While I’m cranking out some stuff to meet a deadline, do read “This Is What’s the Matter With Kansas: Sam Brownback tried to create a conservative utopia. He created a conservative hell instead.”
The Mahablog
Politics. Society. Group Therapy.
While I’m cranking out some stuff to meet a deadline, do read “This Is What’s the Matter With Kansas: Sam Brownback tried to create a conservative utopia. He created a conservative hell instead.”
Modern Republicans/conservatives are like the old Alchemists, except that instead of trying to turn minerals into gold – they’re hoping that somewhere, sometime, somehow, they can turn their own bullsh*t into gold!
And while they’re trying, the rubes are happy to help them win and keep jobs – so, for them, for a period of time, “Thar’s GOLD in them thar shills!!!”
Republicans don’t want voters to see the foul and stinky turds they’re trying to sell them – so they try to sell them the super-thin layer of gilding.
“Modern Republicans/conservatives are like the old Alchemists, except that instead of trying to turn minerals into gold…” they’re trying to turn bullshit into a raison d’etre philosophy.
This is why Ayn Rand’s “Objectivism” is complete fail: it’s an entirely closed epistemic system. It retains all the features of religious fundamentalism sans the supernaturnal; to her, capital+productivity+desire =a logically moral good.
Maha – thanks for the link!
Scary thing is, on the state level, you can sometimes score a quick “win” by cutting taxes or regulation. Obvious example: Delaware set low regulations for banking, and a bunch of banks headquartered there. And sometimes you can say “see? This proves conservative principles work!” But it just proves that people will seek economic advantages when they’re sitting there.
What’s also scary is… well.
There’s two ways you can look at “conservative” arguments.
First, there’s the true believers, who can maybe become disillusioned by evidence. (“Kansas cut taxes, and lost revenue… and someone points out that the Laffer curve only works if taxes are high enough to force people to take fewer profits. So maybe Kansas’s tax burden wasn’t high enough for a tax cut to increase revenue….”)
But then… then there’s the people who see political power as a way to set yourself up to give stuff away, and Republican principles as a way to get the support of big money boys to help you win the election so you have that stuff to give away. See Christie, Chris, “you helped me get elected, now I’ll put a chunk of my state’s pension funds in your underperforming hedge fund…”, Bush, George W., and Perry, Rick….
Here, principles don’t have to work, they just have to have enough people believe in them until you get to make some big giveaways and get yourself set up nicely with some big favors owed.
Actually, he created a “hell which is conservative”. A “conservative hell” is a Denmark-like land where there’s decent healthcare for all, relative equality between the sexes, and a people who report that they’re happier than most any country on earth. In other words, a society that works.
they’re hoping that somewhere, sometime, somehow, they can turn their own bullsh*t into gold!
They’re not hoping, they’re succeeding. Maybe not literal gold, but figuratively speaking there is a whole bunch of them who have turned bullshit into gold.
I give you Paulie Ryan to prove my point.