Echidne the Effete Elitist

I always admire the Republicans' ability to define the terms in our public conversations. How they do it! Take, for instance, the concept of the liberal elites who apparently govern this country from shore to shining shore, except that they barely manage to hang on to those shores. They are a mean-spirited bunch, looking down on the masses from their ivory towers, and the only kind of populism that works against them is a right-wing one. Like tea parties.

David Brooks likes to talk about us, the effete liberal elitists (yes, I want to belong!). We are incredibly powerful and sneaky. We are so powerful that we tend to lose elections all the time, but that's neither here or there. We are still the ones in power, though we do it without money or access to the mainstream media and with odd demands which really don't help us personally that much. But the Republicans know better! We don't demand social justice or fairness or shit like that because we would believe in those concepts. No. We demand those things because that way we get lots of money for our research projects and for our blogs and for all those television companies which have nothing but liberal propaganda on.

Which reminds me that you should send me some money. Right now I'm making a loss on this here effete elitist blog. And Soros never answers my e-mails, never.

If this sounds to you as if it could apply to feminists, too, you are quite correct. But feminists are several grades more radioactive than liberals, and therefore much more in power than anyone has been able to understand! It must be the feminists who are trying to make miscarriage into a crime in some states and it must be the feminists who are demanding that women wanting abortions must first go to crisis pregnancy center for non-medical information.

Must be the feminists. (Did you know that universities get a payment for each female student they take in? That's the reason why better qualified men are not admitted. The things one mis-learns on the net!) Or the effete liberal elitists.

So this is the world in which we all desperately paddle our little boats. In that same world Barack Obama, the second-best Republican president ever, is called a communist or perhaps an Islamofascist. In that world the tea-party is not a new rising of the crusted center of the extreme right but a brand new movement, a breath of fresh air, one wishing to blow over the ossified institutions of the evil state.

And in that world the new Republican governors all practice disaster capitalism by trying to kill the unions and by trying to roll back women's reproductive choices as fast as it can be managed. If there IS a conspiracy somewhere it sure looks like it is on the other side of the aisle, not among the liberal elites.

Ezra Klein points out that the majority of our real elites vote Republican.

Just think of that! It puts the miracle of the Republican framing into a proper perspective. Of course it also suggests that all those lower-income people who voted for Republicans were had, unless they are happy with the idea of putting the women and the minorities back into their proper places. Because that is all they are going to get from their overlords.