By Dennis Rahkonen

Displaying laughable absurdity, Republicans, Tea Partiers, and related reactionaries always label anyone even a millimeter to the left of their own right-wing stance on the political spectrum a “socialist.”

Besides being utterly ridiculous, that outlook works against their own professed interest.

After all, practical solutions to today’s many societal problems will necessarily come from that part of the ideological ground not being trod by clown shoes or neo-Nazi jackboots.

Those who’ve incessantly been described as commie traitors to all that’s good, decent, and properly American will actually be the ones who’ll save our country from collapse in the end.

Much to the appreciation of grateful masses: “Well, if socialism means getting my job and home back, and having affordable healthcare and a solid pension, then I’m all for it!”

Chalk that up as a big, forfeited victory for real revolutionaries tickled pink by the Right’s unwitting validation of the long-standing Marxist claim that capitalism in global, systemic crisis becomes so beset by limiting contradictions that it can’t simultaneously meet the profit lust of a corporate/financial elite and the wage-earning majority’s crying human needs.

Each time some wildly irresponsible conservative insists that tax loopholes larger than the rings of Saturn for the mega rich shouldn’t be closed, but that social safety net programs vital to the beleaguered masses need drastic cutting, old Karl’s ghost shakes its head in incredulous wonder.

The myopic Right is blindly working overtime to prove Marxism’s central claim, namely that capitalism in its moribund monopoly stage is utterly incompatible with fair play and justice, that the rich will get richer and the poor poorer, and that the disintegrating “free market” hand basket will completely fall apart before it gets even halfway to Hell.

During the devastating travails of the Great Depression, the intimate organizing connection that the U.S. Communist Party had with America’s unemployed made it definitely look like a Yankee variation of the Bolshevik revolution would happen here.

Franklin Roosevelt recognized that threat, however, and had the wisdom to co-opt Communist demands by absorbing them into his New Deal, thus giving American capitalism continuing decades of being able to derive benefit from its golden goose -- a mass proletariat still subject to routine under-compensation for the true value of the wealth its daily labor creates.

Now, the Republican axis is determined to decimate the entire New Deal legacy, leaving everyday people with nothing as protection or crucial service precisely when predatory exploitation by the capitalist hierarchy is at its worst.

Without the least bit of heart, and even less critical sense, Rick Perry and others of his benighted ilk are adamant in insisting that profit-dripping bosses and banksters not offer a dime to help pay for the economic crisis their own avarice, ineptitude, and criminality created.

The cost should be borne, instead, by old folks on fixed incomes, by impoverished urban residents and the rural destitute, by students in classrooms with leaking roofs and not enough books, and by working-class mothers who open kitchen cupboards at suppertime to just a few remaining cans of vegetables and some Ramen noodles.

The guilty few get off entirely free; the innocent multitudes collectively suffer.

Hasn’t that colossal inequity been the essential impetus for every great revolutionary uprising in recorded history?

You can be sure that an untenable status quo is irrevocably at the end of its rope when its most ardent defenders become so bereft of viable options that everything they say and do actually enables and advances precisely that which they most despise and fear.

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(Dennis Rahkonen, from Superior, Wisconsin, has been writing progressive commentary with a Heartland perspective for various outlets since the Sixties)