America The Selfish

This meme was recently posted on a the very partisan Facebook page Stop the World, the Teabaggers want off and has really caused a stir with commenters. Mostly due to Nancy Reagan being dead... however she was still among the living when the meme was first created. I'm still not a fan of memes and wish there was a citation but you don't need to sift all the way through Rick Perlstein's The Invisible Bridge to know that these charges are true. The real issue is deeper though. There is a severe lack of empathy in America, a deficit if you will, and it is not restricted to Republicans.

Maybe I have prattled on about Thomas Frank's Listen, Liberal too much already, but his core argument holds here. The faction that controls the Democratic Party has a large empathy deficit about economics and working life in America. Unless I did not catch it, Frank made it through his entire book without discussing his concept of the "Liberal class" controlling the Dems without mentioning Noam Chomsky's theories about the eternal class struggle in this country. That's okay, Thomas Frank's history kung fu is far superior to mine and he has no need to lean on anyone else to make his argument. But that won't stop me from connecting the two great thinkers' ideas about class consciousness among the elite.

To paraphrase: The history of America is that a highly class conscious business elite is always fighting a bitter class war against working people to beat them down and win the subservience and quiescence of the low to the high. This is the never ending battle for the hearts and minds of men, and is fought in this country with a naked and ruthless aggression that makes the rest of the world gasp. Now, that business elite which held itself as the enlightened and progressive side of American capitalism has taken effective control of and entire political party even as the regressive and reactionary side has long held firm control over the other one. However, it is the Republican elite that has driven the empathy deficit to it's impossible depth today. First AM talk radio was taken over after Nancy's Alzheimer's ridden husband removed the firewall of relative fairness and paved the way for one-sided reactionary propaganda to colonize the airwaves, brainwashing millions of listeners over decades. Then Republicans pushed through the deregulation of news on cable TV, bringing the bitter fruit of Fox News to a much wider audience.

The effect was to polarize and atomize a vast swath of Americans, the right-wingers all understand that they are on the same team but are only connected to each other vertically through what they were exposed to through conservative media. Thus programmed, these lone wolf soldiers in the Republican war on American civilization are able to shut down any reasonable debate they can worm their way into. And family get-togethers and holidays have never been the same since. Another book by Thomas Frank explains then how the Republican base reorganized itself to shout down any possibility for solidarity after the housing collapse and financial meltdown brought on by that bastion of selfishness on Wall Street. "Hard Times Conservatism" is how he puts it in Pity the Billionaire and deftly shows how the mass indoctrination into the values of the business elite of both stripes can and will prevent us from trusting one another, probably forever.

Perhaps, little by little as the vicious authoritarians fall victim to life's tragedies including the ones mentioned in the Nancy Reagan meme above, they will experience an extinction burst and realize the depths to which they have been lied to but it will never go away on its own. "It can happen to you" should be our rallying cry to rebuild trust in our fellow Americans and empathy for the struggles our neighbors and families face. Yes, you will probably get cancer. You will probably lose your job. You will probably experience divorce or death or betrayal by loved ones. No matter how much you believe in Trump, he will use you and abuse you. As will the next man on horseback. As will probably Hillary Clinton. We have to do it ourselves, but we can't until the cancer of lies and hate are still broadcast and pumped into society.