I don’t think that there is any prospect of conservatives declaring peace on the safety net. The conservative movement has become a cult that is unmoored from Christian teachings about helping the needy. Their need to punish anyone who has fallen on hard times is almost limitless. I don’t even think it is connected anymore to a desire to use church charity as a substitute for government assistance. That used to be the idea, but a different value system has been internalized. Now, the overriding ethos animating conservatives is the “takers vs. makers” meme, which argues that people who need help are fundamentally unworthy and should be considered political adversaries.
It used to be that a lot of conservatives thought they could improve their position vis-a-vis God by devoting some of their time to helping the poor, the mentally ill, the drug-addicted, and the homeless. I think that idea has been replaced by the idea that they can kick those people in the teeth until they die, and then they can light them on fire.
I don’t expect Catholics to support the new conservative movement to the same degree that they have in the past, and I think the evangelicals will start moving away soon, too. We’re already seeing the division on immigration reform.
I mean, it shouldn’t be necessary for the president of the American Enterprise Institute to tell conservatives that “this war against the social safety net…is just insane.” The fact that he feels the need to say something like that tells you all you need to know.
The conservative movement has crossed some invisible line and they are now one of the most malevolent and dangerous and anti-American movements that we’ve seen arise in this country.
It’s not just American conservatives. Conservatives the world over will never, “declare peace with the social safety net.” The British are trying to privatize the NHS.
Despite Hayek’s support for it, including universal health care, conservatives hate it with a passion, and will not rest until it’s gone. They see child labor laws as an impediment to freedom, for god’s sake.
This is the ethos that animates them now:
Period.
Example 261,546.
I had an epiphany last night while listening to an interview about a new movie. (in bold later)
The heart of conservatism resides in the South. Check out The Rise of Southern Republicans for a great overview of that.
( http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674012486 )
Sure there are significant pockets all over, but even the Western mountain states often don’t seem as batshit hateful as Southern states. And in mostly blue MN, the rabid right doesn’t get away with as much even though Bachmann is from there.
( http://www.armytimes.com/article/20131031/NEWS05/310310041/Hagel-blasts-states-same-sex-benefits-pol
icy )
Most of my interests in the history of slavery has been about the sufferings and progress toward civil rights of African Americans. And so much injustice from our slavery “legacy” infects us yet today. When I first visited the South I was shocked at how so many whites never came to terms with the cruelties of their region’s culture decades ago.
But what I underappreciated until recently was the mindset of the slave owners and other whites that lived in the slave states. What we are faced with is the legacy of that mindset. To sum it up: human beings (who aren’t like you) are commodities.
During slavery years, the owners had to have quite a complex of rationalizations and peculiar psychology to justify their “self image”. They had centuries to find a way to brutally beat a black man for taking an extra piece of bread and “reconcile” it with Jesus’s second commandment: “Love your neighbor as yourself”. How many more generations will it take for that toxic psyche to fade away?
The 47% comment by Romney that is the basis for so much conservative thought (i.e. conspiracy fantasies) never made any sense on any rational level. But it was clear that it is mostly a current choice of phrase for that long line of euphemisms used by the racist conservatives over the decades.
And it is used by a set of the people who think they are the class of nobility. They have the sense of privilege that Ishmael Reed exposes so well in “Flight to Canada” and other works of his. “Let them eat cake” in today’s world becomes “let them go to the emergency room”. Corporations are people and people are commodities.
So anyway the movie review was an interview of Chiwetel Ejiofor and the movie “Twelve Years a Slave”. If it is half as good as Ejiofor made it sound…
Jeff, that’s an excellent comment. I don’t have any references at all for you, but years ago I used to read about England in the late 1800’s when there was so much technological advance. I was absolutely appalled at the conditions of servants for the wealthy. The very rich did “own” them and if they wanted could throw them out with nothing and no where to go. When this technological change occurred there were new types of jobs and opportunities for women, children and men, but often in slave-like conditions. The technological change also provided new ways to become middle-class. I’ve often thought Romney sounds like one of the wealthy aristocracy in late 1800’s England.
The only way I can understand conservatives is that they must believe that the 47% they are talking about are less than they are, less than human and that they don’t deserve any assistance. What I also hear in my red state is that these people believe the 47% are taking from them personally. The GOP siphons money to the wealthy and tells their followers that the poor are the ones that are taking it from them through taxes and “needless” and wasteful services.
It’s sickening to me to hear and see what the GOP is doing and saying now. Your comment about the South being the heart of it is spot on. It existed in other parts of the country, but was hidden. I’m in Indiana and saw the KKK march in my small town when I was in grade school. I heard the men in my family use the n word. There are confederate flags flying on pick-ups around here.
I think the thing is that it’s out in the open in a way that it never was before. The “good” people of the middle class could always say it wasn’t them, it was the South, it was someone else, it wasn’t really America doing that. Now it is. They’re part of it, or their neighbor or someone in their family.
We are in revolution now and the only way to go is forward.
I wonder how many people on social security and medicare or people for other reasons that don’t pay taxes also believe the 47% are takers. There is such a disconnect with reality for that conspiracy theory – and on so many levels. I was amazed to hear it come out of a Prez candidate’s mouth, even Romney. It broke historic ground IMHO.
Racism is all over and the institutional forms as well. Chicago’s own Rahm Emmanuel is doing his utmost to put eduction in disarray for African Americans in Chicago.
But in the last 400 years of Europeans on this continent, Southern whites developed attitudes and rationalizations to a breadth, depth and longevity many northerners did not “have to” in order to accept the financial benefits of owning people. That psychological heritage persists. That’s my thesis.
There are many demographic maps that bear this inheritance. One of the recent instructive ones is the one showing how the House members voted on the shutdown and default. The deep south is where the mass concentration of tea party thinkers are. Of the states with large numbers of congressional districts, Texas stands out because the few reps that voted to end the shutdown and avoid default were all Dem representatives. Of the remainder, ALL went the teahadist route. Not a “moderate” Repub among them. Contrast that with states like IL or NY, where of the Repub CDs most still voted with the Dems to end the shutdown/default. In IL only one CD voted the teahadist position.
All the Republicans who don’t pay income taxes believe that the 47% figure, a figure that is only that high because it includes them, doesn’t really include them. It’s because it’s different for them, see, because they earned their benefits, not like the soon-to-be 50% who just want a handout. It’s not a product of numbers or logic, it’s just spite and horror that Other People are getting help. This isn’t just some Republicans who think this, it’s effectively all of them. It’s the reason why Republicans are Republicans, from the elite to the rank and file. Talk to Republicans. It’ll come out in 35 minutes, tops.
JeffL, you’re spot on.
The American South is a society that was built on the backs of slaves, and took to heart the moral corruption to justify slavery. Its entire power structure is built on top of that corrupt societal model.
Burn it down. Start over.
Slavery is predicated on the attitude that human beings are chattel, or in your (and Marx’s) words commodities. The practical issue for slaveowners in America was that Native Americans could successfully run away and white indentured servants (classical slavery was replaced with serfdom in the 1200s) could disappear into other white communities in other colonies. African slaves were marked by their skin color, and that fact was translated into law in the mid-1600s in Virginia and elsewhere by the late 1600s. The law created the attitude against much contrary practice of equality by some whites. And the slaveholders of Virginia had to argue back a movement of manumission by Methodists (and ironically Bapists) after the Revolution. They failed in part because of the Methodist bishops who were slaveowners. But there was a conscious effort in the beginning of the 1800s to create a theological justification for slavery as it existed in the US. And those arguments crept into Jerry Falwell’s defense of segregation in the 1960s and are institutionalized to a great extent in Liberty University’s educational philosophy.
The Southern mindset of the George Wallace days was disappearing in the 1970s–until the Reagan campaign operatives whipped it up again. Reagan launched his campaign in Philadelphia MS, essentially dancing on the graves of three civil rights workers.
It may be comforting to folks outside the South to pretend that this is primarily a regional problem, but it is not and it is not limited to Republicans at the moment. What is happening in Chicago is a form of ethnic cleansing putting pressure on blacks and Hispanics to relocate into inner ring suburbs by taking away vital municipal services. And what is happening in Detroit is straight-out colonization of a black city by white politicians.
The attitudes against the poor and and against black poor in particular are being held in being through billions of dollars of investment in communications institutions and active networking among those institutions inside and outside the South. It will take outcommmunicating (not outmarketing) those institutions to deal with these narratives about the poor. Not only do you have the shock talkers on radio and FoxNews on TV but the substantial investments in Bob Jones University, Liberty University, Regent University, Oral Roberts University and bunches of other “educational” institutions that produce the lawyers and preachers who are the network through which the true faith of white supremacy is kept alive, in varying degrees of sophistication and civility.
And in this communication, Southern California and the California Valley are as important as Mississippi and Texas is hugely important. But Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Long Island have to clean up their politics as well.
I recommend Leon Higginbotham’s book on Colonial law and slavery. It’s a must read IMHO:
http://www.amazon.com/Matter-Color-American-Process-Colonial/dp/0195027450/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie
=UTF8&qid=1383324687&sr=1-1&keywords=leon+higginbotham
I never would have stated that this is “primarily a regional problem.” That is not what I am saying. In my opinion, the breadth, depth and longevity of this mindset is most virulent in the South and in larger percentages of the white population.
And while I know there are racist institutions including colleges all over. I think it is interesting that the ones you mention by name are all in the South.
I think this mindset (formed over centuries) needs to be understood, because I think we need to marginalize it better.
My first trip to the South was to Atlanta during the Olympics. Atlanta was beginning to take on a cosmopolitan (and more corporate) sheen. I was still shocked by how many whites could not seem to come to terms with the cruelties inflicted by slavery. (And I wasn’t browbeating people about it either.) After I returned and was back to work in Chicago I told a white work colleague this. He said he never encountered that. He went on to describe in glowing terms a party he attended there, a huge gala sponsored by a Fortune 100 IT company. The men were in confederate uniforms and the women were in antibellum dresses. They were just celebrating the tradition, or whatever…
I asked my colleague if any African Americans were wearing confederate uniforms. “No.”
Were there any there? “Yes.”
What were they wearing at that gala. “Playing the banjo.”
Looked up that book and read some of the reviews. It sounded very interesting. I checked the local libraries and they didn’t show as having it, so I just ordered it online. Look forward to reading it.
Thanks!
Tarheel Dem,
I don’t think the Southern mindset of the George Wallace days was really disappearing during the l970’s, only to be resurrected by Ronald Reagan’s first campaign. Due to all the attention on the South during the l960’s, I believe the “mindset” was subdued; and, of course, obvious racial acts were prohibited. Barry Goldwater did not support the Civil Rights act (too much Government for the libertarian) and swept the South in l964. In l968, Nixon’s people saw this opening and employed the “Southern Strategy.” However, Jimmy Carter’s election in l976 obscured the “Southern Strategy.” Nevertheless, the South is changing; but I think it’s a slower change than what non-Southerners are accustomed to. http://www.umich.edu/~lawrace/votetour9.htm
Read more:
Just was glancing through the online comments (I know, I know) on today’s news stories about the cuts to SNAP and the vicious contempt of the overwhelming majority for those in need was truly stunning. Especially the ones who preached their Christianity even as they trampled on Christ’s message.
Almost makes me wish there were a Christian afterlife, run by Jesus 1.0, wherein these Pharisees would get their just reward.
Well, Sinclair Lewis nailed when he said that when fascism came to America it would arrive draped in the flag and carrying a cross.
Nitpickery: I love that quote, but Sinclair Lewis never said it, at least not in those words.
Where the rank-and-file are going is different from where the plutocratic shills in the Republican leadership are going. Don’t mistake the showboats shilling for their next grift for the folks who actually vote. The PVIs of Congressional districts could be in flux if the incumbents are too tied to this plutocratic cult.
Over the next few months there will be a lot of white conservative Republicans who will wake up to the fact that they are acceptable collateral damage for the Republican’s racist war on the President and its racist stereotyping of who actually is poor.
Democrats would be wise to figure out how to speak to those folks instead making assumptions about their rigidity. Screwing around with Social Security and Medicare themselves is not the best way to do that even if it is politically expedient.
why do you think so?
>>Over the next few months there will be a lot of white conservative Republicans who will wake up
those are people who have been voting against their own economic interests forever, because of racism or because of god guns and gays. Why would they change now?
As Booman has said before, a democrat with a populist message might have a chance to change this, but your standard corporate conservadem won’t.
The SNAP reductions not only effect the people the benefit feeds but it also may impact jobs. Walmart may not layoff workers but reduce store hours which will result in a reduction in worker hours. Thus, by next week the white poor in rural GA might be hit with a pay cut and a $40 SNAP cut.
Soon, on FOX “News:”
“Ultimate Bum-fights – to the Death!!!”
We’ve been here before. Where’s Jonathan Swift when we need him?
Seriously, I have a few fellow employees that spout this nonsense regularly, about “doing away” with this or that public assistance.
The nasty undertone which they are too cowardly to come right out and admit it, is that they would just as soon put them all in burlap bags and throw them in the river, like an unwanted litter of stray kittens.
When you contemplate murder as a solution to social problems, what does that say for your moral values?
I mean, it shouldn’t be necessary for the president of the American Enterprise Institute to tell conservatives that “this war against the social safety net…is just insane.”
Yet he was one of the same ones egging those same Conservatives farther and farther down the rabbit hole. Where did he think it would lead?
One wonders if the Koch bros., et al, have begun to take note at the increase in orders of guillotines at their wholly owned Chops-Alot, Inc., subsidiaries?
Clearly doesn’t understand the nature of addiction in human beings. That over time more of the addictive substance is required to get the same high. That there is no such thing as “enough” for the addict, be the substance power, money, wealth, alcohol, etc.
It slides easily into the libertarian (anti-social) orientation (anti-tax, anti-government, and sexism and racism) of the Republican base. The “Christians” can scream, “No, abortion and contraception for poor women” out of one side of their mouths, and then transition to screaming about all those irresponsible (lazy) women that have all those children that they can’t afford to feed. Both positions have become bedrock in their brains; so much so that they experience no cognitive dissonance.
Libertarians can be a bit rawer in their loathing for the poor because their ideology has zero use for them. The reliogio-nutcases require the poor for their survival. If not for “the poor,” how would they know that they have comparatively been blessed by the Jesus-Santa? Dispensing a few alms to the poor is necessary to make them feel good about their sense of generosity. And the Catholic Church has long encouraged the poor to have lots and lots of babies as a growth strategy for the church.
So some in the Republican Party have recognized that bashing the poor may not be in the GOP’s long-term interest — not because of some sudden moral/ethical epiphany, but because the ranks of the poor are growing. From Salon – Half of American Births are covered by Medicaid. Well, not quite half, yet.
Medicaid expansion could get us to that 50% or more. Medicaid And A Tale Of Two Miami Hospitals.
It’s malice, plain and simple.
Happily, technology and social media may help here. Rancid hatred is easily captured, quickly broadcast to all for laceration, and within weeks is entombed in the resin of popular opinion. Rupert Murdoch, Roger Ailes, and the Koch brothers can be taken down faster than they think or was once possible. It’s a double-edged sword, but youth wins this one and hates being fooled.