When Robert Reich ascends to The Huffington Post to define “The Rise of the Wrecking-Ball Right,” would anyone doubt that this destructive movement would be led by Fox News and Rush Limbaugh? The Huffington Post shouldn’t pay for this kind of endlessly recycled talking point:
Add in the relentlessly snide government-hating and baiting of Fox News and Rush Limbaugh and his imitators on rage radio; include more than thirty years of Ronald Reagan's repeated refrain that government is the problem; pile on hundreds of millions of dollars from the likes of oil tycoons Charles and David Koch intent on convincing the public that government is evil, and you have all the ingredients for the emergence of a wrecking-ball right that's intent on destroying government as we know it.
But Reich was also phoning in his explanation for all this government-hatred: naturally, it comes from American idiots who don’t realize they’re all government dependents and should be offering glory and praise instead of opposition:
It's no coincidence that the emergence of the tea party coincided with the Wall Street bailout. An acquaintance who has embraced the tea party explained to me she hates government "because it's always captured by the powerful, who take our taxes and eat our lunch."
At the same time most of what government does that helps average people is now so deeply woven into the thread of daily life that it's no longer recognizable as government. Think of the indignant voters who showed up at congressional town meetings to protest Obama's health care bill shouting "don't take away my Medicare!"
A recent paper by Cornell political scientist Suzanne Mettler surveyed how many recipients of government benefits don't really believe they have received any benefits. She found that over 44 percent of Social Security recipients say they "have not used a government social program." More than half of families receiving government-backed student loans said the same thing, as did 60 percent of those who get the home mortgage interest deduction, 43 percent of unemployment insurance beneficiaries, and almost 30 percent of recipients of Social Security Disability.
Notice how Reich says if you get a mortgage deduction, you're dependent on government? This is the same kind of logic that says since conservative think tanks are tax-exempt, they're "tax-subsidized" and hence should be more grateful to government. Reich grew especially ridiculous at the end: that somehow the Democrats haven’t made the case for government yet (??):
The final critical ingredient has been the abject failure of the Democratic Party -- from the President on down -- to make the case for why government is necessary.
One would have thought the last few years of mine disasters, exploding oil rigs, nuclear meltdowns, malfeasance on Wall Street, wildly-escalating costs of health insurance, rip-roaring CEO pay, and mass layoffs would have offered a singular opportunity to explain why the nation's collective well-being requires a strong and effective government representing the interests of average people.
Yet the case has not been made. Perhaps that's because, even under the Democrats, the interests of average people have not been sufficiently attended to.
