BITTER - The saga of the American working class and Barack Obama

Just for the moment, let’s forget “bitter”, we’ll get to it, but just for the moment, let’s focus on the part that actually is pertinent, which is the voting against their own self-interests.

The awful truth is that for too many years, the Democratic Party has ceded working class voting blocs to the Republican Party; yes, because the Republican Party favors gun control, and yes, because the Republican Party toes the most fundamentalist religious ideological line, and because working-class, i.e. less educated persons (voters) are more likely to value these issues, that’s not a value judgment, it’s simply a quotation of statistic.

But the unfortunate thing is that in doing so, the Democratic Party leave uncontested the very real truth that working class voters are voting against their own self-interest, because the same party that toes the line of religious ideological fundamentalism is also the party of cutting taxes, and the working class is demonstrably the prime beneficiaries of the social programs that must be killed in order to cut these taxes.

So, why do they generally vote Republican?

It is because they are bitter, but it is especially because their bitterness has been misdirected by efficient propaganda from the Republican Party which faults the party which promises a better life through robust government programs because these government programs either never materialize, or because they do not work. But the reality is that the reason these government programs never materialize has little to do with a lack of commitment on the part of Democrats, and everything to do with resistance and obstructionism from the Republican Party.

In California we have recently seen the reality of this self-feeding propaganda maneuver. Governor Gray Davis was recalled in 2003, ostensibly because he consistently failed to pass a budget. The reality of who was to blame for these budget failures because clear two years later, when Arnold Schwartzenegger “failed” to pass the California budget because of resistance from the same exact same group of lawmakers who had opposed Gov. Davis’s budgets, The California Republican Party.

Voters do indeed become “bitter” when their government fails to act, or fails to fulfill the promises is has made. Because of an overall right-leaning undercurrent in the media of the last 20 years, it has been possible to cast the failures of Democrats to pass the measures they want as a failure of government in general. If government does not work, the Republican premise posits, then obviously the party that favors a smaller government is the party that is best suited to running the government: at least individuals won’t be wasting tax money on social programs that don’t do anything.

The underlying fallacy should be obvious, but that’s not the way TV works. You see only what they decide to put on screen, so if they only tell you half the story, you can be excused for thinking that there is no second half to the story.

It is because of resistance from Republicans that social programs don’t get funded. Think of SCHIP, think of Social Security, think of Medicare, the FDA, the FTC, EPA, and the VA. Of course government will not work when more than a third (often, over the past 20 years, more than half) of the elected representatives of the government have a vested interest in keeping it from working.

For the past 20 years, the less functional the government, the more likely Republicans have been to be elected. It is no wonder the voters who are most in need of support from the government are bitter.