Reading webranding's recent posts got me thinking about my own father. As you can see he had a very different station in life yet somehow was a die-hard Republican until the day he died last year. And my attempt to explain why is below the Orange Squiggle of Doom.
My dad didn't subscribe to beliefs that we typically associate with being Republican. While my mother was a closet racist, he wasn't. He obviously wasn't rich. He wasn't religious until I was a teenager. He didn't own a gun until I was 13 and even then he rarely used it. So why was he a Republican?
In a nutshell he hated unions. I mean he HATED unions in a way that would make Scott Walker smile and cackle with glee. Which scores about a 10 on the irony meter because for most of my life he worked as a union electrician at a paper mill. My mother hates unions as well and you guessed it -- she worked as a member of the Teamster's union driving a forklift at the local plastic manufacturing plant when I still lived with them in Minnesota.
And continuing with the irony the unions were very, very good to him. The union struck to get him pay raises and benefits. Those benefits covered him when his weight and diet gave him diabetes. And those benefits allowed him to retire early with a pension. Unions made his life better every day and yet he hated being in one. Why?
Because he bought "The Lie". We often talk about the war on the middle class and point to the Reagan years as the start of it. But Reagan only followed in the footsteps of a long tradition of Republicans hell bent on destroying the middle class. Reagan used the combination of America feeling sorry for itself after the 70's and pent up anger about social issues to lure union workers into the Republican fold. The "Reagan Democrats". But they only needed a nudge not a huge push to follow the "Pied Piper of Plutocracy" over the edge.
What was "The Lie"? It was a simple one -- the lie was that others were holding you back. That you'd be richer, or happier, or somehow better off if it weren't for those other people who were getting a "free ride" from your work. The lie had been around a long time, the anti-union forces have long used it. But with more than a third of the work force being unionized in the 30's and 40's it was clear it wasn't being successful.
Then came the 50's, post WWII there was new prosperity. My dad graduated high school in '53 and technical college in '55 and went to work in the military industrial complex. He and many others in the middle class now had a wealth the average American could only dream of a decade earlier. And whether they were in a union or not a big part of that new found freedom and prosperity came from the labor struggles of those previous years.
If you're wondering how my dad became a union electrician it happened in '69. We moved from New Jersey to Minnesota because my mother wanted to "get away from the rat race". What she really wanted was to get away from brown people. And upstate Minnesota is as white as the driven snow. He worked for a few years making concrete sewer pipes then got the job at the paper mill.
Unions came under assault with a couple of tactics, one was to call them un-American, "communist", etc. But in my father's case, and I'm guessing quite a few others, an attack that is often overlooked was resentment. You can still hear phrases like, "A chain is only as strong as its weakest link" implying unions hold everyone back to allow the "weakest" member to do their job. Other variations on this theme are "rugged invidualism" or "nobody ever got rich working for someone else" which are at best half-truths at worst blatant lies. I made millions working for someone else as did thousands of my coworkers. It's true we didn't make billions but I'm willing to bet most people would call us rich.
Underneath it all this mentality is fed by our rabid consumer culture. It's not enough that we "keep up with the Joneses". I see it more as "jonesophobia" a deep-seated fear that somewhere, somebody might be doing better than us. To me this is the ultimate embodiment of the "voodoo economics" of the last 30-plus years. That we must buy as much as possible and that means it has to be as cheap as possible. And damn those unions for asking for better wages and safe working condition for some guy spot welding the frame of my car because I have to pay a bit more for it.
When the Republican leadership is really worried about something they'll attempt to rebrand it or misuse it to the point where it can't be talked about anymore. A good example of this is the term "oligarchy" which was famously misspelled and misused by Glenn Beck. The real oligarchs sat back and laughed while he repeatedly misused the term to describe the President and the government.
Well it's happening again, this time they're trying to turn the 99% against itself with resentment. When they talk about the "politics of envy" they want you to be envious of the Mitt Romney's of the world. But they want you to blame the guy standing next to you demanding to be paid a fair wage, or treated like a human being by the banksters as the problem. Or Rush Limbaugh calling the safety net the problem, not a solution. That if we all paid less taxes we'd have more money. If it wasn't for the poor we'd all be better off. The politics of envy, of resentment, that's just "The Lie" all over again. And folks like my middle class Republican father fall for it hook, line, and sinker.