Snare the Wealth 2
August J. Pollak advances a theory about why so many folks oppose health care (and other) reforms so vehemently.
I’m not necessarily agreeing with it, but I think it’s worth considering.
It’s sort of an economic analogy of the classic definition of Puritanism as the bone-chilling fear that somewhere, someone is having fun.
A nugget (warning: mild language):
The entire history of opposition to progressive change in America is based on thinking that someone who isn’t you is having their life improved. And I’m sure it goes without saying that the history of opposition to progressive change just happens to go hand in hand with said progressive change being related to improving the lives of people who aren’t white, aren’t male and aren’t rich, or at the very least in elite social circles.
July 1, 2012 at 2:42 am
We live in an unusual time. However, the nasty suppression of workers and common people is not new in US history. This country has a long history in which the wealthy have preyed on everyone else … and in which the government, or agencies of it have been enlisted tom suppress populist movements. The Great Depression, a result of wealth malfeasance, brought about a balancing, a retaliation against the wealth class which ushered in the New Deal and the success of the US middle class. What he have now is incomprehensible within that context. The time was and is right for a populist movement and the exact opposite has happened — the populist movement — the Tea Party — adopted the bizarre conspiratorial story that the people responsible for economic collapse are heroes because of TOO MUCH liberal meddling. This is difficult for people like you and me to comprehend. Why did this happen? Part of the reason is because it happened in a vacuum of leadership in a desperate time. And the story, a complete fiction, that came to pass was that this was all the result of parasites getting what they didn’t deserve.
It’s classical scapegoating in human history. I can’t do the argument justice in a comment. But it is explained in Pity the Billionaire. I used the social network of my blog to get a copy for review and found, upon reading, that it contains everything in the realm of extremism mainstreamed which I’ve covered and which you have here.
After 2007-08, the current people on Wall Street should have been destroyed according to historical model. But the exact opposite happened and it was the consequence of the collapse of political leadership from the side given the keys of rule. Barack Obama was hailed, briefly, as someone who could be an FDR. And he chose not to take that route. So did the entire party.
So when the writer says the US has the most “dysfunctional” sense of reward, ever, he recognizes the symptom but not the root. This isn’t new in American history. What’s new is that when it resulted in a global economic catastrophe, instead of being pushed into the background, as it had been before, it came back stronger, used as a rationalization for why the catastrophe happened. It was all the parasites and liberals! And that happened in a background that was a vacuum of Democratic leadership, Barack Obama has tried to do some good things, and this week he got lucky and we were all rewarded, but he — and the party — chose, and I do mean — chose — what would amount to epic fail when the eyes of history were on them. The extremists and their upside down fantasies and conspiratorial thinking, stepped into that vacuum with the story that it was government regulation that caused everything, that people who got mortgages they didn’t deserve brought down the entire global economy. This is the signal failure of the Democratic Party. They had the ammunition to fight that fairy tale but because they had no leadership, declined to even take the playing field for the most party, the other side, the irrational minority side, won.
And Barack Obama will have his day of reckoning for that in November. Maybe he will survive it. Maybe not. But the only reason Mitt Romney, a lying oligarch louse with no redeeming qualities, intellectual or personal, could be president, is because of this failure.
July 1, 2012 at 2:43 am
Wow, sorry. End or rant. Won’t happen again.