Why Are the People Harmed By Bush His Biggest Supporters?

Hochschild -- The surprise is that the people most hurt by Bush's policies are his strongest supporters. We know that there have been 2.5 million jobs lost in his presidency. He's kind of got a "bleed 'em dry" approach to the non-Pentagon part of government spending. He's not doing anything to help blue-collar workers learn new trades, or get a house, or help their kids go to college. He's loosening the Occupation Health and Safety regulations. The plants the guys work at are less safe. His agricultural policies are putting small farmers out of business. So we have to ask: why would they vote Republican?

Tax cuts are creating budget shortfalls for the schools the guy's kids go to. The library hours are shorter. And, given Bush putting the foxes in the henhouse in environmental posts, the air and water are going to get dirtier. Kids are more likely to get asthma. He's even loosening regulations for nursing homes, so the man's elderly parents are going to have worse care in their later days. All of Bush's military adventures -- the ones he's already done in Iraq, and perhaps Iran and Syria, impact the blue-collar guy more than anyone else. His kids are going to go, or his brother is going to go, or he's going to go and possibly be killed.

What he's not doing is looking at Bush, the guy at the top, who's rigging the whole economic game, and who's not doing a thing to support him, and who's actually deflecting blame away from the top. So it comes down to this: those feelings that come with a kind of loss of position, income and status among blue collar males is being exploited instead of addressed.

How does Rush Limbaugh play into this? He's an essential factor, his drug addiction aside.

Oh, he's huge. He's the push-from-behind guy for three hours a day, nationwide, often during commuter time. We are really subjected to a certain emotional tone of resentment -- a recounting of the latest political news in resentment-drenched language.

Limbaugh doesn't point out that the very people who are outsourcing jobs to Third World countries and leaving high pools of unemployed in our country sing the praises of the free market.

Bush is the upper-class mess-up who ends up on top anyway. It is subliminal: If you mess up, don't worry. The reason that becomes important, I think, is that we live in a culture of individualism. And if you lose a job, it's your fault you lost the job. It's your credit if you do well, and your fault if you do badly. And so for him to be the mess-up that gets ahead anyway is sort of an end-run around this whole burdensome ideology of individualism.
He's picking their pockets but saying to them -- with a wink and a nod, in politically correct code words and symbols -- like that all-male signing of the late-term abortion bill, where only white males were present -- the white guys are in charge here. "Notice there's no women," Bush is coding to them. "We're reigning them in, but not officially -- we're going to say we're all for women."

And then a wink, a wink and a nod.

This is the BuzzFlash interview with Sociologist Arlie Hochschild.

See also my earlier post on The True Believer. More articles on my Search button.

What to say to bring the blue-collar voters back?

"You've been exposed to a giant hoax, and here's what the hoax is. It is offering you a make-believe candied apple with one hand and picking your pocket with the other hand. And take your own feelings back. They're yours. And put them behind a vote for someone who's going to really solve your problems. Set about seriously setting up a domestic agenda that makes a difference to you."

I think Dean is plain-spoken. He can just say that.

There's been a whole hug-the-middle strategy of the Democratic Leadership Council, and that worked for Clinton. But it's not going to work for anybody after Clinton. I think the Democrats have got to go in the opposite direction -- stop hugging the middle. Get out there behind the issues we really believe in. And I guess along with that we have to enliven a vision of what life would be like if we weren't just privately rich, but rather, all publicly rich. If we really had great schools, and great playgrounds, and great public hospitals, and then there wouldn't be such a desperate scramble to be privately well off.