Pity the Poor Congress-Critter

 The 535 high-net-worth Congressional servants of oligarchs, war profiteers and corporations are becoming very rattled by the growing number of threats being leveled against them by a very tiny subset of the electorate.

Two articles in this week's New York Times squarely point the finger of blame at the generic public itself, rather than at the Congress which is theoretically elected to represent the interests of the public.

 The first piece conveniently ignores this year's five-point dive in the already-rock bottom approval ratings and myriad justified reasons for anger against the legislative body, concentrating instead on people having racial and gender-based motives for the mostly verbal, but sometimes physical, threats. This has resulted in several members having to dig deep into their own pockets for security - beyond the $10,000 that they just allocated themselves for that purpose.

Even in the second article, in which the Times explores the "toxic relationship" between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, blame is once again deflected away from the petty and the powerful. and toward regular people. If Pelosi has called McCarthy a moron, among her other pithy insults,  and if McCarthy once quipped that he'd like to beat the Speaker over the head with her own gavel, then it's all the fault of the teeming masses. The paper quotes former Democratic Speaker Dick Gephardt as saying: 

“This disdain is really part and parcel of where we are in the country between the parties and between people. Congress is a reflection of the people. If the people are polarized and divided and hateful, then Congress is going to be the same.”

Gephardt, one of the original architects of the right-wing Democratic Leadership Council in the 1980s and now a lobbyist for Goldman Sachs and the private health insurance cartel - among other antisocial corporate entities - not only shows his own disdain for the electorate with that glib statement, he also pathologizes them.  He essentially claims that "the people" are so diseased that even two of the most powerful politicians on the entire planet are unable to withstand the malignancy of the lower orders. 

 It should thus come as no surprise that Gephardt has also successfully lobbied Congress to protect the patents of the profiteering pharmaceutical industry and block the manufacture of more affordable medicines for those horrible polarized people.

To delve into the rampant, pre-existing corruption that has long been an integral strand of the congressional DNA is obviously more than either Gephardt or the Paper of Record can bear to contemplate. They also have no interest in mentioning the studies which reveal that since the rich and powerful bankroll Congress with their often-dark money, Congress usually gives the rich and powerful whatever they want in the way of legislation and public policy. The exceptions seem to come only once every two or four or six years, at election time. A recent example of this truth is President Biden's own belated and obviously grudging approval of only some education debt forgiveness for only some student borrowers.

The recent kvetching from elites that our "democracy" is so suddenly under attack by a monolithic Trumpism is also disingenuous, given that the aforementioned studies (Gilen and Page) concluded nearly a decade ago that it is the elites themselves who endanger what passes for democracy with their outsize influence, especially with the recent Supreme Court decisions which bestow political speech rights upon the wealth of billionaires and corporations. How can democracy, or rule by the people, possibly be threatened when it already has devolved into an oligarchy? (Hint: it's predatory capitalism itself that is under threat - from a resurgent labor movement to climate activism to the independent journalism running rampant on the Internet despite their best efforts at censorship.)

It's funny how the definitions of "people" and "public" also keep changing according to the evolving needs of the ruling elites themselves. Of course, since everyday Americans (actually, our votes) are now enjoying one of those rare periodic bursts of minimal leverage, it is incumbent upon them to dose us with gaslight even as they allow the electorate their brief turn in the limelight. Their personal fear of violence and loss of power must be coupled with the instillation of fear of certain manufactured enemies of their own choosing.

This cycle, Republican elites are recycling the dog-whistled fear of immigrants and crime in the streets, accusing Democrats of wanting to abolish police departments and to let murderers roam free courtesy of modest bail reform agendas. Democratic elites, who had nearly half a century to codify abortion rights, warn the populace that Republicans want to kill women. These issues, manufactured and enhanced for our voting pleasure and incessantly broadcast in negative attack ads, conveniently blot out any mention of the inflation and the wealth and income inequality and the basic unaffordability of life itself that are foremost on the minds of people. We are voting to avoid something rather than to gain something. Fear is the only way they can get us to the polls next month.

Meanwhile, our politicians can so, so relate to you! These poor vulnerable souls are threatened with even worse things than we are being threatened with. Our rent may be too damned high, but just look at what they have to fork over for bodyguards! They're not threatened because they're corrupt, or because they won't give us nice things, like pandemic relief and a living wage law. According to the Times, they're threatened solely because they are targets of racism and misogyny. If you can't relate, for example, to the fear of Maine Republican Susan Collins when she had a storm window broken at her house in the wake of her vote for anti-choice justice Brett Kavanaugh, then who can you relate to?

After all, she is as human as you are, as human as Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, who is Black and Muslim and apparently is being attacked purely on the basis of her gender and skin color, and not for her support of Palestine.. Ditto for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who never met a creepy incel Twitter troll she wouldn't feistily engage with, and who considers voters who are justifiably angry over her retreat from Medicare For All legislation to be incipiently "violent" whenever they show up to protest at her district office.

By concentrating on the direct physical and even sometimes-armed physical confrontations with lawmakers, especially with women of color,  and expressly linking these threats to the January 6th Capitol riot, the Times is tacitly warning us to tone down our own legitimate anger at the people we vote to represent us and end up betraying us. You never know when your justifiably angry voice will become a trigger for the nut-job next door, or way across the country, to act out violently and even kill a politician.

But to show how terribly fair that this establishment rendering of a profound social problem is, the article reports that nearly a third of the threats are made by Republicans and almost one quarter are made by Democrats. This little nugget had the result of infuriating not a few party-loyal readers, who accused the Times of "both-siderism," and "false equivalency" - thereby confirming the elite claim that this nation's polarization emanates from the bottom up, that it is not a carefully nourished if not wholly manufactured Divide and Conquer technique and media narrative employed by the powerful to stay in power, ever since the dawn of what passes for civilization.

Given they have chosen to ignore the myriad reasons why citizens might confront or attack elected leaders, the Times measures the intensity of the threats by the dollars that the congress members spend on their own security. Liz Cheney, the neocon pro-war anti-Trump dynastic Republican, must be especially vulnerable, the article implies, because she's spent the most money of anyone in her party for her security detail. That apparently puts her in the same boat as Missouri Democrat Cori Bush, a Black progressive representative who once had to live her car after an eviction. Ditto for Senators Ted Cruz and Raphael Warnock, who have achieved a measure of collegiality and bipartisanship simply by virtue of having spent roughly equal amounts of money to protect their bodies from the ravening mob.

The Times concludes its article by linking the increasing threats with the near- fatal shootings of Democrat Gabrielle Giffords and Republican Steve Scalise in the years before Trump came to power. The paper does not mention that both of these assaults were committed by people with significant psychiatric issues.

The paper also somehow forgot to mention that Giffords was a staunch gun rights advocate before she got shot and changed her mind, and that Scalise voted against gun reform even after he nearly died from a bullet wound in the torso.

And, tellingly, no Democratic politician has yet spoken out against the recent veiled death threat made by Donald Trump against Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. It must not fit the narrative, for some reason.

The ultimate inconvenient truth is that the bipartisan Congress has always enthusiastically rubber-stamped weapons sales and trillions of dollars for both direct and proxy wars, and has also approved violent economic sanctions against the poor people in authoritarian regimes that it wants to overthrow - all in the interests of "democracy." 

Since democracy is their buzzword for capitalism, I suppose we should at least give the elites some credit for veracity as they moan, all day and every day, that democracy is now under such unprecedented attack. Something has got to give as the rich no longer hide that they got that way by stealing from the poor, and that they despise and blame the poor for it.

So, it's hard out there for the average high-net-worth individual in Congress. They comprise a living buffer zone between the ultra-high-net worth individuals who bankroll them, and the low/no-net-worth individuals that they use as cover to install themselves in office every two or six years.

 Maybe if we had a multi-party or parliamentary system instead of a de facto House of Lords with two right wings, and they were actually held accountable even in the off-season, they wouldn't be feeling so damned vulnerable right now.