Ambrose - 'Wrong, Wrong and Oh, Please Shut Up, Would You?'
July 28, 2016 at 4:25 p.m.
By Jay Ambrose-
– Henry Fairlie, journalist, describing Republicans in 1980
Harold Meyerson is just about the only socialist in punditry land who calls himself a socialist, and for that he deserves a tip of the hat, but not for the Fairlie-like bigotry he exhibits toward the grassroots folks he supposedly adores.
Scout around on the Internet to see what people have been saying about the debt-ceiling fracas, and maybe you will bump into a column this editor of The American Prospect wrote for the Washington Post. He tells us that the House Republicans, in their opposition to new taxes, are at war with government and that market capitalism is malfunctioning. He is pretty put out that President Obama actually indicated he would consider entitlement cuts.
Sorry, but wrong, wrong and oh, please shut up, would you?
The House Republicans are at war, not with government, but with government abuses, including an irresponsibly accumulated bipartisan federal debt that could spell ruination. That’s not just the Tea Party talking, but top thinkers at institutions like Harvard.
One of the things abused is market capitalism. As a new book called “Reckless Endangerment” shows, it was government along with Wall Street that caused the financial crisis. What’s now thwarting business expansion as much as anything is fear of the debt, inflation, bureaucratic battering and legislative overkill.
Concerning entitlements – mainly Medicare and Social Security – the amount we owe on them beyond revenue projections is $61.6 trillion, and you couldn’t pay that off if you confiscated all the income and wealth of every rich person out there. Try to borrow our way out of it, and you’d have to give China the United States as collateral.
But those Meyerson goofs, plus a misunderstanding of the mutual advantages of trade and the rising of compensation before the recession, are Mickey Mouse stuff compared to his reach for deep insight into the conservative psyche. Here is his King Kong paragraph:
“Republicans, to be sure, have long waged a war on government, but only now has it become an apocalyptic and total war. At its root, I suspect, is the fear and loathing that rank-and-file right-wingers feel toward what their government, and their nation, is inexorably becoming: multiracial, multicultural, cosmopolitan and now headed by a president who personifies those qualities. That America is also downwardly mobile is a challenge for us all, but for the right, the anxiety our economy understandably evokes is augmented by the politics of racial resentment and the fury that the country is no longer only theirs. That’s not a country whose government they want to pay for – and if the apocalypse befalls us, they seem to have concluded, so much the better.”
That’s typical leftist babble, and the reason I quote Meyerson is not that I have any particular quarrel with him, but that he so aptly illustrates the pugnacious prejudices of hoity-toity left-wingers who think they have an obligation to control the hoi polloi beneath them, much like some slave owners thinking they were the slaves’ best friend. Though history has proven socialism inhumanely wrongheaded, you are some kind of a moral thug if you do not worship at least some semblance of that tattered god. Fairlie, a British journalist now dead, thought Republicans who nominated Ronald Reagan for president indistinguishable from Nazis.
By the way, we have not been downwardly mobile, either. Check the latest Pew survey on that question, and then, if still in a studious mood, pick up a copy of Arthur C. Brooks’ book, “Who Really Cares?” Measured by giving time and money to charity, it is those rank-and-file right-wingers who care most for their multiracial, multicultural brethren. They give a lot more than richer liberals relying on well intended but counterproductive, coercive measures paving the way to waste, more taxes and defenseless debt. Get in the way and feel not their generosity, but their sting.
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– Henry Fairlie, journalist, describing Republicans in 1980
Harold Meyerson is just about the only socialist in punditry land who calls himself a socialist, and for that he deserves a tip of the hat, but not for the Fairlie-like bigotry he exhibits toward the grassroots folks he supposedly adores.
Scout around on the Internet to see what people have been saying about the debt-ceiling fracas, and maybe you will bump into a column this editor of The American Prospect wrote for the Washington Post. He tells us that the House Republicans, in their opposition to new taxes, are at war with government and that market capitalism is malfunctioning. He is pretty put out that President Obama actually indicated he would consider entitlement cuts.
Sorry, but wrong, wrong and oh, please shut up, would you?
The House Republicans are at war, not with government, but with government abuses, including an irresponsibly accumulated bipartisan federal debt that could spell ruination. That’s not just the Tea Party talking, but top thinkers at institutions like Harvard.
One of the things abused is market capitalism. As a new book called “Reckless Endangerment” shows, it was government along with Wall Street that caused the financial crisis. What’s now thwarting business expansion as much as anything is fear of the debt, inflation, bureaucratic battering and legislative overkill.
Concerning entitlements – mainly Medicare and Social Security – the amount we owe on them beyond revenue projections is $61.6 trillion, and you couldn’t pay that off if you confiscated all the income and wealth of every rich person out there. Try to borrow our way out of it, and you’d have to give China the United States as collateral.
But those Meyerson goofs, plus a misunderstanding of the mutual advantages of trade and the rising of compensation before the recession, are Mickey Mouse stuff compared to his reach for deep insight into the conservative psyche. Here is his King Kong paragraph:
“Republicans, to be sure, have long waged a war on government, but only now has it become an apocalyptic and total war. At its root, I suspect, is the fear and loathing that rank-and-file right-wingers feel toward what their government, and their nation, is inexorably becoming: multiracial, multicultural, cosmopolitan and now headed by a president who personifies those qualities. That America is also downwardly mobile is a challenge for us all, but for the right, the anxiety our economy understandably evokes is augmented by the politics of racial resentment and the fury that the country is no longer only theirs. That’s not a country whose government they want to pay for – and if the apocalypse befalls us, they seem to have concluded, so much the better.”
That’s typical leftist babble, and the reason I quote Meyerson is not that I have any particular quarrel with him, but that he so aptly illustrates the pugnacious prejudices of hoity-toity left-wingers who think they have an obligation to control the hoi polloi beneath them, much like some slave owners thinking they were the slaves’ best friend. Though history has proven socialism inhumanely wrongheaded, you are some kind of a moral thug if you do not worship at least some semblance of that tattered god. Fairlie, a British journalist now dead, thought Republicans who nominated Ronald Reagan for president indistinguishable from Nazis.
By the way, we have not been downwardly mobile, either. Check the latest Pew survey on that question, and then, if still in a studious mood, pick up a copy of Arthur C. Brooks’ book, “Who Really Cares?” Measured by giving time and money to charity, it is those rank-and-file right-wingers who care most for their multiracial, multicultural brethren. They give a lot more than richer liberals relying on well intended but counterproductive, coercive measures paving the way to waste, more taxes and defenseless debt. Get in the way and feel not their generosity, but their sting.
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