If there’s one thing the right gets right, it’s this:
Liberals are stupid.
Not all of us, perhaps not even the majority, but enough to keep us from effecting anything more than superficial change. And when that change disappoints or fails, the right can shut it down and double down on what once was.
Most glaring example was in 2009. Wall Street had just collapsed, and the titans of capitalism faced ruin. A new, liberal president had a chance to hit a reset button, a whole new economic order that would have eliminated the speculation of shareholders, leaving only the investments of stakeholders with first-hand involvement in the business from which they earned income. Without shareholders, markets would thrive as employees thrive. Customers would benefit from lower prices, and communities would not face threats of re-location.
We don’t need to look to Denmark or Sweden, much less Cuba or Venezuela, to know how that would look. Instead, we can turn our own American clock back 70 years when corporate CEOs made a healthy 20 times the average income of workers who back then had plenty, enough to be unanimously considered a thriving middle-class. All that was during the two terms of Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican president in the 1950s that many think of as the “again” in the MAGA phrase.
It began to unravel under a liberal Democrat named Kennedy who slashed corporate tax rates in the 60s. Even the saintly Jimmy Carter aided corporations with deregulation in the 70s. By the time antigovernment Ronald Reagan took over, CEOs made 40 times what workers made. Who could tell Republican from Democrat during the 28 years that Reagan, two Bushes, and one Clinton served Wall Street as dutifully as well-trained dogs. So dutiful that CEOs now make 350 times more than workers who work second and third jobs to make ends meet.
And we wondered why people in the Rust Belt wouldn’t vote for another Clinton?
Obama seemed different in 2008, but in retrospect, he had the presidency handed to him. In the primaries, his opponent was part of that 28-year, if not 48-year corporate binge. In the general election, his opponent chose a certified looney-toon as a running mate. And, from his election right past his inauguration, America’s economy was in the tank.
Some will want to add race and age as factors, but whatever the case, Obama had a chance to take this country off the narrow and ruinous path followed by the last nine presidents–four Democrats, five Republican–and return it to the wide and successful path blazed by two Democrats and one Republican who preceded them.
Instead, he fell in line with the nine and shored up Wall Street. To do it, he needed a slogan, and who could argue with “Too Big to Fail”? There was the promise of immediacy, of jobs protected and restored, not to mention the convenience of keeping everything as it was, no hassle of paperwork that any real systemic change would require in anyone’s bank accounts, mortgages, insurance policies. All so easy with tax revenues to shore it all up, no matter that most of those revenues now came from the general public rather than from corporations as would have been true in the FDR-Truman-Eisenhower years.
“Too Big to Fail” paved the way for “Make America Great Again.”
No, liberals never fell for the second slogan, as much a lie as what we now call “the Big Lie.” But most of us remain silent while our senators and representatives compromise public interest with that of corporations. Because we are so quiet, those who represent us have little to bargain with, like poker players dealt a weak hand. Meanwhile, we know that the other side is as loud as can be. What president other than Donald Trump has ever had his name, sometimes his face, superimposed on an American flag and flown from roof tops, porches, front-yard flag poles, pick-ups, and boats?
When has the threat of violence ever before gripped town halls, election boards, and school board meetings across the country?
What makes liberals stupid is the belief that, in the face of all this, after we cast our votes, we can let our Joe Bidens and Kamala Harrises, our Nancy Pelosis and Chuck Schumers, our Bernie Sanders and Liz Warrens confront it for us–as we remain silent and smug that we are on “the right side of history.”
What if, in the weeks following his inauguration, Obama heard from just half of us who voted for him insisting that any bailout had to be of the middle class, not from it? What if, in the months following that, every Democrat in congress heard from half those who voted for them during the debate that began with universal health care, before it began to be watered down? Phone calls, letters, emails, letters to newspapers, peaceful assemblies in town centers, town halls, as or more frequent and relentless as the MAGA crowd but without MAGA’s threats of violence and expressions of hate?
Instead, we expected it to be done for us. Therefore, we ended up with the middle-class bailing out the corporations, and with the uncertainties of “Obamacare.”
Even when one of us does speak up, others consider it a chance to excuse their own comfortable silence. So it was following a letter that appeared in my local paper that refuted an earlier letter’s claim that mask mandates and vaccines are “government overreach.” The rebuttal was strong and spot-on, as I made sure to let the writer know–my way to encourage her to write more.
A week later, another letter appeared on the editorial page which identified the second writer without ever mentioning the subject before declaring:
I totally agree with her, and now I don’t have to write a letter of my own.
For all the times I’ve used the line, “Sometimes the jokes just write themselves,” I never thought it could be literally true.
Meanwhile, others who agreed with her blamed the newspaper for printing the first letter to begin with. In effect, they would prefer that editors do the work of democracy for them. Come to think of it, why should the First Amendment matter to those, liberal or not, who think democracy is a spectator sport?
Ever since the red MAGA caps first appeared, I’ve joked that they are 21st Century dunce caps. Liberals aren’t so bad that any one of us should be wearing anything like that on our head, but we sure are good at stuffing gags in our mouths.
The right could call them “dunce gags,” as they may as well be indicative of our collective IQ.
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Mouth of the River 