Focusing Only on the Rich is a Mistake

WHY IT'S NOT ENOUGH TO JUST FOCUS ON BEING AGAINST THE CORPORATIONS/RICH

by John Spritzler

October 13, 2018, updated February 24, 2022

The URL of this article for sharing it is https://www.pdrboston.org/focusing-only-on-the-rich-is-a-mist

I monitor conservative talk radio. I listen to it carefully (not just to rant to myself in anger). I do this in order to learn how exactly the conservative media appeal to their audience, how they maximize their persuasiveness.

I've written about this in my article, "How the Ruling Class Sets Progressives Up to Fail." But here's something I didn't mention in that article.

Conservative talk radio hosts frequently bad mouth the rich, the corporations!

It is NOT just the liberals/progressives/Leftists who say very bad things about the rich/corporations. Not at all.

The conservative talk radio hosts accuse big corporations of actually liking and profiting from the fact that there are lots of illegal immigrants because they use them for cheap labor and to drive down the wages of American citizens. (They never talk about how Big Money has been doing things for decades to deliberately FORCE people to illegally immigrate, but that's another story.)

Listen here, for example, to the Fox News chief right-winger, Tucker Carlson, lambaste the upper class for attacking the working class.

The conservative talk radio hosts frequently blame Big Money for making life harder for the regular people in their audience. There is very little love lost between the conservative talk radio listeners and the big corporations. Nor is there very much love lost between these listeners and most politicians, even Republican ones.

Here's my point. The ruling class (that controls both the liberal and conservative media) knows very well that it is never going to make ordinary people love the rich/corporations. Its strategy doesn't require making people love the rich. Not at all.

The ruling class strategy merely requires turning about half the have-nots against the other half; making each half despise and fear the other half. Fox News and the liberal media work hand in hand to do this, as you can see here (in examples #1 to #9). This is all the ruling class needs to do to stay in power: divide-and-rule.

Time for a cartoon: The very worried King and his calm advisor are on the balcony of the castle, overlooking a huge crowd of super angry peasants with pitch forks and scythes. The advisor says to the king, "No problem. You just need to tell the ones with the pitch forks that the ones with the scythes are trying to steal their pitch forks."

OK, now think about it. If the king makes a persuasive argument that the ones with the scythes are trying to steal the pitch forks from the others, and if the pitch fork peasants start to fear and even turn against the scythe peasants and the scythe peasants start to use their scythes as weapons against the pitch fork peasants, and if you are one of the peasants, what do you need to do as your most important task:

#1) Yell, "Down with the king!" (as if the peasants didn't already agree with that)

#2) Expose as a lie the King's claim that the scythe peasants are trying to rob the pitch fork peasants?

This is, I hope, a no-brainer!

You can yell "Down with the king!" all you want, but if that's all you do then the king will remain in power. You've got to defeat the divide-and-rule strategy, or else you lose. And to defeat the divide-and-rule you have to take the divide-and-rule lie head on and refute it persuasively.

And no, you cannot just say, "Oh of course the King is trying to turn us against each other, but that's just a distraction; ignore it. The main thing is Down with the king!"

It would be wonderful if all it took was yelling "Down with the king!" But that's not real life unfortunately. The ruling class knows this. We should know it too.

We ignore the divide-and-rule schemes of the ruling class at our own peril. We need to study those schemes carefully and figure out how to defeat them. That is what my book DIVIDE AND RULE: The "Left vs. Right" Trap is all about, and it is why I write so much about the specific divide-and-rule schemes, from abortion to same-sex marriage to race (affirmative action, preferential hospital care for non-whites, CRT) and feminism and transgender bathroom laws, illegal immigration, Israel/Palestine, etc. These divide-and-rule frameworks for public discourse are the weapons that the rich use to defeat us and we cannot just ignore them and say they are a mere distraction, not if we really intend to win.