Who Is Behind the Conservative Backlash?

According to the news, there are a lot of organized gatherings and demonstrations of conservatives who are angry. A few weeks ago we heard of the shouting at health care reform meetings held by congressmen; and there were the "tea parties."

I said then and I say again that these groups are largely staged. Last night (11/2), on ABC News NightLine, Terry Moran interviewed Dick Armey, who used to be a (very conservative) congressman from Texas and is now organizing these protests. He refused to answer Terry's questions about corporate funding of his organization.

If he doesn't want to discuss something, that certainly looks like he does not want the answer revealed. U.S. corporations, almost without exception, take a conservative position: for example less government regulation, lower corporate (and personal) taxes. And wealthy Americans also want to hold on to their money, rather than allow the government to take some of it and spread it around; so these people naturally support—and very handsomely fund—right-wing causes. I have to think that many Americans—those in these groups and demonstrations that we are seeing—if they are truly the "little" or "average" Americans that they claim to be, are being made dupes by these corporate interests. They are saying they want to hold onto their money—though I don't see Obama raising taxes—and their guns and their freedom. I don't see that the threats that they are afraid of are real ones; they have been manufactured by cynical conservative and corporate interests.

Large U. S. corporations are caught in a dilemma and are playing a dangerous game. On the one hand they are supporting and probably in fact organizing (if indirectly) these gatherings and protests. But the protests are protesting "Obama-nomics" measures such as bailouts of banks and corporations. Corporations are aiding, abetting, and even organizing protests against "big government" when government policies have in fact benefitted them. Their game must be subtle, devious, and cynical. I think it's, "Anything for the larger conservative cause, and against a liberal president, even if some of those policies have benefitted us."

I have to think that, although the business-corporate and banking-investment communities have benefitted from bailouts under the Obama administration, in spite of this fact they still would not want to in any way be supportive of a Democratic administration because they believe they would pay a price of being more closely regulated under a Democratic administration, whereas Republicans are traditionally—some say notoriously—in favor of laissez-faire.

The little guy or average American who we see in these protesting crowds somehow fails to see, or forgets, that the Republican party is the party of those who have wealth and power—the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant heterosexual male—and want to hold on to it.

Copyright (c) 2009 by Richard Stein