Junior O’Daniel: We can’t do that, Daddy. We might offend our constituency.
Gov. Pappy O’Daniel: We ain’t got a constituency! — “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”
What happens if you are a major political party, and wake up one day to find out you “ain’t got a constituency?”
Behold the future of the GOP, whose “constituency” is presumably working, taxpaying Americans. The Democrats? Americans dependent on government for their livelihoods and sustenance, of course (native and imported).
And the Biden administration is determined to grow that constituency. How else to explain, in addition to throwing open the floodgates to invaders whose first order of business is to sign up for government benefits, the “winning” agenda of massively growing the “green” renewable sector at the expense of fossil fuels and forgiving student loans, while unleashing IRS marauders on upper- and middle-income taxpayers?
Mitt Romney, bless his heart, saw it coming back in 2012. “There are 47% of the people who will vote for (Barack Obama) no matter what,” he told a fundraiser in a widely panned but accurate disquisition. “Who are dependent upon government … who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. … Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax. So our message of low taxes doesn’t connect.”
The Democrats are working overtime from both ends to get that figure closer to 100%.
Job 1: Get people hooked on programs that gradually increase the level of government involvement and then take over altogether, while increasing the cost of private goods and services.
Take Obamacare (please). As this commentator once noted, Ted Cruz fought that monstrosity based on his belief that President Barack Obama’s “strategy is to get as many Americans as possible hooked on the subsidies, addicted to the sugar. … If we get to Jan. 1 (2014), this thing is here forever.”
As further noted on these virtual pages a fortnight hence, Obamacare repeal was wiped out in a revenge vote by John McCain. And further further noted last week (citing the Wall Street Journal), the COVID-driven acceleration of expansion of Medicaid and federal exchanges are a stealth (your correspondent would argue not-so-stealth) takeover of health care.
The Democrats don’t need “Medicare for All.” Medicaid and Obamacare for Nearly All are rapidly transporting them to their destination.
What about Inflation Reduction Act initiatives to further boost “green” energy? They’re about eliminating businesses and jobs that don’t need government help (read: control) in favor of those that do. From this perspective, renewables’ need for humongous, infinite federal lifelines to survive is not a bug – it’s the proverbial “sticky app.”
Democrats have figured out that thanks to the magic of “climate change,” they needn’t nationalize oil fields like other autocrats to command this sector so utterly vital to America’s economic success and way of life.
Rather, they’ll shut down the abundantly productive U.S. fossil fuel sector and grow industries that are born nationalized, sucking at the government teat and so unfeasible they can never let go. Anyone who works in solar or wind – and most likely, electric cars that will need immense incentives even to approach near-impossible 2035 goals of market domination – will owe their jobs and allegiance to Uncle Sam.
And as energy poverty sweeps the land with skyrocketing electricity and car prices, well, all the more reason to subsidize and be gatekeepers to renewables’ output, too.
Student loan forgiveness? Hmmm. Suppose one wanted upper-income elites (to the extent you have any left) dependent on government, too. Might one not start off with free college educations, implying, as in Europe, authority over to who gets in and what they study?
And to get to free college educations, employ aid programs driving cost-push inflation to the extent that they become unaffordable for all but the wealthiest families, forcing others into loans?
Might one not then take over the loan programs to direct access to those funds? Then enter into a limited forgiveness when costs (and repayments) you helped inflate get overwhelming? And then, given the outcry over limiting eligibility, continually expand those forgiveness programs just as health care “sugar” keeps mushrooming? Doesn’t that start to look a lot like free college educations and another “stealth” government takeover?
Finally, there’s the new planned swarm of revenooers, which everyone assumes is intended to vacuum up more cash to pay for federal largess.
But what if the actual idea is to make existence so expensive and miserable for private business owners and employees that they throw in the towel and go into favored “nationalized” sectors? And not just to finance programs, but intentionally suck the private sector dry of resources to further grow dependency on the Nanny State?
What if, channeling Margaret Thatcher, America wakes up and has not only run out of other people’s money but out of the other people – e.g. taxpayers – who have provided it? That day in which Democrats have bought so many voters and exhausted so many others that the Republican Party really doesn’t “got a constituency?”
Is November 2022 too soon?
Pappy O’Daniel, move over and warm up the biscuits. You could have company.
Bob Maistros is a messaging and communications strategist, crisis specialist and former political speechwriter. He can be reached at bob@rpmexecutive.com.
