Conservatives have been building their marketing infrastructure for decades. They’ve got think tanks galore, large numbers of endowed university chairs, and a huge, coordinated media empire. And there should be no mystery about how they’ve managed to build such a huge machine, as compared to the liberal/progressive infrastructure: A few plutocrats have huge amounts of money. They control an extremely large portion of our national wealth, and they use their wealth to accumulate more power and more of our national wealth at the expense of everyone else.
Right-wing plutocrats have used their wealth to dumb down our public education system in order to create a population that can be more easily manipulated. They use higher education to promote their agenda, such as with the bullshit-based, supply-side “Chicago school of economics”. And they buy politicians.
They will force millions deeper into poverty. Our elderly will certainly suffer when they cut Social Security and Medicare. Students who invest in our country’s future by seeking a higher education will be forced into deeper debt for a significant portion of their lives. Poverty is rampant now, and will get worse.
But that’s not all of it. People who protest those conditions will be hurt with stifled career advancement and even arrest. We’ve seen how even wearing a t-shirt in protest against a politician who supports increasing poverty can result in arrest. Law enforcement will be turned increasingly against reformers. So-called “free speech zones”, which are actually proof of the restriction of freedom of speech, is a trivial example of that. We’ve seen, such as during the Republican convention in Minnesota in 2008, that police are used to break into people’s homes and arrest people who only intend to peacefully protest — but have done nothing yet — and to confiscate campaign materials that oppose the oppressors. But it’s going to get a lot worse than that.
The plutocrats don’t care how much they hurt people in order to preserve their power. Real physical courage will be required to withstand their attacks. They already employ violence against reform, and it will get worse.
That’s what we’re up against. Don’t ever think that overcoming the machine that is out to destroy us and our country will be easy, or that the battle won’t be long and hard and painful. It’s going to take a lot of guts to defeat that machine. As in any such struggle, people are going to be hurt, both innocent bystanders who don’t know what the hell is going on and the fighters.
But I think the battle is worth it, and I’m willing to sacrifice whatever I have to to join it. I want this fight because it’s for liberty and justice — both mine and yours. How about you?