It’s easy to romanticize the past, of course. But I distinctly remember that 20 years ago, things like sudden increases in the number of people going hungry were considered important issues. Nowadays to even muse about whether this is something we can do something about as a society marks you as an unserious hippie. Even as we speak, Slate/Levitt/TNR are probably writing something along the lines of “you think that having a high percentage of the population without access to food is bad, but once you get past the conventional wisdom of our hippie overlords, you’ll see that blah blah blah.” David Brooks is probably on the Snooze Hour telling E. J. Dionne that the only solution is food vouchers and, anyway, in Red America, the hungry can always visit the Applebee’s Salad Bar for free. Robert Samuelson and Fred Hiatt are cooking up some bogus figures to tell us that there is no way that we, as a society, can do anything about this. And, anyway, Michael Moore is fat, so how can anyone really be hungry?
What the hell happened? How did all the conservative talking points become so thoroughly internalized in this country?
cleek
decades of Working The Ref has made it impossible for the media to ask questions that the radical right disapproves of.
Jon O.
Fix’d.
beltane
I can’t answer your question. All I can say is that these talking points had better be un-internalized immediately lest we end up like every other failed society. People don’t kill; people with bad ideas kill.
scav
perhaps they’re more internalized in the village? Festering elsewhere and possibly going to blow once people figure out how to distinguish their TV sitcoms from their mirrors?
Notorious P.A.T.
8 years of Reagan, 12 years of Bush.
Colette
The Big Lie. Say it often enough and loudly enough, and it becomes the truth.
Bubblegum Tate
That, to me, is the gazillion-dollar question. And I’ve only heard partial answers to it.
calipygian
The refutation will be much along the lines of Doughy Pantload-style refutation of Anthropogenic Global Warming – “If the globe is warming, why did it snow on St Swithin’s Day? Heh,” along the lines of “First the liebruls tell us gubmint needs to regulate what goes in our food because poor people, Michael Moore and Al Gore are FAT! Now they say that one sixth of the country is starving? How can that be, everyone I see is FATTY FAT FAT FAT!”
And this will be a seriously considered policy argument.
Zifnab
I expect a full multi-part expose by Andrew Brietbart and the Pimps’n’Hoes division, raiding the local food pantries and relief centers with video cameras to catalog all the fat, lazy slobs stealing your hard earned tax dollars.
Young Bucks eating T-bone steaks. Cadillac driving welfare queens. Makers and Takers.
I think the difference between now and twenty years ago was that the people snidely deriding the homeless and the impoverished didn’t get to host their own hour long news segments on cable TV.
But I don’t think there’s ever been a time when the Marrie Antoinettes were ashamed to tell the rabble they should eat cake.
calipygian
You know who has done more to spew idiocy and push the dreaded Overton window right in the last 20 years?
Rush. Seriously.
How much better off would this country be if Rush hadn’t found an excuse to blow off his obligations as a citizen and had to come back from Vietnam in Max Cleland’s condition or worse?
Greed is god
I blame it all on Gordon Gekko’s mantra “Greed is Good” gaining traction among the righteous.
I think somewhere along the way Church Lady replaced “Feed the poor” in her mission statement with “In Gold We Trust”
SiubhanDuinne
Besides, they all have cell phones. If they can afford cell phones, there’s no reason for them to be hungry, amirite?
/snark
Neutron Flux
Going back 20 years is not enough.
It seems to me that the basic M.O. was generated in response to the end of the Vietnam war. The GOP understood it was in trouble and found the outrage against the DFH’s in the soft underbelly of the country, the deep south.
They learned the rules by trial and error over the Reagan and Bush years.
We hope that all they have today is this construct, but we will see what we will see.
But, hey, surely this can be beat down. If not, too cold in Canada, so it is some place closer to the equator for me.
Jon O.
To be a little less flip about it…
I think this is a structural rot that has been happening for decades now. We don’t need to go over the decades of working the refs and all that – it’s enough to say right now that the media is basically a conservative actor at this point. I do think it was true enough that it was institutionally liberal a few decades ago – the whole “everybody I know voted for Mondale” anecdote comes to mind – but at this point, Seriousness in media is the province solely of status quo defenses and de rigeur belligerence.
That said, the media has a gatekeeper’s control over only one thing in this country: the Overton Window. That’s the real damage they’re doing. The people being most misled by the media are what poli-sci professors call “high information voters” and elites.
Man, it’s something about the times we live in where I’ve just written what I’d consider a pretty logical set of paragraphs, but reading through it makes me feel like I’m a frothing leftist. (No offense to frothing leftists out there.)
BC
Also, the biggest issue of the day is the deficit and if we do anything about the people going hungry, that might increase the deficit, which is now the one unifying idea in Washington DC. Same reason we can’t do any health insurance reform. Or anything else that would benefit middle class Americans – who will certainly need to take a hit on Social Security and Medicare because of the deficit. The deficit pony has returned to the public discourse and all the pundits know this inside out, they don’t even have to have anything new, just recycle the Perot talking points. If there’s anything this lazy group likes, it’s recycling talking points. Of course, when it comes to doubling down in Afghanistan, the deficit doesn’t even come into view.
John Thullen
John Cole gave us a clue about this in his recent post regarding the proliferation of “assholes” in the Republican Party and the Republican media, not to mention the electorate.
The assholes are now zombie assholes. A zombie asshole bites an otherwise normal, formerly American individual and they pass on the scourge.
Exponential asshole zombiefication.
Carpet nuking may be our only way out to save the country from this alien scourgel.
Little Dreamer
@Notorious P.A.T.:
Fixeteth!
Zifnab
@Jon O.:
The folks chanting against death panels and creeping socialism and evil totalitarian census workers didn’t strike me as high information voters. But ok.
I think what’s really happening is that we’re all being turned into low information voters, through wave after wave of deceit. You either listen to the news and get bad information, or you don’t listen and you get no information. Either way, the problem won’t even be addressed until it’s splayed across your doorstep.
Little Dreamer
@Bubblegum Tate:
It was a Bilderberger construct, media access of the terribly powerful!
Zifnab
@Jon O.:
The folks chanting against death panels and creeping socia lism and evil totalitarian census workers didn’t strike me as high information voters. But ok.
I think what’s really happening is that we’re all being turned into low information voters, through wave after wave of deceit. You either listen to the news and get bad information, or you don’t listen and you get no information. Either way, the problem won’t even be addressed until it’s splayed across your doorstep.
harlana pepper
Because they only deaths that matter in Amurka are those caused by Islamic terrists. Death from starvation and lack of health care are the victims’ fault, so fuck them, they don’t count.
calipygian
Everyone knows that REAL Murkins have a house and a yard east of I-10 and West of I-95 and know how to grow their own food like the salts of the earth they are and so aren’t vulnerable to starvation.
John S.
Because conservatives know how to stay on message.
And repeat the same talking points.
Over.
And Over.
And Over.
And Over.
And Over.
And Over.
And Over.
And Over.
And over again.
And then it becomes so familiar to most people, that they internalize it because they have heard it so many times that they presume that it must be true.
This is what happens when our educational institutions teach for memorization and not critical thinking.
Brien Jackson
“What the hell happened? How did all the conservative talking points become so thoroughly internalized in this country?”
The same reason the media is obsessed with contrarianism (basically the same thing when you pull it apart); the need for profit in journalism/media.
Nazgul35
Because we are a nation in decline, and this is one of the symptoms of the end of a Great Power…
handy
How far east? At least this far, I’m thinking:
John S.
Because conservatives know how to stay on message. And repeat the same talking points. Over. And over. And over. And over. And over. And over. And over. And over. And over again.
And then it becomes so familiar to people, that they internalize the message because they have heard it so many times and they presume that it must be true.
This is what happens when our educational institutions teach for memorization and not critical thinking: people get wired for repetition and not reflection.
bemused
Decades of rightwingers catapulting the propaganda to low information americans. Decades of republican efforts to strangle education (is civics even taught anymore?) & decades of eroding journalism in media has been extremely successful in hiking the numbers of low information americans.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Zifnab: This.
Have we really ever taken care of our homeless? No.
I think you have to go far enough back that almost everyone was poor – the Great Depression – to get to a time when people were affected enough to care about others. Right now, it’s someone else’s problem, and most people are incapable of imagining being in someone else’s position. Evidence: BOB and vg.
Jim Pharo
I’m so old I can recall when the TV news covered rises (never falls!) in average income — and did so with the actual numbers.
Today, discussions of money are considered too rude for polite conversation, so we are on the verge of adopting a health care subsidy program that will still leave millions and millions of Americans without the means to afford insurance, principally because $88,000 in Terre Haute is in no way comparable to $88,000 in LA.
Gus
@John S.:
And keeping those messages easily understandable in a sentence or two. Complexity and shades of gray are anathema to conservatives, or at least to the kind of conservatives you’re talking about.
Martin
@Brien Jackson: This.
John S.
Such is the grim reality of society.
I should know, I work in advertising.
timb
@bemused: You know the first thing taught in my law school classes (and in the BAR/BRI review) on the Constitution? What the three branches of government are.
These kids (hey, I was in my thirties!), spoiled and privileged, had 16 years of education behind them and the professors still felt the need to lead off with the three branches of government and separation of powers. Their fund of information about the way their government works and its evolution is/was embarrassing.
All they were doing was learning a trade so they could buy a BMW. You think they cared about hungry people?
cmorenc
@calipygian
It’s also all the smugly resentful simpletons who can be found around your very neighborhood listening to Rush on the radio while tooling around in their yard or house, or driving around in their car. I have an other wise pleasant neighbor diagonally across the street from me who actually *jogs* with a radio-equipped walkman listening to Rush through earphones as he strides along. I have another around-the-block neighbor who was out doing yardwork with Rush blabbing ignorantly today about how if people realized how stupid and dangerous it was to switch out incandescent bulbs for flourescents, there would be a mass pouring of outrage at any politicians who had passed laws encouraging or requiring eventual switchover.
The real problem is that a great many people ARE idiot yahoos, and while Rush is a shallow idiot reactionary thinker himself, he nonetheless articulates their resentments about stuff out of their control far better than they are capable of doing themselves, making them feel good about themselves and their knee-jerk simpleton thinking.
georgia pig
Cheap credit and Ronald Reagan.
cmorenc
URK! The block-quote bug strikes again. Fixed below:
@calipygian
It’s also all the smugly resentful simpletons who can be found around your very neighborhood listening to Rush on the radio while tooling around in their yard or house, or driving around in their car. I have an other wise pleasant neighbor diagonally across the street from me who actually jogs with a radio-equipped walkman listening to Rush through earphones as he strides along. I have another around-the-block neighbor who was out doing yardwork with Rush blabbing ignorantly today about how if people realized how stupid and dangerous it was to switch out incandescent bulbs for flourescents, there would be a mass pouring of outrage at any politicians who had passed laws encouraging or requiring eventual switchover.
The real problem is that a great many people ARE idiot yahoos, and while Rush is a shallow idiot reactionary thinker himself, he nonetheless articulates their resentments about stuff out of their control far better than they are capable of doing themselves, making them feel good about themselves and their knee-jerk simpleton thinking.
The Republic of Stupidity
I read an interview w/ Richard Viguerie several years ago, in which he talked about the conservative plan to regain control of the country via AM radio. I’ve looked and looked for that interview, so I could get a direct quote from it, but haven’t been able to find it.
20 plus decades of non-stop blathering of right wing talking points on AM radio worked. Doesn’t ‘conservative talk’ have a 90% plus advantage in air time, and in some case a 100% of the market, in many areas of the country?
The same hateful, insipid drivel, day after day after day, 24/7. Who ever knew the ‘Balding, chubby, impotent, drug-addicted, angry, middle-aged white male’ demographic was that big?
comrade scott's agenda of rage
@cleek: What cleek said. That and the consolidation of traditional media as corporate entities who are scared shitless of the right wing noise machine.
Oh, and this FP article at Teh Orange nails the specific reasons:
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/11/11/803279/-How-Republicans-Killed-Capitalism
ChrisZ
@calipygian:
__
I-10 is an east-west road, that runs the entire length of the country.
I believe it is the case that east-west roads end in even digits and north-south roads end in odd digits.
am
hm, I see a blog post which is full of swingeing criticism of named individuals for doing things which they haven’t actually done.
How strange. I guess they must be really bad people!
cmorenc
@Georgia Pig
Sometimes I find myself wishing and wondering: if ONLY Jimmy Carter had sent another dozen helicopters on the Iran Hostage Rescue Mission, it would have seemed like the boldly appropriate stroke of a tough, yet sanely responsible leader, and Reagan could never have gotten any traction at the debate with any stupid one-liner quips like “there you go again”.
As it turned out, the failure of the hostage rescue mission in a sandstorm in the desert because it disabled a few too many helicopters to make the mission viable, cemented the impression of too many people of Carter as a wishy-washy leader with FAIL written on his forehead.
calipygian
@ChrisZ:
I-10I-5.Fixt.
Liberty60
There was a time when the Democratic party actually represented working class people;
That was about the same time that newpaper reporters were still…working class people.
Today most media reporters and writers and Democratic politicians are college graduates, live an affluent Yuppie existence, and literally have no idea what it means to work at Wal-Mart for minimum wage. Even when they mean well, their entire frame of reference about the working poor is gleaned from reading Barbara Ehrenriech,
(To be fair- it is true of MOST, not all..but probably ALL of the ones who get airtime seem to fit this mold).
I remember when I was a Republican, people always used to accuse us of wanting to “turn back the clock to the 1950’s”…
God, how I wish that were true!
I wish we lived in a time when 1/3 of the nation’s workforce was unionized;
When marginal tax rates were 80% for the billionaires;
When the richest wage earners made 40 times the average, not 400;
When gasoline prices were regulated;
When the government offices actually were open 5 days a week;
When California had an educational system second to none in the world- a system of free junior colleges and nearly free state universities;
When veterans were sent to college for free by a grateful nation;
When a “liberal” like Truman proposed a truly nationalized health care system, and was opposed by “conservatives” who were content to administer same though employer benefits. This at a time when a typical birth (like mine) cost less than 2 week’s wages for an average man.
When a “conservative” would argue that we should balance revenue and spending;
When a “conservative Republican” would argue that:
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. ”
Today these Republicans would be purged, and find the RedStaters sending them
plasticdog poop in the mail.Conservatism has morphed from being a reasoned skepticism of government overreach, to become a cultish religion of Ayn Rand absolutism and ethnic tribalism, administered by self-interested corporations.
bemused
@timb:
Several years ago, I really started to question when americans had become so over the top self centered & money driven. Thinking back, I believe the “me, me, me” trend started in the 80’s. At least, that’s when I began to notice it.
Leelee for Obama
The poor in this country, who tend to be less-educated and often inner-city or rural have become so used to their situation that they rarely make a noise that can be heard. It is left to others, usually unpopular others, to tell their stories in the public square. It has become easy for the right to say that (Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Marion Wright Edelman, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, or whoever else is speaking out) are just doing what they do for political gain. And this argument is swallowed, without a problem, by people who are oftentimes not much better off than those they disdain. It may very well be that things can improve, but it needs the voices of ordinary people who are somewhat better off, and have little to gain to make the argument. Because, otherwise, the Village will do what it has always done, suck up to the haves and abandon the have-nots and there it is.
I saw things get worse a year or so ago, when hunger became food-insecurity. One can only wonder what Carlin would have done with particular pile of shit.
HyperIon
Michael Moore is fat
I saw Al Gore LIVE on BookTV this weekend flogging his new book at the Miami Book Festival. He was NOT fat. (But he was still coma-inducing….very serious.) I don’t know when he took off the weight.
How long til MM slims down?
BTW I saw HIM on Larry King (while visiting my parents in Fla). He was not shrill at all. He made perfect sense and was totally without snark. LK, however, was as clueless as ever.
satby
@Zifnab:
This, exactly.
Xanthippas
I don’t know about all that, but I do know that one thing that hasn’t changed in 20 years is how conservatives react to being told that people are going hungry in our country; if they’re hungry it’s their own damn fault, and anyway it’s evil for the government to steal their money and force them to give it other people for food.
HyperIon
@calipygian wrote: Al Gore are FAT
see #47
Liberty60
OK, not to suck up all the bandwidth, but I am on a tear this afternoon-
Rush-like idots have always been around; in fact, Rush would have been a George Wallace Democrat in 1968, snarling about “pointy headed intellectuals”.
No, the difference is when we lost faith in the ability of government to do good.
The WWII generation saw up close and personal the workings of government- the New Deal programs like TVA, CCC, Social Security, WPA; and the massive government mobilization of the War effort;
We forget today how truly socialised the economy was during the war; how the government essentially ran half the nation’ economy, and people saw how it became more efficient, more orderly, and after the war, much, much more prosperous.
It was Bob Dole, a WWII veteran, who first diverged from the rabid right when, during the 90’s he commented that”government can do some things right”. He was sneered at, and buried under a stampede neo-cons.
We need to push back, forcefully and repeatedly with this simple truth:
Obama is a centrist, no different than Kennedy, closer to Eisenhower than Truman in his vision of the scope of government. The buzzword of Obama=socialism is a meme that even the liberals are buying into. It is the Tea Party that is the radical, angry, destructive force today.
someguy
If only these goddamn pinchpenny Republicans didn’t run the country… Hey, seriously though. Maybe I missed something but I thought we had an election. Why the fuck are people in this country starving to death? Why are Republicans still running the country?
I guess on the other hand if you’re talking about Republican voters going hungry I don’t mind so much. I think that’s not referred to as starvation, but as “karma.”
jcricket
@The Republic of Stupidity: Yeah – but the audience is stagnant. It’s not like Rush had 10 million listeners in the early 90s and 50 million today. It’s still 10. And that 10 (or 15 or whatever) is pretty much the same 10 listening to Savage, etc.
The problem is the crazification has increased, so these people have become louder and appear more prominent. They may even vote more than they did in the past (fear of a “black planet” so to speak).
This is why GOTV is what really matters. Democrats should get behind laws that enshrine the right to no-fault-absentee balloting, and in fact encourage voting by mail/home. This, combined with demographic trends and the Republicans run to the right, would really help lock in Democratic gains in the next 5-10 years.
Sinister eyebrow
The truly sad thing is, is that while these callous simpletons and opportunists will downplay, disbelieve or try to spin away the fact that so many go hungry, while they dither and vie for position more people will go hungry.
I’ve gone hungry. There is perhaps no more desperate and miserable condition.
El Cid
From time to time, it’s worthwhile to ask the opposite — why wouldn’t they have? What would have stopped them?
Why not expect that the most concentrated economic powers in the news production business would most follow along with an overall tone and coverage that served the interests of their own owners and investors and their fellow economic powers?
In other words, why not?
jcricket
@Sinister eyebrow: Yeah, but you know, food stamps will sap your will to work, so it’s best that you let that hunger be a Galtian force driving you to find a job.
Or so I’ve heard from my conservative leaning friends, most of whom have never had to bear the indignity of even going without premium cable for a month, let alone food or shelter.
Frankly, I haven’t either (upper-middle class upbringing, upper-middle class lifestyle now) – but I see social welfare programs for what they are – a tiny offering to show that the richest nation on earth isn’t above caring for those less fortunate (whether permanently or temporarily so).
Anyone who believes otherwise can FOAD.
russell
I put it down to learned helplessness.
bemused
One of my favorite cartoons (possibly a New Yorker):
A lifeguard at the beach is reading a book while a swimmer is obviously drowning says to the upset onlookers, “We’re encouraging people to become involved in their own rescue”.
Spazzman Spliff
You’re confused about this…really?
The answer is self-evident: When was the last time a Wall Street hedge fund manager, or a corporate CEO, or a cable TV talking head missed a meal?
What got internalized during the last 30 years were not so much “conservative talking points”, but an absolutely unshakeable conviction, among the members of “the Village” and their aspiring wannabees, that their lives and interests are the only ones that need to be considered in any discussion about anything at all.
And from that single solipsistic seed, the entire panoply of blindness and inhumanity that characterize the modern Amercan elites grow as naturally as weeds in an empty lot.
Xenos
@The Republic of Stupidity:
It is the indirect result of consolidation. Large corporations that own dozens of stations are not going to put liberals asking for more regulations and an active FCC, on the air. They will gladly lose money on conservative talkers so they are free to earn it back dozens of times over forcing crappy corporate radio on the masses.
As an example, note how Rush’s contract is bankrupting Clear Channel – they are not making advertising dollars on his show to pay that 400 million dollar contract. That is part of their overall business plan to improve and preserve the profitability of the entire operation.
Randi Rhodes boasts that there are some markets where she is on a weak am signal and still beats, in those markets, all the right wing talkers on am and fm combined. But even then, she can’t get a station in those markets with a strong signal to put her on. So maybe we need the fairness doctrine after all.
Numberwang
It’s not just the result of a forty-year movement conservative campaign, but the result of forty years of attempting to refute falsehoods, half-truths, and crackpot theories. Brendan Nyhan and Jason Riefler have turned up some pretty interesting evidence that attempting to refute falsehoods can not only spread them, but actually make believers dig in:
Cleaning up this cultural Ægean Stable is going to be the work of decades, and its in its infancy. It has to be done with positive assertions of the truth instead of negations of untruth. Affirm reality instead of denying insanity.
Numberwang
ugh, wrong its. make sure the history books note that I meant “it’s in its infancy”.
CalD
Well of course, they taught us in Poli Sci 101 that the pendulum swings and that seems true enough as far as it goes. I think the principle reason is that very time you solve a problem, the solution always contains a new problem. After a while people get fed up with putting patches on top of patches and want to try a new direction. We over-correct, finally hit a wall and oscillate back the other direction. Lather, rinse, repeat.
In this particular case though, the normal cycle may have gotten an extra push in the rightward swing from the boomer generation reaching the age where people tend to become more conservative — and perhaps extra bump from a generation of early boomer offspring rebelling against their hippie parents in the 90s. And then the WTC attacks obviously gave it another hard bump to the right at what arguably should have been the apex of that swing, moving us even farther into well-past-ridiculous territory.
But whatever the reason(s), the past two decades have seen the proverbial pendulum swing as far to the right as I’ve ever seen it go, even at the height of the cold war. I’m pretty sure that’s not just me being nostalgic. I’d bet you could find policy areas where Richard Nixon was to the left of Barrack Obama. The healthcare reform proposals winding their way through congress right now look more like the Republican alternatives to the Clinton plan than what Democrats were proposing 16 years ago. The social contract is in on life support. Superstition is ascendant and science is on the run.
The brightest spot I can see in all this is that majority of Americans seem to be groggily starting to notice. Certainly right-wing crazies are gradually beginning to get called on behavior that was considered acceptable and commonplace five years ago. People are getting pretty fed up with them. Of course that only makes the crazies angrier. But the angrier they get, the uglier they get and the uglier they get, the more people notice. So I dare hope that we may have finally reached the end of this swing — hopefully while there are still a few shreds of our previous progress as a society left to salvage.
Ruckus
@Liberty60:
All true but is this what the conservatards are asking for when they want their country back? What are they actually asking for? I for one would love to give them what you described, with some additions – actual health care for all of us (why is it OK for seniors and young poor kids but not anyone else?) (I know you asked for it as well, it just bears repeating)- An executive/military that actually protects our country, not one that is on an empire building/bullying spree and therefore doesn’t cost so much in lives and money. And I’d like to go back to maybe thinking that other people in the world are as important as some BS ideal merkan that doesn’t exist.
I’m open to other things as well, I just think we need to start somewhere.
To answer the original question – because conservatards are greedy, selfish bastards and … well that’s it.
Deschanel
Maybe we should face up to the fact that a slim majority of Americans are meanspirited, stupid, bigoted, selfish , warlike, hypocritical, small-minded, uneducated assholes who actually enjoy other people’s misery.
How else to explain Palin?
Hal
DougJ,
dude, how long did it take John Cole to become clued in? Not to complain, but geebus. As late as 2006 he was still railing against the hippies, periodically…
The sad, simple fact is that it’s really fuckin’ easy to pick on peacenicks, vegans, anti-fur types, etc. Everyone has made the spectacular calculation to make such things *uncool*. What the fuck did everyone think was going to happen? I mean, really… Basic fundamentals. Garbage in, Garbage out.
We spent the last 30 years systematically dismantling education and pretty much every welfare program that was targeted on reducing lead in the environment and ensuring that kids received proper nutrition in the first five years.
But damn if those property rights aren’t properly enforced.
You get what you pay for – and more importantly, what you believe in.
Mark S.
I don’t think it is the only factor, but I would add the unholy marriage between the religious right and the GOP. In exchange for attacking gays and abortion, the GOP got the religious right to adopt their screw the poor philosophy.
(I realize this phenomena has its roots in Calvinism, but I really think it has been amplified in the last thirty or so years.)
J
El Cid @54
Agreed up to a point. But, though, as Dougj observes, It’s all to easy to romanticize the past, I still can’t help thinking there is a difference. There used to be some space in public discussion for the honest reporting of the truth and for sympathies directed at objects other than our poor, persecuted ruling class–and for some outrage directed against our betters when they were in the wrong. I’m not sure of the ultimate explanation, but consequential divisions in what used to be the called the ‘Establishment’ occasionally arose. Witness the publication of the Pentagon papers and the rise to prominence of journalists like Seymour Hersh and David Halberstam. I also remember hearing that–somewhat earlier– The Other America, by Michael Harrington (mind you, a socialist!) came to the attention of JFK through an article in the New Yorker by Dwight MacDonald. Even if this is Kennedy hagiography, it tells us something about the spirit of the times that the story would be put about. Now, with the rarest exceptions, neo-liberal economic orthodoxy prevails everywhere in the public sphere. Vast and every growing inequalities in wealth and power are everywhere assumed to be a part of the right natural order of things, any attempts to tamper with which will lead to disaster. Don’t get me started on the complacency with which torture is viewed by the vast majority of those with a voice in the public sphere and talk of fundamental human rights, international legality and the like as so much piffle. If I’m right in thinking that it was not always so, there remains the question of why the interests of owners that you cite have come to dominate more than before.
inkadu
@CalD: I think the principle reason is that very time you solve a problem, the solution always contains a new problem.
And what’s the most common new problem? That people think the old problem doesn’t exist anymore and the government needs to stop wasting money on it.
R-Jud
Y’all have read Nixonland, right? I thought I was the last person on this blog to pick it up.
JenJen
I wish I had something other to add than DougJ FTW. Seriously. I want DougJ to win, but on this point not that much, because his rightness is pretty f’n depressing.
JenJen
@R-Jud: Best Poli-Sci book ever. Should be required reading in high school Civics, if you ask me.
The Populist
Don’t forget…personal responsibility y’all! We are the most giving nation on earth! No child goes hungry!
Yet, here we are…some folks need to be ashamed of themselves.
R-Jud
@JenJen:
Yes. Though we should require high school civics first.
The Populist
As well as personal finance.
inkadu
@jcricket: but I see social welfare programs for what they are – a tiny offering to show that the richest nation on earth isn’t above caring for those less fortunate (whether permanently or temporarily so).
I’d actually prefer you see these programs as a way to help people get on their feet (or back on their feet) so they can go back to living a decent life. I don’t want a tiny offering. I was universal health care, free university education, and affordable and useful public transit. Throwing bones to the “less fortunate” is a really narrow view of the problem when poverty isn’t a by-chance accident, but part of the design of the system.
R-Jud
@The Populist: Jesus, yes. Especially in any school where there are college-bound kids about to sign up for a couple of dozen grand in loans. If I’d understood finances, I would’ve done things so differently. I’m not in any kind of trouble at the moment, touch wood, but if I’d known then what I known now, I’d have fewer grey hairs.
BillCinSD
Since the DLC-ification of the Democratic party in the late 1980s, there has been only one side to the story being told
Rosali
I felt ashamed the other day at Walgreens when they were playing “We Are The World” over the loudspeaker and I felt nostalgic for the good ol’ days of 1985. Of course, those were not the good ol’ days for the starving Ethiopians. But I missed the time when everyone came together and agreed that we *should* help people halfway across the world. Even though we were in the middle of the Reagan period, we not as polarized as we are now.
Rosali
And I missed the young, 1980s Michael Jackson.
Mark
I saw a picture of a person at a food bank holding a cell phone, so I know for a fact that there are no truly hungry people in my America.
Ella in NM
You remember that 70’s book “Future Shock” by Alvin Toffler?
That’s exactly how I feel lately. Like overnight, the world has changed ALL the rules that until only a couple of years ago were considered written in stone, and my pathetic human brain hasn’t evolved to keep up with it.
It’s not even just politics. It’s everything. And it’s pissing me off.
R-Jud
@Mark: Cell phones are delicious with a little tabasco.
ruemara
Did I ever spout off on my natural predators theory?
In essence, we’ve allowed stupid people to keep breeding. The lack of natural predators has kept these stupids safe, so they can get to breeding age unchecked. With my new patented “Running of the Raptors” theraphy, I posit that genetically reconstructed raptors should be freed to “run” throughout certain cities. We advertise for a completely free “Raptor Day” where people can come on out and meet a real raptor. Smart people will stay home and after we corralled the critters, we can split their stuff. Goldman Sachs people have a mandatory attendance requirement for a Raptor meeting.
Why have we really become a nation of douches? Because we’ve been praising ignorance and selfishness for decades. I’m not sure what can be done about it besides a frigging catastrophe.
Brian J
If I had to guess, I’d say that part of the reason this is such a problem is because these people don’t vote. I believe the only person to make this point so forcefully in recent times was John Edwards, and while I don’t have any hard data to back up this point, it does make sense if you consider the fact that the wealthier you are, the more likely you are to vote, and the fact that politicians respond to those who show up at the polls. This isn’t to say that all of the problems can be solved by government problems, but they won’t help people who aren’t currently aren’t being helped unless these people elect those who can make sure support programs last.
On a different note, does anyone remember the first and second episodes of the second season of “The West Wing,” where after the assassination attempt against President Bartlet we saw how the staff came together and started to work for him? I do, because one of my favorite moments of that entire series is when Josh realizes that Bartlet is the real deal, after seeing the president, then as a candidate, telling a local constituent that he voted against dairy price supports to make it easier for poor kids to buy milk. Bartlet stated that if the man expected anything less from the President of the United States, he should vote for someone else. It’s sappy, yes, but I always imagine Obama doing the same thing. Flaws and all, it’s why I continue to be such a big supporter.
Enoch Root
I would suggest that ‘golly those right-wing talking points sure are ingrained in our society!’ is not a useful solution to the problem of hunger.
John Thullen
Edible cellphones.
The simple answer to all of America’s problems brought to you by zombie asshole Republican dumbshits.
Dream On
I think historically liberal Republicans (yes, they used to exist) agreed with Democrats that there was such a thing as a social contract. Not socialism – but an understanding that there were some basic functions of both government and society as well. What we have seen – ever escalating since the early ’80s – is an abandoning of the social contract. Jobs are outsourced to save a buck, 40-year-old judges are allowed to tear up 50-year-old company pension plans, banks rob us blind, politicians lie. Those who can’t survive are de facto drafted into the military. The media urges us to look away from both reason and our good nature. The system is truly screwed up.
Thank you for this topic – it’s a very serious one, and one which cuts through all the Xmas shopping crap. This Christmas will be a very different one for so many people, myself included.
America will never recover until we restore the social contract.
mclaren
Food vouchers for Crustey’s brand genuine imitation gruel. “9 out of 10 starving homeless people can’t tell the difference.”
tc125231
The Boomers turned out to be self-centered arse wipes. And nothing is more self-serving than American “Conservatism”.
sparrow
Really? You can visit the Applebee’s Salad Bar for free?
Dream On
You can most certainly – for free- visit any Applebee’s Salad Bar that you can find.
The Tim Channel
Did the sandstorm alone disable the helicopters or was it Ollie North’s job to sabotage them for the express purpose of helping Reagan?
Enjoy.
demit
LOL! I believe David Brooks is the recognized authority on Applebee Salad Bars throughout the country. I think if you email him for the list he’ll be glad to give it to you.
John Morris
Google an essay called “Tentacles of Rage” by Lewis Lapham. It exactly answers all of the questions asked here. Short version; after the embarrassing defeat of Barry Goldwater, in 1964, a group of conservative intellectuals convinced a small group of very rich men that if they did not fundamentally alter the content and flow of information in the USA, they would lose their family fortunes. The rich men endowed the ubiquitous conservative think tanks which then hatched the conservative world view and began to disseminate it. Once they had Reagan in office, they began to dismantle our media and degrade our schools. When RR took office in 1981, there were 600 independent news companies in the US. Every city of any size had two newspapers and at least one radio and tv station. Now almost all the airways and the presses belong to 8 corporations. The transformation was conscious and planned and its purpose was to magnify the fortunes of a ruling class in a country that was never supposed to have one.
Android
@bemused:
I was a graduate teaching assistant in the late 1970s when I first met them – they called them Preppies then… Unlike my generation of only a few years earlier, these students attended school as though dressed for work… I was teaching an American culture class, and when I started a discussion about Kent State, one of my students, said, “but the military had to shoot, they were only defending themselves.” The rest of the class nodded like cows…
These people like to pin the blame on my generation – those dirty hippies! – but we’re the ones who were concerned with getting things right with the environment and with creating useful jobs… not the money-laundering jobs that turned so may Preppies into Yuppies…
What really stung is that the Preppies – at least where I lived – got ahead of the queue on decent jobs from my generation, who had had to sit out several serious recessions…
Tom Heiden
Dom Carrera:
“When I gave food to the poor, they called me a saint.
When I asked why the poor have no food, they called me a Communist.”
Any questions?
twiffer
@ruemara: “raptor day” sounds suspisciously like “rapture day”