You can’t defeat the fascists by pointing out the contradictions and inconsistencies in their speech. They are perfectly well aware of them. The only thing you can do is demonstrate to others the hypocrisy and cynicism they bring to the table, especially in how they manipulate the language.

Example: “Crony capitalism”. Really, is there any other kind? Even Adam Smith remarked on that.

Marx, and his translators, brought an entire vocabulary to the discussion which is carefully avoided by his Rightist critics. Words like “capital”, “bourgeosie”, and “proletariat” are perfectly useful and value-free terms which describe certain politico-economic concepts precisely without taking an ideological position. But the Right replaces these terms with the more emotionally loaded “enterprise”, “middle class”, and “worker”. Marx’s simple equation variables are thereby replaced by brave merchant princes, uprighteous burghers and noble heroes of the shop floor (or is it troublesome low-lifes who always want something for nothing). The terms that go right to the heart of the issue, like “surplus value”, and “class struggle” are ignored altogether. By not mentioning them, its as if they never existed.

Surely, you will recall how keen some of our former posters on the Right were that we strictly restrict ourselves to THEIR definitions of key concepts. You control the language, you control the conversation. The great English Socialist George Orwell taught us that.

Never forget that.

Pretty much all the social programs that benefited the middle class were the result of a people working together to promote the general welfare. They asked the rational question, “how do you ensure a comfortable old-age?”, and came up with the rational answer of a socialized retirement savings system. For decades we’ve asked how to best provide medical care for everybody, we keeping getting the rational answer “single-payer”, because the bigger the insurance pool, the greater the efficiency; only to be shot down by insatiable greed and overwhelming wealth. Unemployment insurance, flood insurance, look closely, and a democracy is a gigantic insurance agency. And sometimes union. Government is collectivism.

We the people have a right to structure our society to promote and maximize the general welfare. If that happens to be the formula for socialism, well great, socialism appears to be what the be-pedestaled Founders had in mind (admittedly, for themselves and the other white guys of the time). It’s the greedheads who came after who’ve been trying to rewrite the founding consensus of this country.

Never surrender We the People.

The middle class has always had its share of welfare giveaways; not as much as the upper classes, of course, but certainly more than the poor. Its this middle class welfare that has allowed the rich to command the support of the bourgeosie, and to have them collaborate in their own exploitation and vote against their own best interests. In essence, the Bosses bribed the Babbitts and Bunkers to vote for them by offering them the crumbs off their table and even promising them their own seat in some distant, indefinite future. The Bubbas got food stamps and Public Defenders.

But today, for a variety of reasons (the whole pie is shrinking, the rich are greedier than ever, and the shrinking middle and working classes who actually pay the lion’s share of the bills, are suffering from rising prices, wage stagnation and approaching tax saturation) the situation is nearing a crisis. What is happening today in American politics (and to a great extent, in all the industrialized Western democracies) cannot be understood until this dynamic is recognized. The Babbitts and Bunkers are finally seeing themselves being progressively marginalized and they have been convinced it is all the Bubba’s fault. Who wins? Only the Bosses. Follow the money.

So how is the middle class subsidized by this insidious welfare, you may ask? Well, I will use myself as an example. My family was working class; my mother a secretary and my stepfather an immigrant auto body shop worker. I was able to break the cycle by going to college, because I attended a cheap state-supported school (taxpayer subsidy) and payed for it with GI Bill (also payed for by the taxpayer) Part of that GI Bill was my natural father’s (a sheet metal worker) who died when I was 4 years old, and part of it was my own. Both my mother and I purchased homes using VA benefits; again, both my late father’s and my own. Mom and I both wrote off a substantial portion of our income taxes using our mortgage interest deductions (and a host of others that primarily benefit those who can afford the initial ante and get in the game). Again, this is another taxpayer-subsidized benefit. One, by the way, which benefited the financial and home construction industries, and perhaps even the entire nation. But the point is, unless you could afford the price of admission like the middle class, these collateral benefits were mostly denied to you. The poor were much less likely to get a mortgage or send their kids to college, even if they technically qualified for mortgage tax deductions and GI Bill.

I’m not saying these benefits I and so many other working and middle class people enjoyed are a bad thing. On the contrary, they are an excellent way to redistribute resources from the rich to the poor. This brings the poor up and prevents the rich from eventually accumulating ALL the money and power. It is the triumph of Western social welfare democracies in the twentieth century, and even if the middle classes benefited disproportionately from these New Deal policies, it was certainly better than nothing.

But the giveaway is expensive, and the upper classes no longer want to pay their share. They want tax cuts, they want someone else to pay the tax bill, or not have a bill at all, and they want no part of the regulations that control industry and protect the environment, the worker, the consumer and the market place. As always, they want it all.

The cost of energy has gone up. The cost of housing has gone up. The cost of education has gone up. Even the cost of credit has gone up! All the commodities that allowed for upward social mobility are now in short supply, and now they are going after medical care (even Medicare and child care): pretty soon only those who can afford medical insurance will have access to medical care at all. Even political power is now up for sale. As the prices rise to reveal the true effect of those hidden subsidies, the middle class shrinks, not because they are lazier or dumber, but simply because they are now poorer. The middle class is still there, they just are working shit jobs now, or they’re not working at all.

The rich (represented predominantly by the political Right) has managed to bring this about by skilfully dividing the population, and convincing the middle and working classes that their true enemies are the poor, the immigrants, and the colored; and some undefined intellectual elite that has mobilized these unfortunate
masses against them. You will note that the financial and property elites are never included among these villains even though they are the ones with the most to gain! In other words, those with the means, motive and opportunity to benefit from our current problems are never even considered as a possible cause of them. Instead, we are told that our true class enemies are movie stars, artists, scientists, college professors and journalists, writers and intellectuals. Even the bourgeois distrust of the intellect has been mobilized for political purposes, along with racism, nativism and classism.

Of course the other side of the political aisle shares some of the blame as well: They are guilty of cowardice, complacency and laziness. They are the Chamberlains that made the Hitlers possible. And now we have a Congress and Presidency crowded with Quislings.

Serves ‘em right. The middle class has always thought the world owed them a living.