“You know you’re a peasant when you worship the very people who are right now, this minute, conning you and taking your shit.”
Matt Taibbi on conservatives’ efforts to paint Obama has both socialist and fascist, despite his administration’s huge giveaways to bailed-out businesses:
It requires serious mental gymnastics to describe the Obama administration — particularly the Obama administration of recent weeks, which has given away billions to Wall Street and bent over backwards to avoid nationalization and pursue a policy that preserves the private for-profit status of the bailed-out banks — as a militaristic dictatorship of anti-wealth, anti-private property forces. You have to somehow explain the Geithner/Paulson decisions to hand over trillions of taxpayer dollars to the rich bankers as the formal policy expression of progressive rage against the rich. Not easy. In order to pull off this argument, in fact, you have to grease the wheels with a lot of apocalyptic language and imagery, invoking as Beck did massive pictures of Stalin and Orwell and Mussolini (side by side with shots of Geithner, Obama and Bernanke), scenes of workers storming the Winter Palace interspersed with anti-AIG protests, etc. — and then maybe you have to add a crazy new twist, like switching from complaints of “socialism” to warnings of “fascism.” Rhetorically, this is the equivalent of trying to paint a picture by hurling huge handfuls of paint at the canvas. It’s desperate, last-ditch-ish behavior.
My favorite bit is this:
You know you’re a peasant when you worship the very people who are right now, this minute, conning you and taking your shit.
To be fair, many people don’t vote in their own self-interest. (Look at me: I’m a straight, married, white, American-born, middle-class male. By all rights, I should be a Republican.) So we wind up with a few hundred people participating in a protest, organized by the wealthy, who are protesting tax increases for those wealthy people and tax cuts for said protesters. Strange? Sure. But it’s within the confines of what passes for normal in modern American politics.
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