It’s kind of interesting to wade into the fetid waters of Lunaticville to see how they’re reacting to the news that real Republicans represent Wall Street, and Tea Baggers are merely their (mostly) useful idiots. Look, this isn’t complicated. There are a few very wealthy people in this country and there are hundreds of millions of…well…everyone else. Very wealthy people have a particular set of concerns. They would like to keep the money they have and they’d like to set the optimal conditions for them to make much more money. In this, they’re not really much different than the rest of us, but their behavior can have an outsized impact on all kinds of things, like the integrity of investments or the quality and safety of products or the healthiness of the air and water or the kind of compensation we receive as their employees. Very frequently, our interests conflict with their interests. They’re badly outnumbered, so they should expect to lose political arguments pretty much all the time. But they have money. Lots and lots of money. And they use that money to create political speech and political outcomes. But speech isn’t enough. They need votes. And the only way for them to get enough votes to have their interests reach parity with ours is to align themselves with some other large segment of the population. In our recent history, this has been religious conservatives and, especially, Southerners who still retain an unhealthy contempt for the Federal government that beat them in the Civil War. There’s also another group of people, usually called libertarians, who are basically cheerleaders for rich fat cats not out of any particular self-interest but probably as a result of some quirky protein produced by their DNA in utero. Who knows what is wrong with these people? Most of them were born on third base, think they hit a triple, and are really pissed that they haven’t yet scored. They blame empathy. And Al Sharpton.
Now, you can believe political rhetoric or you can believe your lying eyes. Republicans run up huge deficits whenever they have the power to do so, and they loot the treasury to enrich themselves and their political donors. That is literally what real Republicans live to do. That’s the party’s entire purpose. The deficits are not really the primary goal. They’re a byproduct of their desire to pay the lowest possible taxes while steering the maximum amount of the government’s money to their rich pals. The deficits do serve a purpose however. Once bounced from power, the Republicans behave as though it was the Democrats who produced those deficits. And they pound the Democrats to cut social programs that steer government money away from their rich pals to people who are in need of some assistance.
This is how American politics work in our two-party system. Anyone who rallied to the Republican Party because they wanted to see them fix the deficit problem is not paying attention to how our system operates. Mitch McConnell doesn’t want to do away with earmarks. He doesn’t want a balanced budget amendment. Those things would interfere with his ability to steer our tax money where he wants it to go. A Republican Party that couldn’t run up massive deficits would have no real reason to exist anymore.
If you joined the Tea Party because you want to see lower taxes on millionaires and less regulation of business, then good; you’re on solid ground. But if you joined because you want smaller government and a balanced budget, you made a grave mistake. The thing about greedheads is that they have no moral qualms about ripping you off and selling you out. They’re almost sociopathic by definition. I mean, who attacks empathy? That should be your first clue that you’re on your own.
If you are getting well paid to be an idiot, more power to you. This is America. But if you actually believed that John Boehner and Mitch McConnell want to transform the government into some Galtian paradise, you’re just a sucker. Plain and simple.