There is a lot of noise in our society these days about income inequality. Interestingly and predictably, those that have just don't see what all the fuss is about, and invoke their delusion that those exponentially less well off than them are guilty of class envy and waging class warfare, as if their nemeses had the weapons to wage such a war.
A slow-motion earthquake has been underway in the US for a while now and the fissure that has opened up continues to widen. On one side are the Americans for Prosperity and the Freedom Forum and their ilk - organizations with names extolling some of our most cherished popular ideals. The cruel truth is that the only freedom and prosperity they care about is their own.
Carl Rove, the man declared by James Moore and Wayne Slater to be Bush's Brain, pulled off one of the greatest feats in American political history - using social issues proposed by the fundamentalist right to scare people into voting against their own economic self-interest. The only thing that rivals it in our modern politics is the Southern Strategy engineered by Lee Atwater to propel Richard Nixon into the White House in 1968. Atwater's campaign did result in Nixon's election, which was after all Atwater's job. It also broke the solid south in terms of presidential politics, opening the door for the transition of the south from a Democratic to a Republican trump card in national elections in one generation.
One of the generals in Atwater's War Council was Kevin Phillips, a relatively young Republican political strategist that went on to write The Emerging Republican Majority, one of the most prescient books on American politics of the last century. Many years later, as he has closely observed and pointedly commented on the relationship between our culture and our politics, he left the Republican party and eventually published two books that incisively and damningly examine where we have headed since that fateful 1968 election. The first, 2002's Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich, looks at the history of the influence of money in our elections and lawmaking. Phillips went on four years later to apply the lessons he saw from that study to our modern politics in American Theocracy: The Perils and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century. In this latter work, he has strong words for what he calls the "unholy alliance" of these three interests in corrupting our politics to serve their ends.
Phillips saves some of his harshest criticisms for Alan Greenspan, who he blames for what he terms the "financialization" of our country during his tenure as Fed Chairman. In a stunning irony, he outlines Greenspan's slavish devotion to the ideas of Ayn Rand, who the future quarterback of our economy literally studied at the feet of. What is mind-boggling about this is the seemingly cozy alliance between a financial class that benefitted from a largely discredited atheist "philosopher" whose major treatise was titled The Virtues of Selfishness, and the Religious Right that claims to represent a religion whose Lord declared that it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God. I have never been able to figure out if these people have very tiny camels or very large needles.
There is a point to all of this. What Phillips proves Greenspan is guilty of, the financialization of our economy to the disadvantage of all but what we now call the 1%, has now happened to our politics. At a time when virtually every rational commentator is trying to warn us of the corrosive effect of vast sums of private wealth on our politics, a Supreme Court majority appointed largely by a president installed by the Unholy Alliance first shot Lincoln's "government of the people, by the people and for the people" in the heart with the Citizens United decision, and then last week shot it in the head with the decision in McCutcheon v FEC, just to make sure it was dead.
The rantings of some among the wealthiest of the wealthy in this country about class warfare is one of the cruelest examples of blaming the victims we have ever witnessed. The class warfare they have waged is now largely in the mopping up phase. Lincoln spoke his words on a battlefield soaked by the blood of 50,000 dead and wounded Americans. No one could have imagined that 150 years later that government he described would perish without a single shot being fired.
There a lot of things the Grand Old Party is called, both in praise and in condemnation. The one thing it should never again be called is the Party of Lincoln.
