How Repugs Hide Their Creepy Reality

With euphemisms as deceptive as their promises are mendacious.

Kathleen Geier at Political Animal has the definitive translations: 

But the other big reason for conservatives to rely so heavy on abstractions is that most people disagree with the real-life implications of those abstractions, and conservatives, for marketing purposes, want to soothe voters’ anxieties by covering that up. Consider the ugly reality behind that list of abstractions above:

“Small government” = No Social Security, Medicare, or unemployment benefits, or at the very least, radically reduced versions of same. It also means the rich and corporations paying little or no taxes, and ordinary people paying more. In other words, pretty much no social insurance or wealth redistribution, no matter how frightening the degree of economic instability or how obscene the level of economic inequality.

“States’ rights” = Racism. Period. Though I guess these days it could also mean homophobia.

“Family values” = Women being discouraged from having careers and encouraged to depend on and constantly defer to men, gay people not being able to marry the people they love, people being heavily pressured to get married early and to stay married even if they’re deeply unhappy being so, no unapproved sexytimes whatsoever (e.g., no sex before marriage, no extramarital sex, no homosex, etc.), heavy censorship of media that deals with sexual themes.

“Judicial restraint” = Bringing back the 19th century, more or less. In particular, it means no right to privacy (including no right to contraception or abortion), no rights for women, gays or nonwhites, and the court having the power to strike down any laws involving regulations on the private sector or redistributive public policies they don’t like (be they the New Deal policies or ACA).

“Free markets” = No minimum wage and no rights for workers. The right for all of us to be “free” of consumer safety laws (for food, drugs, other products). And as the economistDean Baker likes to point out, it never means a truly free market in patent and intellectual property laws, or the freedom for professional class workers from other countries to emigrate here.

“Right to work” = Union Busting Iz Us, or, as my friends in the labor movement like to say, the “right to work for nothing.” 

Read the whole thing.

And call them out with what they really mean every time you hear them trot out one of these rhetorical lies.