VIEWPOINT / HOW DO 1% CONTROL 99%?

By Timothy Weaver, Ph.D.

They must have a corrupt intermediary, a political party, the GOP, that is comfortable with constantly lying to its poor and working-class voters, promising to help them avoid further downward mobility, all the while doing the opposite by (a) passing bills and taking actions that continue to favor the rich, and (b) blocking bills that would help offset costly expenses for the working class, such as health care, child tax credits, higher minimum wage, and education. This is a trick that would make any magician proud.

The party must accomplish not one but two nearly impossible feats: (1) convince their working-class voters that heavily favoring companies and rich is good for them, and (2) give these voters affirmative reasons for thinking they benefit from their support of the party. GOP voters must believe that removing workplace protections, banning required union dues, deep tax cuts, ever expanding tax loopholes for the rich, and blocking HHS from negotiating Medicare drug prices, ARE ALL being done for working Americans.

Either one of these feats seems virtually impossible. Conditions must be perfect, or nearly so for this magic trick to work. Those perfect conditions are fear and angst caused by intergenerational downward mobility. Nothing injures the American Dream and haunts working class families like being poorer than your parents and grandparents, being required to work two jobs to make ends meet, and never having enough for your kids. The emotional and social issues that stem from this condition fill libraries. One of the hardest things in life to face is not having enough money to get ahead. The constant worry about debt and making ends meet results in divorce, domestic violence, alcoholism, drug addiction, and emotional breakdowns. It also results in the abandonment of hope. This condition is called anomie, a feeling of hopelessness and helplessness. This condition permits a charlatan to flourish.

The tactic that works best under these conditions is to create a boogeyman to blame for the fear, anxiety, and hopelessness. The tactic requires egregious lying and spending resources on a prolonged campaign to (1) create the boogeyman and (2) keep generating a stream of lies that sustain the campaign. The target is liberalism, and the goal is to make voters believe liberalism has caused all their problems.

The affirmative reason the voters think they benefit is that the corrupt intermediary delivers solutions to issues (the entity itself helps foster) as having primacy in their lives, e.g., banning abortion, banning transgender treatments and accommodations, blocking the undeserving and irresponsible from voting, i.e., anyone of color, eliminating affirmative action from every institution but particularly in hiring and college admissions. Other boogeyman solutions include giving individual parents, no matter their intelligence or education, more say in what all children should learn in school, eliminating institutional preferences for diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, ridding libraries of anything suggesting that white leaders were responsible for the suppression of minorities in America, and attacking immigrants as a major cause of your problems. Not one of these or any combination of these helps the lower and middle classes get ahead, to reverse downward mobility, or accumulate wealth.

If someone had forecast this scenario in 1980, when Reagan put a pretty face on the GOP, there would have been merciless blowback. Although Nixon had worked out the first stage of corruption (race-baiting to win Southern votes), Ronnie seemed a model of moderation. Everyone loved the Gipper. He seemed honest, sincere, thoughtful, and loving. Yet, he savagely attacked the very programs helped build America’s middle class, including busting the unions, but he did it with a smile. His strategy of cutting off the money to kill Roosevelt-Kennedy-Johnson middle-class programs became a blueprint for successive Republican presidencies. If you don’t give politicians the money, they can’t waste it. Let the job creators have that money and the economy will blossom for all. All ships will be lifted by the tide. Even the creator of this nonsense, David Stockman, later confessed that he knew it would do nothing but enrich the rich. Nothing would trickle down except more misery. Yet, George W. Bush and Donald J. Trump were able to sell this air in a bottle.

As a result of revenue slashing, education beyond grade 12 has become unaffordable for the middle class without encumbering the family and the student with heavy debt. After years of subsidizing college costs (from Eisenhower’s Defense Education Act to Johnson’s Great Society), Reagan and his war on higher education was a huge reversal of fortune for the middle and working classes. Yet, many of them voted for Reagan, twice.

Now, the GOP is propagating the importance of NOT going to college through lies and misinformation. Betsy DeVos’ latest salvo could have been written by a good screenwriter in Hollywood—”we must save our children from education!”

The blueprint laid down by Nixon and popularized by Reagan has become disastrous for the working and middle classes. Yet, the GOP delivers on their cultural hot buttons making it seems as though they are the only party helping this constituency. No matter how often the Democrats pass bills that actually do help the working class and middle class, the GOP has been successful in denigrating such programs as give aways and wasteful. The formula has worked.

Will it continue?

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