A woman attended a Democratic rally, was appalled, and wrote about how awful it was. I’m thinking we ought to pay her to attend more rallies and publish her reactions, because dang, this is great stuff.
But then Ocasio-Cortez spoke, followed by Bush, and I saw something truly terrifying. I saw just how easy it would be, were I less involved and less certain of our nation’s founding and its history, to fall for the populist lines they were shouting from that stage.
I saw how easy it would be, as a parent, to accept the idea that my children deserve healthcare and education.
I saw how easy it would be, as someone who has struggled to make ends meet, to accept the idea that a “living wage” was a human right.
Above all, I saw how easy it would be to accept the notion that it was the government’s job to make sure that those things were provided.
If you’re like me, your first thought was that this has to be satire. No one could be this oblivious. But no, this isn’t someone mocking the right-wing’s inability to grasp elementary civics, this woman is an associate editor at the Daily Caller, and went on Fox & Friends to repeat her gasp of horror.
I was listening to them talk – to Ocasio-Cortez and also to Cori Bush, who she was stumping for in St. Louis – and they say things, they talk about things that everybody wants, especially if you’re a parent,the writer said.They talk about education for your kids. They talk about health care for you kids. The things that you want. If you’re not really paying attention to how they’re going to pay for it or the rest of that, it’s easy to fall into that trap and to say, ‘My kids deserve this,’ and, ‘Maybe the government should be responsible for helping me with that.’
It’s revealing. The mole people have so thoroughly absorbed the ideas that government is bad and the ethos of libertarianism that they’ve lost the ability to recognize that government is a social structure specifically intended to provide for the well-being of its citizens. It’s right there in the preamble to the US Constitution.
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Providing for the health and education of our children is what government is for, among other things…but I suspect this person is one of the fearful ones who only sees “for the common defense”, and imagines that justice, peace, and the general welfare are things that detract from the military.
My eternal question about this is, what’s the alternative? If you assert that it should be fine to pay wages that don’t allow a person to live despite taking up their full time, you’re saying either that that position should not be filled for any length of time, it shouldn’t be filled by anyone who doesn’t have some extra form of income or savings to burn through, or people should die or accumulate massive debt if they do fill the position.
Public education has been a thing for hundreds of years.
Roughly half of all state budgets goes towards…education.
The vast majority of us, including myself, have had a public education.
The USA, the last superpower, became great (for some value of “great”) while providing public education.
If this woman had paid more attention and taken advantage of public education, she could figure all this out in a minute or so.
This being a democracy, she is free to reject public education and government subsidized health care (Medicaid if she qualifies for it) for her kids.
OTOH, I wouldn’t expect them to have much of a future though.
(I’ve seen this a lot. Fundie xians set their children up to fail. They then…fail.)
And then when those kids fail… it’s more proof of liberal bias in education, science, and society at large!
raven@#2:
This being a democracy, she is free to reject public education and government subsidized health care (Medicaid if she qualifies for it) for her kids.
… Thereby violating her kids’ rights to the same. I’m in favor of maximizing personal liberty but I’m afraid that childrens’ rights are too often put on the chopping-block. If I can say (and I do) that a parent does not have a right to get a child a tattoo or mutilate its genitals, it ought to extend that a parent can’t choose to raise a child illiterate or ignorant or indoctrinated into a cult. But suddenly it gets tricky.
Cases where parents decide on appropriate/inappropriate medical treatment are the tip of the iceberg.
If you can stomach it, watching the Fox and Friends segment she went on to talk about her article, you could actually see the confusion on her face as to why she thought all the things said was so bad as she recounted the event. It was like, in her head she was seriously asking herself, “Hey, why do I think my kids don’t deserve healthcare and education?”
What I’m saying is that raising a child republican may be child abuse.
@Chris J #1
It certainly seems to me that they favor the “die and/or accumulate massive debt” option.
My 89+ year old mother who lives in Jacksonville, Florida, told me she heard that the Republicans want to cut Social Security in half. She told my brother, a White Man Party supporter, that if they do that he would have to pay some of her expenses (he lives nearby). I asked what his reaction was, and apparently he didn’t say much. Hope he asks me to help out when the time comes. I’ll gladly help my mom with her expenses, but I have one or two conditions for him.
Well, I opined about the Just World fallacy and hierarchical prosperity-based morality a few threads ago, so I won’t repeat the whole thing. Just that, yeah, there’s a knee-jerk reaction that “government is bad”, but also, “if everybody has bread then I’m not special for having bread”.
Chris J, #1
Yeah, it’s mind-boggling. Their position is essentially “We believe that removing garbage from buildings is an absolutely essential job because businesses would shut down without it, but we want housekeeping staff and their families to live miserable lives.”
@1: “If those people want more than they should work hard and get promoted or else go to a job that pays more. They accepted that job, so they accepted that pay.” (Ignoring how the distribution of opportunity works)
@2: I’d love to see her say “I saw how easy it would be, as a parent, to accept the idea that my children deserve healthcare and education…but they don’t, they really don’t. That’s a privilege that they happen to get and if they instead didn’t and died, then too bad.” in front of her kids.
Lately I’m starting to say if you don’t want to pay a fast food worker a living wage you should stay home and cook for yourself. Should I add anything else is stealing labor?
Providing for the common defense sounds a lot like socialism to me!
@ 1 Chris J
You omitted the obvous one.
Turn to a life of crime.
Steal anything that is not welded to the floor.
Better to mug someone or sell fentanyl than starve?
Join a decent gang? Hell’s Angels come to mind. Forget MS-13, they’re losers.
If possible consider joining the Italian or Russian mafia?
Oh yes, if you have not seen it, here is a link to someone who must be that woman’s soul mate. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/07/beauty-brands-ban-kuwaiti-blogger-comments-filipino-maids-180724114845023.html
A whole day off once a week! Madness.
@rpjohnson #9
Piling on here:
“They should have negotiated terms of employment more favorable to them”,
said while the Republicans deliberately exacerbate power imbalances between employers and employees by, e.g., eviscerating unions.
My last should have cited #11 rather than #9. Mea culpa.
@ PZ
It certainly read like satire.
I am bewildered that someone could yammer on like that and it not be satire.
We may need a new formulation of Poe’s Law for political rants. Perhaps something along the lines of “Political satire is often indistinguishable from the ravings of a crazed right-winger.”
I realize the “crazed” is redundant.
@ mathman85
They should have negotiated terms of employment more favorable to them”
This reminds me of the head of a major Canadian bank who was giving a speech to a university student audience. When queried about the interest rates and terms of student loans, he suggested that a student should negotiate with the bank for a better rate.
@jrkrideau
Really? Wow. It takes a special kind of self-unawareness to say something like that.
Seeing these arguments from EU I’m just… I can’t even.
What they call “socialism” has been working very well for decades in several rich and proudly capitalist countries (Hello UK? Australia? Japan? Shall we talk Scandinavia?)
Like, what the fuck are they talking about!?
Granted, EU has its problems and its evils, but they are very much not those that the US propaganda describes.
This is a level of abnegation of reality that is genuinely difficult to process.
It’s not from the same rally or candidate, but it is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders on the same trip (the day before?), They thought this was Trump country. Hell no, a long article excerpted in poopyhead’s current Political Madness All the Time thread. Broadly, the impression I get is dummie central is acting just like the woman in the OP (emphasis in original):
If I remember correctly from my bad old days as a libertarian the alternative is… Are you ready?… ELMINATING TAXES AND REGULATIONS! You see, those poor, put-up entrepreneurs MUST pass the costs of taxes and making sure their factories are safe and clean onto the consumers, needlessly driving up prices. If we just stop taxing them for the cost of doing business and making them install handrails and safety showers in their factories, then they can lower their prices so that even the “poorest” worker can afford them!
Also, since our money is just paper rather than precious metals, it virtually worthless! If we re-establish a gold (or some other commodity) standard, than our money will be worth more! Sure, without those socialist minimum wage laws, your employer will pay you a $1 per hour, but that dollar will be worth a lot more. What’s that? You also work in a toxic hell hole where someone is killed in an accident every week? We’ll you CHOOSE to work there, didn’t you? No one is forcing you.
And if you still can’t make ends met in a completely untaxed and unregulated economy and you can’t find anyone who can voluntarily help you, TOUGH! Just like companies going out of business is the way to be ride of economic failures and poor people dying in alleys of sickness and starvation is how you clear human failures from society.
There we go! Everything tied up in one nice, neat, glib, and uninformed philosophy!
Oh, the blockquote should be credit to Chris J from post #1.
She doesn’t, but she’s operating under the delusion that 1) she should capable of providing these services to her children without the gubmint (otherwise, she’s a failure as a self-reliant, non-parasitic ‘Merican), and 2) that providing others who can’t pay for them on their own will mean she will have less money to get what she things her children deserve.
Sorry again, that blockquote was courtesy of Jermey Shaffer @ 5
Akira MacKenzie, Here’s some blockquotes for you, to restore the electron balance of teh internets:
<blockquote>…</blockquote><blockquote>…</blockquote><blockquote>…</blockquote><blockquote>…</blockquote>(Apologies, I’m just in a bit of a cheese-free mood today — the mildly deranged penguin got to my cheeseboard last night, and I didn’t notice it (other than the usual chunks of charred building rubble and empty vin bottles) until recently, too late to procure some more…)
blf:
That’s OK, I’m at work, making these posts in-between calls, so it’s easy for me to get distracted.
It’s not that HER children don’t deserve those things. It’s just that if ‘big government’ provides them, then families who she feels are ‘undeserving’ will get them too.
For some reason this reminds me of the healthcare billl the republicans proposed last year where 1/4 of the bill was about revoking benefits from welfare recipients who’ve won the lottery.
@DrewN #28
That, right there, is the problem. There are far too many people in this country who value punishing those they see as undeserving or unworthy more than they value helping themselves.
this reaction is totally believable and a long time coming. It is the result of the posture as stated by Raygun that government iss the problem. That view has been made worse by the capturing of the government by corporations and the wealthy which tended to skew the balance of taxes toward the middle class who can’t afford it away from those who can. That along with the politics of resentment that they have been banging on for years has lead to 45. The shock the right is having is that the contradiction between what has been the policies and practices advocated and the ordinary needs and desires of their voters. What has been going on for too long is gross manipulation by the political class to win election using buss words and hot button issues and not plain speech, the shock comes from simply hearing the truth stated openly and letting the people decide. The distrust has been fed by the habitual political rhetoric that has been used by the parties.
it shows that it would not be so hard to get the change needed at least I hope so.
uncle frogy
If the author weren’t so in the thrall of a prefab ideology overriding open, thoughtful, empathetic humanity, the event on which she reports might have sparked a dark-night-of-the-soul reexamination of her principles. Instead, it was bewildering yet insufficient to move her away from ideological possession. Familiar posture from all over the political spectrum.
Could you please send her to the Netherlands for a little tour? Sure she’s going to embarrass Dutch right wing nuts thoroughly.
DrewN is very close to the way I’m thinking. We live in a culture where material comfort and wealth is believed to be sign of hard work and virtue. Everything they have is a reward for putting in their 40 hours-a-week (plus overtime) without complaint, and following the rules and mores of society. Meanwhile, we’ve decided that the poor suffer their lowly status because of laziness and immorality. They “deserve” their miserable lot in life as a punish for the sloth, idleness, intoxication, lust, and general “irresponsibility.” The idea of giving the “undeserving” a leg up without moral judgment turns this paradigm on it’s head which is always a horrific prospect. especially if it comes from the public coffers paid for by the “deserving.”
mnb0 @32
Knowing right-wingers as I do, she’d likely complain about the high taxes and how it’s only a matter of time before the Dutch run out of money to waste on the “bums and stoners.”
Is that actually possible? There is, e.g., Greet Wilders & the PVV. This nutter wants to ban (new?) mosques, and also the Koran (which, if I recall correctly, he says is the same as Mein Kampf). He’s pals around with the French le penazis and the Italian League, and probably other such open nazis. He’s been banned from entering the UK (at least), writes for breitbart, and is known as (e.g.) “the Dutch Trump”.
Despite all that, and probably a lot more, he’s an MP.
I’m inclined to think the lady in the OP would have to eat the royals on live TV to embarrass Wilders / PVV supporters. But only if she adds ketchup.
@Akira MacKenzie #33:
Article: Motherboard – The story of the postbellum South, as told by parasites
Gee, it’s a good thing we’ve spent 30 years supporting incrementalist triangulating Third-Way New Democrats who prefer to give in to the hard right in hopes of an eventual quid pro quo than supporting New Deal Democrats who would view certain stances as non-negotiable. It certainly prevented the Republicans from branding the Democrats as “socialist” and getting their insane stances into the media, didn’t it? Why bother trying to anchor the Overton Window when you can let somebody from the 1% tell you how great NAFTA and the TPP are?
The right didn’t conquer the left, the left was suborned and sabotaged by traitors. Republicans aren’t the only ones delusional about things; Democrats believe their party is working for them, rather than the 1%.
I do remind one and all, the public welfare was considered of such importance that it was mentioned twice in the Constitution.
First, in the preamble. But, it gets further mention in Article 1, Section 8.
It can be sometimes.
As well as raising a child religious can definitely be child abuse sometimes.
I knew two parents who homeschooled their kids.
In their case, homeschooling meant no schooling.
In these cases, they weren’t fundie xians though.
Both kids were of normal intelligence.
Both became adults barely knowing how to read and write.
They struggled a lot in life.
One is now dead from a drug overdose.
Sadly Australia, which has long had a pretty good mixture of public and private enterprises in the social democratic style, is hell-bent, under a neoconservative government, of selling off all public enterprise (after first starving it of funds), reducing taxes on the rich to a miniscule amount in order to prevent any future slightly left-of-centre government restoring some public activity, on making Australia a Mini-Me America.
“what’s the alternative?” (to a living wage)
Give government money directly to poor people. EITC, basic income, means tested grants, whatever. Just give the money to the people who need it directly. Avoids all the negative side effects of a high minimum wage and still achieves the goal of making sure everyone gets enough to live on.
Akira MacKenzie at 24:
In a round-about way, that’s certainly what she expressed in the segment where she appeared on Fox and Friends. However, what I was talking about was the cognitive dissonance playing out across her facial expressions as she spoke. It was like the gears were turning and the conservative propaganda she had been spoon-fed since the Reagan years was combating a reality she witnessed firsthand. That’s normal but more importantly, perhaps for once in quite some time, reality seemed to be getting a foothold. The marketing she had so long fallen for wasn’t functioning as well as it did normally in this case.
That’s not to say I think the author of the piece is going to scrape the Trump sticker from her SUV and vote Democratic come this November. What I am saying is that- now that Trump has ripped the mask completely free from the Republican party and there are left-wing candidates honestly talking policy- maybe she’s indicative that the right-wing talking points aren’t as sweetly effective as they once were.
– Jon Steingart (writer for Bloomberg Law)
Yep, we’re supposed to believe that the primary victim in this is the corporation which will have to pay more in labour costs, not the employees who have been suffering from wage theft for years (decades?). Is it any surprise that Ocasio-Cortez’s message is resonating with people when we keep seeing crap like this show up?
@Akira MacKenzie #24:
I’ll always have a strange feeling seeing Americans debate the caveats of socialism, the very thing they already have in spades. What I don’t understand why it doesn’t come up that a business entity (a pre-Citizens United corporation and not a person) has no incentive to support workers, forming part of the larger goal of not doing things that don’t turn a profit.
Republicans and libertarians like to defend this system where the corporation pays a wage to a worker who can then support a family of five. It’s nothing short of hypocritical to claim, poor people are lazy when having such a wage system actually encourages single income households.
Don’t get me wrong I’m not saying you share that view, rather that I don’t see people bringing this up. It’s a feat of the New Deal, the “American way”, and it truly is, you’d be hard pressed to find a country where welfare would be handled by a system designed to take risks bigger they can handle themselves.
The core problem is, that the editor of Daily Caller is oblivious to other forms of populism, like the subsidization of soy farmers, even though their section of agriculture isn’t the most important unless someone proves America has suddenly become vegan.