With a nod to his oligarch funders, in his inaugural address, his first day on the job as president, Reagan famously said, “[G]overnment is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”
When Reagan flipped our economic system on its head, rejecting two generations of classical Adam Smith economics and replacing it with the Laffer Curve and “supply-side” economics, almost a third of Americans had union jobs and around 60 percent of American families lived in the economic “middle class.” But starting in 2015, as NPR noted, reporting on a Pew study, “middle-income households have become the minority.”
We are not citizens of a nation founded by Konservative Intellectuals whose generational grandchildren prance and posture on our national stage nowadays.To wit …
Heredity: A few historical markers of Uninformed Kindergarten Konservatism
The American Revolution.
Approximately one third of the colonial population supported the English King George the Third. These Konservatives wanted no disruption. Afraid or trying to hang on to what they felt England had granted them, they did not want national independence. These Kindergarten Konservatives were not our original patriots.
Original American Konservatives supported protection of slavery in our Constitutional Convention. They wanted to count slaves in determining which states would be “slave states” but did not desire that they be citizens with voting rights. These Kindergarten Konservatives in no way acted as Founding Fathers, rather as enforcers of their own power and influence at the expense of all others.
Our original Konservatives opposed tariffs to protect American manufacturing. In their Kindergarten-ness they were not able to understand any need to develop our own industrial base. They wanted no changes to a system based on cheap slave labor. They were not industrialists, but cash croppers – planters whose profits required no economic equality.
- Our historical Kindergarten Konservatives supported “nullification”, which said that states didn’t have to enforce federal laws they didn’t like. Sound familiar?
- Our original Kindergarten Konservatives supported repeal of the Missouri Compromise so as to allow slavery in other states where votes and political clout was more vital than common good.
- The ancestors of today’s Kindergarten Konservatives opposed the transcontinental railroad, primarily because railroads carried people who might want to work on their own land and who wouldn’t want or need slaves in the western territories because it might encourage small farmers who owned no slaves in future non-slave states.
- Which is why the Grandpas and Grandmas of today’s Kindergarten Konservatives were against the Homestead Act. They didn’t want more land-owners turning the American West into a collection of non-slave states.
- Those old Kindergarten Konservatives opposed freedom of speech for Southern opponents of slavery. Perish the thought that southern adults and children might hear something other than the Konservative gospel.
- And so Kindergarten Konservatives full of pretend patriotism and self-promoting civic piety disagreed with our sacred declaration that “all men are created equal.” Their Kindergarten civic ideology was that “the black man has no rights the white man is bound to respect.” (Dred Scott v. Sandford: quite possibly the most foolish Kindergarten Konservative legal decision in our national history) … which led to a Kindergarten Konservative support of destruction of the union rather than allow any restriction of slavery.
- Konservatives were opposed the earliest civil rights legislation to enforce the 14th and 15th amendments. They obstructed, intimidated and harassed newly freed slaves who attempted to exercise their Federal civil rights, including the right to vote … and considered themselves god-fearing, civic-minded moral patriots.
- Konservatives were against preserving the union. Back then they wanted secession and they got it.
- Konservatives were also aggressively and brutally opposed to industrial workers forming unions. Sound familiar?
- The ancestors of today’s Kindergarten Konservatives supported the acquisition of foreign colonies
Curmudgeon at Work 