Politics
Out of context: Reply #26856
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- allthethings0
I was thinking about "us" vs "them" last night, specifically about how this lady on Twitter, during a conversation about healthcare, said, basically, "I work for what I get," painting people like me who believe in basic healthcare as a right as sucking on the government teat.
I hate all the talk about "entitlements." The right calls social security an entitlement. It's your own fucking money! It's been taken out of your check for 50 years, and then eventually you get it back. It's the government's way to sneakily tax people at the same time that it keeps hundreds of thousands of sick, old people off the streets.
The right has done a really good job of making the working middle class and some working poor angry at the people as poor as them or poorer, that they're lazy and "just don't want to work." But the fact is the Republican healthcare bill (and most other tax-oriented bills) screw all of those groups so they keep most of the money. I think this is proof that Democrats, who moved to the center in 1992 and have run scared of Republican efforts to paint them as socialists since about 1946, need to reclaim the mantle of the party of the worker. They have to reframe this narrative, say to the working poor that the "us" is the 99 percent, and the "them" is the 1%...right, this is what Occupy and Bernie were all about...but it means peeling away those people voting R because they've always voted R, or hate Hillary, or fear blacks, or whatever. Each of the faulty R-driven narratives about welfare queens have to systematically undermined, but in way that says "we have solidarity with workers," not that one of the baskets of poor whites is labeled "deplorables."
Healthcare should be the easiest to reframe: Healthcare is expensive, and rich people want to keep it all for themselves. Just like Congress votes to keep its own healthcare and says it's accessible to you if you can pay for it.
I know many of you have already thought all this. I'm just trying to keep myself sane writing it down.