The Smog is Lifting

In the "Nice Clothes" post below, in what was mostly a sarcastic and flippant piece about a truly insignificant issue, I made a serious point at the very end that I want to elaborate on: Republicans need working-class people to be on their side, so they (wealthy Republicans) will continue to benefit economically (buy clothes), even though that works directly against the economic self-interest of the working-class people themselves.

This is at the heart of the Reagan Era, as expressed so well by Thomas Frank in his 2004 book, What's the Matter with Kansas? After being baffled as to why average-income voters were supporting conservative economic policies that actually made them poorer, Frank realized the sophisticated nature of this scam.

"While earlier forms of conservatism emphasized fiscal sobriety, the [Great 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 policies. Cultural anger is marshaled to achieve economic ends....[Cultural] backlash ensures that Republicans will continue to be returned to office even 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 remake itself along the lines preferred by the Republican Party, U.S.A."

"Old-fashioned values may count when the conservatives appear on the stump, but once conservatives are in office the only old-fashioned situation they care to revive is an economic 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 country's 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, historic 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 backseat to the needs of money once the elections are won....Abortion is never halted. Affirmative action is never abolished. The culture industry is never forced to clean up its act."

"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 professions; receive electricity deregulation. Vote to get government off our backs; receive conglomeration and monopoly everywhere from media to meatpacking....Vote to strike a blow against elitism; receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our lifetimes, in which workers have been stripped of power and CEOs are rewarded in a manner beyond imagining."

This, dear reader, is the swindle of the Reagan Era that is being revealed before our very eyes by the financial crisis of 2008. Times are changing. Fewer people are ready to believe the bogus cultural charges against Obama: "radical", "friend of 60s terrorists", "elitist", "pro-abortion", "secret Muslim". It's not working, because it's not believable.

Colin Powell didn't have to make anything up when he recently endorsed Barack Obama; he simply told the truth. The smog is lifting.