In response to my brother’s rhetorical question asking where all the Tea Party deficit hawks had gone, I offer this reply:
For all their bluster about being against Darwin and for Jesus, the fundies on the Tea Party fringe are actually pushing for an agenda that’s their dogma’s exact antithesis: a dog-eat-dog, survival of the fittest society where the gap between rich and poor widens every day and a persons value to society is judged solely on the basis of how rich he is. In the Tea Party Utopia, feudalism is the way of the world; corporations and co-opted governments conspire to perpetuate the status quo; and the Golden Rule is replaced by an amoral policy of treating your neighbor as a potential obstacle to success.
Tax cuts for the rich exacerbate the growing income disparity, forfeiting much needed investments in the country’s future just to line the pockets of those who already have more than they need. As Matt Miller rightly pointed out in his Washington Post editorial yesterday, it is particularly galling that the Republicans and their wealthy benefactors are unwilling to make the slightest sacrifice, even during a time of war and appalling deficits.
When the far Right succeeds, it does so because its fiercest adherents are so adept at doublethink that their followers, incensed into a self-righteous and xenophobic fury, do not notice—or ignore—the hypocrisy.
2 comments:
sounds like rightwing politics in general to me.
Espousing plainly hypocritical positions is a hallmark of the extremes of both end of the political spectrum. I suspect it arises from the very nature of extremism: an extremist starts from the accepted truth of his ideology, and then works backward to find arguments that support his position. There’s also a sort of desperation of the fanatic: others’s opinions are irrelevant, simply because they are held by non-believers.
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