As Jen Senko the producer of the film The Brainwashing of my Dad, said in that film:

 

“The goal is to get people so mad at each other that, (a) they don’t notice who is really causing their problem and (b) they won’t join together to oust the truly guilty parties and (c) they are then capable of feeling nothing towards the group that’s blamed.”

 

Much earlier, back in the sixties Bob Haldeman, Chief of Staff to Richard Nixon went on the Today Show and said, “all politics is the politics of division.”  That may be an overstatement but it sure has a strong dash of truth to it. Haldeman was shrewd.

 

It is a brilliant strategy and American companies with their professional advisors, including, media firms, lawyers, public relations firms, and others have proved adept at using this strategy over and over again. It has been astoundingly successful. Many liberals in America were unable to understand how Americans could vote for Trump who seemed to manifestly unqualified for the job of the presidency.  The liberals failed to understand how the strategy of blame and divide worked.

 

Rick Perlstein summed it up well: “The team that manages to divide the country and ends up with the bigger side wins.”

 

Senko’s father who was originally a liberal, and a “nice guy”, soaked up right wing propaganda for many years and concluded that American people, particularly of course, black Americans, were getting so much on the dole and social assistance that they were no longer interested in working. It didn’t matter that this was simply not true. It didn’t even matter that this was absurd. It could rile their side and divide them from their foes.

 

Manitoba learned this in the 1970s with their experiments with a guaranteed basic income in Dauphin under the Schreyer government. That study found that most people kept working except people like single moms who took the opportunity to improve their circumstances and get better job. Not no jobs as Conservatives constantly and wrongly allege.

 

As Bill O’Reilly said on Fox, “one side, president Obama and the Democratic Party want America to become an entitlement state versus a self-reliant one.” That of course is a convenient point of view for American business interests who don’t want to pay taxes for government programs to help needy people.  Because of the divide and blame tactics practiced so well by American conservatives, people who are poor, such as Senko’s dad, uncritically accept such claims as that made by O’Reilly and his cronies.

 

Please note I do not say liberals never use such tactics.  I just say the right proved very adept at using them.

 

John Williams, a professor of Sociology said this is in the film: “With African Americans the assumption is that we’re all on welfare and that we can’t get there without taking from somebody else, and that’s simply not true.” So white American working men and women are taught to hate African American workers. This strategy of painting African Americans as lazy people who don’t really want to work and prefer being on welfare has been very effective at convincing Americans that they are out to game the system. The strategy has been so effective that people like Senko’s father won’t vote for Democrats who would bring in Obama care, even if it would greatly benefit themselves, because they just don’t want black welfare queens to get the benefits too.

 

Instead of looking at the facts, Americans prefer to believe lies on Fox News such as that of Bill O’Reilly and Stuart Varney from Fox News who tells them that “welfare is very, very, generous.” Or Bill Reilly again who said, “you are not motivated to succeed because you are getting free stuff from the government. You are surrounded by goodies that are put onto you.”

 

Senkow’s father bought this line—hook, line and sinker. This is what he told her,

 

“As long as the government is supplying him the money that he needs to live on, he’s not interested in getting a job so he’ll go on year after year on the government dole and not bother getting a job.”

 

This ignores the fact that in America, as in Canada, people’s self-esteemed is based on their jobs, not on the dole they receive. I don’t believe people would take the dole and lose their self-esteem. They take the dole because they need it.

 

Blame and Divide Works! That’s why politicians do it.