This essay was originally published on November 29th of 2020. Originally I had claimed that this essay would be part of the book "The Information Warfare Machine", which was my previous working title for the book that I'm currently working on.
Barack Obama was absolutely correct when he said in a recent interview that the GOP had convinced rural and working class whites that they are victims. If the Democratic Party is to succeed at attracting support from working class voters, it is essential that the party leadership make a greater effort to understand where that sense of victimization comes from, and make an effort to describe how Democratic Party policies are likely to produce more positive outcomes for working class voters. In this article I will present what I believe is the root of that sense of victimization. The root of modern day GOP propaganda involves a blame-shift, where labor unions, environmental regulations, and Democratic Party policies are blamed for the loss of working class factory jobs in America. The root of working class anxiety, the "economic insult" described in earlier essays in this series, is the loss of steady employment, and the substitution of far lower paying "Gig" and retail jobs. The real cause of that job loss has been the rotation of points of production and consumption among different countries.
In the introduction to his book "The Authoritarian Personality", Theodore Adorno warned that he was worried what would happen if the wealthy of the world learned the art of manipulating those with authoritarian tendencies, and decided to put that knowledge to use. (Adorno, 1950) It appears that day has come. Wealthy libertarians like the Koch Brothers run their businesses in a way that takes full advantage of lower wages in other countries and advances in international shipping technologies, while feeding agitative propaganda to socially frustrated working class peoples, telling them that it's labor unions, environmental regulations, and Federal organizations like OSHA that have chased all the jobs away.
The Republican base's perception of themselves as victims began with the flattening out of wages that occurred over the last three decades, and appears to have peaked with the economic collapse of 2008. Their feelings are legitimate, as many working class Americans, some of whom had been lured in by sub-prime mortgage opportunities, found themselves struggling to find work as a result of an economic collapse that had been created by Wall Street gamblers. After President Obama took office, and the economy began improving, conservative pundits very predictably insisted that we were living through the "slowest economic recovery ever", and that conservative policies would surely create greater prosperity. There was no mention of the fact that laissez-faire policies of the Bush Administration, and their failure to properly regulate derivatives markets led to the reckless behavior that caused the crash. Any reference to reckless behavior by Wall Street was cloaked by the term "international banksters", which is correctly interpreted as a form of veiled anti-Semitism from right-wing pundits. The notion that white male Gentiles could be responsible for the collapse was never spoken in conservative circles. In his book The True Believer, Erik Hoffer mentioned that the period when a mass movement is most likely to gain traction is when individuals who have seen a decline in their quality of life are just beginning to see an improvement in their life condition. When there is no hope of improvement, people resign themselves to their current situation in life, but when they see signs of hope, they become impatient, and are easy prey for any demagogue who comes along making grand promises of greater and more immediate prosperity. This is exactly what happened when, as the country began to emerge from the 2008 financial crisis, right-wing media outlets, and Donald Trump came along promising untold prosperity from the adoption of conservative economic policies.
One of the quirks of human behavior is that the surest way to win the loyalty of a frustrated individual is to tell him that he has a right to be angry. Whether that anger is justified is irrelevant. In fact, if you tell a useful lie, one that allows the listener to externalize his sense of frustration and find a scapegoat for his anxieties, then your little lie can be a very effective tool for attracting followers. Part of the reason that so many Americans bought into the real estate boom is it offered construction jobs that seemed to offer a replacement for the loss of manufacturing jobs nationwide. When the housing boom collapsed, and Republicans started complaining about the pace of recovery, and then piled on with their typical complaints about labor unions and environmental regulations chasing all the jobs away, they had a list of grievances ready to be sold to a population that was already anxious about their future economic prospects.
The problem with the Republican Party's argument is that it's based on a bald-faced lie. Most Americans have no idea who Milton Friedman was, but he's a hero in conservative circles. Friedman was the person who created the idea of "shareholder primacy", the notion that creating profits for shareholders is the ultimate goal of any company, and that any investment in developing or providing security for workers, or seeking to improve the community where a company operates is wasteful frivolity and self-destructive do-gooder nonsense. When the shareholder primacy ethos is abetted by advanced international shipping, you end up in an environment where traditional notions of economic growth through manufacturing growth become irrelevant, because any increase in wages and standards of living will immediately be off-set by the manufacturer seeking to out-source labor to lower wage countries. This was the topic of an earlier essay in this serious on how corporate game theory breaks the "virtuous cycle" of economic growth. In this environment, even if there were no such thing as labor unions, OSHA or the EPA, labor intensive jobs would have still left the US for countries where workers make the equivalent of fifty cents per hour, and if those countries start to see a substantial increase in living standards, their jobs will be rotated out to other low wage countries where there are no expectations of increased earnings or improved standards of living.
In this kind of an environment, one way to attract higher paying jobs is by developing a work-force that offers unique skill sets, which in today's environment primarily means highly skilled STEM workers who are capable of designing, building and programming the machines that are used on automated assembly lines. Another way to improve employment prospects in the US would be to dramatically increase the number of medical professionals being trained in the US. A dramatic expansion of the number of Americans involved in providing a high quality public education, with the goal of creating an incredibly skilled and literate work-force should be the goal of every American, yet today's Republican Party is generally anti-education and anti-science.
If Republicans were really interested in trying to promote greater prosperity within the US, that would be their focus, but it's not. By promoting hostility towards both science and education, the Republican Party is able to keep their own voters as a population of useful serfs who can be employed for as little as $9 or $10 an hour here in the US. The end result, is that the Republican Party, used complaints about the pace of the economic recovery under Barack Obama to help gain the loyalty of working class white voters. They then urge those voters to support politicians who promote policies that are hostile towards labor unions and environmental regulations, and urge that population of white voters to avoid, and to urge their children to avoid, the development of advanced STEM skills that could allow them to pursue higher paying jobs. The Republican Party has effectively managed to create the conditions that promote the economic anxiety of non-college educated whites, and then turned around and convinced them they should blame those conditions on Democrats, labor-unions and environmental regulations.
Works Cited
Adorno, T. W., et. al, (1950). The Authoritarian personality. New York, N.Y: Harper.
Hoffer, E. (1951). The true believer: Thoughts on the nature of mass movements. New York, N.Y.: Mentor Books.
For a more thorough analysis of how the Republican Party manipulates voters, please pick up a copy of my book The Perpetual Hamster Wheel of Stupidity, now available in the Kindle Store:
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons: File:Coosa Valley, Alabama. Farm activity near Talladega - NARA - 522573.jpg
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Nice work 🦦
ReplyDeleteGBA 🇺🇲