Sunday, August 23, 2015

This Man Must Be a Self-Fulfilling Prophet

Why does this meme-maker write as though most of "2010's America" didn't support government-run healthcare, expanding Social Security, raising taxes on the rich, and all those other "socialist" programs and policies? Why do people who think that they're smarter than Republitards accept and spread the corporate media / Republicrat propaganda line that the US today is right-wing? Yes, there are people who want to eliminate social programs, but they are a minority. Often they are even a minority of Republicans.  To talk as though they represented America in this decade is not only dishonest, it's siding with them by taking their claims as fact.
 
And it's not as if there weren't many in 1930s America who opposed the New Deal. FDR had to work against a lot of opposition. Probably about the same proportion of the population. Much of the opposition that didn't come from the wealthy came from working-class whites who didn't want the New Deal programs to help blacks -- in other words, to prevent the enactment of any program that would benefit anyone beside themselves. This meme perpetrates historical ignorance, and worse, misinformation.  It also encourages liberals and progressives to believe that the obstacles to improving life for most Americans come from the vast majority of Americans, thus giving themselves an excuse for failure in advance.  As Whatever It Is I'm Against It wrote of their hero and role model, "It’s pretty much always Obama’s working assumption that he will lose any fight. And then, funnily enough, he does."