I have often maintained that if the populists on the right and left ever realized they share common enemies, the jig will be up up for the DC-Wall Street-Big Business axis of evil.
Goldwater-Reagan conservatives have always despised DC (especially when we were the minority). Recently we have awakened to the predations of Wall Street and Crony Crapitalists disguised as free marketeers.
Now if the libs could only see how government "help" mocks the rule of law and engenders corruption, inequality and unemployment. If left and right could link up against this axis of evil, We The People could topple the established order, put government back on firm constitutional footing and strip corporations and banks of their taxpayer-funded government protections.
Daniel DiSalvo sums up the tea party view...
The movement's unifying belief is that government and special interests have created an interlocking directorate, to the detriment of average Americans. Washington colludes with Wall Street while state and local governments kowtow to public sector unions. Thus tea party activists, who are neither Goldman Sachs bankers nor public employees, see the system as rigged against them.The only difference between the tea party view and the liberal view is that the liberal refuses to lump Uncle Sam in with the banksters and the fatcats. These hopelessly naive dupes still see big government as the counter to big banks and big biz, ignoring the fact that these three very big pigs all publicly and noisily wallow in the same trough.
The tea partiers' energy springs from a suspicion of those on the receiving end of government largesse. This suspicion is rooted in the quintessentially American norms of independence and work, and especially in the belief that people should provide for themselves and live within their means. Tea party patriots believe many - from pin-stripped executives to double-dipping firefighters - are scheming with the government to gain an unfair advantage, often at their expense. Therefore, handing over more money to government - no matter its source - is anathema.At some point the liberals must realize that one cannot worship big government while also calling oneself a populist.
Where Left and Right Agree
Among the many possible explanations for the tea party movement's rise, Schoen and Rasmussen suggest that increased economic inequality is the taproot of its fury. On this point, their analysis chimes with that of many Democrats. While the American economy has grown well in recent decades, the fruits of that growth have been unevenly distributed.Conservatives are waking up to your issues, lefties. Will you shake our hand, or will you bite it?
The Populist Wave - Daniel DiSalvo
20 comments:
Will you shake our hand, or will you bite it?..they will ally with their muzlim buddies and cut it off!
great post nad oh so true. I have said on more than one left wing blog when they attacked the Tea Party that they should be thanking them not ridiculing them.
After our wallets are empty they will bite the hand!
I am afraid most of them will only understand when they feel the treed of the boot on their skull. My hope is to wake up the reasonable people in the middle.
ya' know, you alays have a lot to say about what liberals ostensibly think but never present a liberal's thought on anything. Once again, with this piece, you completelty misrepresent how liberals think and who liberaks are.
Take that underhanded little crack about recipients of the largesse. The number one recipients of the largesse are the elderly! The number two recipient if the military sector! That's about THREE-QUARTERS of ALL GOVERNMENT SPENDING between the two!
But is the tea party suspicious of the elderly of the military industrial complex? No. Because the tea party doesn't resally care about the real problems facing this country. They just hate having an uppity black man as president.
JMJ
Congratulations, Jersey! You completely missed the point. I must have pushed some buttons. I don't even know where your comments are coming from...
I'm talking about corporate welfare, you know, you guys' favorite subject.
Hate having an "uppity black man" as president? You are charging racism, and that is an insult to me. If you can't back it pack it.
Silver, Jersey is also forgetting that little inconveint aspect that military spending is CONSTITUTIONALLY MANDATED.
And then of course he refers to the elderly which goes back to the conversation of PONZI schemes he denies and of which his party created.
I am sure Jersey doesn't even consider the billions of dollars being spent on academic welfare. When some senator's nephew cannot get a job with a degree in zoology, his powerful uncle may appropriate $180K to study the effects of cocaine on the sex drive of the Japanese quail.
I am sure Jersey will not consider that there are thousands and thousands of grants being dished out to keep academia happy in THEIR writings and stances that cross over into the political arena.
SF,
You said:
//...the liberal refuses to lump Uncle Sam in with the banksters and the fatcats.//
Not when the GOP is in power. When that happens, they tie anyone that makes money in with the filthy capitalist pig loving Republicans.
I do agree with you in your assessment of what would happen if leftist populists would only see that they do have common ground with those on the right. They agree on the problems, but not necessarily the solutions.
But the leftists are more interested in keeping people poor and demonizing the right than coming up with solutions to anything. After all, we are 2 years removed from Bush and we still here the old , "it's Bush's fault".
"They just hate having an uppity black man as president".
Wow Jersey that's a new low for you.
A narcissist,unqualified,arrogant,
immature,over spending liberal ideologue maybe but not an uppity black man.
They would bite off our hands and then blame it on someone else or claim it was a mistake.
We on the right are waking up to some traditional liberal issues, and that's a good thing.
I have often maintained that if the populists on the right and left ever realized they share common enemies, the jig will be up up for the DC-Wall Street-Big Business axis of evil.
Well, maybe.
But both the Right and the Left will shy away if they see common bonds. America is that divided now, IMO.
Silver, you said, "The only difference between the tea party view and the liberal view is that the liberal refuses to lump Uncle Sam in with the banksters and the fatcats," and that simply is NOT true. The vast majority of liberals would agree that there is NO dicernable line between government and Wall Street. Our biggest knock on Obama is Geithner and the rest of the Wall Streeters he's surrounded himself with! Liberals were FURIOUS with the repeal of Glass-Steagall, FURIOUS with the inadequate demands on the resipients of bail-outs, FURIOUS with the lack of regulation of the derivatives market! Where were the Tea Partiers for all that??? No where is where.
The mindless disfocus of the Tea Party is the main reason we on the Left are very suspicious of them.
And Christopher, I know conservatives understand the constitution about as well as I understand the Basque language, but please show me where in the constitution it is "mandated" that we have a massive military empire!
Always,
The problem is that we don't really have anything in common here. Liberals are truly against the malfeasance on Wall Street. The Tea Party crowd is only against bail-outs. Liberals would prefer we avoid the need for bail-outs in the first place. Tea Partiers are living in a dream world where massive banking failures have no real impact on the economy.
JMJ
Keep hope alive, Jersey!
The tea party was out in the streets these past two years while libs like you were worshiping at the altar of big government, and Obama was making sweetheart deals with insurance, pharma, big business and the banksters.
Military spending is mandated by the constitution, unlike the liberal ponzi schemes, which is what Christopher was talking about.
Thanks for answering the question at the end of this post. The tea parties will leave the bitter liberals behind in loserville while we fight for the freedoms of everyone.
Keep smokin' that hopium!
>Liberals would prefer we avoid the need for bail-outs in the first place.
Ah, so you ARE for getting the government out of the economy!
Asking the federal government to help fix the economy is like asking an arsonist to help put out the fire he started.
Silver, do you know what a "Ponzi scheme" is? I know conservatives like to call SS a "Ponzi scheme," but I'm afraidf it doesn't make you look good. It's not a good argument. You can argue against SS without resorting to misrepresenting what it is. That's just fear-peddling.
No liberal is worshipping Big Government. That's just a stupid conservative soundbite. Your defininition of "Big Government" and mine are only separated, really, by degree and composition. Just as you guys seem fine with a massive military empire (which costs more than any "liberal" spending), liberals do believe the government has certain roles to play.
But you summed up the transparency of the Tea Party movemen tin one clause: "The tea party was out in the streets these past two years..." Yes. We know. Where the hell were they before? What's so different about the past two years?
And where were the Tea Partiers when the SCOTUS ruled that a corporation has the same rights as a human citizen but without any of the resposibilities?
The Tea Party is just a Club of Phonies.
Bastiat, very clever, but I'm sure you understand that I am not a simpleton. I would never assert that there is no place for the government in private sector regulation any more than I would assert that the government can or should "fix" everything. That's just stupid.
And yes, Silver and Bastiat, the constitution requires that congress funds the military. Duh. The question for you is why does that have to be 26-friggin'-percent of government spending??? You do understand, you constitutional scholars, that the Founders were dead-set against the foundation of a military-industrial estate. They rightly noted that the greatest failing of the old European states was just that. You know that, right?
By the way, guys, Silver and all the others, I love this site! You have great spirited debates around here! And you're not a bunch of wusses who can't take what you give, and I give you big kudos for that!
JMJ
Thanks for the kudos, Jersey. We are pretty thick skinned, as are those over at your place,
Jersey McJones
A ponzi scheme is where the "marks" pay into a system, and are then paid back not with their own money, but with money paid by new "marks." That is what our government is doing. There is no lock box, despite what Reverend Al Gore said.
And corporations do have to follow the law, despite what you say.
>but I'm sure you understand that I am not a simpleton.
You're setting yourself up for some snark with that comment, but in the spirit of Christmas that still lingers in my heart, I'll let it go.
>any more than I would assert that the government can or should "fix" everything. That's just stupid.
Correct. You need to understand, though, that government can't "fix" anything. It can just do a little bit to help protect individuals from slavery, theft, and murder. We have to fix things OURSELVES. That's called LIBERTY. As I have continued to say, you don't have to embrace liberty yourself, but I would recommend that you stop trying to prevent others from having it. Why do you support slavery? I find that bizarre. Is liberty and absolute personal responsibility so frightening?
>that the Founders were dead-set against the foundation of a military-industrial estate
I didn't notice anybody arguing for a so-called "military-industrial estate" (which is a cheap expression thrown about rather indiscriminately, and therefore has little value in meaningful communication).
What they were more dead-set against, however, was a government like the one we've got now, regulating like a junkie uses heroin, telling people who to hire, what to eat, how to prepare for retirement, what you can say, and who gets to feel you up at the airport.
>The question for you is why does that have to be 26-friggin'-percent of government spending???
Because national defense is one of only a tiny handful of things that the federal government can legitimately be involved in. It should actually be a higher percentage. Not necessarily a higher monetary value, but since most things the feds are doing are anti-liberty social engineering schemes, and are diametrically opposed to everything set up by the Founders, if those things were abolished, then naturally the legitimate expenditures (mostly just military and criminal justice) would be a higher percentage of the whole.
Conservatives really are just fearful wusses. If you think we need to spend 100's of billions of doallrs on national defense, then you truly are a fraidy cat.
JMJ
...Easy to say from an armchair warm and cosy within fortress America.
I have been in Thomas P.M. Barnett's "Gap," where life is nasty, brutish and short. I have seen actual starving people, I have seen crushing, hopeless poverty that would break your heart. I have seen people murdered in the streets with their guts hanging out. I have seen shit you couldn't imagine and I hope you never will. Civilization doesn't just happen.
Having said that, we are picking up too much slack for other nations. Time for Europe to man up.
Time for us to leave the corrupt, terrorist-supporting, double-dealing middle east potentates to fend for themselves.
Fraidy cats? You're looking in the wrong place.
Fraidy Cats,what are you like 5 Jersey?
I have seen other liberal blogs use that term. Do you all get that from the same place?
12/30/10 8:21 AM
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