What’s really happening with these protests is that the
genuine rage and not unreasonable economic insecurity of these citizens
is being stoked, exploited, distorted and manipulated by movement
leaders for entirely different ends. The people who are leading
them—Rush Limbaugh, the Murdoch-owned Fox News, Glenn Beck,
business-dominated organizations of the type led by Dick Armey—are
cultural warriors above everything else. They’re all in a far different
socioeconomic position than the “middle-income Americans” whose anger
they’re ostensibly representing. Their principal preoccupation is their
cultural contempt for various groups (illegal immigrants, the
“undeserving” poor, liberals) and their desire to preserve the status
quo whereby the prime beneficiaries of government policies remain
themselves: the super rich and the interests that control Washington.
It’s certainly true that many of these protesters are driven by the
standard right-wing cultural issues which have long shaped that
movement—social issues, religious fears, cultural and racial divisions,
and hatred for “liberals” as Communist-Muslim-Terrorist-lovers. For
many, all of that is intensified by the humiliation of being completely
thrown out of power, at the hands of the first black President. But
much of it is fueled by the pillaging of the corporations and Wall St.
interests which own their government.
Actual rich people can’t ever be the target. It’s a classic
peasant mentality: going into fits of groveling and bowing whenever the
master’s carriage rides by, then fuming against the Turks in Crimea or
the Jews in the Pale or whoever after spending fifteen hard hours in
the fields. You know you’re a peasant when you worship the very people
who are right now, this minute, conning you and taking your shit.
Whatever the master does, you’re on board. When you get frisky, he
sticks a big cross in the middle of your village, and you spend the
rest of your life praying to it with big googly eyes. Or he puts out
newspapers full of innuendo about this or that faraway group and you
immediately salute and rush off to join the hate squad. A good peasant
is loyal, simpleminded, and full of misdirected anger. And that’s what
we’ve got now, a lot of misdirected anger searching around for a
non-target to mis-punish . . . can’t be mad at AIG, can’t
be mad at Citi or Goldman Sachs. The real villains have to be the
anti-AIG protesters! After all, those people earned those bonuses! If
ever there was a textbook case of peasant thinking, it’s struggling
middle-class Americans burned up in defense of taxpayer-funded bonuses
to millionaires. It’s really weird stuff.