Consider the heated attacks Mitt Romney’s campaign is now lobbing at Rick Santorum in the run-up to Super Tuesday. By calling the former Pennsylvania senator “Big Labor’s favorite senator,” the effort aims to paint the viciously anti-union Santorum as nothing short of the flesh-and-blood reincarnation of Paul Wellstone. Romney is clearly hoping that such a portrayal will spur a GOP voter backlash, and sensational headlines across the country spur his framing on. The result is a troubling ripple effect that could transcend a single election.

Laugh all you want at the absurdity of calling Santorum union workers’ best friend, and tell yourself that it all will teach average Americans how ridiculous the GOP is, but in reality, it’s not funny and will most likely have the opposite effect: It will probably help the larger effort to undermine the once-undebatable idea of what “pro-labor” fundamentally means.

As the framing of the Republican primary debate argues, it no longer means consistently backing minimum wage increases; consistently opposing corporate-written “free” trade deals; supporting budgets that let the Labor Department enforce labor laws; opposing so-called right-to-work laws; or even casting a majority of one’s legislative votes in favor of unions’ agenda. It means the opposite: a senator who has repeatedly voted against minimum wage increases, for job-killing trade agreements, against budgets that adequately fund labor-law enforcement, and against unions’ stated priorities a whopping 88 percent of the time. It also means a presidential candidate who is actively campaigning in support of a national “right to work” law.

While this particular — and particularly ridiculous — definition of “pro-labor” might not fully stick in the American psyche, it does have a longer-term psychological effect, especially since so much media attention is focused on it. It’s part of a larger process that, over the years, gradually shifts our assumptions and definitions to the right — a process that makes Santorum into “Big Labor’s favorite senator” and by comparison, genuinely pro-labor lawmakers into wild-eyed leftists. Indeed, with Santorum depicted as Paul Wellstone, today’s conservative Democrats who sometime votes with unions are suddenly at risk of being seen as European socialists, and progressive Democrats who are actually pro-labor are almost certain to be reimagined as Marxist revolutionaries — even though nothing could be further from the truth. Meanwhile, the momentary argument over whether Santorum is pro- or anti-union bleeds out into the larger campaign to reset the political center and define both the terms “liberal” and “conservative” as something farther to the right than they were even a few years ago.

On that latter point, notice the response from the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO (emphasis added):

Rick Bloomingdale, president of the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO, remembered trying to schedule meetings with Santorum, but always being passed over to his staff. After appealing to the Republican Senator’s aides on the labor issue of the day, Bloomingdale said his office would receive a letter stating the senator “was opposing you on whatever that issue was.”

“His thing was, ‘I won without you.’ He’s an arrogant guy, he thinks he’s right and everyone else is wrong,” Bloomingdale said. “Calling him a labor supporter would be similar to calling Mitt Romney a conservative. They’re both ridiculous.”

So now, not only is the media forwarding the idea that Santorum is pro-labor, but labor leaders themselves are suggesting archconservative Mitt Romney is not actually conservative! For the national conservative movement, that means the whole affair — regardless of whom it helps in a given election — is a victory in the larger war to move America to the right.

This is precisely why the longer the GOP primary and these vernacular-changing skirmishes take center stage, the better it is for conservatives, and the worse it is for the progressive movement. Sure, an elongated primary battle may (and I stress may) minimally help President Obama’s reelection campaign. But over the long haul, it threatens to change the very parameters of our political discourse — and that will have consequences for many elections to come.

How you answer all of these questions is a matter of political identity — your answers all but determine where you fall on the larger political map, and in the process, highlight your assumptions about a whole host of issues.

Now, in the wake of Whitney Houston’s tragic death, Christie’s done it again. By ordering his state government’s flags to half-staff to mourn the singer’s tragic death, he has ignited a heated national debate about who should — and who should not — be posthumously honored by the public. In the process, his move has provided a lesson in how dog-whistle politics works — and how the ugliest forms of bigotry still dictate so many Americans’ unconscious reflexes.

To summarize the details of this latest manufactured controversy, read the arch-conservative Washington Times’ writeup (emphasis added):

Twitter was abuzz Wednesday with reaction to the decision by Christie… In online postings, there were two main arguments against the honor for the Grammy Award winner who died over the weekend in California at age 48: One was that it should be reserved for members of the military, first responders and elected officials. The other was that it’s wrong to honor a drug addict.

Heather Clause, a Richmond, Va.-based blogger who writes about teen moms and was tweeting critical comments, said in a telephone interview that she was appalled by the planned flag-lowering.

“It’s just such a bad example for people,” said 23-year-old Clause. She said the decision was like saying if someone sings well, drug use doesn’t matter and “you can still be an idol.”

In upstate New York, Rebecca Eppelmann, a newspaper copy editor, also tweeted her disgust at the Houston honor, then discussed her views.

“It should be for major events,” she said. “It’s horrible that she passed away. It’s not something that should warrant this.”

Thankfully, Christie did the right thing and proudly stood by his decision, saying “I am disturbed by people who believe that… because of her history of substance abuse that somehow she’s forfeited the good things that she did in her life — I just reject that on a human level.” But that hasn’t stopped the backlash. In response to Christie’s alleged crime of honoring the dead, conservatives’ Fake Outrage MachineTM has rip-corded to life, generating the usual howls of heartland outrage — including a man who burnt a New Jersey flag in protest of Christie’s order.

Of course, when singer Frank Sinatra died and New Jersey’s flags were flown at half-staff, this kind of outrage was nowhere to be found — despite the fact that Sinatra himself was a drug abuser (the drug in question being alcohol). Likewise, the outrage was nowhere to be found when Elvis Presley died of a drug overdose in 1977 and flags all over America were flown at half-staff. Indeed, as the Rockford Register Star’s Chuck Sweeney notes, that event prompted an order for “all city flags in Memphis (to be) lowered to half staff”; compelled former President Richard Nixon to “ask Americans to fly their flags at half staff in honor of Elvis”; and got then-President Jimmy Carter to issue a statement saying, “With Elvis, a part of our country has died.”

What, then, explains the difference? Why would there be a hostile reaction to the way New Jersey memorialized the drug-abusing Houston, when there was no such hostile reaction to the way the drug-abusing Sinatra and Presley were memorialized?

The answer, of course, is rooted, in part, in racist and sexist double standards.

When famous white men engage in illicit activities, American culture allows them to nonetheless retain their street cred, their wholesome image and their public honor. In some instances, in fact, the illicit behavior contributes to their mystique and their legacy — it is seen as a cool part of who they are. This is exactly why one of the iconic images of Sinatra is him in a tux with a highball in his hand — because a white, male-dominated culture accepts — and even at times celebrates — the blemishes of fellow white men.

By contrast, when famous women — and particularly famous women of color — engage in the same behavior, the same swath of America that celebrates the Presleys and Sinatras often reacts with indignant disgust. Hence, the backlash to Christie daring to minimally honor Houston — a reaction that shows a white, male-dominated culture which accepts the imperfections of white males simultaneously refuses to accept the imperfections of “the other.”

Importantly, such a double-standard isn’t just amplified by men. In this case, some of those criticizing Christie’s decision are women. But that merely shows how pervasive the double standard really is — it’s so widespread and so accepted that it’s operating at a subconscious level across demographic divides.

To be sure, it’s fair to raise questions about whether any entertainer deserves the same form of state-sponsored memorial as soldiers, elected officials, first responders and other public servants. Such principled and necessary queries make us contemplate a culture that overly deifies famous people, regardless of why they are famous — and challenging that celebrity-worshiping theology is important.

However, if we are going to accept entertainers being recognized and memorialized by our civic institutions, then we ought to apply one standard. Either icons should be recognized regardless of their lifestyle choices, or they should not be recognized because of their lifestyle choices. Applying two standards to two sets of icons — and applying those standards selectively against women and minorities — converts solemn memorials of the dead into more ugly expressions of racism, sexism and other pathologies that still plague America.

All of these explanations are fables with a purpose: They are designed to deny the obvious by pretending that exploitation and policies that encourage exploitation aren’t the root cause of offshoring. More specifically, they ask us to ignore the fact that tariff-free trade agreements and tax loopholes incentivize companies to shift production to countries where slave wages, environmental degradation and human rights abuses are tolerated.

But now at least a few manufacturing jobs are suddenly coming back to America, and the same CEOs, economists and politicians who have tried to squelch any honest discussion of exploitation are inadvertently admitting that exploitation has always been the manufacturing economy’s invisible hand. They are admitting it when they concede that jobs are returning primarily because American wages are precipitously dropping at the same time Chinese minimum wages have slightly risen — from awful (in some places, $100 month) to a mere terrible (still just a $240 a month).

This is not some fringe theory. It’s a widely acknowledged fact.

President Barack Obama admitted it when in his State of the Union address he said jobs are returning because “it’s getting more expensive to do business in places like China.” Economists at the Boston Consulting Group underscored it when in August they said employment growth is happening because rising Chinese wages are “eroding China’s cost advantages” while the United States “is becoming a lower-cost country” as American wages decline. And GE Consumer & Industrial CEO James Campbell reiterated it when he recently told the New York Times that “making things in America is as viable as making things any place” because domestic labor costs are now “significantly less with the competitive wages” — read: far lower wages — now accepted by American workers.

Now that this consensus is finally out in the open, the real question for America is simple: Do we accept an economic competition that asks us to emulate China?

If our answer is yes, then we should support current state legislative proposals to reduce child labor protections; back federal legislation to eliminate all environmental, wage and workplace safety laws; and applaud corporations that crush unions and further reduce wages in America. We should also probably encourage our fellow countrymen to follow Apple Inc.’s Chinese workforce by simply accepting $17-a-day paychecks, 12-hour workdays and six-day workweeks. Indeed, if we accept this race-to-the-bottom style of competition, then we’re basically saying Chicago should look more like Chengdu; our heartland should look more like the poverty-stricken interior of China; and 21st century America should look more like late-19th century America.

If, alternately, we reject this dystopian future, then it requires us to more seriously consider things like tariffs, industrial policy, tax incentives for domestic investment and Buy America laws for government procurement. In other words, it requires us to declare that access to the American marketplace is no longer free — that corporations who want to sell things to Americans must play by our wage, environmental and human rights rules no matter where they make their products.

Between these two paths, there is no “third way”- – and doing nothing will likely mean that the uptick in American manufacturing jobs will prove fleeting. A choice, therefore, must be made, and it should be a no-brainer.

In all the ovation and self-congratulation, however, two big problems were left unmentioned.

First and foremost is the simple fact that this is not some brilliant P.R. move in the Nixon-to-China vein. On the contrary, many (though certainly not all) Wall Street financiers have long professed their support for gay rights, culminating in their pivotal role helping legalize gay marriage in New York state. That’s, in part, because it’s an effective strategy to divert attention from their economic agenda.

Taking a page out of corporate greenwashing strategies, many of the most offensively greedy, right-wing thieves in the business world have long touted their personally progressive position on select social issues like gay rights as a means of publicly presenting themselves as Good and Decent People. Not surprisingly, the particular progressive causes they choose tend to be those that do not impact their businesses or personal economic situations. In some cases, in fact, these thugs seem as if they are leveraging their stands on such progressive issues as a quid pro quo bargaining chip for their personal financial interests. As just one example of where that kind of dynamic may have played out, recall that almost immediately after Wall Streeters underwrote Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s campaign to legalize gay marriage, Cuomo launched a public (though ultimately unsuccessful) campaign to halt the extension of a so-called millionaires tax on those same Wall Streeters.

This isn’t to say that Wall Streeters’ support for marriage equality isn’t a good thing; it most certainly is. (As a strong supporter of marriage equality, for instance, I’m glad those Wall Streeters helped New York State legalize gay marriage.) It’s only to say that Blankfein’s support of gay marriage isn’t some hard-to-believe coup; it’s probably exactly what many “average Americans” would expect from a Manhattan investment banker.

That gets to the second, even bigger problem: What, then, is the movement for equal rights really saying to “average Americans” when that movement promotes someone like Blankfein as its chief public spokesman? And what is the muted reaction to the HRC announcement saying about what is acceptable in America?

To answer that question, consider who Blankfein is — and recall specifically that he is not some quiet, buttoned-up executive in a staid manufacturing industry, nor is he known as a new Lee Iacoca or Steve Jobs — aka a person widely revered (rightly or wrongly) for how his innovation and business savvy (supposedly) helped the world. On the contrary, Blankfein is the singular — and rightly detested — poster boy for the lies, crimes and avaricious schemes that destroyed the economy, impoverished millions of Americans and ripped off taxpayers.

This is a man who refused to tell Congress the truth about the basic facts of how the firm he led bet against — and profited off — the destruction of the American economy. As Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi documented, in 2010 Blankfein “went to Washington and testified under oath that Goldman Sachs didn’t make a massive short bet and didn’t bet against its clients” — even though the Senate’s “Levin report proves that Goldman spent the whole summer of 2007 riding a ‘big short’ and took a multibillion-dollar bet against its clients, a bet that incidentally made them enormous profits.” Blankfein’s lying was so egregious, the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations has recommended that the Justice Department consider perjury charges against him.

Blankfein is also the CEO who oversaw Goldman at the very moment that the firm engineered the infamous Abacus deal, a deal that was so insidious, that it ultimately drew a record $550 million fine from the Securities and Exchange Commission. Lately, he’s made headlines personally lawyering himself up in preparation for possible criminal prosecution, which is probably a smart move because he’s already being formally deposed in a civil lawsuit related to the SEC settlement. And, of course, this says nothing about Blankfein and Goldman’s central role in the deceptive mortgage securitization schemes that, ya know, cratered the entire global economy.

Considering all of this through the prism of HRC’s decision to promote him and the political/media world’s supportive reaction to that decision, we see a disturbing message: namely, that in America, if you commit the most odious economic crimes against humanity, you can not only get taxpayers to bail you out, you can not only keep your job atop the most powerful corporations, but you get to keep your social status as well. In this case, you get to be promoted as the cheery spokesman of a progressive social cause.

This elucidates a troubling double standard between how we see civil rights/equality and how we see economic justice. Most mainstream organizations (and certainly all progressive organizations) would never willfully brand themselves to opponents of the former — that is, they would never make their spokespeople open proponents of bigotry, prejudice and homophobia, and they would never do so in the name of reaching “average Americans” (yes, there are of course still groups like Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council that align themselves with that kind of hate, but at least as they do so it’s considered controversial and cause for widespread criticism). Yet, when a group pushing the progressive cause of civil rights and social equality promotes one of the avatars of economic injustice as a spokesman, there’s either no criticism at all — or widespread applause.

To be sure, when it comes to divisive political issues, there are no perfect high-profile spokespeople for public awareness campaigns. Everyone has a flaw, nobody is pure, and almost nobody is universally liked. But there’s a clear and obvious difference between imperfect and villainous. When a progressive group refuses to find the former and instead willfully aligns itself with the latter, it may help the specific and worthy cause at hand in the short term (in this case, marriage equality). But over the long haul, it sanitizes that villain and, worse, helps legitimize all he represents — including all the terrible things he represents.

That’s why Blankfein probably jumped at the chance to be HRC’s spokesperson — it’s a great deal for him, even as it gives the big middle finger to the millions of Americans he harmed in this recession.

So when former Pennsylvania senator turned Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum late last week cited his roots in the Keystone State as reason to support more fracking and oppose any regulation of the process, it provided a disturbing example of the power of Big Money over our political system.

To review: In an Oklahoma speech last week, Santorum said, “I come from Pennsylvania [where] we’re doing a little bit of [fracking] in Pennsylvania, thank God.” He then went on to say fracking is “the new boogeyman” — the “new way [for environmentalists] to try to scare you [by] saying, ‘Look what’s going to happen. Ooh, all this bad stuff’s going to happen, we don’t know all these chemicals and all this stuff.’ Let me tell you what’s going to happen: Nothing’s going to happen.”

I don’t know for sure what sickened residents of Dimock or Canton would say in response to Santorum’s declaration that “nothing’s going to happen” — nor do I know for sure what the response would be from the Oklahomans who, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, have likely experienced pretty serious earthquakes thanks to fracking. My guess is that they wouldn’t cheer on such statements from a lowly city councilman, much less a presidential candidate — and they almost certainly wouldn’t mimic the right-wing activists who wildly cheered on Santorum’s head-up-the-ass statements.

That’s just a guess, of course — but what isn’t a guess is that Santorum has now put himself squarely to the far right of both the already-conservative Pennsylvania Republican Party and even the drilling industry itself.

As the Associated Press reports, the state’s Republican legislators just passed a bill “that could force Pennsylvania’s booming natural gas industry to help pay for a wide range of state and local government programs [and] toughen safety standards” for fracking. While the GOP bill is certainly not perfect — AP reports that “environmental groups were split over the bill, and the industry has been largely silent on it” — unlike Santorum, it at least acknowledges the reality of the health and safety concerns surrounding fracking. The legitimacy of such concerns are conceded even by the fracking industry in Pennsylvania: As Santorum’s hometown CBS affiliate previously reported, “The president of the Marcellus Shale Coalition, which represents natural gas companies, said the group now believes the natural gas exploration industry is partly responsible for rising levels of contaminants found in area drinking water.” And that admission came before the EPA’s headline-grabbing revelation of groundwater contamination in heavily fracked Pavillion, Wyo.

Considering this, Santorum’s, ahem, controversial position can only be explained as the behavior of a person who not only famously doesn’t actually live in Pennsylvania, but more important, was long ago bought and paid for by the oil and gas industry.

As the Center for Responsive Politics reports, Santorum is one of the top U.S. Senate recipients of campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry — and what makes those numbers so stunningly outsized is the fact that he remains one of the top Senate recipients even though the last time he ran for Senate was in 2006. Put another way, this is not a run-of-the-mill legislator who happened to get a few afterthought contributions from the industry; this is a guy who was such a sycophantic apostle of the industry that he received enough oil and gas money to keep him on the top-recipient list a full six years after he was voted out of office — that is, a full six years after he raised a single dollar for a Senate campaign. In baseball terms, it’s the equivalent of Hank Aaron racking up so many home runs that he was able to hold the record well after he retired — only with Santorum, it’s not home runs, it’s oil and gas cash.

For the industry’s part, spending that kind of cash was clearly brilliant. With Santorum ahead in national Republican presidential primary polls, the oil and gas money has presciently purchased a potential major-party nominee who gives them an unthinkably powerful spokesperson: a candidate willing to actually cite his fracking-scarred state as reason to support less regulation of fracking. As expenditures go, that’s about the best political investment money can buy.

After the financial meltdown, for example, Congress witnessed an unexpectedly spirited fight over enacting pay caps at bailed-out financial institutions. Beneath the overheated rhetoric, the brawl revolved around determining how much is enough to compensate Wall Street’s government-subsidized scam artists.

Today, that conflict has metastasized into a battle over taxes. Marked by mind-numbing arguments over Mitt Romney’s IRS returns and esoteric catchphrases like “Buffet Rule,” the skirmish is really just a proxy war over how much individual income we are going to collectively deem “enough” before the next dollar of income is subjected to a less preferential levy.

Even at the state level, “enough” has gone mainstream, as Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo just signed an executive order barring state contracts from going to firms that pay executives more than $199,000 a year. Again, the idea is that such a salary is more than enough to attract skilled workers to taxpayer-funded firms.

Academia, by contrast, is playing host to the flip side of this long-overdue discussion, as tuition and athletic controversies highlight the absurdity of the “not enough” argument.

At the University of Colorado, for instance, oilman-turned-president Bruce Benson recently floated the “not enough” rationale in defending a $49,000 raise given to an administrator already being paid $340,000 a year. “I’ve got to pay for good people,” he said, implying that such a huge salary boost, paid for by massive tuition increases, was barely enough to keep the university competitive.

Similarly, USA Today recently reported that new college football coaches now make an average of $1.5 million a year — a 35 percent year-over-year increase from their immediate predecessors’ average of $1.1 million. Though Republicans regularly claim public employees such as teachers, police officers and firefighters are paid exorbitant salaries, the GOP almost never notes that coaches tend now to be, by far, states’ highest-paid public employees. Coaches retain that status in the face of budget pressures because school administrators constantly insist that they never have enough coaching-salary money to retain the best talent.

In all of these conflagrations, the forbidden six-letter word — “enough” — is the omnipresent ghost raising necessary-but-uncomfortable queries such as: Is a million dollars enough before one faces slightly higher taxes? Is $199,000 a year enough for a government contractor? Is $350,000 a year enough to attract a “good” university administrator? Is $1.1 million a year enough for a college coach?

It’s a shame such self-answering questions even need to be asked. But with Gallup’s latest poll showing most Americans believe a $150,000 annual salary makes one “rich,” it’s clear most of us would probably respond with an emphatic “yes” to all of them. That’s because most of us know what “enough” is. Now it’s just a matter of openly embracing it and finally replacing the era’s ethos of greed with a much-needed spirit of dayenu.