The battle of fundamental ideologies cannot be averted
by David Atkins
It’s late and I haven’t been able to fully formulate my whole thoughts on the subject–that will likely be for a later post at some other time–but as Digby notes, depth of conservative depravity in fully owning the “screw the poor” stance marks something new in modern American politics. No longer is the pretense that they would like to help the poor, but that fiscal prudence or differences between “us” and “them” stand in the way. It’s not even about the best way to help people.
They’re literally taking the stand that if you don’t have a job, you don’t deserve to eat. If you can’t get a job, you didn’t try hard enough or grovel for low enough wages. If your job doesn’t pay you enough to eat, you should have gotten a better education. If you got a good education but your job doesn’t pay you enough to eat, you should have gotten an education in a different field. If corporate profits are at record highs and the obscenely rich are better off than ever in the meantime, good for them–they clearly earned it.
That’s a special kind of perverted and sick. Sick in the soul, sick in the heart, and sick in the mind.
But it also suggests another fundamental truth: this fight isn’t about who has the better policies to help 99% of Americans. The fight is about whether the other 99% deserve help at all.
You can’t come to a battle like this with a battalion of technocrats armed with white papers. This fight is one for the preachers, the philosophers, the orators and the visionaries. It’s not about how best to deliver healthcare, it’s whether people should have healthcare at all. It’s not how best to feed people, it’s whether people should even have food. It’s about whether anyone deserves human dignity except for those who were lucky or devoid of basic human decency enough to climb to the top of the corporate food chain and sit there seeking ever more exorbitant rents on the masses below even as globalization and mechanization grind them into the dust.
Technocrats can make some minor improvements around the edges of this system assuming they can hold the levers of power often enough and long enough. But as we’ve seen, there’s no guarantee they can do so, and no promise that the current system can be made to function on behalf of all the people even when they do.
But that’s not what will make the big changes we need. That will require a full ideological engagement that condemns the shriveled wickedness of modern conservative ideology for what it is, while offering transformative, aspirational and innovative answers beyond what the technocrats can deliver.
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