Dumb GOP Propaganda Long Ago Conflated Essential Infrastructure With ‘Socialism’

Politics

from the absolutely-everything-I-don't-like-is-radical-socialism dept

There’s a routine assumption that U.S. partisan division is something that’s just inherent in the American DNA. In reality, the nation’s divisions are routinely and intentionally cultivated and encouraged by powerful and wealthy individuals and corporations to stall consensus and reform. Both parties are culpable, though it’s the GOP that has perfected the tactic as an art form.

Take broadband for example. A bipartisan majority of Americans hate Comcast or their local cable company and support any efforts to challenge that monopoly power. But any time anybody attempts to do absolutely anything to challenge that power you’ll notice a lot of rhetoric about how those efforts are “socialism,” “government run amok,” or “radically partisan.”

It doesn’t matter what we’re doing to hold telecom monopolies accountable. It could be encouraging net neutrality, blocking problematic mergers, holding AT&T accountable for fraud… it’s all very quickly framed through a partisan lens despite the fact it’s not at all actually partisan, and a significant bipartisan majority of Americans support the efforts to try something smarter and better.

The same dumb gamesmanship infects our national conversations about improving our failing infrastructure. Everybody wants their roads, bridges, airports, and utilities to function well, but key corporations often aren’t as keen. Comcast doesn’t want increased broadband competition. Oil giants don’t much care for solar power. The auto industry doesn’t much care for mass transit.

So again, they infect the discourse with claims that absolutely any effort to try and improve anything is somehow radically political. Corporate giants (see again AT&T and Comcast) prey on partisan disdain for taxation (despite they themselves being a massive beneficiary of wasteful taxpayer subsidization). They suggest that policies common across the world are themselves somehow partisan and radical.

And it almost always works, and has worked for the better part of fifty years. The GOP in particular has long been a useful marionette in this little game we play, and did so once again in the wake of the infrastructure bill — using partisan division to sow disdain among their base, while simultaneously taking credit for the very real improvements the bill will bring to the everyday lives of their constituents.

From Ted Cruz to Ron DeSantis, a vast majority of the GOP opposed and maligned the bill, then turned right around and took direct credit with their constituents for the benefits the bills created. In this way, they get to have their cake and eat it too; they get to rile up their base with sordid tales of radical “left wing” government policy (like, gasp, essential bridge repair), yet simultaneously benefit from the very obvious benefits the legislation transferred to real Americans.

It’s idiotic but effective artifice. The GOP didn’t just vote against the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, they used its passage to malign their political opponents, rile up the base, agitate and distract the public, and generally urinate in the discourse pool. Then they turned right around and wrote letters begging the Biden administration for their share of the essential funding for key projects:

Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar, a leading Biden critic who explained his vote against what he called a “phony” infrastructure bill by issuing a statement that “this bill only serves to advance the America Last’s socialist agenda, while completely lacking fiscal responsibility,” wrote three separate letters between March and July advocating for projects in his district. They’d enhance quality of life, Gosar wrote. They’d ease congestion and boost the economy. They’d alleviate bottlenecks and improve rural living conditions.

On one hand, their covert approval of the infrastructure bills still result in better outcomes for the constituents (the broadband bill alone is going to deliver more than $50 billion in improved service across the country). But the bad faith bullshit employed with the other hand creates untold damage in terms of trust in government, belief in policy, and any effort to actually get anything done.

It’s all an extension of the propaganda and culture war gibberish that has become a cornerstone of GOP power. All promoted by a AM radio/Fox News/Sinclair/YouTube propaganda apparatus it took the GOP and major corporations the better part of the last forty years to build. That, in turn, is an extension of corporate power, and its entire function is to agitate the public, sow distrust, and erode meaningful consensus and reform on the most foundational of issues that actually have widespread support.

And you see its “success” absolutely everywhere you look in policy. To the point where words like “socialism” have lost all coherent meaning. What you won’t see as much of are intelligent solutions to any of it. In large part because the dysfunction remains immensely profitable.

Filed Under: airports, broadband, disinformation, hypcorisy, infrastructure, mass transit, propaganda, socialism