The Invisible Hand

Speak For Yourself, Ken

Anguished tears stain the Letters page of The New York Times today. Ken Swensen, an enlightened reader from one of New York's tonier bedroom communities, takes issue with David Brooks’ column on how the conservatives in Republican Party have finally achieved their goal of tipping the political balance of the country to their favor in an enduring way just as FDR’s Democrats did in the 1930s.

Writing from the paneled seclusion of his McMansion in exclusive Pound Ridge far from the unwashed of the Big City, our latter-day Patrick Henry explains the ways of the world to the rest of us:

The reason conservatives will not stay in power long is simple: the majority of voters do not agree with their basic tenets. Their success must therefore rest on deception. Eventually, voters will unmask the truth.

Eventually these narrow minded proles will come to understand what Swensen has known for years. In fact, it seems Swensen knows what Americans really want even if they don't yet know it:

Americans do not want to dismantle environmental regulations. They don't want to favor big business over consumers and taxpayers. They don't want to starve the Social Security and Medicare programs. They don't want a foreign policy that shuns international cooperation. They don't want increasing concentrations of wealth.

Actually, no one wants those things except maybe increasing concentrations of wealth and then only as long as they are concentrating in bank accounts that are easily accessible.

It may take voters a few more years of George W. Bush to figure out what's happening. But it won't take 60 years.

Oh, those ignorant voters! My word. A few more months of that gauche cowboy and they'll finally come to their senses. I mean, really. They may be stupid but they’re not THAT stupid.

Until the masses finally come around to his point of view, Swensen will just have to content himself with deer running rampant on his protected wetlands, a six figure salary as some sort of corporate pilot fish, the comfort of knowing his 401K has been growing at a rate that actually surpasses inflation, and the security from random acts of barbaric cruelty that the U.N routinely deplores but rarely does anything about.

Oh, and that concentrating wealth? I’d say it’s a safe bet that Ken Swensen in a major beneficiary of this awful deception and that he’s not in any rush to correct the imbalance.

what I don't get is if ignorance is bliss, why is Ken so angry?

Conservatives in Power