A good many
true believers think "capitalism" and "America" are
synonymous. What makes the Tea Party so
powerful is that it also appears to
be an uprising against
capitalism, against Wall Street -- in
particular against the bailouts. For example, Tea Party protesters often talk
about how much they hate "crony capitalism." It's only when you really dig down that you
discover that their understanding of "what went
wrong" in the housing bubble and the financial crisis is that government played too large a role in
the economy, not too small a role. And their crazy idea for getting revenge on
"crony capitalism" is to cut red tape and get regulators out of the picture altogether. A perfect example of this is Newt Gingrich's
Super PAC's TV commercials against Romney and Bain Capital: The ad's narrator is all
for "capitalism," but oh how he hates what Bain Capital has done to
working people's lives! (But Newt's
solution would be further deregulation!)
[Watch this
very slick million-dollar video (paid
for by Newt's sugar daddy) that utterly destroys the credibility and alleged
integrity of Mitt Romney and the doings of his predatory, leveraged-capital
buyout operation, Bain Capital and other
such enterprises.]
In his book,
Frank says that the right wing and their media shills suffer from a
"victim complex." But how is
this possible? (How to understand books
such as "The Persecution of Sarah Palin"?)
That they do
indeed understand themselves as victims is undeniable. It is Sarah Palin's entire raison d'etre. Whenever one sees her face TV, one knows that
very soon someone is going to make the point that someone, somewhere was mean
to her. This is also what explains the
whole fantasy of concentration camps for conservatives, which continues on in
places. [See this link, for
example].
Not
surprisingly, perhaps, this ties in with the absurd theme that runs throughout
"Atlas Shrugged," where the main character, who has organized a
strike of the billionaire class, describes himself as "the defender of the oppressed, the
disinherited, the exploited," by which, quite incredibly, he refers to his
fellow billionaires! That's right, in one of the most popular
novels in recent history, billionaires are said to be -- insisted to be! -- the
"disinherited" and "exploited" class. And millions of college sophomores and others
who came to be of like mind have gobbled this up!
How can
conservatives keep this down, once they've gobbled it up? The explanation is that they merely
understand "elitism" in a different way than you and I. In their deluded way of thinking, the true "powers'
of society are not the rich, but the professionally-credentialed and the
government-connected. Conservatives
basically invert the populist categories of yore: Instead of blue-collar
workers or farmers being the exploited producer class, it is entrepreneurs. Why? Because
it's they who have to work so hard and have to comply with regulations and pay
taxes and put up with the whining of their tattooed hipster employees. And so to their way of thinking it is the
rest of us who are the real parasite class.
Ironically, utopian capitalism is, in all
sorts of ways, a delusion that runs parallel to utopian communism.
It's not a
coincidence that both movements, utopian capitalism and utopian communism, had
their heyday as responses to systemic economic breakdowns, and that both of
them have spawned similar social movements, in which the gleam of the utopia is
so blinding that it cancels out all sorts of realities that are obvious to
everyone else (famine in the Ukraine;
the role of toxic credit default swaps
in the US). There are dozens of other
curious parallels, all of them drawn out in shocking detail in Frank's book.
The Obama presidency was the time for a
second FDR, not Clinton II.
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