From stagnant wages to soaring costs for rent, medical, and prescription drugs, so-called "conservative" voters never seem to figure out what's going on.
—
Desperate workers struggle with soaring rents (courtesy of
Republican-donor hedge funds);
— lack of healthcare (12 GOP-controlled states still refuse to expand
Medicaid for under-$15,000/year workers) is literally killing Americans;
— wages have flatlined since
Reagan declared war on workers in 1981 while the merely rich have become the
morbidly rich;
— Americans pay 10 times as much as Canadians for some drugs because
Republicans block any effort
to bring competition to that marketplace;
— at the same time Trump and his GOP buddies in the House and Senate borrowed
$1.7 trillion to fund a tax giveaway to his billionaire buddies, student
debt passed the $1.7
trillion mark…
Yet
somehow the “conservative” base voters never seem to figure it out. Why?
Most Republican voters don’t think much about it, but there are two very distinct layers to the GOP. It’s like a pyramid with a capstone at the very top.
The
vast base of the pyramid are the white voters who Richard Nixon invited into
the party after the Democrats embraced racial equality in 1964/1965 with the
Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.
They
mostly live in all-white neighborhoods, attend all-white churches, and send
their kids to all-white schools. While most aren’t the Confederate-flag-toting
“out and open” racists like the folks who showed up at the Capitol on January
6th, they’re nonetheless “uncomfortable” with nonwhite people. It’s their
“culture,” they’ll tell you.
At
the tippy-top of the pyramid, it’s capstone, are the handful of white
billionaires who answered Lewis Powell’s 1971 call to get active and seize
control of America’s political institutions.
They’ve
funded think tanks in every state and at the federal level, sponsor anti-labor
economics and political science professors in our colleges and universities,
lever judges into positions all the way up to the Supreme Court, and pour a
seemingly unending river of cash into Republican candidates for office.
These
elite of the GOP live insular lives in their mansions with servants’ quarters
and private security, travel on private jets, and vacation on private islands
or their own personal super-yachts. They don’t really care that much about race
because it’s not an issue in their daily lives: the people who enter the circle
around them and their families are tightly regulated.
These
conservative elite often own or are descended from the owners of America’s
largest and most profitable businesses. Their issues, therefore, are their own
income taxes and the regulation of their companies’ behavior.
They
understand that Voltaire was dead serious when he said, “The comfort of the
rich depends on an abundant supply of the poor.”
To
keep their taxes low they fund movements to privatize public schools, gut
“entitlements,” and oppose any sort of “welfare” aid to working class or poor
people. To keep their businesses “free of government interference” they pay off
politicians and hire judges to destroy unions, kneecap regulations, and spiff
“conservative” media celebrities who lionized them as “job creators” and
“geniuses.”
You’d
think the white base of the GOP would have figured out by now that the
Republican elite are more interested in keeping their wages down than having
them as neighbors, but the “Makers” of the party have executed a brilliant strategy
to keep their own taxes low and profits high while suppressing the “Takers’”
wages and benefits among the party’s base.
Truth
be told, many in the GOP base were beginning to figure this out by the end of
the disastrous presidency of trust-fund-baby George W. Bush.
He’d
begun the privatization of Medicare with his Medicare Advantage scam in 2003;
lied us into two unnecessary and illegal wars; borrowed around $4 trillion to
fund a massive tax cut for his donors, family, and friends; and to top it all
off was only in the White House because his brother was governor of Florida and
threw 80,000 Black voters off the rolls just months before the 2000
election…and still needed his father’s friends on the Supreme
Court to get him into office.
Bush
Junior was also the least racist of the Republican presidents since Nixon, and
put two Black people at the top of the State Department: many in the white GOP
base never forgave him for Colin Powell or Condoleezza Rice.
All
in all, most Americans — including a substantial margin of Republican voters —
were done and over with Bush and the metaphorical horse he rode in on (as much
as he wanted to emulate Reagan, Bush is afraid of horses which is why his Texas
election-prop “ranch” was an old pig farm).
Combine
that dynamic with Barack Obama being one of the most gifted political orators
of the 21st century and in 2008 a Black man became President of the United
States for the first time in history.
Obama’s
ascension to the highest office in the land was a gift to the morbidly rich
funders of the GOP: a “Black liberal from Chicago” being president broke the
brains of the most reliable part of the GOP base.
The
billionaires leaped to the opportunity. Resurrecting a meme from the tobacco
industry’s “smoker’s rights” scam of the 1990s, they rolled out the 2009
version of the Tea Party, complete with millions of dollars to pay for buses,
staged events, and well-funded PR operations to get it all into the media every
day.
While
the foreground was “taxed enough already” and “death panels,” the background
was “Black man in the White House wants to give your tax dollars to his Black
friends.” It was Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” all over again, only in a far more
sophisticated form.
There’s
a lot of truth to the internet meme: “Republicans
have gotten over Trump’s sexual assaults, affairs, idolatry, greed, profanity
and vulgarity…but they’ve never gotten over Obama being Black.”
By
the end of Obama’s presidency, though, the Tea Party had become a caricature of
itself: old white boomers with silly “Keep your government hands off my
Medicare” signs wrote their own jokes.
So,
with fellow billionaire (at least he said he was) Trump in the White House, the
capstone funders of the GOP changed their brand positioning.
They
plastered the word “freedom” all over everything, including the caucus they
bought and paid for in Congress. They helped launch hundreds of
Spanish-language radio stations to spread the gospel of “free markets” and
“you, too, can have white privilege” to America’s fastest growing demographic
group. Their media operations made billions and aligned themselves with Russia,
Hungary, and other straight-white-male-power authoritarian states.
They
even continue to financially support politicians who tried to overthrow the
government of the United States.
Which
brings us back to the question:
“When
will Republican voters wake up to their own oppression at the hands of the
GOP’s billionaire funders?”
My
bet is that as long as Democrats continue to welcome racial and gender
minorities into their party, Republican voters will stay with their
nearly-all-white politicians. Particularly people like Steve “David Duke without the baggage”
Scalise and Marjorie “Jewish space lasers”
Greene.
Will
investigations of Hunter Biden’s laptop or the FBI be enough for Republicans to
re-energize their base and gain control of all of Congress and the White House
by 2024?
Hold
my popcorn…
Thom
Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of "The Hidden History of
Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream"