Okay, chuckleheads. I’m only going to explain this once. Responding to an article that asks why you’re angry in the title by posting angry comments on the paper’s webpage exactly proves my point. I was giving you an out in the last article; I specifically pushed buttons so that you could say “oh, he’s just trying to make me angry, so responding to it would only make me look the fool. I will not give him the satisfaction.” But instead you decided to answer the question “why are you so angry” by shouting “I’ll show YOU how NOT ANGRY I AM!”
And I just don’t know where to go after that. I really didn’t expect to win that easily; is this really the best conservatism can offer these days? Easily debunkable, wildly contradictory pre-packaged talking points that not only disprove each other, but sometimes even disprove themselves? There used to be a time, not so long ago, where people on the right weren’t this easy to defeat. Do they still exist, or is an Eisenhower Republican the same as a mainline Democrat these days? And if the leadership of the two main parties (who essentially have the run of the place due to the way our system is set up) are pretty darn close in ideas, and those ideas are almost always some variation of “let’s give the rich more tax breaks and surely they will save us,” where are the other 98% of folks in this country supposed to turn to find someone who actually represents them?
This current situation isn’t really surprising. Every investor will tell you it’s silly to put all your eggs in one basket, so as soon as politics opened up to the big money you saw them diversify their portfolio and, in less than 40 years, you’ve got this mess where the two major parties argue about what color ribbon they should put on the gift they give Bezos while the rest of us struggle to make ends meet. Elements of both parties love the rich while pretending to support the “middle class” (a made-up term that can cover folks making anywhere from 50,000 a year to 150,000 depending on how you define it) and we wind up fighting each other for three crumbs, desperate to find a way to prove that we’re “better” than that guy over there who only has two crumbs.
Luckily, Minnesota has a long history of telling “conventional political wisdom” to take a hike: Mondale, Ventura, Olson, Anderson, and consistently sending some progressive people to state and federal office via the Democratic-Farmer-Labor party, a group formed through a fusion of the almost invisible Minnesota Democrats with the massively popular Farmer-Labor party in 1944. We even used to have some decent Republicans back in the day, although today I see lots of sons of rich men and grandstanding chumps who seem not to care how much district folks suffer as long as their name is on enough bills. But I’m not going to pretend like anyone’s perfect… it’s just that it’s becoming pretty darn clear that “The Forgotten Men” talked about in 2016 are becoming pretty darn forgotten ever since.
I get it. It’s no fun admitting you were wrong. But once you start, you find that it’s actually pretty relaxing. Heck, I supported Biden back in ‘08, so I know a thing or two about eating crow these days, but trust me, it all gets better once you stop worrying about being “right” and start asking yourself what can be done to help your family and your neighbors. Who really benefits from property taxes going down? Not someone renting. Who really benefits from Social Security Income taxes going down? Not people on Social Security. Who benefits from using the phrase “middle class” over “working class”? People that really don’t want all the workers to realize they outnumber the bosses… and that the bosses have had their fingers in the cookie jar for 40 years. Come on over and let’s work together to make things better for everyone, not scream at strangers about how good things are for you personally because, in the end, it doesn’t even matter.
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