The Republican model campaign is to find divisive issues, then use them to make us hate each other. They’ve been following that model for a long time. I saw the beginnings decades ago, and I’m probably missing more.
Each time Republicans find another wedge issue, they shred the fabric of our society, and our culture. It’s horrible, and un-American, and, at least so far, highly successful.
I think not having the estate tax recognizes the people that are investing, as opposed to those that are just spending every darn penny they have, whether it’s on booze or women or movies.
— Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, about dropping the Estate Tax.
Yeah, not those people. You know who I mean. Maybe you don’t know any of them personally, but you know they’re out there somewhere.
I bet they look different from us, too.
Better writers than me have pointed out this is nonsense. Roughly two Americans out of every thousand — yes, only 0.2% of us — will get hit with estate taxes. The idea that the small family farm or the corner business is on the chopping block is hogwash. Does Sen. Grassley really think the rest of us would be leaving behind eleven-million-dollar-plus estates if we’d only cut back on booze and iPhones?
Remember Ronald Reagan’s “Welfare Queen” trope? Sound familiar? This isn’t the first, second, or even third time Republican have pulled out this dog whistle.
Think moderate Republicans are better? Sorry. Here’s Mitt Romney speaking at that private fundraising gig in 2012:
There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That’s an entitlement. The government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what. And I mean the president starts off with 48, 49… he starts off with a huge number. These are people who pay no income tax. Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax. So our message of low taxes doesn’t connect. So he’ll be out there talking about tax cuts for the rich….
My job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives. What I have to do is convince the 5–10% in the center that are independents, that are thoughtful, that look at voting one way or the other depending upon in some cases emotion, whether they like the guy or not.
— Mitt Romney, in a fundraiser on May 17, 2011.
Why, from Romney’s description, I bet he could even pick out those worthless takers in a crowd. I wonder what he’d be looking for?
Look, these are the stories of laziness and decay that Republicans politicians tell when the doors are closed. I’ve listened to similar conversations among my friends, who talk about ‘those people’ who only want handouts. “Those people. Yeah, not like me. Not like us. I had to work since I was a kid.”
“Yeah! Me too! They were shitty jobs, but we always worked. Why, I remember when I was working for UPS….”
Don’t scoff. Stories are important, and we all tell them. We use our modern myths as one way of understanding and ordering our world. And the stories we tell each other, and the myths we build for ourselves, these ideas shape us deeply.
In committee debate, Sen. Sherrod Brown recently challenged Sen. Orrin Hatch. Brown loudly asked why Republicans were effectively defunding the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), while they spent all their time carving out extra billions for corporations and the hugely rich.
It’s a fair question. Until now, CHIP this has been a popular and bipartisan program to care for sick, poor kids. Nobody’s against CHIP, I don’t think. Not even Orrin Hatch, probably. Which is why so many of us are perplexed about why Republicans let an easy win slip. They could pass a CHIP re-authorization in a New York minute, and then pass it off as a legislative miracle. We already know the pubic is desperate for a real win.
But they aren’t going for it, it’s desperately needed, and Sen. Brown was getting angry about why. Sen. Hatch got hot at being challenged, and after roaring that nobody has any right to question him that way, Hatch blurted this out:
I have a rough time wanting to spend billions and billions and trillions of trillions of dollars to help people who won’t help themselves, won’t lift a finger, and expect the federal government to do everything. Unfortunately, the liberal philosophy has created millions of people that way, who believe everything they are or ever hope to be depend on the federal government rather than the opportunities that this great country grants them.
— Senator Orrin Hatch
[More in the Dec. 13 update below.]
So, did Sen. Hatch mean to suggest that those sick — but lazy and shiftless — infants and small kids are takers, who aren’t willing to take honest work? They should be out in the world, damn it, earning their keep! I wonder if the spinning mills are still hiring?
Sorry. I’m guessing that Hatch wasn’t talking about children anymore. I hope not, anyway. He was really talking about those people who are dragging down our precious country. You know, those lazy bums who depend on the government for everything, and won’t lift a finger for good, god-fearing people.
Hatch uses ‘Liberal’ to describe those people, but I’m guessing he has other descriptions he could use, too. And I’m sure he’d be offended even more at my suggestion that ‘skin hue’ might be among them. Or accent. Or religion.
Roy Moore’s campaign is already saying that the upcoming election will suffer under widespread voter fraud. Which false voters might that be?
On the surface, most of these complaints are easy to debunk because don’t make any damn sense. They don’t even try hard to make sense, and I assume that’s because they don’t have to. These aren’t stories that illustrate carefully created models of behavior. No, they’re what we’ve built to flame our feelings of aggrieved victimization, and a sense of sidetracked entitlement. “You’ve been a sap! You’re being swindled! You never would have suffered and lost your position in American society if they hadn’t taken it from you!”
As much fun as it is to focus on the crazy voices, this story-line affects so many of us. I hear echos in so many other places.
The New York Times had an Op-Ed today by Peter Wehner titled “Why I Can No Longer Call Myself an Evangelical Republican.” It’s a sincere explanation from a dedicated conservative and a deeply felt christian, trying to explain why both the Evangelical and Republican political movements have lost his support. I agree with much of what he says, but then this caught my eye:
There are of course a great many honorable individuals in the Republican Party and the evangelical movement. Those who hold different views than I do lead exemplary lives. Yet I cannot help believing that the events of the past few years — and the past few weeks — have shown us that the Republican Party and the evangelical movement (or large parts of them, at least), have become what I once would have thought of as liberal caricatures.
Assume you were a person of the left and an atheist, and you decided to create a couple of people in a laboratory to discredit the Republican Party and white evangelical Christianity. You could hardly choose two more perfect men than Donald Trump and Roy Moore.
— Peter Wehner, in a Dec. 10, 2017, NY Times Op-Ed.
As good as Wehner’s op-ed is, I did a full stop. “Assume you were a person of the left and an atheist, and you decided to create a couple of people in a laboratory to discredit the Republican Party and white evangelical Christianity.”
Really? Why might I assume that’s something that I’d have to be an atheist to do? Or, to use his fascinatingly roundabout expression, ‘a person of the left’? I’m deeply distressed that this generous, clearly ethical, morally centered man, accepts the underlying persecution narrative without even noticing.
America is built on freedoms: speech, religion, association, and so on. That’s hard. Every generation has to rediscover what that really means. Worse, that wonderfully American, loose structure of different groups is really hard to hold together. It’s a big country, with a lot of different groups. We have a great thing, too, but we’re don’t have uniformity as glue. We can’t use race, religion, culture, or heritage as a rallying cry. We have to use complicated things like ideals and freedoms. Those are ethereal ideas that are a much harder sell than race or any of the rest.
And I’ll throw in my two bits. I’m a strong liberal. I support LGBTQ rights, racial equality, and gender equity. I worry about income inequality, worker’s rights, and the social safety net. I’ve been a feminist since I was a teenager.
That said, I know that centrally managed answers are seldom the best. I want to limit the extent of government interference to the minimum necessary. I want government to be efficient, and I’ve spent my whole career supporting it, but sometimes, we do it poorly. There’s room for improvement. So no, I don’t hate conservatives, even though I frequently disagree. There is plenty of common ground, if we try.
I’m an atheist. I grew up in the (Christian) church, so I know all the words, but I don’t believe in god on high. Never did. I believed in the people, though. I know so many good, wonderful people with deep faith. No, I don’t hate them or think they’re mistaken, even though I don’t share their faith in god. Yes, that’s possible, too.
The Republican party has been tearing at our seams for decades. And whether or not an attack gets them votes, It wedges us apart. Tell whites that blacks are lazy, and they’re easy to convince. They’ve been hearing those same rumors since Reconstruction. Distrust is easy to spread, and slow and hard to fix.
Worse, each Republican attack has to be stronger and deeper than the last wedge, or people won’t get involved. Today’s Republicans are reduced to attacking the federal government, the courts, the FBI and all other intelligence agencies, the State Department, all major news media, voters, donors, and every opponent they can point out.
In the Republican worldview, there’s nothing left except their core voters and supporters, as measured by a rotating panel of increasingly restrictive litmus tests. If we let them, they’ll pull us all underwater.
Update (2017-12-13): I finally looked up Orrin Hatch’s real full(er) quote. Here’s a larger section, as quoted by PolitiFact, and verified it against the recording. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) had been strongly and angrily challenging Sen. Hatch about his justifications for not renewing CHIP when he was cutting corporations tax breaks. Hatch responded with this:
Nobody believes in the CHIP program more than I. I invented it. I was the one who wrote it. Kennedy came over and became the one who helped put it through.
Of course I do [want to fund CHIP]. I don’t think I do everything on my own here. I’ve got to have good Democrat friends to do it. I don’t think you do either.
But let me tell you something. We’re going to do CHIP, there’s no question about it in my mind. It has to be done the right way. But we — the reason CHIP is having trouble is because we don’t have money anymore. We just add more and more spending, and more and more spending, and you can look at the rest of the bill for the more and more spending. I happen to think CHIP has done a terrific job for people who really needed the help. I have taken the position around here my whole Senate service. I believe in helping those who cannot help themselves but would if they could. I have a rough time wanting to spend billions and billions and trillions of dollars to help people who won’t help themselves, won’t lift a finger and expect the federal government to do everything.
Unfortunately, the liberal philosophy has created millions of people that way who believe everything they are or ever hope to be depends upon the federal government rather than the opportunities that this great country grants them. I’ve got to say I think it’s pretty hard to argue against these comments, because if you look it over, for decades now, we have been spending more than we have been spending more than we having, building more and more federal programs. Some of which are lousy, some of which are well intended, and of which are actually good like the CHIP program. We’re going to get CHIP through. There is no question about that. I’m going to see that it gets through.
Hatch gave a heartfelt and, to my eye, sincere explanation of feelings about CHIP. No, he wasn’t calling for sick infants to work in the mills.
But I don’t stand corrected, because that’s what I’d figured in the post. It doesn’t change the core problem for me: the Republican myth of the liberal slacker. Hatch envisions millions of worthless, presumably liberal people — takers — whose only goal is to suck down their next federal handout.
Remember the context: Brown was challenging why Hatch rammed through the bankrupting Republican tax cuts for the rich and corporations, which Hatch has said doesn’t leave enough money for things like CHIP. And Hatch’s response was because… um… slackers! Really?
In the end, I think Hatch spoke emotionally and sincerely about a wonderfully constructed, emotionally charged, and utterly empty, Republican red-meat meme.
This is exactly what I meant. Welfare queens, revisited. Millions and millions of ’em. And the irony is that Hatch the the Republican party are explicitly expanding their own permanent corporate-welfare class.
