Matt Yglesias has this tendency to apologize for behavior even as he demolishes it. He published a great example of this earlier this morning, AEI Chief: To Win Latino Votes, the GOP Needs an Agenda to Help Poor People. That sounds fantastic and almost unbelievable. The head of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, Arthur Brooks, understands that in order to appeal to Latinos, the GOP needs to help the poor? That’s great! I’ve been arguing the same thing for a long time.
Alas, that isn’t what he said at all. After laying out what Brooks has to say, Yglesias adds, “The problem, of course, is that Brooks’ proposed solution looks an awful lot like nothing more than reframing.” And of course, that is Brooks solution. Conservatives love to talk about all the opportunities that they want to create for the poor. But when it gets down to actions, those opportunities end up being nothing more than the opportunities for the rich to exploit them.
Brooks in fact says that he wants the poor to know that they are not the cause of our fiscal problems. Instead, it is those evil middle class people. And by cutting Social Security and Medicare, there will be plenty of money for the poor. Well, Brooks has a different definition or “poor” than I do. I think roughly half the country is poor. Brooks is more of the “if they have a microwave oven they can’t be poor” school of thought.
Yglesias goes after the reality of the Republican Party in terms of how it wants to “reform” the budget:
Not exactly a “protect the poor” agenda. But Yglesias goes on to speculate what Brooks is really doing. Is he trying to push the GOP in the right direction? Is he just clueless? I think Yglesias nailed it at the beginning of article. Brooks is just another good Republican soldier, out there trying to claim that they really want to help the poor without, you know, actually helping the poor.
It is also interesting that Brooks employs racist Charles Murray who only yesterday wrote a defense of fellow racist, with particular attention to Latinos, Jason Richwine. So this is really just SOP for the conservative movement. And that is all clear from Yglesias’ article. Yet he still tries to argue that maybe, in some alternate dark matter universe that I have no access to, the Republicans really are trying to change into something a little less evil. If it makes the young blogger happy, I guess it is okay. But the rest of us don’t need to buy his happy horseshit. His hard nosed analysis destroys it anyway.
