A meditation on right-wing cognitive dissonance

Conservatives fetishize what they consider traditional life. Family farms, mom and pop businesses. Good neighbors helping one another clean up after a storm.

Republican politics, on the other hand, treat labor as a moral failing. If you take your shower after work, rather than before, you must have done something bad to deserve such a dirty job. At best, you must be a lazy scoundrel, or else you could have a nice, clean pencil pushing job like us.

Here’s the thing. If you earn a paycheck that is signed by someone else, you are a member of the LABOR FORCE. You trade your LABOR in exchange for money. It doesn’t matter how big that paycheck is, you’re still a laborer.

Before the Industrial Revolution, even the professions – doctor, lawyer, accountant, engineer- were lower class work. For the son of a gentleman to lower himself to take a mere profession was scandalous. Being poor but not working for someone else had a higher social status than wealthy and taking a paycheck.

These so-called conservatives make absolutely no sense. They don’t even understand the history of their own biases.

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