Resenting the poor (cont'd.)

Ed Kilgore notes that a vicious resentment of the working poor is fast becoming the central organizing principle for America’s right wing:

The transformation is widely observable across the conservative landscape, with Republican fiscal proposals in the states and in Washington going after a host of other key support systems for the working poor with a vengeance: state-level EITCs, job training programs, unemployment benefits, food stamps, Medicaid, you name it. It’s also no coincidence that, in the agitation against the Affordable Care Act, many conservatives deliberately stoked resentment towards alleged redistribution of federal largesse from virtuous Medicare beneficiaries to the uninsured, who are, by definition, working individuals and families who don’t qualify for Medicaid for one reason or another.

Underlying this assault, there seems to be a current of genuine anger at the working families who no longer receive “welfare as we knew it,” but remain beneficiaries of some form of redistribution, even if it’s only progressive tax rates. … The social peace so many anticipated in 1996 — after it had been established that no one receiving public assistance could be accused of refusing to work — has now been broken. Work is no longer enough, it seems, to avoid the moral taint of being a “welfare bum.”

Paul Waldman adds to this, noting that the dishonest vogue talking point for everybody from Michelle Bachmann to Bill O’Reilly to Rick Warren and Rush Limbaugh is an attack on the progressive income-tax structure.

There’s no reason to suspect these folks are  arguing in good faith this time any more than they were in 1996. If we got rid of the progressive income tax and crushed working class families under a regressive flat rate and they would move the goalposts yet again, switching to complaints about those freeloading mooching working poor families who pay less in taxes in absolute terms.

Waldman notes that this scapegoating of working people is unavoidable for a political movement aiming to serve the needs of the wealthiest:

This argument about the leeches at the bottom, and in particular the misleading argument about taxes, is becoming central to Republican rhetoric. Not only are the presidential candidates and GOP members of Congress repeating it, it’s in heavy rotation on Fox News, conservative talk radio, and outlets like the Wall Street Journal.

As the party of the wealthy, the GOP has to continuously stoke the politics of resentment, making sure that the finger of accusation is always pointed downward and never up. People could put blame for our problems on banks, corporations, the wealthy, and those who represent the interests of all three. But that would never do. So you have to convince them that if the economy is bad, it’s because of poor people. If there’s a big deficit, it isn’t because of the Bush tax cuts, it’s because poor people aren’t paying their share. …

I understand the vampiric choice of attaining power by preying on others, so I’m not confused by the barons who choose the lucrative path of oppressing the poor.

Nor am I confused by their lackeys — the Fox News hosts and pundits-for-hire whom Clement would have called “servile flatterers” chasing after “the hope of a large return.”

The people I don’t understand are those in their target audience — those who have nothing to gain from that downward-pointing finger of accusation and that foolish nonsense about the “leeches at the bottom.”

The barons are selling their souls for worldly gain, but these folks are just giving theirs away in exchange for nothing but an empty hole where their souls used to be. The barons have their estates, but these poor bastards get nothing but the bitter taste of perpetual, impotent, misdirected resentment.