To Shore Up The 1% They Were Willing To Destroy Democracy

They hate the government for taxing them and regulating them, so they decided to destroy it, which means they decided to destroy our democracy because that’s the kind of government we have here.

It began in the 70s with a memo Lewis Powell wrote to the US Chamber of Commerce. Workers had rights, polluters were being regulated, corporations didn’t like being taxed and regulated by a public sector that inhibited them from predatory practices.

You can read up on Lewis Powell at Bill Moyers' website, and learn more about Powell's influential memo that stole the economy back for the plutocrats. Powell went on to sit on the Supreme Court and help convert it into a law firm for the wealthy.

In the 70s the super-rich decided enough was enough and decided to fight back.

Slowly, over the past 3 or 4 decades, workers’ incomes have flatlined and infrastructure, schools, and trusted institutions have been deliberately degraded.

The Right knew that the only way to destroy democratic government was to defund it, degrade it, discredit it, make it not work, make people distrust and dislike it.

Now the Congress is owned by the people who own for a living. The Court works for the people who own for a living. And the president is one of the people who own for a living.

The Citizens United court ruling turned democracy into a proxy operation by which ordinary people voted for their government but wealthy corporate clubs owned and operated one major party and dominated the Supreme Court through the Heritage Foundation and the Club for Growth and a whole zoo of upliftingly and patriotically and vaguely named non-profits devoted to free market absolutism.

Bill Moyers has some very good analysis of the powerful octopus of tax-free lobbying operations led by Heritage.

They had a single goal: the total levitation of the owning classes above the bothersome social responsibilities that constitute citizenship, the stuff contained in the social contract by which you contribute of yourself and expect decency and fair play in return. The corporate absolutists who drove this Big Idea felt no obligations beyond themselves and felt the average citizen and his or her government owed them absolute freedom of action and total obedience. When you’re very very big and powerful your dreams are big too. The 1% now own the world.

The Self-Reinforcing Conspiracy Theory

'No, no!' said the Queen. 'Sentence first—verdict afterwards.’

This excellent piece from Ezra Klein's VOX got me thinking. What is it about Benghazi that has Republicans so obsessed? Does the time they've spent digging make them more certain there is something there? Did they begin digging with a certainty in their heads?

Fitting our conclusions to our preconceptions is bad philosophy. It’s illogical. It’s what made Galileo recant his discovery about the solar system. It’s stupid. But that is the guiding principle of modern Republican thought. Eisenhower, TR, Lincoln, every admired Republican in the party’s long history would be embarrassed. The leaders of the party should be ashamed of where it’s got to.

There seems to be a greater habit among Republicans to fit conclusions to preconceived ideas, to shape policy around an unproven belief system. To take one example, denying science while at the same time criticizing the public education system for the way our students are failing at science. (Bill Moyers takes a look at this tendency towards stupidity.)

Republicans seek government office, run for it, or buy it, and then they use it to make government stop working. Why? Is it because they believe government is automatically and a priori bad? Do they believe this so much they have to make it true? What does it mean when they spend their lives in government trying to make it fail? (New Yorker piece: the Republican War on Competence.)


Why do Republicans oppose everything Obama does, even when he proposes a health care reform their own Heritage Foundation devised? You reach the unavoidable conclusion that it’s because Obama is black. They cannot bear it that a black Democrat is so much more intelligent and capable than their hapless George W. Bush was. White superiority has become an unspoken but deep principle among Republicans. It’s their secret handshake. It too is a preconceived notion that doesn’t fit with reality.

Or is this a preconceived notion? Here are some statistics about it from Nate Silver's 538 blog. Unsurprisingly the racial bias is higher among white Republicans than white Dems, but not that much more. How much information is suppressed in these answers? Which group is more likely to hide its “inappropriate opinions” in a public forum? Which party is likelier to act on inappropriate opinions in concert with their like-minded friends?

Or is that just a conspiracy theory of mine?