People vote Repub on SOCIAL issues, then get screwed on ECONOMIC issues

There's a great article by Thomas Frank in the April 2004 Harper's (sorry, not on-line - $6.95 at newsstands). He explains the sleight-of-hand the Republicans pull off - running on SOCIAL issues and then screwing everyone on ECONOMIC issues once they get in office. Calling the liberals "elite" and then turning around and pandering to corporations and tycoons.

If you're interested in creating a winning strategy for liberalism, check out the excerpts below and then go but Harper's April 2004 and read the whole article. It's a really revealing look into how Republican doubletalk (acting folksy while secretly corporate) makes people vote against their own best interests. And it's kinds disturbing to see how some of the outrageous things liberals do (in anger or in jest) end up playing right into this Republican strategy of portraying liberals as godless elitists.

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Lie Down For America
How the Republican Party sows ruin on the Great Plains
by Thomas Frank
Harper's Magazine, April 2004

Welcome to the Great Backlash, a style of conservatism that is anything but complacent. Whereas earlier forms of conservatism emphasized fiscal sobriety, the backlash mobilizes Voters with explosive social issues - summoning public outrage over everything from busing to un-Christian art - which it then marries to pro-business economic ends. ... Backlash ensures that Republicans will continue to be returned to office when their free-market miracles fail and their libertarian schemes don't deliver and their "New Economy" collapses. ... Because some artist decides to shock the hicks by dunking Jesus in urine, the entire planet must be remade along the lines preferred by the Republican Party, USA.

...

Backlash leaders systematically downplay the importance of economics. The movement's basic premise is that culture outweighs economics as a matter of public concert - that "Values Matter Most," as one backlash book title has it. On these grounds, it rallies citizens who once would have been reliable partisans of the New Deal to the standard of conservatism. Old-fashioned values may count when conservatives appear on the stump, but once they are in office the only old-fashioned situation they care to revive is the regimen of low wages and lax regulations. Over the last three decades they have smashed the welfare state, reduced the tax burden on corporations and the wealthy, and generally facilitated the return to a nineteenth-century pattern of wealth distribution. Thus the primary contradiction of the backlash: it is a working-class movement that has done incalculable harm to working-class people.

The leaders of the backlash may talk Christ, but they walk corporate. Values may "matter most" to Voters, but they always take a back seat to the needs of money once the elections are won. This is a basic earmark of the phenomenon, absolutely consistent across its decades-long history. Abortion is never halted. The culture industry is never forced to clean up its act. Even the greatest culture-warrior of them all, Ronald Reagan, was a notorious copout once it came time to deliver. {Let's not forget that those "activist judges" in Massachusetts who ruled in favor of gay marriage were *Republicans*. Republican fund-raising strategists such as Viguerie later said that the ruling was a godsend for them, because abortion was played out as a fund-raising issue.}

One might expect this reality to vex the movement's true believers. Their grandstanding leaders never produce, their fury mounts and mounts, and nevertheless they return ever two years to return their right-wing heroes to office for a second, a third, a twentieth try. {Are the abortion wars and the gay-marriage wars our *true* bread and circuses, I wonder?} The trick never ages, the illusion never wears off. Vote to stop abortion, receive a rollback in capital-gains taxes. Vote to make our country strong again; receive deindustrialization. Vote to screw those politically correct college professors; receive electricity deregulation. Vote to get government off our backs; receive conglomeration and monopoly everywhere from media to meat packing. Vote to stand tall against terrorists; receive Social Security privatization efforts. Vote to strike a blow against elitism; receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our lifetimes...

These social issues are just a smokescreen so the pubies can just steal more of our money. They just keep us fighting with one another.

analysis of the whole Repub phenomenon, and is worth twice the price of the magazine.

I was also totally blown away by it - I couldn't put it down (and I had bought the magazine at around 3 AM so I couldn't get to sleep till about 5 and I had to get up the next day!)

If you want to figure out how the Republican party gets poor people all fired up to support tycoons, you really need to read this article! It's amazing!

I work in a union shop and I hear everyday Kerry wants to take our guns, he's for abortion and gay rights. The Democrats fall for this
same crap year after year. When you make a mistake why keep repeating it over and over. The Democrats put the gay marriage thing in there hands. Then both Kerry and Edwards left the campaign to cast a vote against the assault weapons ban when their vote wasn't even needed.

out of their very livehihood. If I were you, I'd tell them they have their priorites screwed up. Here's a snapshot of what I'd say:
America has become a nation of brainless suckers. These Republicans are just telling you what you want to hear, yet they have absolutely no intention of doing anything to bring about any change.
We're facing the loss of health care, couple by exorbitantly-priced presciption drugs, and you're worried about gay folks having sex without going to jail.
We're facing impending totalitarian dictatorship and the loss of our Constitutional rights, and you're worried about activist judges who legalized abortion. Mind you, the only pro-life politician who ever did anything to reduce abortions happened to be a freakin' Democrat! And those activist judges who made such a ruling were Republicans!
We're facing the loss of our retirement funds to privatization, and you're worried about some Democrat taking your hunting rifles away.

America: Grow the hell up and get your priorites straight. The country you'll save may be your own.

I don't think that the Democrats deserve as much blame as they get. Many people of all political beliefs think that gay and lesbian people deserve to have their constitutional rights protected. It's Republicans who twist the issue so it is unrecognizable. The Republicans perpetuate mindless stereotypes.

It's the same with the assault weapons ban. Who in their right mind would be in favor of private ownership of assault weapons? Certainly not the police! This should be a non-partisan no-brainer. Again, the Republicans twist the issue, making it sound like "a vote against assault weapons is a vote against deer rifles."

It's nonsense, and it's lies. Americans should know better. We're a well-educated, independent, creative-thinking group of people. We need to stop listening to the lies and spin.

In my opinion.

When a Republican is leftwing on social issues and rightwing on economics (e.g., Schwarzenegger), I believe that's a formula that could dominate American politics.

It's true there are many blue-collar types in Red states who vote on the rightwing social issues. But some of them like tax breaks and deregulation, too.

However, I think there are many *more* urban, blue-state types, who are leftwing on social issues and rightwing on economic issues.

If the Republican Party ever ditched the conservatives for this formula, I believe both we Democrats an the conservatives would become minority parties.

They're conservative on social issues and will rail about gays and guns, but if you ask them about living wages, health care, Social Security, and outsourcing, they sound downright leftist.

At last that's what I've heard from blue collar people ever since I worked as an industrial temp in the 1980s and rode the city buses in Portland from 1993 to 2003.

They're "economically conservative" only in the sense of not liking taxes. But part of that being anti-tax is thinking (correctly) that they're not getting much for their money.

But I call this whole culture war bullshit a scam, and here's why. Every single divisive social issue is in fact some controversial lifestyle issue which become, thanks to relentless propaganda campaigns, so emotionally charged as to be impervious to reason--abortion, guns, gays, patriotism, affirmative action--because they pander to our fears instead of appealing to reason. And if you take the "wrong" position on any one of these issues, your "wrong" stance drowns out everything else you have to say. For instance, pro-life liberal Democrats are ostracized within their own party despite their liberal position on economic issues, women's rights (other than abortion), and civil rights--and despite the conscience clause "including" dissenters (can you say, lip service?).
Democrats and Republicans, liberals, moderates, and conservatives alike fall for its siren song every time. Both parties act as if you have to take polar opposite positions--with no room for compromise--in order for Republicans to dictate to the Democrats who they are. It's time we call the Republicans on their political con job; it's also time we don't react to their propaganda by acting like rebellious teenagers, taking opposite positions in a knee-jerk way, but it's time for us Democrats to grow up and hijack their so-called conservative social positions, putting a liberal spin on them, if we want to afford to call Republicans children.

I talked to her at college last night, and she told me that a friend of hers announced proudly, "I voted for Bush last time and I'm voting for him again. He's pro-life and pro-death penalty!"

Just break down that quote to see how demented one has to be to vote Republican.

http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/lessgovernment.htm

I'll just leave it at that.