DISILLUSIONED CONSERVATIVE VOTERS

Everyday more and more people deny voting Republican; they don't say it but they are disillusioned. The easiest thing to do is to “disillusion” a conservative because of inherent conflicts in their basic political philosophy. Most of the conflicts are obvious. The prime one is that they want to pay less tax, but do not want “their” benefits cut. The entire Tea Party based their organization on the first one-half of this thought—Taxed Enough Already and ignore the fact that most people do not want their government benefits cuts . . . the last half.

I was enchanted by the details of how this all plays out in the newly minted Republican majority in North Carolina, for example, which can serve as a practical example to explain this. Thom Tillis a radical right wing political leader and his cohort in the senate Phil Burger, have used their new found majority to slash schools budgets, moved to destroy teacher tenure, cut taxes on industries and the rich. In addition, they cut income tax on everyone and compensated for the decrease in state revenue by increasing sales tax. What this legislative “slight of hand” does is shift the tax burden to the working class and removes it from the economic elite, the people who paid Tillis’s and Burger’s election costs: greedy people as Art Pope, Koch Brothers, etc. Actually, what the legal manipulation does is pay them back ten to one hundred fold for their expense of corrupting the state electoral process.

Cutting school budgets is an example of cutting something the people want, which is public education including good salaries for teachers and labor unions, while trying to create an illusion of cutting taxes. Now, all the Republican ads are asking for political credit for cutting taxes and working to raise teachers’ salaries. All voters, including Republicans, are disillusioned; their party state government has caught them up in their own trap. They see public schools deteriorating, teachers buying schools supplies out of their meager salaries, and school choice increasing for the rich but not for them. Our teachers are so poorly paid they are now fleeing the state in droves—rather than change jobs, dedicated teachers want to teach more than anything else but they have to eat. All voters see their school going to hell and the cost of living increasing but seem not to know why. Somehow, good conservative Republicans believe they could have it both ways but are disillusioned; life is not like that.

They know what they are doing. They want to destroy Social Security that prevents old age poverty; they want to destroy Obamacare that makes affordable health care available; they want to destroy government regulations as they apply to the economic elite, but they don’t want to the people to benefit from the taxes they pay.  If the people realized they are benefiting from paying taxes, they might want more benefits and more taxes. If they realize they are benefiting from government services, they might want more government services, hence more government, which would be an economic nightmare for the economic elite. The people might even become so disillusioned they might even—horror of all horrors — “hate” a President who advocated helping out the people in this way.    

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