Right-Wing ‘Tea Party’ vs. AFL-CIO Convention: Competing Visions for America

http://www.inthesetimes.com/working/entry/4887/right-wing_tea_party_vs._afl-cio_convention_competing_visions_for_america/

Sunday September 13 10:38 pm

This weekend, tens of thousands angry "Tea Party" protesters (not two million, the figure right-wing bloviators have concoted) denounced the "socialism" of the Obama administration and the President's health care plan. Some, but hardly all, of the protesters fueled by Fox News disinformation and mobilized in part by corporate front groups, displayed even uglier invective against Obama as a terrorist and likened him to Hitler.

Yet on Sunday, a different vision of America was unveiled: the AFL-CIO started its convention in Pittsburgh with the goal of creating an economy and government that works for everyone, and the contrast with the protest in Washington couldn't have been more stark.

Both mainstream journalists and leading bloggers have differed over how much a role racism has played in driving conservative attacks on the President. But from what I saw when observing the rally on the Capitol's West Lawn (see C-SPAN video for full coverage), something more politically ominous was at work than overt racism amid the sea of yellow flags with the "Don't Tread on Me" symbol of a segmented snake. Kooky racists can be easily marginalized and dismissed by progressives, but that's not the political danger to a progressive and labor agenda the protesters actually pose.

Instead, it's the not-so-veiled hostility to the notion of virtually any government role in American society (outside of war and policing), and the resistance to taxation and "Big Government." The Nixonian politics of resentment laid the groundwork for the anti-big government crusade of President Ronald Reagan that still shapes our political debates -- while the notion of government-as-villain dominating GOP politics today was fueled decades ago largely by racially-tinged hatred of social welfare programs.

Rush Limbaugh has updated this racist fear-mongering by casting President Obama's efforts to cushion the blow of the recession through expanded food stamps and extended unemployment benefits as "forced reparations."

Most of the time, though, hostility to government spending and taxes is disguised, even to many conservative protesters themselves, as a legitimate concern about dangerous deficits and the long-term debt burdening their grandkids. But the alarm about trillions in spending and ballooning deficits didn't seem to bother the right-wing during the Bush era when needless Iraq war costs and massive tax cuts to the wealthy were involved.

FULL story at link.