Stunning Republican attack on poor people
Former US congressman, Tom Tancredo, spoke on Thursday evening at a Tea Party meeting. The Tea Party groups, which we’ve discussed on this blog before, are supposed grassroots supporters of the view that Obama is a socialist and this his massive programme of deficit spending to bail out the US economy is on a par with the measures of Stalin and Hitler. Nuanced stuff, I’m sure you’ll agree.
Speaking to six hundred delegates of what is supposedly the first national Tea Party conference, Tancredo declared his belief that “Barack Hussein Obama” (repeat foreign-sounding middle name ad nauseam) was elected because “we do not have a civics, literacy test before people can vote in this country.” A lot of commentators have since dwelled on how this echoes the Jim Crow laws which prevented black people voting.
The significance of this should not be lost, in a country which elected a black president. Nevertheless, I think it’s counterproductive to concentrate exclusively on the racial aspect. It is, in fact, an attack on all poor people, of all colours. Whilst black and latino people, and single mothers, are still disproportionately poor according to the last census, the connection of poverty to education is undeniable and transcends race and gender.
American socialists and Democrats should be hammering this message home, as it completely undermines the pretensions of the batshit crazy Tea Party movement to stick up for normal Americans, using rhetoric that portrays Americans as crushed under the jackboot of income tax. It offers the opportunity for radical socialists particularly to escape from the caricature of being addled Ivy League professors.
The Left has confidence in Americans to make up their own mind, without asserting prior conditions before they can have a vote. Moreover, through massive funding of the public school system and full democratic engagement with school boards, it’s the Left which has an answer to the problems of education and poverty.
Meanwhile a genuinely progressive coalition would give substance to our claims of defending the US working class by boosting redistribution – directly and through additional funds for areas of high poverty. Abolishing income tax and FICA tax for those earning under $30,000 and recouping the money through much more stringent corporate taxes, reversing the Bush-era tax cuts and then some, would be a start.
As someone once said, “Let’s hear that dirty word now…SOCIALISM!”
This ‘reform’ is also recommended towards the close of Caplan’s ‘The myth of the rational voter’ book, which is making a huge splash, and which I will be publishing a review of.
Pres. Obama–and do have the pimitive courtesy to give a title to his namw–is probably not a Socialist but in a sense acontinuation of the new Deal. He is most certainly a thoughtful, highly intelligent, honest and hard working person who would likento bring back some “parts of the New Deal”. I begin by saying that Socialism is decidedly not Communist. Briefly, at the second International Dr. Kautsky led his faction out if the meeting. Socialists wants the following:
(1 )All laws, etc. should be made openly and by Democratc process.
(2) Socialism objects to the “party discipline” In which all decions are made behind closed doors and then are presented to be accepted by all.
(3) The means of production should be in the hands of the workes in such a concern. (A worker is anyone who contributes to the operation of an enterprise by physical or intellectual means.
(4) By no means should everyone get equal pay, But everybody who works the reqired # of hours,the lowest paid is still a decent wage–by which I mean that it is enough to lead their life and be able to enjoy it.
(5) There should not only be a bottm wage but a top wage separated from the lowest by a good bit but not be the chasm that we have today.
(6) The education of the worker should have priority.
(7) Inheritance taxes should be graduates—the final intent is to prevent the emergence of a class-ridden society in which, “inevitably” wealth predominates the
plitical scene.
(8) Every district will have “open, regularly scheduled meetings” in which the President and staff are open to be asked questions. Fireside chats were a very good idea,
Not really sure what your point is Dr. Loewy, but here’s a raft of replies.
1. Citizen Obama’s title as President is of no importance to me and I’ll use it or not use it as I please.
2. I’m not entirely sure you know what you are talking about w.r.t. socialist history. No one mentioned Kautsky or the Second International, and why Kautsky’s departure from that International has any relevance to what we’re talking about is beyond me.
3. Don’t know where you’re getting these ideas for what ‘socialists’ want, but socialism is a broad camp and lots of us want different and competing things.
4. I notice that in your points you are prepared to countenance inequality, you make no mention of a market or private property, yet you maintain that the few measures you mention will “prevent the emergence of a class-ridden society” – leading me to suspect that you don’t understand the definition of class. And yet still, everything will keep within the confines of the US Constitution?
The Jim Crow undertones are bad enough, but there’s something even more disturbing going on. Tancredo has been one of the most high profile fascists in the U.S for a long time, and this ‘tea party’ thing has obvious fascist elements as well (no, I think I’ll go further. Something about it feels more like the sort of thing that Nazism emerged out of).
I agree, the emergence of the Tea Party movement is disturbing – which is precisely why the Left needs a clear cut, pro-working class message with which to stop them in their tracks.
Those of them who are thinking entirely in terms of eschatological religious terms are probably lost already – but their pull on the rest of the American working class can be stopped.
If we do stop it, and re-organize the US working class, buffer the unions and begin to assert an anti-capitalist alternative, grounded in liberal values and solidarity with all workers – whether supposedly middle class or not – then those elements we can’t convince, the movement will be able to sideline.
01. You certainly have a right to call most people by whatever non-insulting words that you can.
02. Perhaps I do not know what I am talking about. Kautsky—to whom I was somewhat remotely connected—is considered a pivotal force in Europ’s Democratic Socialism.
03. Please correct my impression of what Socialists wants. Having been a Socialist my entire life (minus a few years in the beginning). I do not think that I was off target. I learned little from the Kaustky we rarely saw and not at all after Hitler.However I have come to find in his life and writing a lot that appeals.
05. Of course I countenance inequality—what I speak about is firtsly: that the loewest paid in a concern still is adequately paid, that the workers (whether those of intellect or brawn); secondly: that the difference between the higher paid and the lowest paid is not as vast as it is roday and that what people earn is—as long as it is sufficient to live a decent life—is decided by those who contribite their skill to a particular concern. If the workers (broadly sketched to include anyone contributing intellectually or physically to a concern) “own the concern” (o stocks or bonds for people who sit at home and take what is rightfully that of the workers in that concern) I doubt that CEO’s will often have several miliions pay + large bonuses and a golden parachute such conditions might vanish.
06. That Socialists in fact do not have a party line which must be rigidly adhere to even when the person disagrees. That to me is Communism that I could do without.
Dr. Erich H. Loewy
Prof & F’dg Chair, Bioethics (Emeritus)
U of CA, Davis
ehloewy@ucdavis.edu
Dr. Loewy, thank you for getting back to me.
I still don’t understand why you brought up Karl Kautsky. Kautsky wasn’t especially central to European or any other social-democracy. Even foregoing that, I don’t see how one jumps from Kautsky to Obama, or what lessons one is to take from it.
I have no intention of formulating a list of my own view of what socialism is or should be – my point was not to argue against your definition of what socialism is, it was to ask why the list of demands was relevant to an article which challenged Tom Tancredo’s view that people should be disfranchised based on their education.
Finally, with regard to your concrete suggestions as to what we should demand, some of what you say is valid if your purpose was to outline a programme liable to pick up support from the workers of the United States.
However when you say things like “of course I countenance inequality” but also maintain that through reigning in inequality a little we can abolish the class system – without making reference to the underpinning of the class system, which is private property, or to market, which can translate inequality into entrenched, multi-generational benefit – then what you’re calling for sounds muddled.
If this is what socialism means for you, you’re right Obama’s not a socialist. No one here, however, is maintaining that he is. He is in fact pro-capitalist. Perhaps his spending plans have some of the social content of the New Deal, but if so it is minuscule. This is what makes the claims of the Tea Party movement so outrageous.
I notice the tea party charged $500 to go to the conference, many of the people who could not afford had a meeting at another venue and were angry that speakers were paid over $100,000 each. now thats socialism.
But how sad America the land of the free, should hate socialism so much, then again over the last twelve years or rather the last 30 odd years in the UK I’ve not seen a hell of a lot of socialism here.
The existence and apparent popularity of the Republican party and Tea party trying to drag it RIGHTWARDS is the single most alarming and depressing fact about the world right now. I cannot understand a group of rich people, organising themselves in an effort to prevent their country offering universal healthcare.
What do these people think they will say when they meet St Peter at the Pearly Gates?
I would have thought that it was perfectly understandable Giles. People want their money to go where it will do them the most good – and for the wealthy that is not universal healthcare, or any sort of redistributive system – the Tea Party people protest most taxes as you may note.
Liberals should not pretend that capitalism has the capacity to be a moral economy. Whether it’s drugs, weapons or any other substance that results in human suffering, if it makes money, under a system based on private property and personal accumulation, then it will spawn industry. It just makes them look disingenuous.
Hi Dave
Fascinated by that answer. Does every person or class think that way? Do you – i.e. everyone for themselves, larger interests than mine don’t work, etc. I’d be surprised. And is capitalism the REASON they think that way – would those fat rich Americans be better citizens if they were somehow schooled in some other system? Or would they just lack the means of expressing their odious views?
In socialist systems do people have more altruistic motives, intrinsically, than in others?
What I don’t get is that, when asked to choose a system, a small sector of American society is so determined to choose one that hurts a small minority. I don’t think people are generally like that. I think most people are more moral than that – regardless of the economic system. There seems to be something odd in American culture, IMHO
Obviously what I said above is not a sophisticated answer. A lot of people will think of self-interest in terms of the American national discourse – pulling yourself up by your bootstraps etc. This is an attempt to subvert any collective instincts because it poses as the best, fairest way to organise a society.
Yet the emphasis on this, contrasted with “interfering big government” – a standard topos of the Right, can be broadly correlated to the interests of big capital. This means that for the wealthy involved in the Tea Party conference, they’re acting directly in their own self-interest, even if they frame it in terms where that is not immediately apparent.
The more interesting bit, which I hoped you would pick up on, is that a lot of the seventy thousand people who marched on Washington with the Tea Party crowd, carrying banners equating Lenin, Hitler and Obama are acting against their own interests.
In fact, there are also new and very dangerous aspects to American ‘culture’ that over the last number of decades – almost parallel to the expansion of neo-liberal doctrines within the US economy – have expanded past the original narrative of the self-sufficient individual towards Christian eschatology. The grassroots of this movement are tied, through the Republican Party, to an anti-redistributive, pro-business agenda, and it’s not an implicit link. You merely have to listen to US talk radio to understand how demagogues can jump from one to the other.
I think it was Umberto Eco who said that if Fascism comes to American shores it’ll be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.
My point in all this is of course to contradict myself, if I gave the impression that people think in terms of self-interest in an uncomplicated fashion. Ideological narratives are involved that not only negate the stark selfishness which you point out, but will cause thousands of supporters – perhaps the ones who couldn’t afford the hundred dollar tickets and were angry that Palin et al got paid five/ six figure sums – to act against their own interest.
I should have picked up on that, having really enjoyed “What’s the matter with Kansas” by Frank. I 100% agree – many of those marchers will be damaging themselves, but fooled by the folksy patriotic discourse into thinking they are being noble.