I read a post this morning that blamed the decline of a working class neighborhood on the Southeast side of Chicago on “the progressive socialists.” I have no idea who these “progressive socialists” are, but let’s continue. These progressives, many of whom appear to be minorities, are somehow responsible, as far back the 1980’s, for the closing of the steel mills by their corporate owners like US Steel, who closed their mill in South Chicago, and started buying steel from China, while investing in Marathon Oil. All of this, the post claimed, is the fault of immigrants and minorities who feel “entitled” to things not named. “Things” that the writer of the post believes that minorities and immigrants are not entitled to get. Seems like the same kind of rhetoric used in the 2012 elections.
During the recent Presidential election the twisted mantra of entitlement, in some form, was promoted by all the right wing Republican politicians, which means the entire Republican Party. A party now pretending to try to figure out why they lost the election so badly. Pretending to want to reinvent itself to appeal more to Latino and Asian immigrants (they don’t seem to mention African American citizens very much). They talk about how they can get their message over to people, sugar coat it, so minorities and others will vote against their own best interests. Republican surrogates talk about having Senator Rubio, the Cuban American Senator from Florida, go out to pitch Hispanics, as if they were some monolithic group who would automatically vote Republican because there was one Latino politician pitching them.
Republicans, including Ronald Reagan, have used the technique of turning working class white people against minorities of all persuasions. First they take away jobs that white working class people have and then blame minorities and immigrants for taking those jobs. Republicans promote racial and ethnic animosity to Americans who are predisposed culturally to this tendency. Republicans have taken over a block of southern states building on the civil rights movement that did away with segregation. The voting rights act was used to further anger white southerners who had been suppressing minority voting up to that point. Midwestern and Northern working and middle class whites have been taught to fear minorities.
Democrats may have won the majority of the battles in the current election cycle. But as far as the Republican party is concerned this is just one battle in a war that has been going on for a very long time. For Republicans and their plutocratic puppeteers this is a war of attrition. Plato must have had Republicans in mind when he wrote about a cave where prisoners are chained to a wall so they can only look in one direction, unknowingly seeing only shadows, cast in front of a fire by puppeteers they cannot see. The prisoners perceive the shadows cast on the wall as reality.
Democrats must organize and prepare for the next election cycle. Credible candidates need to be found to run against tea party and far right leaning obstructionist politicians in the senate and congress. Democrats should help the President explain the Affordable Heath Care Act and other achievements of Democrats and the administration. The Republican propaganda machine is at work every day trying to win over anxious and frustrated Americans in any way possible. Democrats need to counter this with a campaign that promotes facts and reality to counter the propaganda and lies.
The Republican Party of today is not the party of moderate conservatives it once was. It seems many of those moderates have become “Blue Dog Democrats” or centrist, conservative Democrats. Even though the cable news pundits don’t talk about it, the coalition that elected the President for both terms, included a sizable number of middle and working class white voters. This includes men, women and younger voters. The President and others down ticket could not have been elected without white voters. The press and others by failing to describe the Democratic coalition of voters properly are playing into the hands of the far right who will make it seem that the Democratic party is the fabricated reality of “minority and immigrant progressive socialists.”
by J R Martin