How Did They Do That?

Ian Welsh published a great post yesterday at Firedoglake about the morality of allocating health care on the basis of personal wealth. He noted that whenever he addresses this topic, people crawl out of the woodwork with stuff like this:

I worked hard for my health insurance. I don’t see why someone who didn’t work hard, save, and prioritize paying for health insurance, should get as good a health care as I do.

This led commenter ekunin to relate this attitude to a general feature of what he or she called the “psychology of capitalism”:

The guy without sympathy for the uninsured has a need to feel superior. That need trumps everything else.

Well, that got PhysioProf thinking again about something that has always bothered him: How has the Republican Party been so electorally successful over the last 30 years, when the vast overwhelming majority of people who vote for Republicans get economically and politically fucked over and over by those they have elected?

The Republicans have realized that if they satisfy the deep psychological need to feel superior to someone else, then they can get people to vote against their real economic and political interests over and over and over again. All this talk about the brilliant Rovian Republican coalition of this, that, and the other batshit crazy delusional collection of drooling troglodytes really comes down to one simple principle: Convince a voter that you are going to fuck somebody else up even worse than you are going to fuck him up, and you’ve got his vote.

They convinced the Jeebus loons that they were going to fuck up Christ-haters by hanging the Ten Commandments in courtrooms, allowing government-endorsed Jeebus prayer in public schools, and basing public policy on wacked-out patriarchal iron-age mythology.

They convinced the libertarians–not the “Live Free or Die” kind, but the “I got mine; you got nuttin’; fuck off and die” kind–that they were going to fuck up lazy, non-productive parasites by eliminating government handouts to the filthy, dirty, undeserving poor.

They convinced the laborers that they were going to fuck up illegal aliens who were stealing their jobs and causing their economic woes by rounding them up and sending them back to wherever the fuck they came from.

They convinced patriotic Americans that they were going to fuck up liberals–dirty fucking hippies who hate America, made us lose in Vietnam, and want us to lose in Iraq–by demonizing the notion of liberalism and painting liberals as traitors who ought to be completely eliminated from the realm of legitimate political discourse.

They convinced neo-cons and sundry other poopy-pants bed-wetters that they were going to fuck up a bunch of towel-head Muslims in the Middle East by picking a few suitable Islamofascist target countries, picking them up, and throwing them against the wall.

And under the cover of all this ratfucking–stirred up and cheered on by despicable shits like Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, and Bill Kristol–the Republicans served the ends of their real constituency: the oligarchs. While they diverted the rabble with illegal aliens, welfare queens, Islamofascism, and liberal traitors, they shook down the vast bulk of Americans and transferred this ill-gotten booty to the already-obscenely-rich top 0.1%.

I hope enough people have woken the fuck up to this shell game that we as a people make it abundantly clear in November, 2008, that we are not going to fall for this crap any more. We do not want to live our lives motivated by fear, loathing, and disgust any more. The steaming fetid effluent river of shit peddled by the Republican Party is not what we as a nation are about, and we aren’t buying it any more.