Let us bluster you to sleep

The only thing our Right Wing politicians have learned is bluff and bluster.

All those years of organizing support has led on occasion to slim majorities in both houses. The White House was won with each Republican victory by slim margins that reflected more than anything else, a lack of success by Democrats to get out the vote. The Democratic party has learned the hard way that one cannot take for granted any voting district anywhere in the country.

Republicans have never had anything like the solid working majorities of the New Deal and Great Society. The foundation of their so-called “working majorities” has been nothing but bluff and bluster.

Truth be told, if you pay attention to far right politicians – MAGA or otherwise – they do not for the most part talk about their policies. There is little positive to share. Best example is the childish appeals to childish moral voters who think the world revolves around an imaginary heavenly friend who has elevated abortion issues above any other common sense consideration.

Conservative propagandizers seem to be better sales persons that their Democratic counterparts. Although they are selling a moral and civic inferior product and do so with slogans, labels and epithets.

Any expenditure of public resources for the benefit of ordinary citizens is “socialism”. It is not merely bad policy. It is illegitimate. It is “tyranny”. Some of the most extreme conservatives regard even public education as “creeping communism”.

The fact is that no cause supported by conservatives ever stood a chance in a fair fight. So they dress themselves as pretend patriots and disingenuously explain to the public how their brand of corporate feudalism is really the “true vision” of American society. The conservative agenda can only succeed if it is the “only” agenda.

Progressives must be made illegitimate. What tactical labels are used to accomplish this sleight of hand? Progressives apparently represent of something the right wing calls the “counter culture”. They are “outside the mainstream” and don’t reflect “American values”.

The defensiveness in response to Right Wing name-calling is a serious mistake because it concedes the cultural high ground to the conservatives who have not right to it and certainly have not earned it. By doing so it legitimizes the conservative pretense to representing “pure” American values. Let them get away with these junior high school bully tactics at your own risk.