Wednesday, March 31, 2010

THE REPUBLICULT

Mike Forbes was a Republican Congressman from Long Island 11 years back. One day he caught everyone by surprise and switched parties. Why did he do it?

Was he one of that vanishing breed of moderate Repubs? No; although pro-labor, he was a typical pro-life conservative who had voted to impeach Bill Clinton.

Then did he just want to get into the majority, where you can get things done? Again no; he transferred out of the majority. So it was a puzzlement.

The truth is that Forbes was turned off by Newt Gingrich and the Repub leadership. The Dem caucus was more accepting and tolerant; you didn't have to agree with the other members to get along in it. He was a rightist Repub intellectually but couldn't be one emotionally.

(Forbes lost the Dem Congressional nomination by 35 votes the next time out, to an elderly woman librarian who then lost the election. But he's still around. He was in Pennsylvania in '08, for one thing, campaigning for a Dem Congressional candidate.)

It was probably unprecedented for a member of Congress to give up on his party not because of disapproval of its outlook or from opportunism but because he couldn't take the atmosphere of ill will and coerciveness, the assumption that unanimity could be commanded of the caucus. It was no longer the party he had joined. The Mike Forbes defection signaled the GOP's transition from party to cult.

Political parties are run by glad-handers who want everybody to join. If you're not typical of the pack, they're tickled that their party appeals to you. But if you join a cult, the members will keep a narrowed eye on you to see if you're somehow different. If you are, then, depending on how powerful the cult is, they will freeze you out, kick you out, or take you out.

I would not be coining the term "Republicult," accurate though it is, if Republicans had not for decades pushed the title "Democrat party" on their opposition. It was done maliciously and to inculcate disrespect. It was all too typical of their tactics, which have recently reach a new low.

The Republicult is a Gideon's army, excluding more and more members before it fights. As its numbers dwindle, the chances increase that it will also split in two because of the growing shortage of reasonable, tolerant members who could reconcile and compromise its differences.

So one day we may see the Religious Righters excommunicating and anathematizing the teabaggers, and the teabaggers threatening the Religious Righters with death on the polling place steps.

Harry Truman once offered the Republicans a deal whereby the Democrats would stop telling the truth about them if they would stop telling lies about the Democrats. Now more than ever we should tell the truth about the Republicans. The truth is that they're a cult.

Monday, March 29, 2010

JOHN BOEHNER FOR PRESIDENT

When we think of the Dems, we of course think of Barack Obama. He is their symbol. And when the Repubs were prematurely gloating about how healthcare would be his Waterloo, how he was Jimmy Carter all over again, how he would be a one-termer, they inadvertently pushed the Congress into passing the bill because the Dem majority had to save Obama's prospects in order to save its own.

But if Obama is the Dems' face, whose face should it be that adorns the Repubs' standard? I imagine they would prefer that we forget Dubya. And Cheney frightens little children. Who, then?

It could be the visage of a prom king or prom queen. (When you have nothing going for you, try looking extra good.)

There is square-jawed Mitt Romney, for one. And as my old friend George Ball observed, "Romney has a kind of glossy insincerity that some Republicans like." And there are Scott Brown and Sarah Palin, both fit to be prom royalty. And there is John Ensign, another handsome fellow - but forget that.

However, there is no reason to choose some one of them over the others. And those types, the pretty folk, come and go.

For the enduring mug of the GOP, I propose that of House minority leader John Boehner of Ohio. It may be that nobody would want him for prom king, but he personifies those who in generation after generation have done the party's work - propounded the unreason, pushed the members into conformity, pulled in the corporate world's self-interested contributions.

John Boehner, then. All right, all right, I admit he's a chain-smoking nihilist. But be fair: nobody's perfect. True, he may be no help if you want health insurance or a responsive government. But nobody doubts he was born in this country. Yes, he's thoroughly unwholesome. But there's this to be said in his defense: with him what you see is what you get. He's authentic, even a kind of existential hero: call him the Boehner of our existence.

The Republicans should have the courage to put aside glamor and pretense and run a presidential candidate who's really them in all their dreariness. That is Boehner. And if they give him Mitch McConnell for a runningmate, so much the better.

They may as well just do it, because they aren't going to win anyway.

Saturday, March 27, 2010

THE PARTY OF NYET

Red was always the color of the left. In America today it's the color of reaction.

Perhaps that is appropriate in one narrow way, because the Republicans have recast themselves in the mold of the old Soviet Reds. They are now the ones who forever say no, hell no, never, nyet. They cannot be reasoned with.

Despite their habitual intransigence, the leaders of the USSR did in the end manage to negotiate our differences. And they did modify their economic system as it became clear it wasn't working. But they didn't do the latter sufficiently to save it. To do so would have meant freeing and empowering the people and ending the Communist party's hegemony.

The topheavy Soviet system destroyed economic incentive. What the people wanted was to be able to work to advance themselves individually; that was refused them. They were expected to be idealistic, but they saw the self-serving nature of those at every level above them.

By suppressing criticism and limiting free speech, the Communist party held down feedback and adaptability so as to keep control in its own hands. Everything in Russia became a racket, where lip service was paid to equality while the economy was based on bribery and who you knew and sweetheart deals.

Thus privilege, the very thing it professed to have rooted out, was the essence of Soviet society, garlanded with hypocrisy. The Communist party and the lords of management and technology were the new ruling class, as was argued by Yugoslavia's dissident Communist Milovan Djilas.

The USSR failed not because it was left-wing but because it wasn't left-wing enough. Where the people can get their hands on capital and collaborate in private ventures, the economy does well. Where they can speak freely and there is equality of voice, there can be accountability and reforms and smart adaptation. Those are expressions of equality, of what it is to be lefty.

Now look at our country, where again most of the wealth and discretion are with the people on top. But here we don't call them the Communist party. No way!

Under Reagan the gigantic tax cuts for that oligarchy and the enormous deficit spending on defense, undertaken in part to deny money to the welfare state, resulted in a depression. We did get out of that one, but under Dubya the same measures landed us in a worse one that we are in some danger of being submerged by. And the Republicans' answer to that - cutting back on spending - would guarantee our submergence.

Starving the welfare state is economic suicide. If the poor don't have money, they can't spend money and so the economy languishes. They have little or no access to capital and so can't participate in the entrepreneurial ventures that lead to expansion of the economy.

Economic success requires the Golden Rule. Equality isn't just a nice idea, it's an economic necessity. When one class enjoys the lion's share of the wealth and the prerogatives, look for calamity eventually if not sooner. The Soviet Reds and the Republican reds proved themselves masters at generating economic failure by putting too much money and too much say into too few hands.

There is only one thing to say to the prospect of more of that: Nyet!

Thursday, March 25, 2010

NEW SECOND PARTY, ANYONE?

The Republican party has died and gone to hell. Now the question is whether it will take America with it some day.

You have probably seen the recent Harris poll on Republicans' beliefs: the one showing that 67% of them think President Obama is a socialist, that 45% of them think he is foreign-born, that 57% of them think he is a Muslim, etc. That the leaders of such a reality-averse outfit should assume national responsibilities is a frightening prospect.

Americans must have a third alternative: a second party that is realistic and can engage our better instincts. We dare not be left with a choice between a party that is more liberal than most are comfortable with and a party of lying soreheads and heedless crackpots.

In the 1950s what was called Modern Republicanism was such an alternative. It was put forward by President Dwight Eisenhower and the Republican national leadership. Its mood was cautious and a bit skeptical. It was wary of big enthusiasms, suspicious of sweeping new answers. It was pro-business but not anti-labor. Withal, it aimed to be reasonable, open-minded, pragmatic. It preferred to unify Americans rather than divide them.

Ike was dismayed enough at the far-right attitudes in the Congressional wing of the GOP that he pondered starting a new party. Today he would be kicking himself for not having done so.

Does anybody remember Arthur Larson? He was a minor figure in the Eisenhower government but was known as the chief theorist and exponent of Modern Republicanism. He thoughtfully worked out and defended a rationale for what he and Ike believed in.

Larson was a blandly handsome Midwestern law professor of Scandanavian ancestry who seemed the personification of a Modern Republican. He was decent, smart, attuned more to details than to overarching generalizations. He would have made a good candidate for something - maybe even for president.

But then in 1964 the Goldwater forces took over the GOP and extremism became its chief "virtue".

Arthur Larson fought that, debating and writing and doing everything he could to promote centrism. He rejoiced in signs that strong middle-of-the-road Republican candidates were winning in some places. But today the Moderate Republican is all but extinct.

Larson could never see why, when most people are in the center and are turned off by extremes, there could not be a thriving and even dominant party that represented their point of view. But polarization is what galvanizes the activists and the donors, so it is what we get whether we like it or not.

Can there be a third pole that defines itself against the other two? Maybe. New party movements are emerging. There is the Modern Whig party, which means to claim the center. (That name may have to go.) There is also a nascent Moderate party. These are attracting followers, though so far not enough of them to get widely noticed.

Third parties have tended to build around individuals - George Wallace, Ross Perot. They have not lasted.

Below the national level, centrist independents have sometimes caught on in races for governor in recent years. Jesse Ventura won in Minnesota. So did Angus King in Maine and Lowell Weicker in Connecticut. This year former senator Lincoln Chafee, who was a Republican, is the frontrunner for governor of Rhode Island. Another ex-Republican, Joe Schwartz, formerly a Congressman, is in the race for governor of Michigan.

There is no evidence yet that any party of the middle will become a big deal. But I can't believe that most Americans want to see today's Republicans running things. So we must look ahead with some urgency.

Arthur Larson's thinking remains pertinent. If the centrists can unite themselves and come up with charismatic leaders and good organizers, perhaps the displacement of the Republican party by something unifying and practical-minded can finally occur.

Otherwise we may be in tremendous trouble whenever the people feel ready to replace the Democrats.

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

DID YOU THINK I WAS KIDDING?

You may have seen this. TPM LiveWire at Google Analytics has a story by Justin Elliott from March 19, 2010 about a man with Parkinson's disease who walked over to a bunch of teabaggers protesting healthcare and sat down in their midst. He was carrying a sign that read "Got Parkinson's? I Do and You Might. Thanks for Helping! That's Community!"

It stands to reason that wasn't going to go over well. It didn't.

The man was Bob Letcher, who is 60 and who taught technology and science at Ohio State in the years when he was able to.

A teabagger told him, "If you're looking for a handout, you're in the wrong part of town. Nothing for free over here. You have to work for everything you get." A nice thing to say to someone who would love to work but can't.

Another protester said, "No, no. I'll pay for this guy. Here you go, start a pot. I'll pay for you." He put a dollar bill in the man's lap. Then he dropped the sarcasm and added, "I'll decide when to give you money," and he threw another dollar at him.

You may have thought it was exaggeration when I relayed a reported quote from a teabagger about his wanting the uninsured to die on the hospital steps rather than receive government help. You can see from this episode that that might just be the norm for teabaggers.

They are saying that what I possess is mine absolutely, that I have earned it unconditionally, that nothing can legitimately hedge my ownership of it. That assumes, of course, that my ability to earn it was not leveraged by good fortune or government policies that favored one group over others. In other words, it assumes something that can't be true. It overlooks our system's built-in biases and inequalities and the differences in our backgrounds that give some an edge over others.

If they were saying that those who can work should work and contribute, that would be fine. But they are going well beyond that.

The teabaggers are lucky and wealthy. Their idea is that if you are not, then they get to decide whether you live or die. In their worldview, this is axiomatic. It is the opposite of what they call being socialist and what the rest of humanity refers to as being civilized.

All of Hebrew civilization, all of Christian civilization, and all of Islamic civilization have rejected their idea decisively in favor of human equality and a conception of justice based on equality. Similarly, according to the Eastern conception of karma, we are one and the things we do to distinguish ourselves have no finality.

The teabaggers' attitude is most likely a secularized residue of the old belief among some Protestants that they are the chosen ones and that wealth is the outward sign of God's favor, so that the poor are impoverished and improvident because God means to damn them.

The baggers go to their churches and hear that the first shall be last, the last first. And they don't believe it for a minute.

So it's the tea-drinkers against everybody. But that seems to be how they like it. They feed on their frustration and outrage.

It may be that they have so numbed themselves with their materialistic values and their sense of entitlement that nothing except getting furious and lashing out can still make them feel alive.

Monday, March 22, 2010

HOW THE RIGHT SAVED US FROM THE REDS: PART II

The Vietnam war cost tens of thousands of lives. It made a wreck of Vietnam. Domestically it was a disaster that overheated our economy with inflation. It cost an unimaginable fortune in money. It divided the American people as nothing had in decades, and as a result the righties got in power and have largely stayed in power till this time, either directly or by gumming up the works.

The balance of historical evidence suggests that John F. Kennedy was prepared to withdraw our troops from Vietnam rather than intensify the war. His death precipitated a reversal of that judgment. One can only wonder what would have happened if he had lived, where we would be historically in this period?

It was Kennedy's academically outstanding and governmentally talented advisers, "the best and the brightest," who went for the war and persuaded a skeptical President Lyndon Johnson to go along with it. One of them, McGeorge Bundy, said that LBJ was always the last on board with the decisions to "escalate."

Kennedy had the intellectual confidence and knowledge of history to stand up to those fellows. He would have heard their recommendations and said, "You guys are full of it," and that would have been the end of these schemes. But Johnson never had the self-assurance to resist what such impressive men were telling him. If he had trusted his instincts, we would have been better served.


Am I saying these advisers were right-wingers? They were liberals domestically, but their elitism shines through their attitude. The tip-off to the rightist mentality is always one thing: that somebody counts while somebody else doesn't. So we were fighting to keep another country artificially divided and permanently under our thumb, a betrayal of our own origins.

Over and over they told us we had to win in Vietnam or the whole of Southeast Asia, maybe the whole of Asia, maybe in time the entire planet, would go Communist. Since the result was unambiguous - we simply lost - we have a perfect test case. Were they right?


Did the world go Communist? Did Asia? Did Southeast Asia? Did even one additional nation? No. They couldn't have gotten it more wrong.

Beware of righties who seem superficially to be lefties! The telltale signs are always there. And the outcomes will be crucial, as they were in the Vietnam war.

Friday, March 19, 2010

HOW THE RIGHT SAVED US FROM THE REDS: PART I

If you are young and a product of our American educational system, you may not know that there is a country in Asia called Vietnam, a place about the size of Pennsylvania, and that we once fought a war there.

This was a righties' war all the way: unrealistic, unnecessary, enormously destructive, and unsuccessful. A Democratic administration waged it, but the left turned against it early and only the right tries to defend it today.

We were in it against a Communist regime. And naturally we were fighting to keep the world's Commies from taking us over in the longer term. Today Saigon, tomorrow Seattle.

But the Commies in Vietnam were not part of a worldwide conspiracy. They were not, as my grandfather liked to believe, cat's-paws of the Russians. Their venerable leader, Ho Chi Minh, had struggled for decades to get his country free of foreign control, and he wasn't about to hand it over to the Russians. He took their help but maintained his independence from them.

The Vietnamese Communists were primarily nationalists. And they were fighting to reunite their country, which was half Red and half something else - something that we called free while making it into a horror.

Ho had lived and worked in America as a young man. He knew us. And he liked us. If we had courted him instead of opposing him, we would have fared much better. Possibly we could have not only avoided the war but influenced Vietnam toward a less rigid and more democratic system. It would at least have been worth a try, considering what we ended up with.

You will be told that we were over there on behalf of American values, notably democracy. But were we?

In the 1950s, when the French colonialists were driven out of Vietnam, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles agreed to a negotiated settlement with the North Vietnamese such that nation-wide free elections would be held, on the basis of which Vietnam would be reunified.

But then Dulles got some disturbing intelligence. It seems that Ho Chi Minh was very popular as a patriot - he was seen as their George Washington - and that his forces were favored to win the elections. Well, we sure as heck couldn't have that! So Dulles backed out of the agreement.

Have you got the picture so far? We were fighting for democracy, except that it was the enemy that wanted democracy while we were against it.

There was an unforgettable movie about the Vietnam war called "Hearts and Minds," a phrase that President Lyndon Johnson had famously used referring to our having to win over "the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people." At the end of the film, running down the screen for minute after minute after minute, were the names of U.S. corporations that were doing business in Vietnam.

Now, I don't think that President Johnson was carrying on that war for business reasons, just as I don't think he was involved in his predecessor's assassination. While he was a pretty flawed character, there were limits to what he would do. I think he honestly believed in the rightness of his policy. But if there had not been that degree of American corporate involvement there, I wonder if it would have taken us so long to realize the dimensions of our mistake and our hypocrisy, and to disengage?

There are wars we have to fight, and there are ones we should never go into. Only right-wing thinking fails to detect the difference, and that is true whether those who engage in it are on the left or the right.

I will have more to say about LBJ and Vietnam.

Thursday, March 18, 2010

"WE'RE FOR FREEDOM"

The Republicans, and conservatives generally, like to boast that they're the ones who are in favor of human freedom while liberals want to enslave us with bureaucracy and endless regulations. That the regulations and bureaucracy are necessary to keep us alive and FREE doesn't register with them.

"Freedom" is always the issue. Note that the righties' youth wing is called Young Americans for Freedom.

When it comes down to cases, especially the most telling cases, conservatives always seem to be against the freedom of the American people. Some examples:

>Say you're a woman and you're pregnant and you'd like to decide for yourself whether to carry the fetus to term or have an abortion. The conservatives, being for freedom, are going to support you in that, right? Hell, no! Decide for abortion and they want to put you and your doctor in prison. They're for the government's freedom to tell you what you can do with the contents of your own body.

>Say you're a kid who is upset with how things are going in this country and you register your protest graphically by setting fire to an American flag. The conservatives, being for freedom, are going to support you in that, right? As the Supreme Court has said, it's nothing but Constitutionally protected free speech, the most basic of basics. But no! Again they want to lock you up in this free country. They favor the government's freedom to protect the flag against those pesky rights and liberties that it stands for.

>Say you're gay and you'd like to be free to marry your own kind, like anybody else. The conservatives, being for freedom, are going to support you in that, right? Afraid not! They're supporting their own freedom to make you into a second-class citizen.

>Where "right to work" laws exist, they give your employer the freedom to fire you for exercising your freedom to join a union. But the conservatives, being for freedom, are going to support you in that, right? You know better!

>Say you take that right-to-work phrase at face value and think you should be able to have a job. So you don't want business corporations exporting your work opportunities, and you push for fair trade. The conservatives, being for freedom, are going to support you in that, right? Fat chance! They're for the freedom of the corporations to do what is in their interest, to your cost, while getting tax breaks at your expense.

>Say you lack health insurance and want government intervention to make it possible and to free you from being crushed by arbitrary, self-interested decisions of Big Pharma and Big Insurance. The conservatives, being for freedom, are going to support you in that, right? Not bloody likely! They want freedom for the gouger, not for the gougee.

How can conservatives be for your freedom, if they are for the freedom to make you unfree?

And how do they get away with this, anyhow? If you insist on having a country where you can live free, it looks like you're going to have to fight them to get it.

Happily, in this country you are still free to do that.

A LINK

You might want to look at Wes Richards's blog for a timely report on what Texas is trying to teach our kids: http://wessays.blogspot.com. To some, ignorance is the greatest freedom.

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

THE EXOTIC RELIGIOUS RIGHT

If you are not a Christian, or if you are a Christian but not a right-wing one, it is no secret that the Religious Right has a problem with you and means to create problems for you.

Yet in a way it isn't that simple. When Religious Righters want to punish people for not being Christians, they go after the Mormons, who are Christians, and not after the Jews, who are not.

That seems incomprehensible. So my chore here is to see if I can unravel it.

The Mormon part is just a question of theological differences, I think, and need not detain us. But the RR's one-sided love affair with the Jews is a thing to marvel at.

For nearly two millennia such people were blaming the Jews above all others for not converting. But then a generation or two back, the Jews began to be seen as meriting not pogroms but plaudits.

The explanation may be that the RR thinks that these are the "end times" and that the Jews are scheduled to convert any day now. Thus, they are okay prospectively.

But there may be something more. American rightists in general are big on the Jews now and especially big on the Israelis. Could it be that some factor here trumps religion from the rightist standpoint?

I figure it this way. American righties look at the rightist, Netanyahu-type Israelis and see themselves: the same pioneering/buccaneering spirit that made our country grate. They look at the Palestinians and see our American "Indians" and blacks and illegal immigrants and other inferior types. And those inferior types are sitting on a valuable commodity: land.

For rightists as such, the archetypally defining event is a righteous genocide against those they see as less human than themselves when those others possess a treasure that can be appropriated: land, oil, minerals, etc. That is the prospect that galvanizes them. It ties into one package self-righteousness, sacrificial mercilessness, triumphalism, and avarice.

Israelis are like Americans. They are practical-minded but idealistic, as witness a large peace-and-justice constituency among them. They are capable, as Americans are, of much that is good and much that is not, depending on the circumstances. But what the right is capable of falls into a much narrower range. The RR is not altruistic, despite its religiosity. It believes that if you belong to its tribe you deserve and will get all the goodies.

It also believes that it will never have to pay for its arrogance and selfishness. When things get hairy, it holds, Jesus will appear in the sky and rapture it out of here to someplace safe where it can lord it over everyone.

What its putative savior might think when contemplating this gang I don't know, but I am reminded of the shortest Bible verse: "Jesus wept." If this is his following, I'd say he has cause to.

Sunday, March 14, 2010

THE BODYBAGGERS

The teabag world has a marked undercurrent of lawlessness. You can hear it in the words of hatred toward government and of scorn for elected officials. You can see it in the boisterous overthrow of town hall meetings. You can infer it from the talk of revolution and the repeated comparisons, however loopy, with 1776.

The most extreme teabaggers are beginning to resort to violence. So far they have been doing it individually, like the individualists they are. But that is likely to change before long.

There was the ancient racist ideologue who killed a guard at the Capitol and was fatally wounded. Those who knew him said he had gotten angrier and angrier recently. Well, that is in the air.

Then there was the Austin, Texas fellow who stated, "Nothing changes without a body count." He burned his house with his family in it (they got out), then slammed his plane into a building that had a notable IRS presence. Limbaugh tried to spin this man as a lefty because he hated Dubya, but teabaggers have no use for establishment Republicans. And while some points in the manifesto he bequeathed us were unique to himself, such as his quarrel with the Catholic church, most were pure teabag/anarchist. For sure no one on the left would attack the IRS, which is the great institutional hope for redistributing the nation's wealth.

Most recently there was the guy who tried to shoot it out at the Pentagon. The righties are saying he was a registered Dem; that doesn't settle anything, because baggers are quirky. He was big on the freedom to do dope, but that fits with the libertarian element in bagger thought. Look at the statement that he left behind and you'll see that most of it was teabaggery: the conspiracy theory, the inflamed patriotism, the fury over our supposed loss of freedom.

There are also the resurgent militias and militant racist groups, possibly training in a woods near you. What are they saying? That the country isn't white enough anymore, that the government is illegitimate, that it's time for armed revolt. Is someone going to try to tell us that they are really liberals, too?

There is a difference in degree, not in kind, between the teabaggers and these bodybaggers. All exhibit the same rage, the same rejection of reasonableness, the same dislike of institutions, the same belief that citizens must rise up and act against their own government.

It is eye-opening to realize that you can go all through Canada and England and Europe and not find anything equivalent to this teabag/bodybag notion that you are free only when you secede from society, stockpile personal arms, and beggar your neighbors. In all these places you find a high degree of personal liberty and good social services, without the neurotic supposition that people must choose between those. What we are suffering from is a homegrown affliction, not something universally human or inevitable.

If you want to drive right-wingers buggy, just tell them the truth: that we are all in the same boat and that nothing is going to win them a special deal, a separate peace.

In recent weeks something called the coffee party movement has started up. It is moderate. It sounds sane. It is saying that the government is not our enemy but is our instrument for claiming and shaping our country. It is saying that we should take lawful, intelligent civic action, not make it impossible for citizens to do so. And it seems to be gaining adherents fast.

Something outside the government has to counter the teabag and bodybag mentality. Could it be that that something has now appeared, and that people will start hearing it out? Fingers crossed!

Saturday, March 13, 2010

THE RACE CARD

I went to grad school at Temple University, which is nestled among the streets of a black ghetto. On one of those streets - it must have been about '65 - I was appealed to for help by a middle-aged white woman and her college-age son, both with East European accents. Their car's engine worked, but when the man tried to back up it wouldn't move.

The woman complained bitterly several times that "the lazy neegers" all about wouldn't help them. In view of what happened, I am sure they never requested help till they saw a white person.

While we were scratching our heads, a skinny, poorly-dressed but jaunty middle-aged black guy with a too-small hat happened along. He noticed our bafflement. He also noticed what we hadn't - that the front bumper of the pair's car was interlocked with the rear bumper of the car ahead of it. So he and I stood on the front bumper while the young man backed clear.

Free at last! The pair thanked me profusely while the black man was sauntering off. I loudly called thanks after him, but they didn't pick up on it. In defiance of the evidence, they thought I saved them while "the lazy neegers" shunned them in their plight.

Things are different now on the racial front, as we all know. But that's no thanks to the Republican party. Under the leadership of Senator Robert Taft, the erstwhile party of Lincoln made a conscious decision to induce the segregationist South to switch parties and join it. So it stayed aloof from the work of civil rights and social justice, and it cashed in on racial backlash. Nixon's "Southern strategy" carried on that policy. The message to the white working class was, "Blacks and whites are, as such, in competition."

That view is needless and irrational, on a par with that long-ago pair's untruthful division of their world into "lazy" blacks and "helpful" whites.

The fancier, more erudite conservatives like to prate about Edmund Burke and the importance of history. But conservatives are historically short-sighted. Writing off the black vote for the segregationist vote may have seemed shrewd in 1950, but take a look today at the number of segregationists compared to the number of blacks. What the Republicans opted for was not only wicked but dumb.

Conservatives say that success makes us on the left feel guilty and that that is why we care about blacks and the poor and the helpless. On the contrary, we like the feel of success. So naturally we want it to be shared in by everyone, including those who have not had our advantages. Those who cannot understand that have something wrong with them.

Of late there have been attempts by right-wing propagandists to make liberals appear racist. Anyone on the left who practices racism is being inconsistent, because the left is defined by its belief in equality. It is the right that thinks humanity can advance only when some are enslaved or segregated or exterminated or degraded or held down.

To conservatives, if I win that means you have to lose. The truth is that we both win when they lose.

Thursday, March 11, 2010

MAKE A WISH

It was not long ago that conservatives prided themselves on being hard-headed realists, in sharp contrast to the liberals' idealism. Somebody like Richard Nixon may have reduced Realpolitik to rank cynicism, but nobody doubted his tough-mindedness. Back then reality, not tea, was the right's bag.

Forget that. These days conservatism is par excellence the province of wishful thinking.

Take the Religious Right. There is no longer any basis for denying that evolution brought us into being. The science is there. But they will not admit it. And you can see why not. Because if every word in the Bible is not the literal truth, they are denuded of the phony authority they have dealt themselves. In that event, where do they get off persecuting groups they dislike and legislating their primitive theology over all of us?

They want to believe that evolution is a lie or a mistake. Therefore it is. Simple, no?

And then there are the teabaggers. They see well enough that if global warming is a fact - as all of the science and the melting of the polar ice caps attest - then we are going to have to change the way we live. They don't want to change. They won't have the illegitimate, unConstitutional gummint telling them what to do. Therefore global warming is a commie plot.

They're inviting catastrophe, but who cares? It isn't here yet, so there's still time to pretend.

Then there are the birthers. They dramatize their idea that Obama doesn't belong in the White House with the groundless notion that he was born in another country and so isn't really president. They are determined to believe it; therefore it must be so.

And there are the truthers, though only some of them are righties. They think we have been lied to about what happened on 9/11. They like to blame conspiracies for everything; therefore the truth has to be concealed, except to them.

Actuality is the enemy. But fear not, it can be overcome through sheer willpower.

Also on the scene now are the tenthers, fans of Jeff Davis and the dissolution of Abe Lincoln's tyrannical socialist Union, who say the outlawing of racial segregation was outrageous Supreme Court interference with states' rights. Expect to hear more about nullification and secession: issues we thought were long dead. Again, cold sanity doesn't stand a chance.

By the way, when segregationists were yammering about states' rights years ago, Michigan Governor George Romney, the far more admirable dad of a current presidential aspirant, answered them in words I've always liked: "States don't have rights. People have rights."

Those significantly right of center in our time can be expected to believe in make-believe. What ought to be true, according to them, can be dressed up as truth without penalty.

So welcome to Rightiesville, where hearts are hard, heads are soft, and fairy tales get the drop on facts every single time.

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

POPULISM FOR THE FORTUNATE

It is said there are 15 million teabaggers. I think most of those were swept up in one part of the protest wave or another - corrupt politics or earmarks or hypocritical officeholders - and are not ready to follow it all the way onto the shore of anarchy.

The real, hard-core teabaggers are a peculiar breed that has come out of our individualistic frontier tradition. They don't want to admit that we are living in a mass society. It doesn't occur to them that there has to be give and take, or that not everyone has their support system and their luck.

They're naive and self-righteous, and their manners are surprisingly bad for such bourgeois people.

Predictably, the unspeakable Rush Limbaugh has praised them effusively: "This is American civic activism at its best." Get that? It's American civic activism at its best to wreck civic gatherings!

They may be good at running their businesses, but in public affairs they are babies. And mostly they are crybabies.

These are not the downtrodden of the earth or even the struggling lower middle class. No one has denied them anything. They have a standard of living that is the envy of the entire world! Just dilate on that one little consideration for a moment.

They see themselves as victims. They are filled with self-pity for no intelligible reason.

They represent themselves as "the people," but this is equivalent to the aristos dressing up like the peasantry, as Marie Antoinette was wont to do.

They believe that they are successful because they work hard, and that the poor don't. They don't see that people all over the world work harder and have little to show for it. They don't see that the West is hogging the world's resources and driving a billion people into desperation, and that they are the beneficiaries of that. They have been dealt a winning hand from the bottom of the deck, and they think they are being cheated!

And what they want is not reform but "revolution." So much for their level of maturity and their sense of proportion.

They slander conscientious public officials and don't care that that's what they're doing. They spread impatience and intolerance.

They possess little knowledge of the past, are attuned mainly to popular legend, and have no historical perspective. To them everything exists in timeless black and white.

They altogether lack a saving sense of irony.

They are without a capacity to be self-critical or to admit that the other guy might have a point once in a while.

They go to church and hear about the Golden Rule and the Good Samaritan, and want a society where the poor are begrudged health coverage. They have no glimmer concerning their own fundamental absurdity.

They think they are patriots. They are spoiled brats.

They try to identify with the country's founding, but with their faith in privilege they would probably have been Tories. Certainly the Founding Fathers - those encyclopedically learned, sophisticated masters of intelligent compromise - were nothing like these oversimplifying, intellectually lazy bellyachers.

What they are above all, I think, is proof of the failure of our system of education.

That they should have gotten all the way through college without an ability to think or to second-guess their assumptions or to care about anyone but themselves is ominous for our society.

Whatever we have been teaching our kids has been the wrong thing, and as a result we are having to swim through foul tea.

Sunday, March 7, 2010

DON'T FIDGET. FIX IT!

We hear it all the time: from columnists, from poll results, from teabaggers. "The government is broken." "The government can't do anything right." "Government is the problem, not the solution."

Gimme a freakin' break already!

What, the people are starving? Traffic is paralyzed? The mail never arrives? You don't get your Social Security check anymore? Medicare isn't paying up? Grass is growing on the national highways? Water doesn't come out of the spigots? Criminal gangs have taken over the suburbs? Terrorists are blowing up our cities with impunity? Just what exactly are they talking about?

Government in fact works pretty well. By no manner of means perfectly, but probably better than we have a right to expect, considering that it is run by human beings. And yes, there are long-term problems with everything. But we have addressed those before, and we will again.

Something is broken. But that something isn't the government itself. It's the political system. And it has been broken deliberately, by design.

Something is broken when lobbyists call the shots and corrupt the Congress with their influence and their contributions. Something is broken when earmarks go forth regardless of merit simply because the legislator has seniority. Something is broken when candidates win by a process of stigmatizing that shuts down thought ("He hates America," "She loves tax increases," "He's soft on terrorism," "He's a San Francisco liberal," "She doesn't like men"). Something is broken when they can destroy opponents' reputations with lies and half-truths and distortions and thereby drive good people out of the arena of office-seeking so that professional politicians get to dominate it whether they are any good or not.

Something is broken when one of our two major parties refuses to do anything realistic about major problems that are before us and instead concentrates on making sure that the administration fails and is humiliated and hated.

Something is real bad broken when it takes 60 votes to pass anything of significance, when 50 was meant to do it and always has.

Something is broken when a single senator can keep unemployment checks from going out. Then what you have is the opposite of majority rule: an anarchy in which any can defeat all.

When till recently have we seen such a ploy as an opposition legislator yelling "You lie!" while the president of the United States is addressing the Congress? Something is broken, all right.

We ought to be angry about this racketizing of our political life. And especially progressives ought to be angry, because they have won the right to govern and are being prevented from doing so by a conspiracy that has taken root in the other party and in a segment of the population, funded and coordinated by large and selfish economic interests like the insurance and pharmaceutical industries.

It is time for the filibuster, "senatorial courtesy," and other tools of obstruction to be revoked. They were useful in more civilized days. I know some say the Dems will need these gimmicks if the Repubs get back in control one day. But I say letting the rightists rule when they have a majority is less problematic than letting them rule when they are nowhere close to having one.

The Democrats must summon the resolve to get healthcare through. Then they must get the rest of their agenda through.

If they do, we the people won't have to choose between the Democrats' failure to achieve and the Republicans' unwillingness to achieve, where the latter looks like strength and the former like weakness.

We can instead contrast the Democrats' achievements with the Republicans' unsuccessful attempts to block those achievements, a much clearer choice and one likely to break the spell of negativity that we find ourselves under now.

Friday, March 5, 2010

TEA AND TUMULT IN TRANSIT

I was at a town hall meeting that got teabagged some months ago when Senator Arlen Specter came to town. While in line to enter the building we saw the anticipated bus arrive: the big fancy one that said HANDS OFF MY HEALTHCARE on it.

(Trying to save your healthcare by denying it to other people makes no more sense than trying to save marriage by denying it to gays.)

Seemingly half the people in the room that day were there to disrupt the proceedings with groans, hisses, shouts, and questions that were actually hostile speeches.

From the outset they made it clear that they disbelieved everything Specter said, including "Hello." It used to be that righties believed in authority and respected an office if not the person who held it. Now even the president of the United States is treated to "You lie!"

The impression of these types that I got was that all of them were white and that they were mostly males in mid to late middle age, who were casually dressed but prosperous. Their motivation seems to come from what they take to be their rightful (i.e. privileged) place in the world.

What of those who were there to learn or to speak? We got the chance to do those things, though in an atmosphere of distraction. Maybe we were lucky. In a number of places, you'll recall, town halls were turned into chaos and broken up: not just teabagged but sandbagged.

Democracy and tea don't mix.

While I was waiting for the bus afterwards - a mere municipal one without luxury seats or gourmet box lunches - a man told me that he had asked a woman who arrived on the disrupters' coach who was paying for their travel. She refused to answer.

Tea and transparency don't mix, either.

Monday, March 1, 2010

BLESSEDLY DIVIDED MINDS

I am sure I will hear (or would if anyone who doesn't agree with these postings were reading them) that I am dealing in stereotypes, oversimplifying, painting all conservatives with the same filthy brush. So let me make it explicit that that is not at all what I am doing.

From the start I have been alert to how varied and even contradictory people are. So I have noted that there are pure conservatives but also many impure ones (traitors to the cause who are awaiting their moment to strike, as I have framed it with tongue in cheek).

Far from wanting to say that everyone on the right is identical to everyone else on the right, I welcome all signs of inconsistency - of real individualism.

Congressman William McCulloch of Ohio was a conservative Republican - yet he played a crucial role in the passage of major civil rights legislation. Politically that was risky for him and gained him nothing. The country owes him something, not because he was a conservative but in spite of that fact.

Congressman John Saylor of Pennsylvania was a conservative Republican - yet he was also an avid outdoorsman who became a highly effective champion of environmental protection. The country owes him something, not because he was a conservative but in spite of that fact.

Senator Howard Baker of Tennessee was a conservative Republican - yet he gave vital assistance to President Carter's bid to do right by another country through turning the Panama Canal over to Panama. His doing so was, at best, no help to his presidential ambitions. The country owes him something, not because he was a conservative but in spite of that fact.

Even that hard-liner's hard-liner Ronald "We start bombing in five minutes" Reagan somehow backed away from his Captain Ahab-like obsession with punishing Communism to reach a healthy level of accord with Mikhail Gorbachev. The country owes him something, not because he was a conservative but in spite of that fact.

Conservatism evinces a society's death wish, I think. What else can you conclude from the competitive piling up of hideous weapons and the refusal to negotiate away their existence, from the ignoring of grave dangers in the natural realm, from the instinctive turning of groups of people against one another?

What I hope is that a conservative reading my words will say inwardly, "I can't identify with everything that he calls conservative, only with some of it." And I hope (s)he will become more mindful of distinctions and possibilities, rather than going along with the others like a lemming.

A lemming who takes a detour and lives is not a true lemming.

So let's hear it for waking up in time. Let's hear it for veering off and going one's own way while one's fellow ideologues go over the cliff. Let's hear it for contributing - in spite of one's deep-rooted tendencies, if necessary - to our society's viability, humanity, and justness. I say God bless America, where we are free not to be agents of planetary death!