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Making “The Government” the villain [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-02-28
Political movements must have a villain to fight.
The villain provides the other or outsider, or THEM that can be blamed, feared and rejected simultaneously. Not only does it take two to Tango, but it also takes a villain to sustain a vigorous, long-lasting fight, say from now to the polls. As far as political movements go, the more ill-defined, the bigger, the more distant the villain the better.
In 1981, President Ronald Reagan declared that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem”. Then economist Professor Milton Friedman in his 1933 book, “Why Government is the Problem”, wrote about a government no longer controlled by “we, the people.” Instead " we now have a government of the people, by the bureaucrats, for the bureaucrats.” Thus the “faceless” bureaucrats became the villains and in today’s double speak, the “deep state”.
Now that the gloves have come off and the doggies have been let loose on the U.S. federal government, the faceless THEM turn out to be many of us, or our neighbors. It also turns out that these federally funded programs have an impact on local people’s lives and livelihood. This is especially true for states that get more federal funds than the taxes they send to the federal government. Suddenly, the THEM has become our neighbors who receive the benefits from federal programs or are the chain of bureaucrats that put the programs into life.
The faceless, deep state, government now has thousands of faces of fired employees. It also includes people, not government employees, who worked for some organization that implemented the laws intent.
To paraphrase Walk Kelly: we have met the government, and he is us.
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