Rick Perry: Culture Warrior of Justice
by David Atkins ("thereisnospoon")
There's been a lot of chatter lately about this from Rick Perry's announcement speech:
We’re dismayed at the injustice that nearly half of all Americans don’t even pay any income tax. And you know the liberals out there are saying that we need to pay more. We are indignant about leaders who do not listen and spend money faster than they can print it.
There's no shortage of facts out there demonstrating why this zombie talking point is so deliberately deceitful. Think Progress has a good basic rundown:
I’s certainly true that nearly half of Americans don’t have any federal income tax liability, but a large portion of that population pays federal payroll and excise taxes, as well as state and local taxes, which fall much harder on the middle-class and low-income individuals than those at the upper end of the income scale. The simple fact is that they don’t make enough money to have to qualify for even the lowest federal income tax bracket.
Overall, less than a quarter of the nation’s households don’t contribute to federal tax receipts — and the majority of the non-contributors are students, the elderly, or the unemployed. Does Perry believe that these people are really undertaxed?
At the same time that Perry is crying foul over the poor and the elderly paying too little in taxes, income inequality in the country has skyrocketed. Just the richest 400 Americans hold more wealth than the bottom 50 percent of Americans combined, and the richest 10 percent of Americans control two-thirds of the country’s net worth. But its low tax rates at the bottom of the income scale that have Perry all riled up.
But what is more interesting about Perry's push on this particular subject is less economic than cultural. It's not just Perry who talks about this "issue." Michele Bachmann has raised eyebrows with it as well.
Rick Perry is an idiot. So is Bachmann by all accounts. These are people with strong social intelligences, but not a lot of analytical firepower or intellectual curiosity.
They appeal to less educated conservative voters who vote their "gut" and "common sense", and take the mockery and rejection of their heroes' ideas by educated elites as proof of their righteousness. By definition, these less educated voters tend to be lower income as well. A great many of them are almost certainly in that poorer 47% that has no federal income tax liability.
And Perry and Bachmann are the conservative candidates trying to win election by promising to raise the taxes of the very constituency to which they are trying to appeal. None of this would make sense if the issue in question were being determined based on rational self-interest and economic motivation. But it isn't. This is a cultural issue for Perry and Bachmann.
At its heart lies the myth of the white suburban taxpayer being gouged to support blacks and Latinos in urban areas. Even though all the data shows that urban counties pay the bills of suburban and rural counties, and more urban states pay the bills of rural states, still the myth continues. It's so pervasive that you see phenomena like red counties in California wanting to secede to create their own state, using "fiscal responsibility" as a talking point--even though the suburban counties in question are net drains on the state, while the Los Angeles and San Francisco counties from which they want to secede are net providers.
There is a mass delusion in whitebread suburban America that they are the real America, and that they are being oppressed by high taxes to pay for poor minorities, even though the reality is actually the reverse: urban centers pay the bills for parasitic suburban lifestyles, which are ultimately unsustainable socially, fiscally and environmentally.
Matt Taibbi called it best:
It would be inaccurate to say the Tea Partiers are racists. What they are, in truth, are narcissists. They’re completely blind to how offensive the very nature of their rhetoric is to the rest of the country. I’m an ordinary middle-aged guy who pays taxes and lives in the suburbs with his wife and dog — and I’m a radical communist? I don’t love my country? I’m a redcoat? Fuck you! These are the kinds of thoughts that go through your head as you listen to Tea Partiers expound at awesome length upon their cultural victimhood, surrounded as they are by America-haters like you and me or, in the case of foreign-born president Barack Obama, people who are literally not Americans in the way they are.
It’s not like the Tea Partiers hate black people. It’s just that they’re shockingly willing to believe the appalling horseshit fantasy about how white people in the age of Obama are some kind of oppressed minority. That may not be racism, but it is incredibly, earth-shatteringly stupid.
They're the sort of people who can suck up the nation's tax dollars, while pretending to be Ayn Rand's Atlas, holding up the entire world on their shoulders, desperate to shrug off the parasitic riffraff for a change. Even when they themselves are the actual riffraff. The less-educated conservatives who will vote for Perry and Bachmann see themselves as oppressed taxpayers even when they are in the 47% that Perry and Bachmann promised to tax, because they don't see themselves as a member of that economic class. The "poor who pay no taxes" aren't them: they're of a different race, in a different place filled with rap music and urban blight. They're not real Americans who drive trucks and SUVs, and do their shopping at Wal-Mart.
Progressive elites can spend all day and all night proving how wrong Perry and Bachmann are about the economic facts. But they're wasting their time, because this argument, much as it appears to be based on economics, is actually based on racism and cultural resentment. It's still Lee Atwater's world, and we're still living in it.
You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger" — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."
If progressives want to deal with the economic zombie lie Bachmann and Perry are perpetuating, they'll focus less on the broad economic realities of rich and poor, and more on smashing the lie that underpins most of the narcissistic conservative worldview.
They will point out that most majority-white rural, suburban and exurban communities, far from being economic producers carrying the weight of America's taxes on their shoulders, are actually parasitic drains on the economy. And that the economic overlords on Wall St. intend to squeeze them to death just as surely as any inner-city minority community in their relentless pursuit of profit. Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry will lead them happily to the slaughterhouse on behalf of the big money rancher--and they'll go willingly, assuming that the undernourished brown and black cows who are supposedly getting all their food will be the only ones coming out as hamburger.