Magic tricks, or “prestidigitation,” depend on sleight of hand – distracting your audience with elaborate hand gestures and flourishes while performing the actual maneuvers out of sight. That’s why it’s a trick – the audience’s eyes and brains are fooled into seeing meaningless activity as purposeful, while missing the actual mechanics of the trick. Sometimes devices are used to conceal, producing English phrases like “smoke and mirrors,” meaning cheap theatrics meant to fool an observer. The conservative movement in America and its standard-bearers in the Republican Party have been engaged in a massive show of prestidigitation for the last half-century – convincing middle-class voters that the poor, and not greedy corporations, are the biggest threat to their own economic survival. They have done this by appealing to our inborn sense of fairness and desire not to be cheated. Give one child four marbles and the other three, and what will the second child immediately cry? “That’s not fair!” Studies have shown that people determine their own sense of wealth not by absolute numbers, but by how well they appear to be doing when compared with everyone else. So the conservative message is always as follows: “You work hard, but not everyone does. Liberals and Democrats take your heard-earned money in taxes and give it to people too lazy to work. These poor, lazy people then vote Democratic in order to keep the flow of handouts coming. That’s why you must vote Republican.” Inside every Republican voter is a little child imagining that the government has given some other, undeserving child more marbles than him. Meanwhile, no mention is made of the fact that 1% of the population owns 40% of the nation’s wealth, or that the collective loss of wealth among the middle class almost exactly corresponds to the gains made among the super-rich. Conservatives keep Republican voters from turning their rage against the wealthy by perpetuating the myth that every wealthy person earned their money through hard work, and that everyone has an equal opportunity to get rich in America. It makes a good fairy tale, and it keeps the anger of middle-class Republican voters wrongly focused against the poor, instead of on where their diminishing wealth is actually going.
Posted on: Mon, 04 Aug 2014 17:09:16 +0000