A Look Inside the Conservative Fog Machine

Fred Allebach

The conservative oligarchy finances huge propaganda campaigns to whip up social resentment of little white guy furor when in fact the oligarchy could give a rat’s ass about any peons at the bottom, white or otherwise.

There is social resentment but it’s aimed at those who should be allies while the real enemy is a self-serving oligarchy. This has all happened before with the Greeks, Romans etc. There is plenty of historical precedent to illustrate that the situation we have in the US now is leading to no good. Hyper partisanship, intractable disputes, extreme unequal distribution of wealth; this all leads to the dissolution of society as we know it. Then we get back to a war of all against all from which new orders emerge to start the same game all over again.

There is a new type of citizen invoked by conservatives: “the taxpayer”. Taxpayers are somehow separate from the population (non-white underdogs) who need good jobs. Taxpayers are somehow exempt from being members of society with any responsibilities other than to themselves. “Taxpayers” actually don’t want to pay any tax at all and would prefer to have no obligations or any social contract. The ethos is all about complete individual freedom and no social responsibility whatsoever. Every dog for himself is basically what the Republican platform amounts to. This is the raw, natural law of domination of the few over the many. The roots of the ideology are clear enough to see. 

What’s happened is that the plantation Masters have managed through billion dollar propaganda campaigns to conflate the interests of the Kings with a segment of subjects who happen to have the same religion, color of skin and cultural background.

Taxpayers don’t want to pay for public union benefits primarily because they aren’t getting any themselves. People are always acutely sensitive to who has more, especially when they have less. (Welcome to the bottom of the pile white guys!) Fairness issues come out pretty quickly. Part of the social resentment behind the small government movement is the feeling that undeserving freeloaders (“takers”, Romney’s 47%) are getting a free ride on the taxpayer’s dollar.

Yet it is totally disingenuous of conservatives to appear to be on the side of little guy taxpayers when in reality there is nothing there other than a negative pronouncement against all people who are legitimately at the bottom.

Racism and class antagonism live on. Looking closer at modern conservativism you see the movement is focused on white people, on an appeal to little white guys who see the economy tanking and don’t want to be lumped in with blacks, Hispanics, immigrants, women and all the civil rights history implied therein.

This lingering racism and class antagonism comes out as a counter-fairness argument. It’s not fair that little white guys should pay one dollar to help any others other than themselves. This can never be said outright but it is pretty clear given the history of racial resentment that this is a card and a code politicians play to win over white guys.

The primary unfairness is unequal distribution of wealth, unequal civil rights, citizenship, education, legal protections etc. Yet this argument doesn’t hold water with conservatives as it goes against the primary assumption that society is fundamentally unfair and that’s OK.

The tax cutting and union busting movements have a similar goal, to strip the government of the means to redistribute wealth in ways that enfranchise races and classes who have faced structural prejudice and wage exploitation. Since the natural order of things is to have an underclass with no rights, conservatives take whatever tacks they can to frustrate legitimate efforts at equality.

The counter-fairness argument is forcefully laid out but puts nothing up for jobs or society at large. The primary assumption is of class and race segregation and antagonism. This is a divisive program, not a positive program looking of the betterment of society. Todays conservative seem to be primarily against things with no actual program of their own to put forward. For example, what instead of Obamacare? Nothing.

The missing link here is that the Republicans have no plan at all to create jobs other than to cut more taxes. And if that works so well where are all the jobs after eight years of Bush? This party line just doesn’t add up. The party line rallies the troops for more draconian cuts against the invisible, unspoken enemy: all who are not of white, northern European ancestry. That’s right you southern Europeans, Jews and Orientals, you are not really members of the club. The smokescreen that “we are broke” is a thin façade for going after labor rights and social programs that include others besides white guys. This is the real agenda, not fiscal responsibility.

It’s really amazing how the ideological fog machine keeps small fish Right wingers from being able to see the Wizard. The current positional conflict has such inertia that facts don’t matter. What matters is not backing down and volume. Winning at any cost is the price of blind emotional conflict. Reasonable assessments and solutions are not possible.

I’m not advocating some kind of utopia of forced redistribution of wealth and free hand-outs. The Gracchus brothers did that at the end of the Roman Republic and they were murdered. I have a simple proposition: a universal fair opportunity to a modest life with food, shelter, insurance and retirement. That’s it.

Today’s workers are like sheep that have been split from the flock and the wolves are having a field day. This is how “taxpayers” can be set against unions, to all the little guy’s disadvantage. This is where Tea Party and Left disillusionment and alienation actually have quite a bit of common ground. There just needs to be somebody to articulate it. The enemy here is not the Left; it is the top 1%.

Deregulation brought the current economic mess. The financial elite got their way and they have brought the world economy to its knees and this is still not enough to see any light as to how things really are. And now the 1% lackeys want to engage in union busting. This is real class warfare. The fight is on. Theses top dogs don’t discriminate between little fish who are union or not.  Why “taxpayers” would be on the side big money is beyond me; it’s against all their interests! These conservative “taxpayers” will soon learn the meaning of a “Pyrrhic victory” when Wall Street and the top 1% leaves them as high and dry as the unions.

The anti-tax people do have some good points. The system is ridiculously complex and regressive. Yet how is society to run with no income? There has to be taxation in order to have the infrastructure upon which the economy runs. There has to be a safety net or people become like cattle in a horrific Charles Dickens novel. If you ask private society to care for its own, well shit, the white guys all fled to the suburbs and nobody wants to own up to legacies of prejudice, exploitation, racism, slavery etc. According to this formula, all success is the result of who gets up earliest in the morning and if some have less it is not any structural fault of society.

This is a house of mirrors of blame and bitter retribution. Rigid positionalism stokes the fog machine and anything close to a public, normal, reasoned analysis is just nowhere to be found. Instead of finding a theme to unite the downtrodden, which is where all little guys are heading, what we get is divisive short-term politicking. The rats are fighting amongst themselves.

When the wolves gain total control of prey, they will run things in an out of balance regime (see allegory of Plato’s Cave) until the whole house of cards comes down. What we have is an unsustainable, out of balance, immoral, unvirtuous situation. Somebody, some regional leader please climb out of the cave and shed some reasonable light on our situation!

Providence and exceptionalism are not so self-evident now. The new financial Kings arbitrarily rule over the new colonists right here in our own backyard; the enemy is not unions or liberals, it’s the top 1%!

Sources

Chafe, William H., The Unfinished Journey: America Since World War 2. New York, Oxford University Press 2007 pp. 106-107

Riccardi, Nicholas, Rust Belt at vanguard of backlash against organized labor. Los Angeles Times 2/18/11, accessed through Mercury News.com 2/19/11   URL: http://www.mercurynews.com/rss/ci_17428384?source=rss

Magdoff, Fred. The Great Recession and Its Aftermath: Causes vs, Symptoms.

URL: mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2011/magdoff060211.html

Rogers, Perry M. Aspects of Western Civilization: Problems and Sources in History. 7^th Edition. Prentice Hall, Boston 2011 pp. 102-105

Sharp, Gene., From Dictatorship to Democracy: A conceptual framework for liberation. 4^th US edition The Albert Einstein Institute, May 2010, p. 17, accessed 2/18/11   URL:  http://www.aeinstein.org/organizations/org/FDTD.pdf

Wikipedia, Edmund Burke, accessed 2/20/11 URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Burke