From the factory that brought you the Contract with America and push-polling, here’s the latest product from the American Right.
No longer content with wheedling NASCAR dads into resenting poor people on an individual basis, the Republican Right’s brain trust has decided to blame entire states for soaking hard-workin’ folk while they live high off the hog on welfare and social programs.
The latest fad in the great neocon echo chamber is to accuse vast swaths of their own country of indolence and parasitism. Michael Barone, a Fox News (sic) commentator, has written a book titled Hard America, Soft America: Competition vs. Coddling and the Battle for the Nation’s Future.
George F. Will pounced on it for his column (so that’s a book, a TV network and a newspaper — these guys have convergence down to an art form), and echoed its thesis, which is basically that “blue” (Democrat) states are welfare-dependent moochers that sap the energy and money of the productive, hard-working “red” (Republican) states.
The good folks at Media Matters point out that maybe that’s backwards. Rather than taking the word of a flak for Faux News (motto: “We Report, You Decide Between Ann Coulter and Bill O’Reilly”), M2 checked out a report from the nonpartisan Tax Foundation; it showed that, in 2000, Gore actually carried most of the states that pay more in federal tax than they receive in federal spending, while Bush was the choice of most states that are net recipients of federal largesse.
Given how well dividing the U.S. into North and South turned out, you might think that dividing the country into Soft and Hard is a wee bit reckless. But then, dividing the country has long been central to Republican strategy: Reagan pitting the suburban middle class against inner-city “welfare queens”, Bush Sr. pitting whites against blacks (in the person of Willie Horton), Bush Jr. and his supporters pitting patriots against traitors (i.e. anyone who questions their agenda), and the Christian Right pitting evangelical Christians against the secular world.
This isn’t a strictly American phenomenon. The Italian right wing, for instance, has played on Northern resentment against the poorer South for years. But it’s the starkest example of regional cockfighting the U.S. has seen in a while.
That’s especially troubling for Canadians, because our own neocons have a habit of importing bad American ideas and turning them into bad Canadian ideas. Politics here have long been riddled by cynical manipulation of regional cleavages and grievances. (Anyone remember the Reform “Not another frigging leader from Quebec” ad?)
And Stephen Harper, in a moment of weakness, delivered a now-notorious slur against Atlantic Canada: “There is a dependence in the region that breeds a culture of defeatism.” (This kind of politics is nothing new to Harper, whose “Alberta firewall” proposal is still warming the hearts of Liberal opposition researchers.)
Harper backpedalled madly from that comment (and now blames it on his drunken evil twin Quentin). That’s a healthy development. Region-versus-region politics are nothing short of poisonous and nearly always intellectually dishonest. If there’s a national firewall to keep them out, I’d be interested in seeing it.
