The Failure of Repeal and Replace begins the Great Unmasking
Last edited Sun Mar 26, 2017, 05:20 PM - Edit history (1)
The Great Unmasking has Begun!
For decades and decades the Republicans have held on to power by exploiting the racialized consciousness of whites who not just mistakenly but also self-deceptively believed that the social safety net has historically served mainly the interest of the dark-skinned other, whom they have stigmatized as undeserving, alien, the other who cannot or will not assimilate, the other who storms our borders from abroad, who infest our cities, who are stuffed in our over-crowded jails.
The Republicans have always known this was a lie. They have known how much the social safety net serves whites too. But it was a useful and powerful lie to encourage whites to think otherwise. That powerful lie helped to block the consolidation of class consciousness, helped to undermine support for redistributive schemes, helped to destroy unions, prop-up the prison-industrial complex, strip government of its moral legitimacy. The big and powerful lie has thus made our politics ripe for the pickings by a Republican elite, who want nothing from government except to protect the unrestrained "liberty" of their sponsors and enablers in a rapacious capitalist class. It also put the Democrats -- including both those who wanted most of all to give capitalism a human face and those who wanted to transcend capitalism altogether -- in a permanently defensive crouch, reduced to fighting rearguard battles in defense of incremental change here and there.
But the failure to Repeal and Replace the ACA may represent the the first move in the great unmasking, when the big and powerful lie is finally exposed for what it really is. For with the rise of the Mad President, partly on the back of the anger of those whose unreconstructed racialized consciousness has been so long manipulated, and partly on the backs of an absurd electoral system that is by design indifferent to the popular will. the chickens are finally coming home to roost
With the Mad King's cruel and incoherent budget, with the Republicans heartless and inept attempt to repeal and replace ACA, it has become clear for all to see that what the Republican Party is most about is ending, once and for all, all redistributive schemes, including redistributive schemes for the provision of healthcare. So now, at long last, the truth will finally have to be faced by all those god-fearing, other-hating, rural and ex-uban whites. The social safety net is not a leftist scheme to take things away from the good, god-fearing, true blue American rural and ex-urban whites -- who want most of all to be free of the dark-skinned other -- and give it to the very dark-skinned others that they have striven so long to flee. They too are the Republicans target. They too are seen by them as too dependent on the leveling and protective power of the state. They too need to get off their lazy, unproductive duffs, and earn what they get, rather than being expected to be coddled and protected by the state.
No doubt they will feel intense cognitive dissonance when they are forced finally to make common political cause with the dark skinned other and are forced to finally see who the real adversary is.
The enemy, dear true blue white working American, is not the dark-skinned other you have sought so long to exclude, demean or imprison. It is the orange-skinned flimflam carnival barker on the stage trying to sell you more poison for your soul.
So let us thank the Mad President for at least heightening the contradictions of our politics, as the radical revolutionaries like to say, if for nothing else.
From such moments of profound ruptures perhaps a new politics may finally be born.
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... that we don't frame this as "racial warfare" between the Democrats and Republicans.
There is that element to be sure, and it has been exploited by the recent election. But the differences between the parties and their ideologies are so much more than that.
Michelle O cautions us, "When they go low, we go high!" and she's absolutely right!
Race-bating is the lowest of the low, and we can do better. We have to.
