People vote Repub on SOCIAL issues, then get screwed on ECONOMIC issues [View All]

[scottxyz]

There's a great article by Thomas Frank in the April 2004 Harper's (sorry, not on-line - $6.95 at newsstands). He explains the sleight-of-hand the Republicans pull off - running on SOCIAL issues and then screwing everyone on ECONOMIC issues once they get in office. Calling the liberals "elite" and then turning around and pandering to corporations and tycoons.

If you're interested in creating a winning strategy for liberalism, check out the excerpts below and then go but Harper's April 2004 and read the whole article. It's a really revealing look into how Republican doubletalk (acting folksy while secretly corporate) makes people vote against their own best interests. And it's kinds disturbing to see how some of the outrageous things liberals do (in anger or in jest) end up playing right into this Republican strategy of portraying liberals as godless elitists.

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Lie Down For America
How the Republican Party sows ruin on the Great Plains
by Thomas Frank
Harper's Magazine, April 2004

Welcome to the Great Backlash, a style of conservatism that is anything but complacent. Whereas earlier forms of conservatism emphasized fiscal sobriety, the backlash mobilizes Voters with explosive social issues - summoning public outrage over everything from busing to un-Christian art - which it then marries to pro-business economic ends. ... Backlash ensures that Republicans will continue to be returned to office when their free-market miracles fail and their libertarian schemes don't deliver and their "New Economy" collapses. ... Because some artist decides to shock the hicks by dunking Jesus in urine, the entire planet must be remade along the lines preferred by the Republican Party, USA.

...

Backlash leaders systematically downplay the importance of economics. The movement's basic premise is that culture outweighs economics as a matter of public concert - that "Values Matter Most," as one backlash book title has it. On these grounds, it rallies citizens who once would have been reliable partisans of the New Deal to the standard of conservatism. Old-fashioned values may count when conservatives appear on the stump, but once they are in office the only old-fashioned situation they care to revive is the regimen of low wages and lax regulations. Over the last three decades they have smashed the welfare state, reduced the tax burden on corporations and the wealthy, and generally facilitated the return to a nineteenth-century pattern of wealth distribution. Thus the primary contradiction of the backlash: it is a working-class movement that has done incalculable harm to working-class people.

The leaders of the backlash may talk Christ, but they walk corporate. Values may "matter most" to Voters, but they always take a back seat to the needs of money once the elections are won. This is a basic earmark of the phenomenon, absolutely consistent across its decades-long history. Abortion is never halted. The culture industry is never forced to clean up its act. Even the greatest culture-warrior of them all, Ronald Reagan, was a notorious copout once it came time to deliver. {Let's not forget that those "activist judges" in Massachusetts who ruled in favor of gay marriage were *Republicans*. Republican fund-raising strategists such as Viguerie later said that the ruling was a godsend for them, because abortion was played out as a fund-raising issue.}

One might expect this reality to vex the movement's true believers. Their grandstanding leaders never produce, their fury mounts and mounts, and nevertheless they return ever two years to return their right-wing heroes to office for a second, a third, a twentieth try. {Are the abortion wars and the gay-marriage wars our *true* bread and circuses, I wonder?} The trick never ages, the illusion never wears off. Vote to stop abortion, receive a rollback in capital-gains taxes. Vote to make our country strong again; receive deindustrialization. Vote to screw those politically correct college professors; receive electricity deregulation. Vote to get government off our backs; receive conglomeration and monopoly everywhere from media to meat packing. Vote to stand tall against terrorists; receive Social Security privatization efforts. Vote to strike a blow against elitism; receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our lifetimes...