Of all the low-rent tropes Conservatives can be counted on to trot out regularly, the resurgence of the “Take Our Country Back!” call betrays an empty hopper in the GOP Idea Department. In the most literal sense, someone like John Boehner getting up before the Values Voters gang and letting fly with the call at least makes practical sense – party leader tries to re-steel the will of the base after taking a drubbing. Harrumph! Following it up with an applause line about taking “the gavel away from Nancy Pelosi” can’t possibly fail with that audience either, and bully to Mister Boehner for landing the zinger. It shows he knows how to read a (friendly) room. What’s missing is any explanation of how it is that a woman from the epicenter of evil might have come to possess their gavel to begin with! There is this nagging disconnect between the claim of ownership and the reality of possession. If I shouldn’t look to possession to discern ownership, then Mister Boehner and his sympathizers are going to need to come up with some sort of proof that this country is indeed theirs to take back.

House Minority Leader John Boehner.

Certainly the political right has no monopoly on claiming this country as being more their country than other’s country. There are loads of nativist groups among the descendants of European settlers making the case for family-tenure-as-authentication, just as there are claims (and counter-claims) from the descendants of the millions of folks actually living here when the Euros “discovered” the land. The various Sons & Daughters and descendants of the (willing) riders of the early boats enjoy a vigorous debate and become very ‘us-and-them’ about historical matters, but they aren’t primarily partisan or political organizations. They are not well-equipped to find much to get excited about in John Boehner’s vision. The GOP notion of This Land Is Our Land doesn’t seem to have much of a historical or anthropological bent to it, so any firm claim to primacy necessarily draws its legitimacy and support from elsewhere.

Minority Leader John Boehner may not have come out to make an economic case for GOP Primacy, but there are no shortage of other right-wing thought leaders who do. Rush Limbaugh has spent decades pointing out just how much of the tax burden in this country is shouldered by the rich and how little is shouldered by the non-rich. Among the archived content always available for free on Rush’s namesake site is in-depth coverage of the taxation distribution. The text says “specifically I have made an executive decision as the owner and ultimate editor of this website that this table and these numbers stay on this website forever – updated when each year’s numbers come out, of course.” One of Rush’s core messages has long been that economic “producers”, simply by virtue of “producing”, have earned the deference of non-producers in matters of commerce, governance, and governance of commerce. Moreover, the denial of this deference by the left betrays their socialist and Communist tendencies! While I didn’t see any state-by-state analysis of pay-in and pay-out among Rush’s links, Rush offers extensive analysis, with diverse sourcing, of not only how much each economic strata pays in, but how much they get out. The equation of what one pays in, what one gets out, and their civic standing doesn’t need to be explicit in Rush’s rhetoric, but it is; and he is by no means alone.

We have seen the entire Tea Bag Movement organized around the idea that it is a taxpayer protest/revolt, and that their moral standing flows entirely from their status as the payer of the taxes. The world swings from the purse strings of Rick Santelli – who called for the tea to again be flung into the harbor in a fever of righteous rage at the idea that he, and his ilk, were being forced to subsidize societies “losers” with their hard-earned taxes! It is the mighty taxpayer who is to take his/her country back, and they are to do so because it is a just endeavor to do so.

This is as clear a principle as the GOP has been able to articulate in my lifetime, and yet the application of this clear principle is muddied by a complete lack of transparency on the part of the aggrieved – and dare I say, some contradictory expressions of these bedrock ideas by those who appear to lack standing under those very same principles.

Put simply, why shouldn’t those claiming to be both aggrieved and producers be expected to state exactly how much they have paid in to the system and what they have gotten out of it if they are going to call others to account for the spending of those taxes? If your claim to authority is your input, then why shouldn’t you be forced to make transparent – in accounting-quality detail – the exact scale of that input, and also, the scale of any output you have claimed or received? What if Rush has this one right, and that a detailed accounting of who pays in and who pays out is the great well-spring of truth in this matter? How can society properly hand the country back to its rightful possessors without knowing exactly what they paid in and what they got out? I see lots of data at Rush’s site, but the numbers are devoid of an identifiable connection to rugged individuals, or even a collection of them. I am shocked that none of his legion have volunteered to go first in showing just how righteous their indignation truly is by proclaiming to all an accounting – to the penny – of the pitiless injury done to them by this government! He has such a giant audience, and their ideological devotion is legendary! Wouldn’t a census of this kind reveal just how high the overlap is between those who are society’s producers and devotees to the producer’s cause? What could be more serendipitous?

I myself am not aggrieved. I would have to defer to the injured to understand my own status among producers. I claim no injury, but I can say I fall comfortably in the top 10% of incomes in recent years. I have no children. I own no home. I don’t even ask for receipts when I donate to charity. I have spent the last decade in either New York City/State and California. My guess is that I could do some sort of cross-tab or comparison with Rush’s data and find out whether or not I qualify for standing in Rush’s, John Boehner’s, Rick Santelli’s, and the Tea Partier’s country they intend to take back. I don’t intend to do that. I don’t consider my tax burden any worse than that borne by those who are in the non-producer class, especially when I compare it to the bounty I have enjoyed in this country I live in. Whether or not that country ends up being “mine” or not is something I don’t get to decide unilaterally. I could also just as easily go back down the same economic ladder I used to go upward, in which case, it seems that the GOP would have that already decided for me.

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Rudy Grahn Jr. is a former talk show host turned writer turned analyst who currently writes primarily on the personal on his weblog Rudayday.com. Rudy is also a digital photographer whose work has been featured on PBS, NBC, and web outlets like BoingBoing.com and The Morning News. His nickname “Rudayday” was conferred upon him by John Romano in the 20th Century.  

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