Victorian romance: The GOP’s “Oliver Twist” budget and the comeback of class warfare

Tom Cotton and Ted Cruz call for more prisons and less gruel in Big Capital's Dickensian war against the poor

ANDREW O'HEHIR

To make sense of the distorted dream world of American politics and its perplexing Lewis Carroll rhetoric, we sometimes have to look beyond familiar categories and recent history. This week, for instance, we get to look clear back to Victorian England, a longtime source of fascination for American conservatives and, at least in its stereotypical form, a cryptic role model for today’s Republican Party. The GOP’s House and Senate majorities have unveiled their budget proposals, a fantastical and mendacious set of documents worthy of Mr. Bumble, the comic villain and font of incoherent conventional wisdom in Dickens’ “Oliver Twist.” Most people will ignore these proposals, for the sensible reason that they will not be enacted. But behind the patriotic-imperial posturing and foreign-policy bluster that have grabbed headlines lately, these imaginary budgets provide a glimpse of the rapacious utopia envisioned by the Koch brothers and their Tea Party-infused ideological mouthpieces, including Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz and Scott Walker foremost among them.

The Kochs and their allies are not conservatives at all, in any traditional meaning of that word. They represent the revolutionary resurgence of Big Capital as a class — enlightened, self-aware and devoted to its own interests. If that terminology sounds impossibly old-fashioned, their impossible dream to undo a century and more of welfare-state policies is a throwback as well. When you hear Cotton call for the building of more and more prisons – by far the most expensive and least effective means of addressing poverty — or declare that food stamps (which feed roughly one in six of his fellow Arkansans) nurture a slothful underclass of criminals and drug addicts, something deeper is at work than the obvious level of dog-whistle racist pandering. He is also channeling the Victorian establishment’s ideology on poverty, virtually without alteration.


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http://www.salon.com/2015/03/21/victorian_romance_the_gops_oliver_twist_budget_and_the_comeback_of_class_warfare/