The battle is about power and economics

[Two Americas]

The truth about politics is hidden from us by the political circus and the horse race and the so-called “cultural wars,” and we Democrats have lost sight of where the true political battle lines are. We have been fooled, as much or even more so than our misguided Fox-watching Republican-voting neighbors, because we should know better and we should hold ourselves to a higher set of standards. “To whom much is given - much is expected. “

The real battle is about power and economics - wealth and power, who has them and who does not and why and how it is that way. Compared to that, everything else is trivial and transient. We all know this - we know that money buys justice, we know that the wealthy still enjoy the protections written into the Constitution, we know that money runs every aspect of our lives. We see irrefutable evidence of this every day, all around us. But our politics do not reflect that obvious reality, that "he who owns the gold rules" has replaced the Golden Rule. This internal contradiction between what we know to be true, and what we say and promote politically - which affects almost all Democrats to some extent—is the source of our frustrations and our relative weakness as compared to the days of the party's greatest success.

Politics has always been about power and economics, not values or personal preferences.

The greatest success of the right wing propagandists has been to re-define politics in such a a way that they always favor entrenched wealth and power, always defend the few at the expense of the many.

It is not those who have been duped into voting Republican who have been the most important targets of the right wing propaganda, it is us. We have allowed ourselves be defined by them, we have let politics be re-defined, and we are now forced to operate in a context that makes it virtually impossible for us to win. We see ourselves as the mirror image opposite of whatever lunatic idiocy they come up with—a caricature of “liberals” always as defined by the opposition.

But most importantly, the issues of power and economics have been erased from the political landscape. Since the Democratic party has traditionally stood for the poor and the powerless, in opposition to the Republicans who stand for the wealthy and powerful, the Democratic party has been erased from the political landscape, or at the very least rendered weak and irrelevant.

The Republicans are fighting - and fighting very hard and very effectively - to advance the interests, the needs and desires of the wealthy and powerful few. They don't care about the cultural war issues - those are all tricks to divide and conquer the people. Don't people realize that the super-wealthy are completely tolerant of minorities and GLBT people from their own upper crust circles? That the women have power and freedom? That they all eat organic and buy green? That the women have access to abortion? That they don't carry guns and are very much opposed to gun violence? That they have wonderful health care? That they have no fear from the authorities? That the Bill of Rights is intact for them?

It is to poor people that all of those rights and freedoms and privilege are to be denied. It has nothing to do with "values" or "lifestyle choices" or any of the rest of the nonsense that the right wingers have lured us into battling over with them.

We are being suckered. The reason we don't have more success is because we are not even on the right battlefield. If we can be fooled - and we are so easily fooled - into thinking that half of our fellow working class struggling friends and neighbors are really the enemy, that distracts us from seeing who our real tormentors are, and it cripples us politically.

Why is poverty so important for us? For the same reason that super-wealth is so important to the opposition. All of us a re a lot closer to being homeless than the $250,000 a year Republican voter is to the super-wealthy who control virtually every aspect of our lives now. That is where the battle lines are, not over the cultural war issues.

Every single liberal and progressive cause could be effortlessly advanced within a context of fighting for economic justice. In the absence of that context, all of the liberal and progressive causes will be stalled indefinitely. And meanwhile, as we play out the role assigned us by the right wing, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. That is the true goal of the Republican party, and it is the root cause of every single social problem we are fighting.

Power and economics—that is what politics is about. The people know that, The opposition knows that. We are the only ones who are confused, because we have all of our bright shiny and righteous causes to distract us. Once we get clear about that, we will be able sweep the right wing from power once and for all.