Matthews Calls Joan Walsh's Observations on Divide and Conquer Strategies "Marxist"
By Heather Friday Jul 31, 2009 2:00pm
This was another gem from Hardball yesterday besides Matthews' "deather" rant where bad Tweety was rearing his ugly head again. Was it a full moon yesterday or what? Joan Walsh attempted to give Chris Matthews a bit of a history lesson on the divisions in the United States which have been played upon by politicians and corporate interests to keep people voting against their own interests, and Matthews attacks it as being "Marxist".
Joan had something to say about this over at Salon, Is GOP using race to block Obama agenda? Ya think?:
There is one main reason the U.S. doesn't have the social democratic traditions and programs enjoyed by most Western democracies -- we are the only such nation without some kind of universal healthcare -- and that reason is our history of ethnic, racial and class strife. (The bounty of the eternal frontier and American exceptionalism fit in there too, but I'd pick our fractious and well-manipulated heterogeneity as the top reason.)
The history of the 19th century and early 20th century is the history of labor and political coalitions splintered by divisions between Northern Europeans and Southern Europeans, between middle-class Germans and less well off German Jews, between the Irish and everyone else, and, increasingly after blacks won something akin to freedom, between all white ethnic groups and African-Americans. Latinos and Asians came with their own demands and baggage and relations got more complicated still. Barriers of language, culture, class and skin color thwarted many efforts to grow labor unions and build a social-democratic majority.
Meanwhile, the one constant for at least 150 years has been a savvy cadre of political operatives who used those racial and ethnic divisions to advance their pro-business agenda. Go back to Karl Rove's idol Mark Hanna, who made turn-of-the-19th-century Republican politics safe for whites-only organizing in the South, to Richard Nixon's Southern Strategy, to Lee Atwater's Willie Horton strategy to Rove's own neo-Southern, pander-to-the-base strategy that has driven the GOP into its current ditch. Where in other Western nations, those years saw the fairly steady advance of basic conceptions of human rights, labor rights and an expanded social safety net, in the U.S. such social progress -- and especially such programs -- was more sporadic and limited.
Matthews didn't buy my analysis; in fact, he called it "Marxist" -- I challenged him, as it's not that simple, and he changed it to an "economic analysis" -- and he put former Rep. Kweisi Mfume on the hot seat asking if he agreed with me. Mfume started off by saying he's not a conspiracy theorist -- for the record, neither am I -- but then he added with a smile, "I don't believe Humpty Dumpty just fell; I believe he was pushed. And there are people who are pushing buttons to try to hold back the progress we are making in this country as one nation. And when you push those buttons, it causes the progress to slow down ... This is anti-American."
Digby weighed in on the interview as well.
Joan's thesis was correct, but Tweety looked at her as if she'd just said she'd joined the Heaven's Gate cult. But then he is the same guy who had earlier blithely asserted that Obama had racially profiled Sgt Crowley, so his awareness of how racism worksa is obviously limited. But the truth is that he's actually just a typical selfish wealthy person who believes that he's rich because he's morally superior to everyone who isn't as wealthy as he is. (And who obviously then admires those who are even wealthier.) His cohort's desire to kill Obama's agenda is just plain old class solidarity.
But when Matthews and other wealthy people obsess over race in the broader sense, and encourage this nonsense about reverse discrimination out of some absurd self-identification as a white working class dude, they do the work of the ruling class as well by reinforcing the All American racial divide --- and its resultant antipathy toward any kind of social welfare. Tweety and Villagers who pretend to be jess folks on yer TV do the work of conservatives by presenting their elite views in the guise of blue collar attitudes. It's a great scam.
Transcript:
MATTHEWS: You know, Joan, you and I have been on television together an awful lot together over the years. And I just wonder whether you believe what you said a minute ago. Do you believe you know this guy Beck enough to make that accusation, that he‘s really charged by racism himself, or that Rush Limbaugh is?
WALSH: You know, I really...
MATTHEWS: Do you really believe...
WALSH: Yes, I do.
MATTHEWS: ... you think you know their motives enough to say that?
WALSH: Yes, I do. I really do. I‘m sorry, Chris because I think that words have consequences, and I think that if you—I judge people not only by their words but what they do. And if you look at people who have a pattern, who‘ve built a career out of dividing people and who built a career out of often not just Obama but finding ways to degrade and diminish African-Americans and African-American leaders, I don‘t care what‘s in their hearts, to be honest with you. They can tell themselves they‘re not racist. They can tell me they have black friends. I don‘t care. It‘s racist to consistently make your living on the backs of black people.
And you know, you brought up 400 years, and let‘s consider this an intellectual show where we can talk history. I truly believe that this assault on Obama is linked to what you referred to earlier, with his health care numbers dropping. And I will tell you why. In the 230-year history of this country, the reason we have never developed a social democratic base, the way they have in Europe—we‘re the only Western country without some kind of universal health care, Chris. There‘s a reason, and it is because corporate interests have divided the American people by race and ethnicity, the Irish from the blacks, the Germans from the German Jews. It goes back to the 1700s.
It‘s been very smart. It‘s been very effective. And people have voted against their self-interests to keep some other group down, and therefore, we don‘t have the basic things that other countries take for granted in terms of a social infrastructure. That‘s what they‘re doing again. They want to defeat health care. They want to defeat his whole agenda by dividing us on racial lines. I don‘t think it‘s going to work. I really don‘t. But that‘s what‘s happening.
MATTHEWS: Do you believe this grand theory, Congressman, that Joan just put out there that there‘s some grand sort of almost Marxist analysis, where you can say that the corporate world...
WALSH: I‘m not a Marxist!
(CROSSTALK)
MATTHEWS: No, but it‘s an analysis. It‘s an economic analysis of human behavior. Yes, it is an economic analysis of human behavior, and I think it‘s more complicated. I think we all have tribalist tendencies. We‘ve got to overcome them. I don‘t think the corporate world created those tribalist tendencies. I think we‘ve...
MFUME: Well, Chris...
WALSH: I think...
(CROSSTALK)
MFUME: Chris, I‘m not a conspiracy theorist, but I don‘t think Humpty-Dumpty just fell. I think he was pushed. And I there are people who in this country are deliberately pushing buttons to try to hold back the progress that people are making in this country as one nation. And when you push those buttons, as Mr. Glenn Beck did and so many others, it causes the progress to slow down. As I said before, this is anti-American, and most of all, it‘s insulting to the democracy that people work day in and day out to preserve.
(Originally published July 30th, 7:30pm)
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America is the great melting pot.
Canada is a mosaic.
Abandon all hope ye who enter here.
Sadly right on . America the beautiful ? Right.
That is sad. We used to be a beacon to the huddled masses yearning to be free. How far we have fallen and in such a short time.
Ya know...If things don't start changing for the better soon...I foresee a mass exodus of Americans to Canada and Europe.
is it conditions viewers to believe yapping and bloviating actually accomplishes something.
But are you saying this clip was a good example of that? I saw one person putting forth a well elucidated point without being interrupted or shouted down, the host interjected (controlling the tempo of the dual interview, presumably), then the other guest made a statement of opinion, again without being interrupted. I fail to understand why you would apparently undermine one of the few examples of actual GOOD talking head programming by implying that it is of the other variety.
i think marx would be as offended by the comparison as was joan walsh
and rightly so
Turn on the off button.
Tweety deserves far worse but his crud is an attack on thinking people - R or D.
pumped into our lives Bill Gates said would make everyone's lives better.
Matthews must have caught the same terminal dementia virus that Lou Dobbs did. His ratings must be really off for him to make shit like this Marxism comment and his paranoid living will psychobabble up.
Maybe one day he'll actually put his brain in gear before engaging his mouth. But I doubt it. He is just a ratings prostitute that will say anything for his nine pieces of silver. He seems to sadistically revel in intentionally causing controversy and seems heedless of the consequences.
He didn't want to be the "boring guy" whose ratings were worse than the lunatics, so if you can't beat 'em..
more than most people change their skivvies....
Walsh:
Mistake number one, this is the Corporate Media.
This is standard Corporate Media procedure. You will not hear intellectual discussion about social issues. The minute someone brings up legitimate SOCIAL issues that point conclusively to the oppression of people by the Corporations, people that work, versus those that have the power, give the orders and are the oppressors, that minute instantly the buzz words start flying.
Walsh is saying the Corporations divide the American people by ethnic and 'racial' groups in order to oppress them. This is quite true.
Matthews goes from race and ethnicity directly to Marx, who talked about class and most centrally, surplus labor.
The Corporations in America go to great lengths to conceal the fact that the groups they attempt to exploit have far more in common with each other because of class and of course, the Corporations make their profits from surplus labor. The less they pay, the more profits.
There are two classes, those in the Corporate Totalitarian regimes that give the orders and those who work beneath that take the orders.
Matthews throws out Marx to change the subject and get everyone talking Marx and Marxists. It works, no one remembers that Walsh is talking Corporate oppression, ethnicity and 'race'.
Marx was not a Marxist as the term is misused today. After 60 years of intense anti social propaganda he is nearly lost to history.
Unfortunately, the Liberals do not know how to counter this.
You go on the attack. Do not retreat. If Marx is mentioned, use what Marx said when it is applicable, which it often is when you are talking about oppression.
We have a Corporate State. We have had 60 years of anti social propaganda, it is way past time to push back.
----
Mr Marx, may I introduce you to Bill McKibbon.
Mr McKibbon, this is Karl Marx.
Gentlemen, may I introduce you to Richard Heinberg.
Marx is one light in the pantheon of people who have something to say.
They all agreed in the end that people that don't care about right vs wrong [Republicans] prey on race just like they prey on sexuality, religion, anything you can name.
Still, Matthews needs a more up to date reference than Marx.
...heat sells better than light.
Yep. MSM controversy is like candy, and now the voters have cavities... Hey MSM - too much candy - wanna dial it back a bit? please. thanks.
that include soda - all fizz.
let them have as much as they want and tax it.
Any country in which over 40% of voters could want Sarah Palin within a heartbeat of the Presidency is stupid. As such, most of Matthews's viewers wouldn't know Marx from Nietsche. Walsh and Mfume might think they are doing something worthwhile, but they might as well be spitting into the wind. We are still a generation away from a country that can understand such a fundamental concept as Walsh was trying to explain.
Agreed, it's shoveling shit against the tide. This is the result of the last 30 years of repuggery and apathy.
Maybe somebody's got to actually go into the corn fields and fill the people in on what their beloved repugs have become!
I'll do it for free corn!
"As such, most of Matthews's viewers wouldn't know Marx from Nietsche."
Marx from Nietsche? Old Billy, Matthews' viewers wouldn't know Karl Marx from Groucho Marx.
"whatever it is, da ta da, i'm against it"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtMV44yoXZ0
Who once said "I don't belong to any party! I wouldn't want to belong to any party that would have me as a member"! LOL
once again tweety proves what
a f#cking reichwingnut idiot
he is.
Remember that awful book Tweety wrote? His argument was to live your life as if it were a political campaign. He's just doing the same thing with his show.
He just spent a couple broadcasts ripping on the birthers, so now he's simply hedging his bets. The easiest way to do that is to appeal to the RW base by ringing the ol' reliable Marxism bell to bring those nuts back to their food bowl. He knows how to make our side giddy when he goes off on Kevin James, but then he knows he has to make their base drool the next day.
It's no wonder he considered a run at the Senate. He's got the 2-faced routine down pat.
"His argument was to live your life as if it were a political campaign."
Which is totally opposite to how I live. I am private and somewhat a hermit. I don't even give out my phone number. I don't want to impress anyone. I don't want them to try to impress me.
That I really,really like Joan Walsh,and I believe her analysis is perfectly correct.
The powers that be would rather have us isolated and indifferent to each other, lest we get together and actually organize. This has been going on since at least after the New Deal from what I can tell. The fact that Mathews can't see this shows just how removed he is from the real world. Look at our labor movement compared to Germany's, or our health care compared to any other industrialized nation's. Britain has had their National Health Service since around the late 1940's, Canada since the 1960's, and here we are still fighting it out.
And a lot of us supposedly "priviledged" classes realize it also.
We (the wife and I) have acombined family income that puits us in the top 5 percent of families. Yet I have many more (FAR many more) common interests in common with a Wal-Mart cashier than I do with Bill Gates.
I have some "conservative" friends who often tell me that the Democrats want me to "carry" the poor. Well, I say that the Republicans want me to "carry" the rich. And if it comes down to a choice (and it does) I'll carry the poor any day of the week and all day Sunday.
Anti-corporation is not anti-business. When the pitchfork and torches time comes we won't be burning out the local mom and pop (if there are any left) who gives us credit when times are hard. We'll be putting it to the Massuh up on the hill who uses us up and throws us to the curb.
Yep. now let's all tell it in the corn fields.
whether or not I agree with what I've heard he's said, he's a hacktacular ass, with not a scintilla of intellect. A tool, and one of the duller tools in the box.
His demeanor reminds me of some saddo who tries too hard.
He's never 'Right On!' he's never cool, and he belongs on FOX. And I mean that in the kindest way possible.
PS. Matthews, look up 'Marxism,' you corporatist tool.
He's just soooooooo self absorbed.
Chris likes nothing more than to hear himself blather on and on pulling out arcane historical references to impress himself if no one else...
I always think, imagine him at a party after 5 martinis.
Marx did refer to false-consciousness, but it wasn't unique then or now.
Personally I see a relationship with the Stockholm Syndrome.
Chris Matthews is a middle-aged man who can't quite keep up with how what's happening in our country, and judging from the way he changes his viewpoint from day to day, I think he'd like to understand what's happening, but can't quite get his finger on the pulse of the Nation.
The fact that he would even ask Joan if she seriously thought Beck was being racist in his remarks, (when anyone with half a brain can see clearly that Beck was indeed, being racist!) shows clearly how much he's lagging.
He, like Pat Buchanan, Beck, O'Reilly, Limbaugh and many of the "older white males" in Congress want to go back to the America of the 1950s. The problem is, in trying to get us back to a time when whites ruled the country, they are proving how ignorant of change they have become. It ain't gonna happen, no matter what they say. (A Disclaimer: I'm an "older white female". 64 years young, to be precise, so I recall the fifties and therefore feel qualified to reject going back again!)
Every time Chris (or one of the other pundits) says something like "historically, we KNOW that young people and blacks don't come out in large numbers to vote in elections", he's using a gauge that is pretty much defunct. (Witness: November 2008)
Someone made a comment online (somewhere) today saying it's time for older white men to move over and allow the younger generations in. Unless the older fogies try a little harder to understand where this country is RIGHT NOW, I'm inclined to agree with him/her. And the sooner the better!
that it's..wait for it...No Country for Old Men(sch)
..is that since the end of WWII the American public has been conditioned so that they can't distinguish between Marxism and Stalinism.
It was easy to fear-monger against the Soviet Union in the 50s because they were big, they were powerful, and Joseph Stalin was a right bahstid. So were his successors to varying degrees But all the elements of the Soviet regime that were legitimate causes for complaint were totalitarian, not Marxist in nature.
I remember reading excerpts from The Gulag Archipelago in Reader's Digest when I was a child. They didn't go into any debates about economics. It was all about the powerful preying on the weak and innocent without regard to laws or human decency. Kinda like the USA today.
I can't believe the American public still hasn't caught on to the distinction between an economic system and a form (really more of a heavy-handed style) of government. The police state mentality is not ideological, left or right. The Nazis were totalitarians on the far right, but nobody seems to have transformed that knowledge into a widespread paranoia about capitalism.
This is the biggest bait and switch of all time, and Matthews is still buying into it?? What an intellectual flyweight!
You can go back to the end of WWI, if not earlier.
Whether the fight was against anarcho-syndicalists like the IWW (the Wobblies) just before that war, or the Marxist-Leninists (any Marxist/socialist movement, really) after it, there was a concerted effort to paint the labor movement as un-American by pointing out the foreign philosophers whose ideas formed the basis of those moements' actions.
At the same time, the powers-that-be ignored the actions of the wholly-American Ku Klux Klan, and later the whacked out members of the John Birch Society.
What we were left with was a right wing but no left wing...And any leftist idea embraced by liberals was and is still demonized in the same way: as foreign, hence un-American, rather than something that might actually be useful to move us forward.
I have to laugh every time anyone on the right tosses about terms like 'Marxist','socialist' and/or 'communist'- Because more often than not- the right wingers have NO IDEA what these terms mean.
Here is a challenege for you- Next time a right wing conservative accuses left wing policies or ideas as being Marxist or socialist- ask them to DEFINE the tennents of Marxism and socialism. Odds are they'll stare at you with a clueless expression..
Actually, I think Marx was against Socialism, since in his Communist Manifesto he refers to other German reformers as being over intellectual and least likely to call for the sweeping changes he was advocating. He practically accused them of being pampered poseurs.
I've done just that and it stumps them every time.
Marx was rather single-minded in his view as the struggle for economic dominance v egalitarianism ans a historical force, I suppose similar to the survival of the fittest, but Social Darwinism is problematical.
But every time we talk of economic disparity is not the same as proselytizing a particular economic paradigm, any more that every time race is brought up one is a racist.
It sounds like more Obama is a Socialist nonsense.
..that anybody who has a conscience is a Socialist.
And by a false inference, therefore a Marxist.
And by another completely illogical inference, therefore a Stalinist.
And by yet another totally incoherent inference, a totalitarian.
And then a fascist...
Marx, was NOT a Marxist as the term is applied (incoherently) today.
...But I can't remember where, exactly, I read it, but Marx was supposed to have said, whenever someone presented him with ideas that were worked off of his own ideas, something like, "If that is Marxism, I'm no Marxist."
Familiar with that, Alice?
Matthews is so mean, I can't believe this. I wanna hug a wolverine.
It's also weird that Mrs. Walsh agree with him that the analysis of it was Marxist and that she aknowledges that HE DID NOT CALL HER A MARXIST. Do you want to revise the poor and misleading transcript?
What I don't get is the assumption that an idea is "marxist" automatically makes it invalid. I know that the US still lives in the shadow of the cold war, but I don't see how it does anybody any good to discount an analysis because it may be grounded in an ideology you disagree with as opposed to a fault in the reasoning.
They're using Argumentum ad Geneseon as well as Argumentum ad Consequentiam.
And now for a Cartesian debate:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8TRoMSG-5I
YouTube: Monty Python, Argument Clinic
A classic!
..it's the very worst that the ad hominem school of argument* has to offer. If you can't attack the logic of someone's position, attach a label to it and attack the label. And here the label itself (Marxism) has been maligned by attaching it to Stalinism, and by inference totalitarianism.
It's no more coherent than if one were to observe that Hitler was once a house painter and then starting a pogrom against all house painters - and then continuing the pogrom against everyone in the building trades. We'd all be living in caves, ferchristsakes.
* - Disagreement Hierarchy: a useful diagram of the levels of Argumentation
(Note that Tweety is flirting with the "nya nya nya, so's your mother" end of the scale.)
Marx's diagnosis was spot on, in my humble opinion-- it was his prescription that was off.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAaWvVFERVA
Do you suppose Tweety feels a stranger loyalty to The Roman Catholic Church or the Cop Culture?
Isn't "Divide and Conquer" the raison d'être for wartime psych-ops?
The First Rule Of the Merkin Police State is "Question A Cop...Go To Jail(or the Morgue)"* *Unless your name is BILL Gates.
something Marxist? But isn't that what Adam Smith provided, too? Isn't the "market" an economic analysis of human behavior? Isn't enlightened self-interest an economic analysis of human behavior? I guess Adam Smith and all capitalists are Marxists.
It made me once again lose a lot of respect for him. He presents himself as a strong liberal anchor but he constantly buys talking points and deceives his listeners. I don't really trust the man and I don't believe he is a great critical thinker at all.
Other times:
When he interviewed his daughter at a rally and passed her off as some random person, didn't disclose his relationship to her, that was so dishonest I couldn't believe it.
When he made a joke that people were acting like someone was from ACORN as an example of how 'radical' that person was. Unfair and stupid.
The way he laughs at stupid jokes and gets tingles up his legs for the president. He's a disingenuous reporter and I'm pretty much done with him.
...has become a slur and a smear thanks to the constant re-jigging by conservatives as to what it actually means. And they keep conflating and confusing socialism with it's idealistic polar opposite, fascism.
Truth is nobody cares what terms like socialist and marxist mean anymore in America. They have been emptied of all meaning and become hollow terms.
It's true that corporations sponsor reactionary creeps like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh but our side need not be so modest. We're helping them. For example, when you have the liberal left taking the side of a black stripper who cleaerly has made false rape allegations over white athelets and continue to behavave as if the false accuser is the true victim even after her lies have been exposed or when our side favors a black Harvard professor over a white cop on the basis of blatant stereotyping or when our side support a movement like feminism which stereotypes men as bad and women as good in the name of fighting sexism and castigates anyone who tries to view their beliefs with anything like skepticism as racists and misogynistic, it's not just the bad old corporations' who are driving a wedge between Americans and their own self interest. There are times when our side can barely make even the pretense of hiding its contempt for regular working white-bread Americans, treating them as if they're too stupid to appreciate how intelligent our side is and presuming that, if people don't automatically agree with us, it's because they're intellectually deficient. I've seen it happen time and time again and, unlike Beck and Limbaugh, etc., we're not even smart enough to make money as corporate whores. Ouar side does it for free.
Just when you begin to think Matthews is alright he pulls a 180 and proves to be just another fart in the wind .
Wasn't that a song by Kansas?
I had to pause myself for a second before realizing all he meant was that the divide and conquer strategy by ruling groups. If Marx were alive today, he would have said "Racism, nativism, and nationalism are the opiates of the masses." Chris, in his blunt way, was trying to say, "yes, we know that" but what about this specific case? In this case, I'm willing to give him a pass with a demerit for lack of tact.
Just because Communism is no longer a viable economic consideration for modern systems, that doesn't mean that some of Marx' critiques of capitalism aren't still relevant. Remember that old style capitalism nearly died out during the 1930s until FDR revised the business model (and post WWII Europe revised that) so that it could survive and thrive today. Marx may finally get to resume his rightful historical place as a political economist in the classical school of thought.
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