~~~ "Actual rich people can't ever be the target" ~~~
What's really happening with these protests is that the genuine
rage and not unreasonable economic insecurity of these citizens is being
stoked, exploited, distorted and manipulated by movement leaders for
entirely different ends.
The people who are leading themRush Limbaugh, the Murdoch-owned Fox
News, Glenn Beck, business-dominated organizations of the type led by
Dick Armeyare cultural warriors above everything else. They're
all in a far different socioeconomic position than the
"middle-income Americans" whose anger they're ostensibly
representing.
Their principal preoccupation is their cultural contempt for various
groups (illegal immigrants, the "undeserving" poor, liberals)
and their desire to preserve the status quo whereby the prime
beneficiaries of government policies remain themselves: the super rich
and the interests that control Washington.
It's certainly true that many of these protesters are driven by the
standard right-wing cultural issues which have long shaped that
movementsocial issues, religious fears, cultural and racial
divisions, and hatred for "liberals" as
Communist-Muslim-Terrorist-lovers.
For many, all of that is intensified by the humiliation of being
completely thrown out of power, at the hands of the first black
President. But much of it is fueled by the pillaging of the corporations
and Wall St. interests which own their government.
~~ Glenn Greenwald
"The one thing that unites them seems to be a sense of inchoate rage."
Gail Collins
<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/12/opinion/12collins.html?_r=1>
As Matt Taibbi notes (Glenn quotes this too), there's nothing
unusual <http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/21289> about this:
After all, the reason the winger crowd can't find a way to be
coherently angry right now is because this country has no healthy
avenues for genuine populist outrage. It never has. The setup always
goes the other way: when the excesses of business interests and their
political proteges in Washington leave the regular guy broke and
screwed, the response is always for the lower and middle classes to
split down the middle and find reasons to get pissed off not at their
greedy bosses but at each other. That's why even people like [Glenn]
Beck's audience, who I'd wager are mostly lower-income people,
can't imagine themselves protesting against the Wall Street barons
who in actuality are the ones who fucked them over. . . .
Actual rich people can't ever be the target.
It's a classic peasant mentality: going into fits of groveling and
bowing whenever the master's carriage rides by, then fuming against
the Turks in Crimea or the Jews in the Pale or whoever after spending
fifteen hard hours in the fields.
You know you're a peasant when you worship the very people who are
right now, this minute, conning you and taking your shit. Whatever the
master does, you're on board.
When you get frisky, he sticks a big cross in the middle of your
village, and you spend the rest of your life praying to it with big
googly eyes. Or he puts out newspapers full of innuendo about this or
that faraway group and you immediately salute and rush off to join the
hate squad.
A good peasant is loyal, simpleminded, and full of misdirected anger.
And that's what we've got now, a lot of misdirected anger
searching around for a non-target to mis-punish . . . can't be mad
at AIG, can't be mad at Citi or Goldman Sachs.
The real villains have to be the anti-AIG protesters! After all, those
people earned those bonuses! If ever there was a textbook case of
peasant thinking, it's struggling middle-class Americans burned up
in defense of taxpayer-funded bonuses to millionaires. It's really
weird stuff.
Matt Taibbi, quoted by Glenn at same link:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/09/14/resentment/index.html
via: http://www.balloon-juice.com/?p=26815
