The White Suburban Myth

The damage racism causes goes beyond the continuing abuse of non-whites, beyond the deranged hatred of President Obama that paralyzes Washington, all the way to the fundamental lie supporting every repug politician.

David Atkins, thereisnospoon, at Hullabaloo:

And Perry and Bachmann are the conservative candidates trying to win election by promising to raise the taxes of the very constituency to which they are trying to appeal. None of this would make sense if the issue in question were being determined based on rational self-interest and economic motivation. But it isn't. This is a cultural issue for Perry and Bachmann.

At its heart lies the myth of the white suburban taxpayer being gouged to support blacks and Latinos in urban areas. Even though all the data shows that urban counties pay the bills of suburban and rural counties, and more urban states pay the bills of rural states, still the myth continues. It's so pervasive that you see phenomena like red counties in California wanting to secede to create their own state, using "fiscal responsibility" as a talking point--even though the suburban counties in question are net drains on the state, while the Los Angeles and San Francisco counties from which they want to secede are net providers.

There is a mass delusion in whitebread suburban America that they are the real America, and that they are being oppressed by high taxes to pay for poor minorities, even though the reality is actually the reverse: urban centers pay the bills for parasitic suburban lifestyles, which are ultimately unsustainable socially, fiscally and environmentally.

Matt Taibbi called it best:

It would be inaccurate to say the Tea Partiers are racists. What they are, in truth, are narcissists. They’re completely blind to how offensive the very nature of their rhetoric is to the rest of the country. I’m an ordinary middle-aged guy who pays taxes and lives in the suburbs with his wife and dog — and I’m a radical communist? I don’t love my country? I’m a redcoat? Fuck you! These are the kinds of thoughts that go through your head as you listen to Tea Partiers expound at awesome length upon their cultural victimhood, surrounded as they are by America-haters like you and me or, in the case of foreign-born president Barack Obama, people who are literally not Americans in the way they are.

It’s not like the Tea Partiers hate black people. It’s just that they’re shockingly willing to believe the appalling horseshit fantasy about how white people in the age of Obama are some kind of oppressed minority. That may not be racism, but it is incredibly, earth-shatteringly stupid.

They're the sort of people who can suck up the nation's tax dollars, while pretending to be Ayn Rand's Atlas, holding up the entire world on their shoulders, desperate to shrug off the parasitic riffraff for a change. Even when they themselves are the actual riffraff. The less-educated conservatives who will vote for Perry and Bachmann see themselves as oppressed taxpayers even when they are in the 47% that Perry and Bachmann promised to tax, because they don't see themselves as a member of that economic class. The "poor who pay no taxes" aren't them: they're of a different race, in a different place filled with rap music and urban blight. They're not real Americans who drive trucks and SUVs, and do their shopping at Wal-Mart.

Progressive elites can spend all day and all night proving how wrong Perry and Bachmann are about the economic facts. But they're wasting their time, because this argument, much as it appears to be based on economics, is actually based on racism and cultural resentment.

SNIP

If progressives want to deal with the economic zombie lie Bachmann and Perry are perpetuating, they'll focus less on the broad economic realities of rich and poor, and more on smashing the lie that underpins most of the narcissistic conservative worldview.

They will point out that most majority-white rural, suburban and exurban communities, far from being economic producers carrying the weight of America's taxes on their shoulders, are actually parasitic drains on the economy. And that the economic overlords on Wall St. intend to squeeze them to death just as surely as any inner-city minority community in their relentless pursuit of profit. Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry will lead them happily to the slaughterhouse on behalf of the big money rancher--and they'll go willingly, assuming that the undernourished brown and black cows who are supposedly getting all their food will be the only ones coming out as hamburger.

I live in the exurbs between two metropolitan areas. My lifestyle is supported by interstate highways, city water lines, public schools and rural post offices that would be impossible if those of us who benefited from them had to pay for them. The cities we ran away from pay for the public services that allow us to enjoy our big houses on secluded tracts but still drive quickly and conveniently to the city to work and shop.

Liberals know who really pays for what in this country, and don't let racist zombie lies invade our political discourse.