What are your thoughts on “Red State Socialism”?

If a person says something untrue but believes it to be true, they are not lying. Lying requires that you know that what you are saying is untrue.

In similar manner, socialist right-leaning states can only be said to be hypocritical if they know that their politics run directly contrary to their reality. But most of them don't. And interestingly, that extends from a GOP smokescreen dating all the way back to 1930s.

When federal programmes such as Medicare were first implemented, the GOP immediately identified a real and present danger to their public policy: These programmes would deliver real, tangible, and highly desireable things to voters. Necesssary ones, but for the GOP the problem was that they would be popular. And that would put them on the political defensive. Even now, you will see ardent 'conservative' voters quickly reach a boil if they perceive any threat to government programmes they rely on.

The problem is, the GOP arranged it a long time ago so that they would not easily know that they're beneficiaries of government social programmes. Here's how they did it.

When Democrats moved to push through the original federal legislation creating these programmes, Republicans insisted that while the money would come from the feds, the States had to manage it domestically. That created an extra (and costly and completely unnecessary) layer of bureaucracy between the feds and the recipients that created the illusion that it was the States, rather than the feds, who were providing the benefits.

If you're indigent and need critical medical care, you will interact with an agency in your state that carries a name probably unique to your state. It won't be labelled what it really is, Medicare. Or if it is, it will be called Bigstate Medicare. Not just Medicare. Even though it's the same federal programme that operates in all states.

Compare to the NHS (the UK equivalent, though theirs is much larger and more comprehensive than ours). If you're in the smallest village in the furthest-flung corner of the UK, and you need medical help, you go to an NHS surgery. ('Surgery' is the UK term for a medical office, even a very small one.) You know without any doubt that you're obtaining national healthcare. But in the US, for nearly a century now, the GOP has made every effort to try to keep Americans blind to the fact that publicly subsidized healthcare is mostly or entirely federal in origin, and the federal programmes they routinely demonize and threaten to cut are the very same ones that their own constituents rely on.

And this is not the only example. Any time that federal money flows to constituents, the GOP has tried to disguise it as state or municipal largesss, rather than federal. And that's how brainless shit like this happens. (It's the biggest part of it, anyway. Some of these people are legtimately stupid, or at least appallingly ignorant.)

This smokescreen strategy has worked very well for the GOP for many years, so they've got no reason to change it. As long as low-information voters keep believing them, they'll keep doing it, because it's part of their successful election strategy, just like computer-enhanced gerrymandering. An enormous number of American voters don't know that the ACA they rely on for their critical medical coverage and "Obamacare" are the same thing. (This video was not shot in Kansas, either. It was shot in Hollywood. Obviously, they selected only the people who didn't know the difference. The point is, those people are easy to find, because there are so many of them.)

Pretty much since the time of FDR, the GOP has relied more and more on the fact that a lot of voters are either not very well informed, or aren't very bright. Or are just huge assholes.

/r/AskALiberal Thread