What could Trump do to tank the economy out of vengeance? What Republicans have done for years
What could Trump do to tank the economy out of vengeance? What Republicans have done for years Republicans have a long history of hurting the economy for political gain, though Trump may also be driven by spite
By MATTHEW ROZSA at Salon
NOVEMBER 28, 2020 3:00PM (UTC)
https://www.salon.com/2020/11/28/what-could-trump-do-to-tank-the-economy-out-of-vengeance-what-republicans-have-done-for-years/
"SNIP......
"Here's the stunning political reality," Wolff explained. "This deterioration of the working class situation, which they feel and kind of understand, they see as something that their party — which coming out of the Great Depression was the Democratic Party — seemed to be powerless to stop. At best, they did it more slowly than the Republicans. They seemed to have been captured by the neoliberal ideologies, so that the two parties become more and more alike."
As this was happening, "the Republican Party shifts attention away from the way it pushed all of these shifts — this neoliberalism, the globalization, the moving production out of the country, the automation and all the other things that contributed to the stagnant real wages — the Republicans don't talk about that." Instead, Wolff pointed out, they shifted the conversation toward social issues. They focused on supposedly "traditional" values to oppose civil rights, feminism and secularism and characterize themselves as the party of "reconstituting the family, reestablishing the hierarchy. God at the top, the man just below him and the women and children below the man and his, to the women and children, the equivalent deity that God is," as well as stopping racial minorities from asserting their rights.
By conflating these social issues with economic ones, Wolff argued, Republicans learned that they could pass policies which would help the wealthy at the expense of everyone else because they could craft their populism off of appeals to unrelated issues.
"They could lead the way to smash the working-class thereby cementing their donations from the capitalists who appreciated the deregulation, who appreciated the celebration of the 'genius' of CEOs [like] Jack Welch, Lee Iacocca, any of the others," Wolff explained. "So you sucked up to the capitalists and you were able to begin to really eat into the Democrats' control of the working class."
.....SNIP"
= new reply since forum marked as read
