Tax cuts for the rich don't inspire voters. Racism does.

My Sunday movie was Theater Camp, the story of a summer camp for theater kids in the Adirondacks. Yeah, eccentric kids working with eccentric adults. There are, of course, problems. While out doing recruiting and fundraising Joan, the leader of the camp, has a seizure and is in a coma. That leaves the camp in the hands of her clueless son Troy, so there are financial issues. Every year the director of acting and the director of singing write a musical – which they haven’t started yet, though that does give them a chance to write Joan’s story. Early in the movie there is a claim it is a documentary. But it didn’t take long for me to doubt that. I had watched a documentary last week and this didn’t feel like one. Shots looked too planned, catching pivotal moments documentarians would not be able to plan for. And, I was right – there is a cast list showing which character was played by which actor. I think the word is mockumentary. IMDb trivia for this movie did say why there is a bit of a documentary feel – all the dialogue was improvised. That would have been fun for creative actors and it explains why they ended up with 70 hours of film – enough to film each scene 46 times. There are credited writers, who also played major roles, so I’m sure they had strong outlines for each scene. I enjoyed this one. Several years ago my friend and debate partner told me about a movie he had seen. I think it was called Sound and Fury. I looked in IMDb and see at least eight movies by that name, so I’m not going to sort through them all. The story was about a deaf community debating whether a newborn should get cochlear implants. A great deal of what I do has to do with music, which, of course, is sound and one needs functioning ears to take in. So I’m puzzled why someone would want to be shut out from that and from all the communicating our world does through voice and ears. I’ll admit right now I have no idea if cochlear implants are actually any good at allowing one to hear the full expression of music. I bring that up because I finished the book Deaf Utopia, A Memoir – and a Love Letter to a Way of Life by Nyle DiMarco. He was born deaf (well, he can hear things louder than a lawnmower), the fourth generation of deaf people. He grew up in a house where the primary method of communication was American Sign Language. He went to deaf schools and Gallaudet University. And he explains all that to us. In the intro DiMarco explains that he sat before a video camera and signed the whole book. His college roommate Robert Siebert (also deaf) watched the videos and translated the signs into English. Then the two polished up the English text. DiMarco ignores my puzzle entirely. He’s deaf. He’s become quite a fan of Deaf culture and glad to be a representative. At the time his parents and grandparents were in school the primary goal was to get them to function in a hearing world – reading lips and speaking. The philosophy of teaching the deaf (set out by hearing people and reinforced by the wider world) meant if one couldn’t speak one was considered not very intelligent. Students are guided into professions accordingly. But DiMarco, who had been in an ASL environment since birth learned much better in ASL. Part of his story is a campaign to let students learn using the tools that are best for allowing them to learn. If it is hearing aids, great. If it is ASL, do that. Nyle’s twin brother Nico, also just as deaf, became fascinated by music, though he had to crank the volume all the way up to hear it. After college he became a DJ. After DiMarco graduated he got into modeling. That got him onto the show America’s Next Top Model. He tells the story of being assigned an ASL interpreter, but on one important day the regular interpreter needed a break and the substitute didn’t show. Though he loves being a part of Deaf culture, it was a frustrating day of not understanding what was going on. He had related earlier of the time his grandfather went to the hospital and, even though the Americans with Disabilities Act was law, the doctor refused an interpreter and pen and paper, insisting on explaining things verbally to Grandma and Mom. That was scary. After ANTM DiMarco was on Dancing With the Stars (this isn’t a spoiler alert, both shows are mentioned on the book’s back cover). He found it pretty easy to follow a pattern of movements in a particular tempo. Cranking up the music so he could hear it was just confusing. In one performance he planned for the music to fade and he and the backup dancers did their moves to silence. He did just fine. The backup dancers had problems. After that he tried an acting career, but few directors wanted to imagine characters as deaf. So he is settling into being a TV and movie producer, working on shows that display at least part of the vast deaf experience, such as Deaf U on Netflix. He wants to show that “deaf and dumb” do not go together. There is one more aspect of DiMarco’s story. During his time in college he realizes he’s ... not straight. And after college he makes a connection. When young he and his twin celebrated a Power Ranger themed birthday. Nyle chose the pink one, a female character. It was only much later that he realized he wasn’t in love with the pink one, he wanted to be the pink one because she was in love with the green one and he was pretty hot. This book is a good one. DiMarco is a quite good storyteller. Thom Hartmann of the Daily Kos community wrote about the history of the rich over the last 45 years. He wrote it during the World Economic Forum in Davos, that gathering of rich people. The article uses the term neoliberalism many times so I start with a definition (which the article does not supply). Neoliberalism, according to the American Heritage Dictionary is “A political theory of the late 1900s holding that personal liberty is maximized by limiting government interference in the operation of free markets.” Oligarchs really like this idea (except when the government has benefits for them and not the poor). The article also discusses populism, which the AHD defines as “A political philosophy supporting the rights and power of the people in their struggle against the privileged elite.” Oligarchs don’t like populism. And the nasty guy is leading a populist movement. The rich are troubled by the rise of populism because they thought the neoliberalism of Thatcher and Reagan would bring greater prosperity. It did – for the rich. Since Reagan the rich pay a lower tax rate than the working poor, America shipped jobs to China, and money in politics is no longer regulated. Strip malls and small towns lost small businesses to monopolistic national chains. Those changes don’t get discussed in the medial because massive corporations and billionaires own over 90% of our media. Before Reagan people were getting what they wanted from Congress. Afterward, the money was sucked up by the 1%. Before Reagan there were 13 billionaires and the richest had $6 billion. Now there are nearly a thousand billionaires and three of them have more wealth than the bottom 50% of Americans. Boomers in their 30s owned 21.3% of the nation’s wealth. Millennials in their 30s today own 4.6% of the nations wealth. The missing 17% went to the rich. A Kinsey study reported on Forbes found almost 60% of Gen Z aren’t meeting their basic needs.

As a result, working class Americans are pissed. They know they’ve been screwed, but most couldn’t tell you what neoliberalism or the Reagan Revolution were if their lives depended on it.

This is where we get to the grand Republican misdirection, led by the nasty guy. They are very loud in saying yeah, we know you’re screwed. It was black people, immigrants, and women (and any other group of not white males) that did it to you. In other countries that embraced neoliberalism over the last 40 years the impoverishment of the working class and the gains by the billionaires are driving populist movements. And their leaders are also pushing the siren song of racism and xenophobia. Reaganomics turned a people who largely got along into an ongoing riot directed by the most hateful voices in the Republican Party. Jamie Dimon, the head of some bank or investment firm – an oligarch, isn’t worried about the nasty guy back in the White House. He knows his desires will be met. There is a bit of good news:

Most Americans have no idea that President Biden is the first president of either party since Lyndon Johnson to explicitly reject Reagan’s neoliberalism. Biden has raised taxes on giant corporations (with his 15% minimum tax on profits), strengthened union protections, forgiven billions in student debt, expanded the social safety net, and fought to raise the minimum wage nationwide. He’s successfully bringing manufacturing home from overseas, and is kickstarting a nationwide electric vehicle infrastructure.

So this election can be seen as a choice between falling deeper into oligarch repression or rejecting Reaganomics and let Biden return to the family and worker oriented values of FDR and LBJ. Mark Sumner of Kos wrote about the nasty guy’s supporters, the ones not in his cult. It matches what Hartmann wrote:

They know Trump is a liar, that he lost the 2020 election, and that many of his ideas are bad. They support him because they’re just tired and disappointed with their lives. They believe Trump will change things. They really don’t care how. In past cycles, some of these voters talked vaguely about “economic anxiety.” But this time around, they seem even less focused. They don’t know what’s wrong, and they don’t know how to fix it. They know only that they want things to be different. Even if, for some, that means burning it all down.

Sumner then discussed various people interviewed by media outlets. One of those was interviewed by Politico:

This isn’t someone who thinks all Americans are behind Trump, or that Trump will heal the nation’s divides, or that Trump even has some policy that will help him personally. He’s looking for the opposite of all that. He’s looking for damage. He’s looking for people to hurt.

Alas, the people who would be hurt are not the ones that caused his hurt. Another is still a believer in Reagan’s trickle-down economics, saying taxing his boss more hurts him. Nikki Haley lost the New Hampshire primary to the nasty guy by 12 points, much better than the 32 point loss in New Hampshire. She vows to stay in the race until Super Tuesday in March. Matt Davies posted a cartoon that gives New Hampshire an Oscar, “For acting as if the presidential primaries matter in 2024.” Haley was also in the news because she said America has “never been a racist country.” Yeah, that ignores taking the land from the natives, slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, the KKK and lynching, police brutality, and all the rest. One can find memes with a variety of rebuttals. Dartagnan of the Kos community wrote rebuttal that is a bit different. Yes, America is racist and Republicans want to keep it that way.

Because if it isn’t, they’ve been wasting literally the last 60 years and billions in political donations in a strangely quixotic quest to nail down the racist vote and make it their own. In fact, if this nation were not as racist as it is, there likely wouldn’t be a modern Republican party to begin with.

Republicans are all about doing the bidding of the rich. They may add in the religious right and those who oppose abortion. But that is far from a national majority and Republicans know this.

That is why the Republican Party has, for the past 60 years—and now, even more virulently thanks to Trump—turned to crude racism as its chief motivator to get out the Republican vote. Because its actual policy goals of more tax cuts and more deregulation don’t particularly inspire people, Republicans must rely on something that does. That “something” is and will continue to be appeals to racism, the seemingly overwhelming human impulse to believe, as Webster’s explains, that a person’s race is determinative of inherent superiority or inferiority, and that policies and attitudes should implicitly work to advantage one race over another. In practice, such racism is typically channeled as a justification for discrimination and oppression, and this country is certainly no exception to that rule.

There have been lots of laws passed over the last sixty years in an attempt to reduce racism. Republicans have continually worked to undermine those laws, though they haven’t re-established racism as a fixed governing principle.

In its quest to satisfy the needs and desires of its primary donors and sponsors, the Republican party has quite deliberately exploited the continued appeal of racism in this country at nearly every turn over the past 60 years. ... Their party’s standard-bearer, Trump, clearly views exploiting Americans’ racism as a viable political strategy. He’d be awfully disappointed (and probably politically impotent) if that weren’t the case. Because if it was, both he and the rest of his party would have to explain to their voters what their actual goals are. And those voters would probably not be impressed.

This post marks 1,000 times I’ve tagged a post for discussing Republicans. I’m sure only a tiny number of those discussions were complementary. This post is number 5,211. I’ve been writing them over 16 years.