It stands to reason that some form of the incomprehensibly odious "prosperity gospel" would factor in there (it's pathetically hilarious how the plutocratic right attempts to square this with Jesus' dead-obvious "camel through a needle's eye" statement by making up some utter bullshit that he was actually talking about some obscure city gate), but to focus back in on my main point, this is precisely the sort of thing that conventional wisdom says the mythical "reasonable wing" of the right and/or "center" should be absolutely up in arms over; it's essentially a holy-roller variation on Friedman's horrific "greed is good" doctrine, which all of the "populists" motivated by genuine material concerns should supposedly also be up in arms over, but mysteriously never actually are. And that's before you even get into the whole "trampling even harder on the separation of church and state" angle (which, in case it needs saying, should, if anything, alarm religious people more than secular ones).Sengoku Strider wrote:It'll just be something along the lines of "When your heart is truly guided by God, you always walk in the light" etc. Christian nationalists start from a quasi-Calvinist premise that white Americans are God's true chosen as evidenced by American abundance, and work backwards from that. So whatever benefits their way of life must be ultimately right by default.
I just don't get how someone who considers himself "even-minded" when it comes to politics can hear this sort of thing being said, proudly and out in the open, to thunderous applause - and not out on the fringes, but by CPAC's keynote speaker, with supposedly "mainstream" politicians present and grinning ear-to-ear all the while - and not say to himself "...yeah, whatever the opposition's problems might be, this just isn't a viable option anymore". Somehow, though, it just keeps on happening. Somehow.
Off to the side, I recently stumbled onto a YouTube video where the speaker, noting that 60 or 70 people own around 50 percent of global wealth, expresses concerns that the centuries-old tradition of individuals and corporations commanding private mercenary armies completely unanswerable to any law may well make a comeback; once he got around to the "how to mitigate this" section, he focused almost entirely on tweaking the market to disincentivize the creation of such private armies; literally nowhere in his analysis did the notion of "redistribute wealth enough so nobody can ever have enough for a private army in the first place" ever come up. I seriously couldn't believe it.
Then again, "analysts" are howling that the inflation reduction legislation currently in the works is actually a sham because the wealthy corporations targeted to pay for it will, as always, simply pass on any and all increased cost of doing business to the rest of us - as if the notion of prohibiting them from doing that, as the country has done numerous times before, is completely alien and verboten. And again, somehow, they're not being instantly laughed off the stage as they deliberately stick their heads up their own asses for the world to see.
