It happens at least a handful of times every week: I talk Math and nobody listens. By Math, I mean what politics really boils down to: fundraising, economic clashes, working class versus rich, unions versus corporations, simplified to the extreme: money. The political feud between Democrats and Republicans isn’t some lofty war of morals like gay rights, women’s rights, abortions, saving the planet, etc. It is actually not much more sophisticated than the Hatfield’s versus the McCoy’s fighting over a property line.
Republicans think the economy runs on the wealthy, the producer, and Democrats know the economy runs on the other 99 percent, the consumers. Republicans think that the more money that flows to the top of the mountain, the more money can flow back down to create jobs, blah, blah, blah, or at least pretend to think that so they can get their hands on more money. Democrats know a simpler solution: Just give money directly to the people you want to give money to. So the Democrats policy of economic inclusion and fighting income inequality has naturally lent itself to attract like minded causes over the years like women’s rights, civil rights, gay rights, and other people looking for equality. It has become a big tent where the Republican core has stayed stubbornly narrow: trying to stop people. Trying to stop people from organizing unions, to stop gays from getting married, to stop women from having abortions (and sometimes even birth control), trying to stop “liberal” activists from replacing filthy fossil fuels with renewable energy, trying to stop people from having more access to healthcare, and most importantly trying to stop the government from taxing corporations and rich individuals.
Of course you can’t cut their taxes without essentially piling on a “tax” to middleclass Americans like cutting police pay, teacher benefits, firemen’s pensions, entitlements to elderly/poor people/single mothers, etc. The changes the Tea Party led Republicans are making this year alone are outrageous, but the trouble is no one gives a shit. I won’t say no one cares, as protesters in Wisconsin demonstrate some people are ready to raise hell. But the majority of Americans and especially the majority of the liberal base are horribly uninterested in Math.
Time and time again I have tried to have an economic conversation with fellow liberals that essentially boils down to Math, Republicans are defunding (a word guaranteed to lose a liberal’s interest) this, they’re breaking up unions because they’re Democrats largest fundraisers that, the GOP’s essential economic philosophy boils down to a pyramid scheme, etc. And 4 times out of 5, almost without fail, I will see a liberal voter’s eyes glaze over until the word “abortion,” “gay marriage,” or anything about the environment is mentioned, at which point they spring into action.
By nature liberals are just not going to be as good at Math as the fiscal conservatives that run Wall Street or Fortune 500 companies. We just aren’t programmed to want to look at a spreadsheet all day or even hear the word spreadsheet without seriously getting bored. However, this is a huge downside that basically means liberal voters have seceded from a lot of economic issues under the guise they’re not “qualified” to really talk about them, and smarter people will figure it out.
If there’s one thing we learned from the great recession it’s that smarter heads than ours are not necessarily in charge of the economic sector, and that we could easily catch up to their knowledge of all things financial if only we took the time to learn it. It’s just a lack of interest in the topic that’s holding us back, not a magic key that would unlock the mysteries of credit default swaps before us. I’ll start you out with your first lesson, and ironically enough it features the Democrats (the party of “Yes We Can”) saying no and trying to stop something. Republicans=breaking up unions to cut employee pay across the board to give tax cuts to their corporate backers, Democrats=trying to stop them.