Blog Credo

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

Saturday, November 21, 2015

Conservative Politics Of Division

The current debate over how much to really, really hate Muslims is part and parcel of a bankrupt ideology foisted upon the world by economic elites, who mobilize rubes by appealing to racism and tribalism.

While some GOP elites are somehow shocked by the ascendancy of the "collection of mummified foreskin and cotton candy" that is Donald Trump, the fact is that this is their monster.  They created him.  Why?

They did it because the very rich want to be extremely, filthy, astronomically rich.  They just don't want to pay taxes at all if they can help it, especially taxes that go to help the poor.

Ever since Hoover, the main conservative argument has been that any sort of program to help the poor will result in a "culture of dependency." This is Paul Ryan's argument - himself a product of Social Security benefits - that the safety net is a hammock.  It seems so intuitive: If you give someone money, they won't work.

Except that's just not true.  Certainly after a point, welfare programs can be so generous that people would rather stay at home and watch American Ninja than get a job.  And this would matter if benefits were really that generous.  But they're not.  And people want to work.  They want a job.

But they also want to be able to eat and have shelter and all sorts of other perks.

This evidence won't make a damned bit of difference to conservatives, just like evidence of global warming, the efficacy of our refugee screening program or the failure of the Laffer Curve has not made a dent on their collective ideologically certainty.

The great crisis we have in America today is that half the nation has decided on a set of beliefs and then basically ignored the mounds of evidence that contradict it.

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