Are Republican good ole boys, Aristocrat wannabes?

[The Backlash Cometh]

Just dawned on me watching Zorro. The kind of airs and sense of entitlement that I witness in some of the local good ole boys, is exactly the kind of airs and entitlement you see in the aristocratic families in Spanish countries. The good ole boys, however, are a little rough around the edges so I didn't pick up on it right away.

[WHEN CRABS ROAR]

1. Ah you noticed the conditioning of our minds did you.

[The Backlash Cometh]

4. I notice nothing. I'm just a poor peasant peering into the sunlight from under the

wide brim hat.

[WHEN CRABS ROAR]

7. Keep watching.

[The Backlash Cometh]

10. But all I see is moving silhouettes

[Fridays Child]

2. I've always considered "good ole boy" to be a redneck label...

...and the "old boy network" to be more about wealth and privilege, regardless of geographic origin. If you're talking about the latter, yes, they are very aristocratic. And that sense of entitlement is so much a part of their fabric that they don't even recognize the trait in themselves.

[The Backlash Cometh]

6. Can't believe it took me this long to see the connection.

[Fridays Child]

11. I think that, worldwide, we are not so much separated by ethnicity as we are by class.

The blueblooded wealthy and the "civilian" wealthy are one and the same. The Merchant or Middle Class is disappearing because the wealthy will do anything to conserve resources for themselves. A two-class society always leads to revolution, and I don't know when it's coming but it'll happen this time around, too.

[The Backlash Cometh]

13. Did you also happen to notice how insidiously they waged a class warfare

against the poor (i.e. anti-welfare programs) at the same time that they chided the liberals for bringing up claims of class warfare? This they did to great advantage during the Newt Gingrich era. How did we miss the hypocrisy of those two opposing points?

[Fridays Child]

18. Accusing us of what they excel at is the GOP's stock in trade.

[Xipe Totec]

3. They are fromage d'gros orteil

(toe cheese)

They think they are sophisticated because they drink from the bidet.

[fenriswolf]

5. i think on DU we tend to make the republican base

smaller and more stereotypical then they are. While not as wide ranging as the democrate party as observed by their traditional party unity I do believe their is room for alot of different breeds of republicans.

[The Backlash Cometh]

9. Certainly would be a mistake to put them all in one group. But now

that I have pegged the ones around me, everything is falling in place. I know Aristocrats very well. In some latin American countries they are usually very educated and have an outside image of noblesse oblige, while internally, they take liberties that very few people have the resources to challenge them on. One wonders, then, how the American Aristocrats managed to get away with so much since they don't have that noblesse oblige factor to take the hounds off their trail.

[stillcool]

8. I like this guys explanation...

http://www.soilandhealth.org/03sov/0303critic/030304lberg/030304toc.html
Two

ROOM AT THE TOP:
THE NEW RICH
A Note on Neo-Conservatism

All the neo-conservatives from H. L. Hunt and Barry Goldwater on down resemble Buckley in that, whatever their rated wealth (which is usually small), they are insecure. Some feel subjectively more insecure than others; all are objectively insecure in a changing world. They are caught between big corporations on the one hand and big government, Communist or liberal, on the other. But, envying the big corporations and wishing to be included among them, they direct most of their fire against the cost-raising social aspirations of the people from whom established capital does not feel it has so much to fear. (If necessary, entrenched capital can stand social reform as in Sweden, passing the costs on in price and taxes. It has, in any event, more room for maneuver and holds all the strong positions.)

But the Goldwaters and Buckleys, with their obscure department stores and oil concessions, are in a different boat. They have begun to suspect that they may never make it to the top, there to preen before the photographers. Sad, sad. . . . Hence, they cry, government should not be used to meet the needs of the people, despite the constitutional edict that it provide for the common welfare; government should merely preside over a free economic struggle in which the weak submit to the strong stomachs. As for the Big Wealthy in the Establishment, in the Power Structure, the Power Elite, they should not, say the neo-conservatives, allow themselves to be deluded by infiltrating nurses, governesses, tutors, teachers, wandering professors, swamis, university presidents and others bearing the spirochita pallida of political accommodation. For accommodation has its own special word in the vocabulary of neo-conservatism. It is: Communism.

The neo-conservatives or radical rightists, like the radical leftists, are discontented. There is, however, a different economic basis to the discontent of each. The leftists own no property, therefore see no reason to embrace a property system; the rightists still have some but feel their property claims slipping, feel they are being precipitated into the odious mass of the unpropertied. They foresee being thrown out of the Property Party; for many of them, in fact, are heavily indebted to the banks. The illusion of the radical rightists is that they can yet save their property claims, not by restoring free competition and subduing the rivalrous Rockefellers, Du Ponts, Fords and Mellons (whom they admire and fear as well as envy) but by inducing these latter to join in an all-out assault on the sans-culottes and descamisados.

However, established wealth, seeing no good for itself in upsetting a smoothly running operation which it feels fully capable of controlling, is not interested in this vexing prospect, Hence the outcries of the neo-conservatives against "the Eastern Establishment" and the "socialism" of Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller. In Buckley's National Review these self-dubbed conservatives sound like inverted Marxists in yachting clothes.

http://www.soilandhealth.org/03sov/0303critic/030304lberg/030304ch2.html

[The Backlash Cometh]

12. So the big fight for the next presidency is going to be, who is government going to be

allowed to work for? The people? Or the power elites?

[stillcool]

14. I think either way business wins...

it's just a matter of how much. I've heard it explained as a pendulum...business and government go together by necessity...but today's reality is the result of the pendulum swinging too far...enabling corporations to grow to behemoth sizes that have more power and assets than many countries. The whole think is hard for me to conceptualize. The Pentagon, and it's Defense Industry alone make my head spin. And...that excerpt was taken from a book written 50 years ago.

[The Backlash Cometh]

15. I've heard the pendulum analogy also, but in a different way.

Republicans think that it's the Democrat's job to tax and replenish the government coffers, for them to get into office and pilfer the treasury. It's a sham, really. One that our grandchildren will understand sooner than we did.
We'll be lucky when we're old and bound to our beds, if they give us a choice to end our lives by lethal injection, or face starvation.

The problem is that business has been in a cannabalizing mode for at least the last ten years. That means that people are not going to be in a compassionate or cooperative mood. Who wants to be taxed if we know the foxes will eventually come and eat the hens?

[stillcool]

16. Strange times...

or maybe not? That's the hardest part for me to figure out. I wonder sometimes if things have always been this way, but nobody told me. It seems a lot of people have been making reference to this reality for a long time..but I had no way of knowing there was a book in the local library on the bottom shelf.

[The Backlash Cometh]

17. I can't figure that part out either.

I don't know if communities in America were ever really healthy, or if it was always a sham. I don't know if the problem is that what went on in small towns across this country, where business and government collided in destructive ways, just accelerated to a national level. But I do know that what is going on a national level today, is definitely a reflection of local town across this nation. Which means that we have to expose the people who are benefitting from this way of life, before we can change anything for the better. Make it fairer for everybody and take back our communities.