The right’s despicable class war: Why they paint the poor as anti-American

For wingnuts like David Brat, bashing poor people as unethical is just one more arrow in their bullying quiver

ELIZABETH STOKER

The old adage about sticks and stones may finally apply more soundly to the rich than the poor. According to a new paper released by Ann Cammett of the CUNY School of Law, the way metaphor is deployed in public policy discourse regarding poor parents can powerfully shape public perception of both assistance programs and the people they serve.

In her essay, Cammett argues that the metaphorical context for major cuts to public assistance programs almost always precedes the actual cuts: that is, before pragmatic political reasoning is applied to weigh out the usefulness or efficacy of welfare programs, particular metaphors, many of them racialized, soak discourse regarding them. The most infamous examples Cammett provides are the notorious “Welfare Queen” metaphor popularized during the Reaganite 1980s, and the “Deadbeat Dad” trope pushed almost in tandem. The net effect of the insistence of the right wing on the usage of these metaphors was to make punitive cuts to assistance programs appear urgent and necessary by cementing an image of their beneficiaries as morally corrupt, perverse and malevolent.

Unfortunately, examples of this brand of toxic discourse are not difficult to locate in our society. And because the right is constantly pushing new angles to snip away at social insurance, they’re also constantly busy shaping new metaphorical categories that undermine policy aimed at solidifying a social safety net. For David Brat, the upstart who recently displaced Eric Cantor in Virginia’s 7th District congressional race, that category is about non-Christian bullies. In his essay “God and Advanced Mammon – Can Theological Types Handle Usury and Capitalism?” he writes:



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