The god that sucked: How the Tea Party right just makes the 1 percent richer

[unhappycamper]

http://www.salon.com/2014/07/06/the_god_that_sucked_how_the_tea_party_right_just_makes_the_1_percent_richer/



Business won on welfare, taxes, regulation, then sat silent as the crazies took over the GOP. Now we're all screwed

The god that sucked: How the Tea Party right just makes the 1 percent richer
Thomas Frank
Sunday, Jul 6, 2014 07:30 AM EST

Time was, the only place a guy could expound the mumbo-jumbo of the free market was in the country club locker room or the pages of Reader’s Digest. Spout off about it anywhere else and you’d be taken for a Bircher or some new strain of Jehovah’s Witness. After all, in the America of 1968, when the great backlash began, the average citizen, whether housewife or hardhat or salary-man, still had an all-too-vivid recollection of the Depression. Not to mention a fairly clear understanding of what social class was all about. Pushing laissez-faire ideology back then had all the prestige and credibility of hosting a Tupperware party.

But 30-odd years of culture war have changed all that. Mention “elites” these days and nobody thinks of factory owners or gated-community dwellers. Instead they assume that what you’re mad as hell about is the liberal media, or the pro-criminal judiciary, or the tenured radicals, or the know-it-all bureaucrats.

For the guys down at the country club all these inverted forms of class war worked spectacularly well. This is not to say that the right-wing culture warriors ever outsmarted the liberal college professors or shut down the Hollywood studios or repealed rock ’n’ roll. Shout though they might, they never quite got cultural history to stop. But what they did win was far more important: political power, a free hand to turn back the clock on such non-glamorous issues as welfare, taxes, OSHA, even the bankruptcy laws, for chrissake. Assuring their millionaire clients that culture war got the deregulatory job done, they simply averted their eyes as bizarre backlash variants flowered in the burned-over districts of conservatism: Posses Comitatus, backyard Confederacies mounting mini-secessions, crusades against Darwin.

For most of the duration of the 30-year backlash, the free-market faiths of the economists and the bosses were kept discreetly in the background. To be sure, market worship was always the established church in the halls of Republican power, but in public the chant was usually States’ Rights, or Down with Big Gummint, or Watch Out for Commies, or Speak English Goddammit. All Power to the Markets has never been too persuasive as a rallying cry.

[sabbat hunter]

1. should we be surprised

considering that 1%ers are the driving force behind the tea party movement, starting with the Koch brothers?

[BadgerKid]

4. There's quite an element of distraction here.

1%ers drive the TP, who drives certain wedge issues. As a result, there is less attention afforded the 1%ers. Brilliant.

[Tuesday Afternoon]

2. DU Rec.

so tempted to post this on FB.

[MisterP]

3. oo, oo howzabout "the god that inhaled" if we're making that pun?

of course trickle-down only "failed" in its AVOWED purpose--as they admitted 1981! it has nothing to do with rescuing the economy and everything to do with feeding an oligarchy

same as hippie-punching and firing marijuana researchers have nothing to do with saving science from woo and everything to do with profit and an ideologized notion of "respectability"