patrick.net

If you're a rich Republican, and you want to get even richer, you have to play along with a little trick on the workers in the red states.

For decades now, those workers have seen their pay fall at the same time that their CEOs have seen their pay skyrocket. CEO pay is coming straight out of the pockets of the workers. The real insult is that the CEO's tax bill has been cut dramatically by the Republican Party, while the tax rate on the workers has not.

How did Republicans get large numbers of working people to give away even more of their hard-earned money to the rich?

The trick is to get those workers very angry - at someone else. This distracts them from what's really going on. Karl Rove understands this clearly, so he stokes the anger of ordinary workers. He makes them angry about abortion, evolution, flag burning, France, gays, guns, liberals, newspapers, "rich Democrats", school prayer, anything, anything except the one thing that would make their lives better: fair taxes on passive income, income the rich get for doing nothing at all.

The Republican party, sensing an opportunity to steer all debate away from the grossly unfair distribution of wealth, happily encourages the resentment of the working classes against the “liberals” and anyone else who talks about fairness.

Investors pay much lower tax rates on money they get from doing no work at all than workers pay on money they get from real work. Long-term capital gains tax is 15%, but most people pay 28% taxes on money they work for.

The amazing thing is, workers really take to that anger. They like it, and it makes sense to them. But they're not angry at what they think they're angry about. They think they're angry because some faggoty liberal or lesbian is telling them how bad they are, and making them say "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas". Sure, that's part of it, but it's the smaller part. Mostly, they're angry because they come to the same crappy jobs every day and see their lives slipping away in meaninglessness, and they know they've lost the American game, but they don't know why. They feel really bad about themselves. They feel like losers. They are losers, because the rich are taking more of the pie and the workers are voting to make it even worse.

The core of this manipulation is to attribute negative feelings to others. Tell the workers that anyone who wants to fairly tax the rich "has contempt for the workers," "is disgusted by you," and the favorite: "they hate you." Attribute negative feelings, over and over. Just ignore reality and claim you know the inner feeling of your enemies. This is also the main psychological mechanism of manipulation in the Koran, by the way. Perhaps Bush learned something from his Saudi friends after all.

Republicans manipulate voter emotions by talking about patriotism, Jesus, and values, but all they ever actually do is start wars and cut taxes on the very rich, making sure the workers have no chance to catch up. Democrats are not so great either since they lost their way and started acting like Republicans, but at least there's hope they will remember they once stood for fairness. There are a lot more poor people than rich people, and the poor could easily vote to make things fair.

About a third of those earning less than $15,000 per year are the angry Republicans. That's enough to swing the election against their own interests. They vote over and over to elect rich Republicans who keep cutting taxes on themselves, while cutting Medicare and Social Security for the workers who elected them. Like Bush said in The Onion, "They help us stay rich, and in return, we help them stay poor."

It would be funny to watch the poor vote for their own poverty, if it were not so sad.

#politics