It is entirely possible America’s right wing demonstrates its love of America’s ordinary people in some highly unorthodox and undetectable way. Until such time as this currently obscured affection is rendered detectable it is only reasonable to interpret the overt hostility of fashionable right-wing ideology and policy proposals as indicative of a dim regard for ordinary citizens of The United States (They don’t think much of citizens of the rest of the world either but we won’t go there right at the moment).
It is never so stated of course, but in the Ayn Rand and Austrian School and even traditional country club thinking clutched to the Republican Party bosom now and fastened there with duct tape human beings, or the majority of them anyhow exist as fodder: raw economic material, cheap labor, easily malleable and deserving suckers of marketing for products and services and every fetid propaganda, powerless consumers here for the bilking, as well of course as impotent environmental sufferers at the hands of indifferent, entitled polluters: in other words Soylent Green tastily consumed with Grey Poupon.
Be it evident in its hostility to any kind of consumer-friendly, health improving health reform, attacks on the safety net, advocacy for the corporate and financial sectors, war-making on labor unions and collective bargaining, targeting of middle class investments and investments in the nation’s future, animus toward regulation, environmental standards and workplace safety, advancing of tax policies which increase or enshrine economic inequality, ordinary human beings on a good day are an afterthought in the eyes of this benighted worldview, on an average day a distasteful necessity, on a bad day an inexpensive and expendable commodity, and on every day saps.
You’ll hear a lot from the right-wing Republican herd about “the market” or more preposterously “liberty” but the oleaginous ideological rhetoric is smokescreen for or perhaps lipstick on a very gluttonous pig: a fancy cover, in their imagination at least, for feudalistic apologia and pus-filled plutocracy. This philosophical name-dropping and promiscuous blathering of grandiose buzzwords is intended to demonstrate a reverence for capitalism, though in fact what is being promoted is a transmogrification of capitalism as a mutant strumpet Adam smith wouldn’t recognize if it stripped down and took him to bed.
This dominance of capital over labor, ideology over human beings, philosophical systems over morality or common decency or the public good walnuts like Paul Ryan or Ted Cruz or Charles and David Koch swoon over as visions of the Dickensian paradise or Objectivism’s happiest place on earth, the Road to Serfdom for America’s 99%: Atlas no longer shrugging but happily sucking his pacifier.
This cannibalism is evident in every Republican position: with health care the concern isn’t ensuring the largest number of Americans can achieve or sustain health, or afford a basic necessity like doctors’ care when sick or suffering, or prevention of future disease; but rather, preventing or impeding reform so as to perpetuate a desperate class of consumers, profitability for America’s insurance companies and hospital CEO’s. Republicans invariably favor the interests of polluters over ordinary citizens and members of the communities in which they make their profits: Let them eat sulfur dioxide. Likewise, the Republican priority on taxes remains a tax structure guaranteeing the middle class and poor will continue bearing the brunt of Social Security funding, contributing a high percentage of income in payroll and sales and excise taxes so the wealthy, and “job creators” and “producers” pay relatively little in tax on incomes.
It goes on and on of course: opposition to a minimum wage is a given, for what regard should be paid the dignity and well being of human beings perceived only as stereotypes and woebegone abstractions against the Republican defended interests of big business and ownership? Who cares about the safety of workers if it inconveniences their employers? It isn’t the victims of faulty products that kill or maim who earn the sympathy and protection of this political brand: it is those who make the product and profit. The principal party in the eyes of these jesters for the economic elite will never be the injury-sustaining worker but rather will invariably be the profitable opponent of regulation. Americans, little more to this bunch than ducklings for targeting at the carny shooting booth in the service of profitability for arms manufacturers are saddled with the disadvantage they’re likelier to be a sitting duck than the carnival kind that moves. As I say, on and on.
Silly, grandiose philosophies aside, how individuals can prance like pygmy ponies on behalf of barons and fat cats and large, grotesque toads such as Donald Trump may always remain mysterious. One might ask, as I have with great curiosity how they live with themselves, while the best evidence indicates their ethos depends upon the delusion that one retains ones rectitude by advocating crumbs of private charity to the poor while the policies one conceives and the society one builds consigns them to poverty, deepens their poverty and adds to their numbers.
In the meantime, in their radicalized eyes you’re neither treasured as a human being or valued as a citizen: you’re a Happy Meal.
