AHC: in '92, Rush Limbaugh goes for brass ring on middle-class economics, far fewer personal attacks

I'm going to take this as high praise. Actually, I very much bat politically from the left side of the plate! Yes, really. :) Writers, thinkers, journalists, and activists who I've learned from include Gloria Steinem, Ralph Abernathy, Edward S. Herman, Noam Chomsky, Rachel Maddow, Amy Goodman, Gene Sharp, Howard Zinn, David Dellinger, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Henry Spira, and Jonathan Glover.

So, I think I may have done a pretty good job simply laying on the table some of where conservatives were coming from.
I thought so. But then this makes this more an exercise in drawing out those who either disagree with us to make their case and perhaps enlighten us if they can, or draw out discussion by those who have delved deep in this world-view of theirs to explain how it is that large numbers of very vocal and activist people believe things we believe are mistaken at best.

I've only just recently come to internalize the site rules that relegate this sort of thing to "Chat" and may not properly understand them even yet. Certainly I never used to worry about taking time and space to try to elucidate my own position on matters without worrying whether all that was "meta" to a direct conversation about probable evolution of an ATL! To me it was always self-evident that one needed to argue from data and also from interpretations, and people either would not understand the bases of my interpretations because they'd never heard of them, or that they'd disagree for reasons that would affect our estimation of what is likely to happen and what is not. Either way, germane. But also repetitious, and perhaps dangerously toxic to the discussion of items at hand in an ATL. Finding that balance is part of our responsibility as participants I guess. A lot of people don't like how wordy I tend to be, and I know anything I write benefits from editing with a cool head and filtering stuff out. Against that, that process delays a post and often causes stuff to get lost completely!

Anyway I still don't see the ATL-ness of the challenge. The way I see it, they did an excellent job of accomplishing what they wanted, as I see it, certainly relative to the results I think they deserved to get. They could want to have accomplished more, but then again there are plenty of things I want I don't get because they are unrealistic. I don't think they could realistically get a lot more than they did, and could and IMHO should have accomplished less.

I believe being disingenuous, on many levels, including a huge dose of self-deception as well as conscious cynicism and lying, was a necessary part of their even existing as they did. So greater transparency, flexibility and accountability would have forced them to rethink their position and goals. Vice versa they found and exploited the niche they did because powerful social factors encouraged them and it is these, rather than the mouthpieces of the movement they represented, that need to be looked at for meaningful AH trajectories to be plotted out.

But trying to define and describe these seems doomed in this context to bog down into philosophical argument with little traction onto any plausible POD I can see.
Clinton ran and won on by talking about people who were playing by the rules seemed to be sliding behind. Don't understand why movement conservatives didn't try and rebut him specifically on middle-class economics? ? ? Maybe they thought they were being both entertained and educated by talk radio. Should have been more insistent on the second point!

I say that on that vague and isolated point, Clinton and his broad coalition of supporters (including say me at the time and now, as far as this isolated question goes) was correct, to argue otherwise would be incorrect and thus either a confusion or a lie.

Of course, taking this one talking point, describing a fact is merely a starting point; one can argue in many dimensions.

Some might argue that there is nothing wrong with this. After all, when one plays a board game or a game of cards strictly by the rules with no cheating, someone emerges as the winner, others come out losers. That's what everyone expects going in, the only argument is about who should win and who should lose, and presumably if the rules were followed, the game itself determines that. Fairly!

Or, they might agree the wrong people are winning and the wrong ones losing, and propose to change the rules (or enforce them, on the claim that cheating is happening) to rectify that--without participants in the debate agreeing on either who should win or who lose, or how and why the undesirable outcome is happening. As I understand the (sanitized, disingenuous) position of modern American conservatives, there is a proper and known set of rules that should be applied, and if they were the outcome would be just and good by definition, and our problems arise from the wrong people cheating, by applying wrong rules or breaking the ones agreed upon, to win instead, causing an inferior and thus wrong outcome.

I perceive that it has been demonstrated time and again that either these people honestly lay out the superior system of rules they believe in and then at some point, a majority of people fall away from agreeing to them. Some see something right up front that seems manifestly unfair and wrong about them that causes them to reject this system and argue against it right away. To others it sounds good but later they see instances where they realize they were mistaken to accept it.

Or--they misrepresent what is they are about, and win bigger support that way, and rely on people not having good information or lacking power to change bad outcomes or reach the majority unaware of their circumstances, or uncaring about them.

We get a whole lot of the latter and little of the former when people are far, far off base.

Now as for the point that maybe instead of being serious about rectifying matters so things are "The Way Things Ought to Be" to quote one Limbaugh title (or paraphrase anyway, damn if I will look it up now) they are just in it for notoriety and money, to entertain. Why not?

I forget right now if I posted my belief that people often support positions not in their direct interest because they perceive they lack the power to rectify matters, and settle for a compromise. And that under these circumstances, they have an aversion for serious political talk, because it painfully reminds them of their humiliating and harmful impotence, and prefer instead to construct fantasy worlds where they can have the power and influence and respect they can't get in real life.

Yep, I for one feel I am describing myself quite as much as anyone I think is wrong-headed. In case anyone was wondering at my own stupidity or hypocrisy or whatever they might feel it seems to be.

And one possible mode of fantasy is to construct a parallel perception of the real world as it is, and more or less believe it is real despite painful contradictions others might bring up, and go with belonging to a circle of allies who share the delusion, more or less, and be gratified by their status in this alternate world.

In this context, entertainment and actual politics fuse. And some might argue this is inevitably and philosophically what real world politics is all about, that everyone necessarily has their subjective view and there is no ruling on whose are more correct and whose less, only the outcome of the interaction of clashing views can judge. Not me, I stubbornly cling to ideas of their being truth and falsehood, and that at any rate one can measure objectively who is more honest and who less so by the number of lies they tell and the number of false delusions they cling to. But for instance, is my notion that there is a bit more to human behavior than relentless seeking of personal self interest a fond delusion I'm guilty of clinging to despite contradictory data? If I believe there is a brass ring of absolute truth out there, that one thing is true and others false, I also believe in the fundamental inability of human beings to ever prove they've actually got it in hand, indeed that by its nature it cannot be grasped. To cite Taoism! "Seek it and it retreats, grasp it and vanishes. The way that can be named is not the True Way."

Anyway, entertainment for its own sake is a thing, a very big and profitable thing in normal human society. Just look at how much work I've put into a couple Star Trek ATLs over the past few weeks versus any useful real world thing I've done publicly! During Limbaugh's "Reign of Error" as I think of it (title of an anti-Limbaugh criticism in his own words I had at the time and may still have packed away somewhere) the post TOS and movie Trek Franchise really got going, with two series on the air at any time. I'm pretty sure, though I find it amazing, that the fan bases overlapped. At the same time Trek shows were to a great extent my own entertainment/fantasy alternate world I perceived as better expressing the world I thought we should all be living in. (I pretty much equated Cardassians with the dominance of the Republicans in Congress and of course Limbaugh et al. And every time I saw a huge SUV on the road, I thought, "there goes another Cardassian!")

Now if anything remains of all this as an AH challenge, why not take it forward yourself? I have no heart to, and don't think there is much probability of doing so even in the American mind, without falling off the edge of the world as it were. We pretty much did, and still are sliding on down a rough, slippery and stinking slope toward ruin. IMHO!

I still don't get what you mean by "brass ring." Objective fact, in my opinion, was not their friend. To quote a later GW Bush spokesman, "You keep looking at reality. We aren't reality-based!" Their traction in the wide American public was already absurdly high. Why grasp for a brass ring when they've got the gold one in their hands anyhow?
 
I forget right now if I posted my belief that people often support positions not in their direct interest because they perceive they lack the power to rectify matters, and settle for a compromise. And that under these circumstances, they have an aversion for serious political talk, because it painfully reminds them of their humiliating and harmful impotence, and prefer instead to construct fantasy worlds where they can have the power and influence and respect they can't get in real life.
But there are all kinds of smart things you can do on job creation. Not necessarily big things of the size of the Apollo program, but rather smart changes on the margins, which all together might add up to a big difference. I guess it comes down to whether Rush's big ego goes in the directions of trying to put together a positive program.

And if not Rush, maybe another talk show host only slightly behind him, who wants to interview Reagan Democrats, people who have tried and failed at indy businesses as well as the 1 out of 5 who have succeeded, etc.
 

This is about four or five Bill Clinton ads from 1992. And it's all about jobs, jobs, jobs + middle-class tax cut.

There was a recession, so President George H. W. Bush lost the election. Disappointing to Republicans and conservatives, but should not have been a huge surprise. (we may have been coming out of the recession, but that point's often lost on voters) What's surprising, at least to me, is that Republicans and/or movement conservatives did not try to put together their own alternate program on job creation, rebuilding the middle-class, etc.
 
Are you familiar with Kevin Phillips? As you can see in his bio he is as much responsible as any one person can be for the current pattern of support for the Republican Party. But in the late 1980s he repented and by 1990 his book The Politics of Rich and Poor signaled his abandonment of the GOP ship, at least as long as it persisted on the course he had helped set it on. A striking phrase I recall from my first reading of this book (apparently not so striking to the reviewer I cite) was "ten million dollars." This number was the approximate threshold below which an individual was too poor to be taken seriously by the political process as it had developed--I could never remember whether that's $10 million total assets, or $10 million annual income. Even the former number obviously excludes the great masses and indeed huge swathes of people who figure they are quite well off indeed.

A major theme of the Phillips book was that as US national politics had evolved as a nominating and electoral process, the opinions and needs of people below this threshold of wealth, whether the lower or higher bar, were of little consequence; by totally ignoring these and catering solely to those above the bar, a politician would be far more likely to be elected or reelected than by doing the opposite, never mind that this fraction of the adequately rich would be demographically just a fraction of less than one percent.

Now it seems self-evident that since the late 80s, many politicians have spent a lot of money to attempt to manipulate the votes of the poorer majority and most campaigns appear to be focused on the majority, essentially everyone, well below this threshold. But in order to be a contender in these gladiatorial contests, in primaries and in general elections, vast amounts of money are needed and generally speaking, every politician who stands a serious chance of being elected must rely on a certain level of support--perhaps not a majority in their bailiwick but any a lot--from that tiny sufficiently rich class.

Note that $10 million, even in income which would imply assets of S100 million or more, is chump change on the scale of some of the biggest private fortunes. Of course most of these fortunes are "tied up" in investments. But this kind of wealth is what defines, in Marxist terms, the capitalist class. To be a capitalist is not necessarily to be a brilliant technical innovator, or even personally a genius at handling money. It is not a term that should be confused with "being entrepreneurial" either. Any idiot can be a capitalist, if they have someone they can trust to guide them on who to hire to oversee their money with reasonable diligence and honesty. The capitalist class is that category of people who have title on enough wealth that invested and managed with average competence by someone or other, will yield profit in its various forms in the normal markets such that they can live, in the lifestyle socially accepted as minimally normal by their fellow capitalists, solely on the returns on these investments. What Phillips was saying is that in fact our political system prioritizes managing the nation on behalf of the interests of these people, first and foremost. All other policies derive priority from what this class of people deems appropriate to do with revenues left over after their primary interests are satisfied, and contingent on not prejudicing those interests in any way.

So now the question is, does the collective interest of this ruling 1 percent or less coincide with that of the American people as a whole, or even say 51 percent of them?

On certain clear points, it clearly does not.

Back in the late 60s, the US Supreme Court--obviously, in view of the fact that Nixon was not elected President yet, a quite "liberal" court, before Nixon's appointments very deliberately took it farther rightward--ruled that stockholders in publicly traded funds were entitled, not just to a profit, or a reasonable profit, but to maximum profit possible with their investment. (So much for the principle of caveat emptor or the theory that profit derives from risk-taking!) Obviously no board of directors can know in advance for sure just what configuration of operations strategy would in fact yield maximum net revenue and thus profit, but the point here I believe is that any board of directors, who otherwise may rule their company's policies with a monarchial whim, had better not take any decisions that clearly would result in lower profits than the most ruthless policies prevailing in the market would be expected to yield. In this matter, the precious freedom of enterprise is quite tightly restricted and regulated indeed! A corporate board persuaded to "invest in human capital" by diverting revenues to worthy causes of any kind that are not focused on raising revenues or cutting costs would be liable to punitive lawsuit--by the way, the "Contract With America" agenda item of "tort reform" would hardly seek to ban these suits as frivolous! (No, what they mean by "frivolous" is if some member of the working classes were to attempt to seek restitution from a corporation that injured them in substantial ways by neglectful or even illegal practices. It is presumably the job of judges and where appropriate juries to rule on the facts of a case--to rule out these kinds of torts is not to filter out the frivolous, it is to bar recourse to those with a solid case. But clearly not to close the courts to "the people who matter!")

Now this court ruling is I believe just icing on the cake. In fact without it there would be little danger of industry being dominated by corporations with CEOs with fuzzy warm charitable notions of how their workplaces ought to be run. If anything should have been barred from the civil courts as a truly frivolous lawsuit, it surely should have been stockholders accusing the management of the stocks they hold of not seeking "maximum" profit--anyone with sense could suggest they should have simply invested their money elsewhere and let the market penalize these allegedly incompetent managers. Isn't that what Rush would say if you reduced the scale of this to a mom-and-pop corner store operation? I mention just to show how hard-edged the capitalist culture of profit maximization over all else is. I doubt similar extreme rules are in place in any other developed nation. They don't need them, nor do we--the basic value of maximization of wealth is in the very DNA of corporate enterprise.

Now given that--are profits in fact maximized by the sorts of investments in America that you and I would say are plainly possible? Do profits rise, or fall, if workers are better paid, if a sufficiency of "good jobs" are to be had here in the USA?

You and I could argue that yes, it can be a win-win for all. But can we prove it? Meanwhile, these people or their hired account managers know darn well how to turn a pretty profit using methods they are familiar and comfortable with, and do well by. The upshot of these policies are well known to the common people. Factories are shuttered and relocated, to poorer parts of the country where wages are lower and unions are weak and regulations lax--or increasingly in the 1980s and accelerating to this day, overseas to another nation completely. Wages have in fact stagnated in real, inflation adjusted terms since the 1960s, although the fact that productivity rises means each worker is producing two or three times as much marketable value as they did back then. The difference is pocketed entirely by that ruling 1 percent. You and I can stand back with wide eyes and cry "shame, shame!" but what positive motive, other than impulse of charity or conscience, does any member of that class have to allow even a small trickle of the massive doubling or tripling or more since the '60s of the profits they take and control to spill out of their hands and water and nurture the great working classes below them? How could a corporate board justify it to their stockholders? Why should they consider allowing it, let alone assist in helping it to happen?

You seem to have understood my remark that people turn aside to fantasy worlds and alternate realities when there is nothing they can do to help themselves in the real world on a very strict level. I certainly would never say that there is nothing they could do--I am saying that what they could do is very very difficult and dangerous for them to attempt, and the very best efforts of an insufficient few would be worthless without getting the larger support of sufficiently many. And they would not be asking the many to simply check a mark on a ballot every couple years. For the theoretical potential of the democratic masses to mobilize itself to challenge the power of wealth, even if they were unopposed would involve titanic efforts of self-organization they can expect no help in from any mainstream institution. And this would be the case in the Utopia where their bosses sit idly by without worrying what their great masses below them are stirring to do. Realistically, this is the class struggle, and realistically the bosses, on every level from neighborhoods and their scattered private workplaces to schools to police precincts to governors and Presidents who will call out the army if necessary, are watching what they do quite suspiciously, based on hundreds of years of political and workplace tradition of how to stay in charge. Nowadays they are supplemented by sophisticated methods of analysis and surveillance.

It is all very well for a liberal Congressman to present a bill for infrastructural works meant to soak up the slack in the labor market at a living wage and also provide for some capital investment the country objectively needs. It is quite another thing entirely for this bill to be voted into law and then signed by the President, then implemented in any honest way unless the bulk of the revenue earmarked for it is also earmarked to flow back onto the market via the same corporations that such a program ought to sidestep. For the part of the funds to actually hire workers to be adequate, the program must be bloated to far greater size than those workers will ever see, so the middleman corporations can take their share, which at currently prevailing ratios of revenue to paychecks, must be three or four times what the workers get! At those kinds of prices, clearly we can't afford to do things we could if it were possible to just pay the workers themselves directly! But that of course would be 'socialism!' And socialism is evil!

Why do the vast majority of the public, who clearly benefit from a little bit of socialism, and would benefit more from more, share the opinion of their 1 percent overlords who clearly would "suffer" from expanding public benefits in that they would have to pay for them while not needing any of the public services themselves? I say it is because of this fear factor. Many workers are intelligent and thoughtful enough to think up these sorts of schemes themselves, without being propagandized by some socialist like me. And then most of those are smart enough to follow through, and figure on how their immediate bosses, their community leaders, their government, would react to their impertinent scheme. Their immediate boss would at the very least regard this worker as a wild card and potential trouble maker, and fire them at the first opportunity. If they try to get another job, they'd find their reputation precedes them. Many a budding potential socialist dies right there, either they foresee the trouble and stay quiet, or they find out the hard way and serve as examples.

This is the context in which Rush Limbaugh's culture of scapegoating and misdirected hatred can really thrive. If it is not OK to turn eyes up the social and economic ladder to try to rectify one's discontents, perhaps there are people off to the side or below one who, by kicking their teeth in, you can ease the slow painful climb up the social ladder for yourself. Certainly you've knocked out some competition, and it feels good to be able to lash out at somebody!

Thus it is entirely possible to reverse the straightforward tide of discontent, to turn it from its logical targets and use it to reinforce the very same structure of oppression that diverted it in the first place. It is a very ingenious social mechanism at work.

Of course probable win-win solutions exist that would fall far short of sweeping socialism. But one should consider that wealth is power. The less starved the working classes are for money, the more powerful and independent they will feel, the more pride they would take in themselves, the less content they would be to humbly take less and concede practical rule to their financial betters. It is a positive feedback process--the poorer the poor are made to be, the more subservient and useful, the richer they get, the more unruly and assertive. Quite aside from the question of having somewhat less wealth to control themselves, then, the rich are averse to the poor improving their lot because it reduces the social gap between them and the masses, and puts their ongoing overall control more and more in doubt.

And this is why I am in theory a radical socialist, who thinks that the masses ought rationally go for "the Brass Ring," which would be sweeping and total control, socialize everything and run it democratically in the public interest. A mixed system is unstable unless one can persuade the wealthy that their status is less important than being one with the common people. Some rich people surely are democratically inclined, or anyway paternalistically charitable, and so it is there is indeed a "dimes bit of difference" between the two mainstream US parties--though only that much! A fair amount of the democratic rhetoric of our society we may well owe to a few of the rich who are reluctant to bury the corpse of democracy and still hope it may revive itself. But they aren't going to go so far as to apply CPR!

And again--what would Limbaugh's Brass Ring be? He is a member of the ruling classes and a shill for their most plutocratic tendencies; he gains nothing by airing objective truths; his whole stock in trade, then and now, is mendacious innuendo and a forthrightly stated world-view that is horrifying in its implications that by sleight of hand he presents as superior to the wicked and sick plots of "liberals."
 
I want to stress something else too, lest I be misunderstood. Although I do believe at least some of the active figures in right-wing politics, including triangulating Democrats like the Clintons, do have a fairly clear and sophisticated notion of what they are doing and what the relevant factors really are, on the whole it is not necessary for the ruling classes to have a clear and conscious vision of what they are actually doing. Everyone sees the world through a lens of ideology, and the ideologies of our civilization have been shaped by centuries of relevant accumulated experience. Some aspects of them go to the very foundations of agricultural civilization nearly ten thousand years ago! By and large, people figure they are behaving decently, the way a person in their position ought to. The "oughts" are shaped by the imperatives of prosperity and survival of the civilization as a whole.

Did you watch the Trump-Clinton debate last night? In response to several points Hillary Clinton made that from my point of view are very telling--that he himself has apparently paid no income taxes for a very long time, perhaps never; that he himself has hired undocumented foreign workers to build his buildings and purchased underpriced steel from China--he responded that he has intelligently operated within the rules that government--that he laid wholly in her personal lap as a former Senator--has handed down, and that if she wanted him to do otherwise, she should have made different rules. Which he claimed he would abide by! But it was thus her fault, not his, that he made large multiples of millions of dollars in personal income and paid no taxes, that he was able to hire workers whom he had extraordinary power over (as if they stepped out of line he could have deported) and would work cheaply, that he could purchase steel cheap from China and use it instead of the product of American workers. Her doing, he said, I am innocent in these matters!

I think the man believes every word he says, and that large numbers of voters will react to that "sincerity," never mind he as much as admits the truth of he himself being one of the villains in the narrative he has used to become the Republican nominee.

Democrats in general are always terribly vulnerable because they do propose to live between two fires, the great public masses they call on to prefer them over Republicans because they are closer to them, and the corporate capitalist oligarchy that they too must gratify first and foremost. If in fact there were a strong movement to take over the Democrats, or form a new party that takes its place as the alleged party of the people and means it, I doubt very much people like Trump will simply allow them to rewrite the rules so as to collect properly progressive taxes, or to require them to hire labor that is paid fair living wages and has the rights of citizens, or to be restricted to buy materials and goods that either have been produced by fair labor practices (never mind environmental!) or are charged a stiff tariff to make up the difference. Every one of these steps would be violently resisted, and to enact any of them in an effective would probably amount to civil war. Therefore Hillary Clinton's promises are also very dubious, because even if she sincerely thinks she can do any of these things she will find upon taking office she is sadly mistaken. Not at any rate without offering people in Trump's position some "compensation" the public may take a while to notice.

But as Trump says, he does not have to conspire to get all these goodies. The political classes, the product of hundreds of years of ideology and the hard facts of the political "market," will do it for him, and do it in the name of democracy and fair play. To anyone who demands that we pretend there are no string-pullers, no conspirators, I would roll my eyes, but acknowledge this--these people rarely accomplish exactly what they want to, because the world is hard to control. But they generally work within an evolved social, legal, and political system that has been shaped to give them pretty much what they want on autopilot. All that is necessary is to defend this as "tradition," the Constitution, the Way Things Ought To Be.
 
@Shevek23, very good posts and I read them in their entirety. I agree with you a lot more than I disagree. Main area of disagreement might that I think economic and social system has more cracks and crevices and openings and possibility for change than you seem to think.

For example, desegregation was not in the interest of Southern elites, who very much benefited (at least economically) from having a system where poor whites could focus their resentment on African-Americans. To their credit, not all poor whites so focused, but a lot did.

Now, someone could say, hey, with a ramped up war on drugs started in early 70s, mass incarceration ramped up in '90s, let's don't compliment ourselves too damn much about things improving. But even here -- slowly and belatedly -- things are starting to improve.
 
June 22, 2016

But maybe if he had talked about more these issues early in 1993 ? ? ?

He's saying (paraphrased):

Education was always touted and understood as a means of self-improvement. . . . . Pre- and Post-WWII, there was vast upward mobility. . . . . American income has always been charted in 1/5's, or quintiles, and you can see how likely younger workers are to move upward as they get older. . . . . Previously, college education was maybe the biggest single factor. . . . . But now, just like healthcare, many middle-class families cannot afford it. There was never any pressure on universities to keep education at an affordable level, just like there was never any pressure on healthcare. . . . . So, what it's become shackles because of all the debt. . . . . And who's allowed this to develop is the establishment and the elites.
 
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