Sunday, April 28, 2019
QOTD: Contempt
“If you live in the Midwest, where else do you want to live besides Chicago? You don’t want to live in Cincinnati or Cleveland or, you know, these armpits of America.”-- Republican ninny Stephen Moore, Trump nominee to the Federal Reserve Board, in a 2014 speech to the right- wing Heritage Foundation. The quote is from a must- read op/ ed by Paul Krugman, in which he contrasts the victim- blaming and contempt right- wingers have for people in the "heartland" with progressive proposals to deal with the problems those Americans face.
The 50- plus years of lies, misdirection, and gaslighting of people in rural America by Republicans has certainly paid off. If you polled a sample, most of them would likely see "coastal elites," "left- wing libruls," "gun grabbers," and other boogeymen crafted by years of constant drilling by hate radio, Fox "News" and other Republican fronts as their mortal enemies. Krugman notes it's a hard stereotype to fight, but it's long past time we turned the tables on the liars.
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2 comments:
I think it's also the case that, in each generation, a lot of the best and brightest (not all certainly) have gravitated away from the "Heartland" to the big cities or the right and left coasts because the "Heartland" majority are frequently intolerant, religious fundamentalists,racists and are militantly anti-intellectual. The GOP Congress people and right wing media know this, of course, and feed these tendencies until it becomes a vicious circle and actually destructive to the lives and livelihoods of these same people (see, e.g. the opioid crisis fed by deliberate GOP-driven policies to create structural unemployment in the rural economy).
The Heartland has a choice: they can continue to drink the Kool Aid or they can search for alternatives. Right now, and truly ironically, they prefer to listen to a cynical New York millionaire who has nothing but barely disguised contempt for his "Heartland" and who has provided no actual solutions to their problems. That's what I mean about the self-destructive tendencies of these people, which in turn, also hurts everyone else as well.
Jimbo -- excellent points. It wasn't always so (progressivism started in the Midwest, after all). Maybe someday we'll see a reversal, but there's been so much damage done that it would be a difficult turnaround.
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