies and things like the deeply unpopular Ryan budget. It explains the GOP’s eagerness to burn down the social safety net that has allowed a generation of the nation’s elderly, widows and impaired to live with a semblance of dignity. But it also explains their choices of candidates.
If Ronald Reagan believed in the biblical end times, George W. Bush believed in hastening them. There is a progression from Reagan to Bush to Gingrich or Palin. The dial only moves in one direction, toward more vocal and strident craziness. That’s why they don’t like Rommey. He doesn’t appear wild-eyed and unsteady enough. His craziness, like his empathy, comes off as insincere.
The Republican worldview also explains the ham handed belligerence of Republican foreign policy. Bombs are not simply tools of diplomacy, they are tools of renewal. Wonton death in lesser countries, or even here, isn’t a tragedy, it is a step in the right direction. It is a deeply sick and twisted ideology that has taken hold in the right. To be sure, it has always been with us. The “end is nigh” has been the fervent hope of many deranged lunatics throughout this country’s history. However, we’ve never before contended with an entire political party composed of people who are so invested in bringing about the end.
The modern GOP advocates social engineering on a grand scale. But like the Iraq war, they envision a deus ex machana of misery that would cleanse the earth and will work perfectly. There is no thought given to the possibility that they might be wrong. No conservatives pause to wonder if the positive effects of misery might be overstated.
Simple solutions are naturally attractive to the simple minded. But there it is; to be Republican means being cruel in order to be kind. If you think of what is at the very heart of the cruelty, it is in a perverse way, a very hopeful and optimistic philosophy. They envision a renewed and reborn nation. Yes. It sounds absolutely nuts to you and I, but it is powerfully motivating to a large number of your neighbors.
So true, Jason. It is as I have observed multiple times over the past period of years: How come so many people who reject scientific Darwinism believe so strongly in the social version of the same?
” The modern Republican Party honestly yearns for a cleansing fire of misery and pain to sweep the land. ”
The last time that happened (Great Depression), Republicans were thrown out of power for generations. When Reagan ran for President, the children of the Depression were old and prosperous enough to forget the national misery Republicans brought, but were only able to emotionally remember the pleasure and allure of the fictional idealized cowboys in the movies of their youth.
From wikipedia:
G O P Spells US Failure
Comment – Part 1 of 2
TPs sang the poorhouse blues while waiting for some 1% news. Republicans favorite tune has been “America need jobs. Haven’t the TP’s noticed, Rmoney’s been making 20 million a year, without working? “Why hasn’t it occurred to TP voters that their ‘economy’ and the billion dollar corporations’ ‘economy’ aren’t in hot water together? Attention poor/middle income TPs: You are not the 1%. The 1% means – the 1% highest income earners. Poor/middle income TP’s are part of the 99%. The thing the 1% wants from you, is not your costly labor, but your votes. The 1% richest and most powerful, have everything except… except…they only have 1% of the vote.. Oh dear. That’s where your ‘issue’ votes come in play. The 1% will allow your views on religion, race, Obama, education, values, jobs, women, gays, etc to be aired for votes, if you vote for the politicians of the 1%. richest and most powerful. Don’t worry, they’ll be sure to tell you everyday, whom you must vote for.
Poor and middle class TP’s don’t realize they’re not soul mates of the country’s rich. Soullessness of corporate entities funding propaganda for a TP political movement is no different than the soullessness of corporate entities responsible for leaving middle income TP’s drowning by loss of investments, jobs, savings; their mortgages underwater, their rising debt, etc. Not only that – the 1% never lets a TP escape his misplaced anger. It’s been lovely spending every day of the last 4 years, feeling used, angry, turning that anger against your fellow American, your own President, hasn’t it? Keep your dial tuned in and Fox, Rush and Savage et al, will keep you feeling violated and enraged (while putting your vote in the 1%ers back pocket.)
Why aren’t the millionaires, billionaires investing in American jobs for the poor TPs? TPs can ask why Rmoney invested overseas instead of investing in American businesses. The answer is, because a 1%er (like Rmoney,) is going to invest how and where it makes himself the most money, even though that means not investing in America, and paying even less taxes than a poor American worker. Keep believing you’ll get trickled down on, from their tax breaks, foreign investments, foreign factories, multi million tax free trust funds, blind trusts, overseas profits, banks accounts, etc.
There is plenty of work that needs to be done in America. There is no lack of need for goods and services, people need them, but there now is a change in what Americans can spend on. Example, $75 haircut vs $20 haircut; name brand product vs. no name; latest vehicle vs keeping the car a few more years; time to move vs. time to stay. Corporations have moved on – by closing American factories to providing other countries with industries of cheap labor. Check the tags on your purchases. TPs can wave the flag all they want, saying they want America back. The 1% even tells the poor/middle class that the minimum wages will cause job losses. The 1% aren’t going to bring jobs back to America, when they can have people work for next to nothing elsewhere.
The poor and middle class Americans need to realize the republican party has been overtaken by the interests of the 1% richest and most powerful who have little interest in whether Americans work, get educated, keep their homes, have health care, retirement security, etc. ( But they do need your vote.) What the 1% fear most, is that poor/middle TPs would realize, the 99% is them. Oh nnnooo. So divide and conquer then. When a TP is out of work, losing his house, can’t afford an education, is collecting unemployment, he’s better, more American, than a poor democrat – those un taxable, needy, jobless.
TPs have grips and complaints. Often the 1% will help them know just what those complaints are. Rush will tell them everyday. And he’ll have an immediate answer as well – it’s the democrats fault, Obama’s fault. Don’t vote for a democrat, vote republican – that’s your answer. TP’s feeling used? Well, that’s because they’ve become their own worst enemy. Try listening to what Rush is really saying – lower taxes on the rich, lower corporate taxes, use more fossil fuels, de regulate, shut down the EPA,attack social security, don’t raise minimum wage, no inheritance tax, more subsidies for oil companies, remove mountains, drill, frack like there’s no tomorrow.
Middle America was hung out to dry – not trickled on. Why hadn’t poor/middle class TPs noticed, that the rich aren’t interested in having anything trickling down on them – they want it all, at the top. Their renourished shores are lined with yachts, jammed with sand castles, accounts overflow offshore; private jets are bought, as the Wall Street 1%ers take home $20, $40 million a year as the lowly TP choir begs, “we need jobs.” 1%ers’ taxes have been lowered since Bush – so how did that help middle America? It didn’t, it helped the 1%. (Yet Rmoney still tells the voters, lower my taxes some more – and get jobs.) 13%. not low enough, Mr. Rmoney?
http://thehill.com/video/campaign/259331-ahead-of-debates-obama-attacks-romney-as-jobs-killer
(continued.)
G O P Spells US Failure
Comment – Part 2 of 2
Since when do the corporate elite, the struggling middle class, swim in the same pool? Uh, never. TPs can wait for the 1% to pull them out of a sink hole. It’s not going to happen. Think about the 47% of Americans Rmoney said it wasn’t his job to worry about. Many of them, are you. If Rmoney had told the room full of millionaires the truth, the figure would be 99%, but he’s counting on getting votes from some of the remaining 53% – some of you TPs.
Would an average Tea Party voter think this is the Bain experience necessary to create jobs?:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&v=S3-15jVL77Q&NR=1
Poor TPs haven’t figures out that the 1% looks out for the 1% and that an unemployed TP is no different than an unemployed democrat – they’re both unemployed Americans. The only time a poor TP matters to a 1%er, is when he steps into the voting booth. But remember, those gates at the end of 1% driveways, aren’t for letting you in; they’re for keeping you out, just as Romney believes those tall fences surrounding 20,000 China workers, aren’t for keeping the workers in, there for keeping other’s out.
http://dprogram.net/2012/09/17/leaked-video-romney-admits-chinese-slave-labor-investment-at-fundraiser/
Help, Mr. Corporate Entity, we cast our R vote like you wanted, like Rush said we should. Now save us, we’re drowning!
Oh for haven’s sake, what’s that dreadful noise? I told you, keep the gates locked.
Tell James to get my bags ready. I’m catching the express to China, then Barbados. Switzerland, India, Bangladesh……Hello, close down the plant while I’m gone – I can get those jeans ‘Made in China’ for $1.
$50,000 for a Rmoney dinner? Send him $100,000. We like to hear who he’s really working for. Us.
An ideology based on the Noah’s Ark story. Yeah, that’s what this nation needs.
My two favorite quotes from this post:
That’s why they don’t like Rommey. He doesn’t appear wild-eyed and unsteady enough. His craziness, like his empathy, comes off as insincere.
Translation: even crazies can sense a lack of sincerity.
Wonton death in lesser countries, or even here, isn’t a tragedy, it is a step in the right direction.
Translation: God wants us to drop small oriental noodles to choke people in lesser countries to death.
This general narrative is not new: it is inherent in domination Christianity, which is a particular offshoot of evangelical Protestantism, and it is tied (at least indirectly) to the “free labor ideology” (an argument developed by Eric Foner, interestingly enough, pre-Reagan) that was at the root of the pre-Lincoln GOP.
It is worth noting that the original GOP ideology before Lincoln was strongly nativist (anti-immigrant), anti-Catholic, anti-labor (in the sense we use the word “labor” today; they would have said “wage earners”), and racist. The initial Republican critique of slavery succeeded with voters because it was not Abolitionism, not based on ideas of Biblical justice or racial equality. It was based almost purely on why slavery was bad for white people in social and economic terms.
You are absolutely correct that there is a continuum from Reagan to Palin in the sense that if you read his letters, speeches, and diaries, Reagan knew that evangelist Christians were a necessary part of his constituency but he kept them at considerably further arm’s length than his successors. He gave them doses of rhetorical inclusion that were far more sweeping than anything he did. It was his successors who went beyond rhetorical inclusion to handing them real power in the movement. Reagan’s personal God was not the Christian Jesus, /i don’t think, but Charleton Heston as Moses–literally the actor portraying a useful myth.
And quite possibly why the tea party is hell bent for global warming. They believe the planet is theirs to destroy, so what; while the 1% may imagine they’ll have enough money to buy their way out of it. But the 1% would find out too late, there are after all, things money can’t buy.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/10/opinion/game-over-for-the-climate.html?_r=0
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/06/10/496039/must-read-scientists-uncover-evidence-of-impending-tipping-point-for-earth/
Global warming, budget brinksmanship that impact our credit ratings…it is all part of Gods large plan.
Actually, as history has repeatedly shown when great societies suffer demise, those who are shut out of society have to exaggerate their claims, because the reality of what is currently working, is pretty good for most people.
They guy on the street corner, shouting “repent, sell everything you own, time is nigh” has no choice but to… that is the only way his message has to be let out. Imagine a priest saying that? He’d be called before his bishop on Monday. Imagine a Baptist saying that to his congregation? He’d be out of a job right after the meeting held post service.
Crazy people have to act crazy to get their crazy ideas noticed…. And we have to realize the reason they are sooooo crazy is because the current status quo is working rather well.
Bottom line, Democrats have created a society, that works rather well. The only issues occurring in our lives right now (unemployment slow to come down) is because Republicans have held up the American Jobs Act for a full year now…. In fact, behind every problem being faced by us today, Republicans had their hands in its creation.
How can a party holding up a workable act to fast forward our nation’s economy, be responsible for creating 12 million new jobs?
It’s crazy to trust them.
Which is why Republicans have to play crazier, so you don’t consider the crazy stuff that will happen if you choose to trust them…. I mean, they’ve gone so far off the deep end, they make even Libertarians look normal.
As humans, we have short term memory levels hard wired into our nervous system, so as the opposition gets crazier and more shrill, it is wise for the rest of us to make note that the reason they are so bizarre and whacked-out, is because things are working out pretty good for the moment. Uhhh, hello. We are not in the middle of a Great Depression, even though the monetary collapse dwarfed that which occurred in the Thirties.
Our fate this time, was determined early by those who understood the Great Depression, who quickly made correct decisions which, had they been made in the Hoover Administration, could have prevented that dreadful economic period of our history.
Today’s Republicans are essentially calling for the return of the Hoover Administration, who’s party platform is almost exactly like that of Andrew Mellon described above.
It is our job to continue to call out their craziness and provide context for those exclamatory statements Republicans often make….. (yes, I know it is never ending and an odious chore).
Failure to do so, is defeat.
For any number compared to zero, is that number.
The above (both story and comments) are some of the most inspiring and poignant posts I have read in quite some time. Thank you all for your essays and thoughtful replies in this thread. Jason330, thank you for touching off this discussion with your thoughtful writing.
Dickens covered this in A Modest Proposal (farming Irish children as a food source). I’m pretty sure Dickens was being facetious.
It was Jonathan Swift, not Dickens.
Yes, Dean Swift’s interest n the Irish exceeded that of Mr. Dickens.
Getting older. The Brit authors run together. Like that guy Shakesarrow.
Thoughtful post? I guess it took a lot of imagination. Reality based, not so much.
“Thoughtful post? I guess it took a lot of imagination. Reality based, not so much.”
If there is one thing RD knows about, its vivid imagination and a reality free perspective.