03.08.11
On Scapegoating (continued)
The GOP playbook is about the politics of scapegoating. In hard times, it a tool that’s even more potent.
This Associated Press article demonstrates it without spending much time getting at the root of what has gone on. This is surprising since all polls seem to indicate Scott Walker is now viewed as a totally unsympathetic character for attacking teachers in Wisconsin.
And so the AP story goes for the gratuitous and predictable comment furnished by someone of the Tea Party.
A USA Today/Gallup poll last month found show that Americans largely side with the employees, though about two in five that want government pay and benefits reined in.
Barbara Davis, a retiree from Cherry Hill, N.J., has been watching public workers in rallies in Madison, Wis., as well as Trenton. She says the protesters are wrong about tightening benefits hurting the middle class.
“I’m sorry, but what they’re doing is telling off the middle class,” said Davis, 76, and a co-chairwoman of the Cherry Hill Area Tea Party. “The middle-class people don’t get all the goodies that they do.”
At its heart, the issue is this: Some public workers get a sweet deal compared to other workers. And it’s taxpayers who pay for it.
That’s set off resentment in a time when economic doldrums have left practically everyone tightening their belts. Many people have found their tax bills rising even if their earnings haven’t.
In Davis’ case, it’s the property tax that smarts. She and her husband pay about $12,000 per year for the house she describes as a three-bedroom “tract home.” That’s a high tax even in New Jersey, where the average property tax bill tops $7,000 and where the Tax Foundation has found homeowners pay three and a half times the national median.
A half century ago, industrial jobs at car and steel plants provided high salaries and rich benefits. But as manufacturing moved overseas, many formerly well-paid workers had to take lower-paying jobs. By the end of the Great Recession, the economic order was undeniably changed.
“It’s the government sector worker who’s the new elite, the highest-paid worker on the block,” said David Gregory, who teaches labor and employment law at New York’s St. John’s University.
The previous sentence ought to read:
“It’s the government sector worker person still hanging on to their middle class job who’s the new elite, the highest-paid worker on the block,” said David Gregory, who teaches labor and employment law at New York’s St. John’s University.
When everyone is pushed to the bottom by economic failure, collapse and predatory business which has nothing to do with them, there’s a visible clawing and striking at others — often the neighbors who, in the case, might not have had it so bad, because unions — eliminated everywhere else — were able to protect them.
This is what operates. Instead of the question of how did we arrive at this awful place and who really put us there.
So instead of marching on Goldman Sachs and burning the place to the ground, vindictiveness is turned on the people beside you. Because you have had it bad, then so must others you know or see in queues also suffer.
I’ve made the point before that this describes Ted Nugent in a nutshell.
Nugent lost his career as an arena-busting rocker. And he no longer enjoys much respect from other aging rockstar peers.
So he went vindictive. Nugent turned being rancid into a new career as a “celebrity” voice for Tea Party views and sock puppet for the most extreme political positions from the right, those aimed at destroying the lives of those who used to fill the stadiums he played in. He passes it off through a couple of transparent strategies — bigotry as a cultural war social antidote to political correctness and a poor man’s Atlas Shrugged for the rabid outdoorsman shtick.
With Nugent, the subtext is always payback, revenge and getting even with wimps, cowards, weaklings and bloodsuckers, all favorite words.
If you look at any interview from his salad days, the polite younger man in the reels isn’t around anymore.
Books written about the politics of nihilism and getting even are around. I just don’t have one in front of me.