[img]583|left|Eric L. Wattree||no_popup[/img]I hate to base an entire article on an ad hominem, but the GOP is proving to be such a manipulative, disingenuous, and petulant bunch that it iimpossible to discuss their machinations without using terms like “plot,” “un-American” and “collusion.” When trying to understand GOP motives, remember whatever they accuse their opponent of is what they are engaged in.
Alexander Hamilton was one founding father of conservative thought. An aristocrat, he held that poor and middle-class Americans should be relegated to second-class citizenship. The GOP has embraced his agenda. Hamilton said:
“All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and well-born, the other the mass of the people…. The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share in government. They will check the unsteadiness of the second, and as they cannot receive any advantage by a change, they therefore will ever maintain good government.”
Debates of the Federalist Convention (May 14-Sept. 17, 1787).
While Hamilton’s position was resoundingly rejected by the vast majority of the founding fathers, whose primary reason for coming to America was to get away from the European class system, many of Hamilton’s ilk chose not to recognize the American ideal that “all men [and women] are created equal.”
They were joined later by Southern Dixiecrats, or social bigots, who also rejected the ideal of human equality.
These are the people who run the modern day GOP, corporatists and social bigots who believe America belongs to them, and the rest of us are simply tolerated due to their “good will and Christian charity.” This is the main reason the Republican party’s platform is fiercely hostile to education (“elitistism”), labor unions and “big government.” That also is why they are strong advocates of state’s rights.
Why They Oppose Education
Corporatists within the GOP are hostile to education because they don’t want the “lower-class” social bigots within in their ranks to realize that they are being duped into working against their own interests, like healthcare reform, for example. They are hostile to organized labor and big government because both institutions tend to protect the rights of the poor and middle class. They advocate state’s rights because the social bigots blame big government for usurping the rights of the Southern states by ushering in integration and civil rights.
The GOP is made up of oil and water. The corporatist agenda is diametrically opposed to the interests of their lower-class soldiers whom they depend on to stay in power.
Corporatists want to import undocumented workers to lower the wages of the middle class. Their socially bigoted soldiers don’t even want legal Hispanics in the country, much less undocumented.
For the corporatists to make their extremely unpopular agenda palatable to the people, they constantly have had to engage in campaigns of disinformation, conflation, the ‘isms’ (convincing the people that anything that doesn’t cater to the rich and “well-born” constitutes the un-American “evil of socialism”), and other divisive tactics that keep the people engaged in knee-jerk emotionalism instead of logical thought.
Their tactics are transparent. Take the term “Obamacare.” It was coined to keep those who hate that we have a Black President focused on Obama rather than the merits of the program. Same for “Islamofascists,” made up promote endless war and war profits. It suggests war is not just about terrorists but all Moslems.
Carrying the rationale to its logical conclusion, we would have to condemn all Christians since those who lynched Blacks in the South and committed genocide against Native Americans were of the Christian faith.
In an earlier essay, “Ode to a Bleeding Heart,” I showed how they use conflation to demonize liberalism:
“When you consider how methodically the conservatives went about mounting their assault on the liberal agenda, you can't help but recognize that it was a stroke of genius. Ironically, the conservatives took the Democratic Party's strength and made it a political liability. First they took the party's penchant for being concerned with the plight of the downtrodden and coined phrases such as ‘bleeding heart liberals’ and ‘tax-and-spend Democrats.’ They played on the frustration of the middle class by tying civil rights legislation, welfare and crime into one neat bundle as the source of middle class woes; they attributed all of these problems to what they called the Democrats’ tendency to be ‘bleeding heart liberals.’ Once the connection was made between minorities, welfare, crime and the liberal agenda, it was just a matter of repeatedly hammering the message home.
“In addition, conservatives used such tactics as spitting out the word ‘liberal’ as though they were saying rapist. In that way they not only implanted a negative attitude toward liberalism in the mind of the voter, but it was said in such a way that the implication was made that all the negative stereotyping of liberalism was true. In other words, their attitude seems to suggest, ‘I could substantiate what I'm saying about liberals, but I don't think it's necessary since we all know what they're like.’ In the election that spawned the ‘Republican revolution,’ the voters said, ‘yes, we do.’”
Now the GOP has come upon interesting times. To finalize their ultimate objective — to transfer what’s left of the nation’s wealth to the rich and lower the standard of living of the middle class — they must show their true colors like they are doing in Wisconsin.
Injustice and hunger have a way of opening peoples’ eyes. It won’t be long before people see that the GOP, in collusion with corporatists, purposely used the Iraq War to ravage the treasury. They sent our jobs overseas to create high unemployment to restore the GOP to power and to depress incoming tax revenue to give themselves an excuse to attack the poor and middle-class safety net.
People also will ask themselves: If the GOP is concerned about the national debt, why did they give a tax cut to the top 2 percent of the population that will add $3.7 trillion to the debt over the next 10 years? Why didn’t we hear a peep about the debt while we were losing our homes and jobs as Congress voted each member a $93,000 raise, above their salaries, in “petty cash”?
Mr. Wattree may be contacted at wattree.blogspot.com or Ewattree@Gmail.com
Religious bigotry: It’s not that I hate everyone who doesn’t look, think, and act like me – it’s just that God does.
