Hereabouts, the transtion from urban to agricultural and rural is abrupt.  Very abrupt.  As in, boom, it happens between two exits on I-40, so, especially as a lawyer, you get to circulate out of the city and out into the less citified areas, most of which bear very little resemblance to anything I ever saw on Andy Griffith. Living here, observing with an outsider's eye but raised among a different flavor of rural conservatives, was like having a ring-side seat for the parade of horribles that has been the last sixteen years. 

Two of the most memorable floats in that parade were the beliefs of the Angry North Carolina White Guys (especially the religious ones) as I've come to call them, a particular species of North Carolinian with whom I became all too familiar,  All of them seem to unconciously ape the dress, the mannerisms and the facial expression of their hero, Dale Earnhardt (who was, after all, one of them).  The farmer cap, the pencil thin mustache, the grizzled hair and tough stringy musculature.  And the hard eyes behind which a torrent of rage seemed just on the verge of breaking out. 

They seemed to me to be very much men of their times, guys who were getting the shit kicked out of them by life and the economy pretty much 24/7/365, whose state was changing around them with bewildering speed but who always seemed to get the short end of the stick as first the tobacco business collapsed, then the textile mills shipped out to China and then the furniture companies followed.

To a man, they were hardcore Republicans, and so were their wives.  They left the Bush/Cheney stickers on their cars til '07, listened to Rush incessently, got all their news from Fox. 

And here are those two floats on the Parade of Horribles I was talking about, both pulled by these Angry White Guys and their angry, angry wives. 

Throughout the 90s, to a man and to a woman, every last one of them was convinced beyond a doubt that Bill Clinton raised their taxes.  It was absolutely incredible.  Congress passed Clinton's budget that jacked the tax rate on the top bracket by three percent it went into effect and the Angry White Guys raged and frothed and stomped about their taxes going up, despite the fact that they hadn't.  The witholding on their paychecks didn't change a bit.  Their take-home pay did not go down one red cent and yet they knew, knew with absolute certanty, that Bill Clinton had raised their taxes. 

Then came Bush/Cheney and the Bush tax cuts and I witnessed the second float in the Parade of Horribles.  A lot of these guys lives got steadily worse under Bush.  The once thriving industrial sector melted away faster than the ice caps.  Factories shut down and the jobs were off-shored, one after another.  Textile companies folded, reorganized under Chapter 11 and came out of it as brand that got slapped onto cheap imports.  The federal government ended the tobacco quota program and the retail spaces in even Winston-Salem, home of R.J. Reynolds and one of the smokingest cities in America, had gone non-smoking.  The furniture manufacturing industry, once the pride of the Piedmont, evaporated in less than a decade. 

None of these folks were under any illusion that Bush had cut their taxes in any meaningful way.  They were now too close to the margin to nuture that kind of delusion.  All of them understood clearly that most of the benefit of the Bush tax cuts had gone to people making a lot more money than any of them would see in a decade. 

But, the final fruit of the thirty year Republican campaign to portray our long-held civic virtues as  positive evils, they believed that was a good thing.  Rushbo told them on the radio that the rich folk need that money to invest and create jobs, and all of these guys nodded approvingly.  They kept nodding for a decade while those rich guys took their extra lucre and invested it in ever more exciting new and innovative ways to make the the Angry White Guys poorer.  

This is where we are now.  Progressive taxation, a cornerstone of the civic values underlying the income tax since the 16th Amendement was passed, and one the rich used to actually take a certain grudging noblisse oglige pride in bearing, was now deemed a job-destroying scurge, a socialistic force of evil destruction that's probably just a big plot to take hardworking people's money away from them and give it to the blacks. 

And now, the guys at the the Republican Party's Minitrue have finally managed to take this innovative thinking to a new level.  Now, they've finally managed make a lot of these guys take the final step and proclaim progressive taxation to be a manifestation of Marxism.  That's what what we saw Joe Biden get hit with by that fruitcake anchor lady in Florida and you saw how incredulous he was. 

I wasn't.  That's been knocking around in the emails the Angry White Guys and their wives have been sending each other for a couple of years now.  Progressive taxation is Marxism.  Not just socialism, nope, its outright Communistic, precious-bodily-fluid-contaminating Marxism.  That's the received wisdom we have have to deal with now and that means we've got to go back to basics when if we're going to beat it back. 

Where did this radical notion of progressive taxation come from?  What economy destroying bleeding heart came up with it?  What no-good job destroying libtard perpetrated this great fraud on the United States of America?

Ladies and gentlemen (as Joe would say), I give you the genesis of the concept of progressive taxation:

 The necessaries of life occasion the great expense of the poor. They find it difficult to get food, and the greater part of their little revenue is spent in getting it. The luxuries and vanities of life occasion the principal expense of the rich, and a magnificent house embellishes and sets off to the best advantage all the other luxuries and vanities which they possess. A tax upon house-rents, therefore, would in general fall heaviest upon the rich; and in this sort of inequality there would not, perhaps, be anything very unreasonable. It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion

What rotten commie pinko fag said this?  Was it Karl Marx?  Leon Trotsky?  Eugene Debs?  Julius and Ethel Rosenberg? 

Nope. That would be Adam Smith in "The Wealth of Nations."   

Sigh.  Why do Republicans hate capitalism?