From Pine View Farm

Republicanism and the Politics of Spite 1

Jay Bookman of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution considers the motives behind the spate of Republican proposals to test poor people for drugs because they are poor people.

A nugget:

The legislation in question — (Georgia–ed.) House Bill 861 — forces welfare applicants in Georgia to submit to a drug test in order to continue receiving state benefits. According to one of its champions, state Sen. John Albers of Roswell, “this legislation will better serve those who are in need by providing a ‘hand-up’ instead of a ‘hand-out’.”

Such condescending rhetoric aside, the legislation was not motivated by a desire to help people. It was intended to be punitive, to make people feel better by making the already hard lives of other people even more difficult. Put bluntly, it was motivated by a sour belief that poor people are poor because the rest of us have been insufficiently mean to them.

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1 comment

  1. George

    April 18, 2012 at 5:54 pm

    Put bluntly, it was motivated by a sour belief that poor people are poor because the rest of us have been insufficiently mean to them.
    Great sentence. There’s something in the mindset the selected for modern Republicanism that gets a charge from punishing the weak. I’m convinced it’s also rooted in some perversion of Christianity, one which means you can make people better, preferably those always smaller and weaker than you, by whipping them. It has always led to the linked desire to criminalize being poor, which is done already to a great extent.

     
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