KRUGMAN: "Recovery Was NEVER The Point"

[kenny blankenship]

12. Every time pro-elite policies fail

be they free trade policies, or financial deregulation, or union busting or other policies directed towards lowering wages, or fiscal policies lowering taxes and cutting govt services the ONLY plan b you hear and will ever hear from the rightwing is MORE AND HARSHER pro-elite policies. Wages must be lower still! Unions must be broken up and their leaders jailed! The government must cut taxes in order to balance its budget! We're in this mess because the government is paying old folks to go on living after their usefulness to all but pet food manufacturers is at an end! I'd be a millionaire already from my sheet rock installation and vitamin supplement business if only the government wasn't taking all my money and giving it to lazy minorities!

But this is neither surprising nor confined to economics. Rightwing policy is NEVER to be measured against its promises to make some situation better, never judged by its outcomes. Those promises are merely tactical: rightwing policies are right a priori the way religion is right in the eyes of the true believer. Because it's right. Because that's the way it was (supposedly) in the Golden Age past. Because God fucking said so. Whether you're talking economics or war, the rightwing view is held to be the natural or divinely ordained state of affairs existing among men. Rightwing policy is correct by default: the outcome is "right" because the principle is "right" - instead of the other way round. Any lingering negative conditions are said to be the persistent corruptions introduced by liberals who think too much and try to impose Utopian blueprints upon the crooked building materials of Humanity. If George W. Bush is widely perceived as a failure and a disaster by the end of his Presidency, then he is magically transmuted into a liberal. The answers to any disappointments caused by rightwing policies are either A) We need to go even further up Mussolini's asshole into overtly declared rightwing corporate fascism or B) of course you're unhappy with the outcome of our Godly policies, you're a liberal or not a true American and therefore God wants you to be unhappy.