Look South

America is an interesting place for so many reasons, not least of which is the practical reality that a country this large and diverse acts as if it is much smaller and more homogenous.  For example, when we think of what it means to be an American we forget that it means incredibly different things depending on where in the country you live.  Our regional differences are felt not simply in the difference between the accent of someone from Minnesota vs Mississippi, but in the people we elect.  To a point these differences become so entrenched that we can also take it for granted that New England is going to vote one way and the South is going to vote another way and the Left Coast, etc.  But I find myself falling victim to this cultural tradition that I can’t help but think of all Americans, irrespective of the profound regional differences, as having much more in common than not and as being part of one large American family.  This is why I find it so tragic that in the areas of this country that need it most, it seems the Left has all but given up on fighting for all Americans.

The five poorest states in the country are Mississippi, West Virginia, Arkansas, Kentucky, and Alabama and things don’t go North until a ways up the list.  The five states with the fewest college graduates are West Virginia, Arkansas, Mississippi, Kentucky, and Louisiana.  The five states with the shortest life expectancy are Mississippi, West Virginia, Alabama, Louisiana, and Oklahoma.  The five states with the lowest healthcare insurance coverage are Texas, Mississippi, Alaska, Florida, and Oklahoma; which has one northerner but the trend still stands.  In all these states there is a decided lack of progressivism and it can be felt in every household that goes under, every family dreading the next hospital bill, and every child that is unable to attain their potential.  So what’s to blame?

Not surprisingly, I tend to believe that the reasons are complex and varied, but mostly stem from bad conservative policy.  Historically, the South has not been an economically thriving region for some time, in spite of a wealth of natural resources.  In fact, since the Civil War the South, as a whole, has had a really difficult time of keeping up with the economic powerhouse that is the United States more generally.  The South didn’t benefit as much as the Northeast during the industrial revolution, it didn’t get the same level of immigration to grow the economy like much of the Midwest, and it hasn’t seen the kind of innovation that has been making the West Coast so influential.  And one of the key reasons for this is a very traditional and independent philosophy at the expense of progress and community.

Far be it from be to knock the South, because there is a lot of good there.  My interactions with the South have shown me what I see across this country, a large number of hard working and compassionate people.  Southern hospitality is not a cliche without reason, and let’s face it, the buttermilk biscuit is among America’s greatest contributions to world cuisine.  That said, there is an unhelpful undercurrent of dogmatic independence that tells Southerners that any community larger than a church parish is to be suspect.  We’ve seen the results of policies that seek to make voting as hard as possible, to make getting insured as difficult as possible, to make getting a decent education as difficult as possible, etc.  And for too long, progressives have just been scared off by how things have been, which only lets the problem get worse and worse.

Judging by the idiots that get elected in the South, the conservatives have long since exhausted their supply of talent.  I suppose if we’re honest, the amount of talent in the GOP is dwindling on its last reserves as it is, but in the South particularly we can see what happens when they’re almost the only game in town.  The individual spirit and the profit incentive are forces that can move mountains, but only in the context that allows for opportunities in the first place.  If it were simply a matter of slashing taxes to entice businesses, then it would seem that the conservative argument makes perfect sense and every sort of industry would be rushing to conservative Southern states.  In reality, however, things are a bit more complex.  Companies want to both have the best talent pool to draw from locally as well as to have the kind of environment that will draw people to them.  It’s not enough to offer a decent wage, if the bread earner of the family sees that their kids aren’t going to get an adequate education and that the access to healthcare is spotty, then they’re probably not moving across state lines.

Moreover, a lot of talent is either gay or gay friendly, and if your state is hostile then you’re pushing away that talent.  Virginia might be the very Northernmost part of the South, but it shares some key similarities with the Deep South, including a large conservative base.  Back when the Republicans were in the governor’s mansion, the anti-gay policies of then Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli nearly lost the Boeing contract the commonwealth was courting. Luckily for Virginians they were able to put out that fire and secure the bid, but in states where they are fighting tooth and nail for “religious rights” bills and attacking non-discrimination laws, things aren’t looking as bright.

We need to show the South what the whole country is learning, that conservative policies may sound right, but when it comes to the real world we’re all left poorer by the far-right’s prosperity gospel.  Economic growth is a good thing, in general.  But if all the growth only helps an ever more limited pool of already well off people while those at the bottom get squeezed out in real wages, then it’s not good enough.  Free enterprise is a good thing, in general.  But if all the freedom does is allow the already wealthy to exert even greater influence in their own domain while prohibiting competition, then it’s not good enough.  Lower taxes are a good thing, in many circumstances.  But if you aren’t able to pay for the services you need and if you let your infrastructure crumble beneath your feet, then it’s nowhere near good enough.

We need to show the South first that these policies are working in Minnesota, Vermont, Massachusetts, Delaware, Oregon in ways that not only keep people employed, but set on a path to a future people actually want to be.  Oklahoma for example has one of the lower unemployment rates in the country, but seeing as it also ended up on a fair few of those other lists at the beginning, it seems that they’re putting in a lot of work for very little reward.  Minnesota might be cold, and don’t get me wrong it is incredibly cold most of the year, but people move there.  People move to Minnesota because they can get a good quality job with access to the best healthcare and among the best colleges on the face of the planet, Um Yah Yah!

I’m reminded of the time tested words of the 90s, “it’s the economy, stupid.”  Good intentions and noble ambitions are all well and good, but at the end of the day people want to see that they can feed their families and that they’re actually moving forward.  But as we demonstrate to the whole country broadly, and the South more specifically, that the progressive economic policies are the ones that create an economy that people want, we must also talk about the cultural issues because the two are inextricably linked.  Saying you want an economy that makes sure everyone has an equal opportunity at success is great but ultimately toothless if you don’t address the serious structural issues that have kept things from being an equal playing ground in the first place.  As mentioned earlier, how states legislate social issues can have a direct impact on the appeal to companies to actually do business there.  So if we want to get America moving forward again we have to make sure that we not only include all of America in policy discussions, but actually seek out the parts of America that need to hear the progressive message most of all.

Sociopathic Policy

It can be easy to forget that the largely homogenous Republican Party of today does still have some notable disagreements and dissensions.  Perhaps it has something to do with being in the much larger tent of the Democratic Party that these differences can seem small or unimportant, but they are in fact quite telling about the state of Rightwing American politics.  There is a trend that undercuts the dissenting opinions certain Republicans have that explains quite well why they don’t simply line up and follow the herd, regardless of how stringent a litmus test the GOP tries to put on its candidates.  The long and short of it is that even the most conservative politicians can’t help but come to the rational, i.e. progressive, side of the argument once they are directly affected or informed on the issue at hand.

Senator John McCain was once hailed as the straight-talking maverick who might even have risen to the White House.  Maybe for nostalgia’s sake he’ll get into this presidential race just to be beaten by another Bush in the primary.  Since his rather chastening loss in 2008, however, he has decided to go pretty much all in with his conservative rhetoric, particularly where it concerns his hawkish foreign policy.  Like former ambassador John Bolton, Sen. McCain is the kind of person who seems to never have met a war he didn’t want to be a part of.  This in spite, or perhaps because, of the fact that he has experienced the horrors of war personally.  I do have to say this much on his behalf, though, John McCain truly loves his country and was willing even to endure torture to protect her.  And it is that experience that informs his belief that the United States should never torture, which includes the practice of waterboarding.

Sen. McCain is one of the very few voices on the Right that is consistent in the moral stance that we cannot allow ourselves to be degraded into using such horrific tactics.  He recognizes the plain truth that even if torture weren’t horrific, it’s ineffective as a means of acquiring intelligence, as you can force a person to say whatever you want if you crush them within an inch of their life.  Sen. McCain was also one of the few voices to stand alongside the Democrats once the investigation of the CIA tactics in the war on terror showed what we’d long expected.  Our government directed our soldiers and war contractors to use “enhanced interrogation techniques” in the pursuit of terrorist leaders like Osama Bin Laden, during the Bush years.  There is little to nothing of value that we got from this, and despite his overall record as a conservative, Sen.McCain did indeed stand on the right side of history to oppose torture and defend those who seek the truth.

Senator Rob Portman is the current Republican Senator from Ohio.  He tows the party line on many issues including opposition to the Affordable Care Act, an increase of the minimum wage, and the maintenance of the social safety net (specifically unemployment benefits).  He was also a co-sponsor to the Defense of Marriage Act, DoMA, which defined marriage as only being between one man and one woman as far as the federal government was concerned.  He was a firm believer in anti-gay policies across the board until he found out that his son is gay.  If I could say nothing else positive about Sen. Portman, it would be that he does truly love his son.  That is why since his son came out, he has changed his position and become an ally of gay rights, not simply to marry but to have workplace protections.  Such positions would seem beyond common sense to me, but considering his background, I have to say that it is still nice to know that there really is hope for anyone.

Former Governor Jeb Bush is certainly proving himself to be his brother’s brother these days.  Say what you will about the elder President Bush, but at least he could give a solid answer as to whether or not it’s a good idea to invade Iraq.  Jeb Bush has also had some laughable responses to alternatives to the ACA, including Apple Watches.  All those people who couldn’t afford healthcare should just pinch pennies until they can afford the next great piece of wearable tech that can inform them of exactly what disease they are going to die of because they can’t afford treatment.  But every so often Gov. Bush can get something right, in much the same way that a broken Apple Watch might give you an accurate time.  He is one of the few remaining Republicans still willing to push for real immigration reform, including a pathway to some form of legal status for those already here.  One would have to conclude that he has come to this decision because, for all his many faults, he does truly love his wife.

Columba Bush is a native of Mexico, not unlike Mitt Romney’s father incidentally.  But unlike Mitt Romney’s father, Jeb Bush cares about her deeply, enough to want to see her and people like her legally protected.  Now that he has an actual stake in the immigration process, now that he cares for someone deeply affected by the rules of immigration he takes a position that is in stark contrast to the rest of the GOP.  Jeb Bush has repeatedly stated that he favors immigration reform that includes a pathway to legal status for those who’ve been living here illegally.  To any other Republican, including their previous presidential candidate, this is illegal amnesty.  The stated position of the GOP is hardline and utterly lacking compassion or reason, leading to such gems as “self-deportation.”  It’s telling that even the supposedly libertarian candidate, Rand Paul, is not in favor of workable immigration reform that protects human beings, so I can only conclude that the reason why Bush takes the liberal stance on immigration is because he actually knows what he’s talking about in a way that most of his colleagues simply don’t.

You see, the general stance of the Republican Party as it stands today has dedicated itself to designing an ever more inhumane and destructive platform.  Whether it is anti-poor people strategies that limit the amount of money people on benefits can withdraw from ATMs on top of cutting what benefits they can receive, or if it’s foreign policy that seeks to keep the business of body bag manufacturers booming, even down to setting up laws defending the “right” of some people to discriminate against and persecute others; the hardline GOP has made it clear that it is not the party that wants to help people.  It’s ironic that during the Bush years, the GOP talked about winning the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people, because at the same time they’ve worked to drive hearts and minds out of their own party.

The intelligent and compassionate people who do still inhabit the GOP are finding it ever harder to find a place within their party, leading to quite a few party crossovers in recent years.  Polls indicate what everyone had been feeling, that society is generally getting more liberal and that the base of the GOP is literally dying away.  But it is hard to abandon our personal identities, political party affiliation included, so there are examples like these who’ve been left behind.  Unless you are the blind ideologue like Ted Cruz that not only resist reality but actively try to silence it, you can’t help but notice that GOP policies have become sociopathic, lacking attachment to other human beings or being unable to recognize human beings at all.  And the only way that they can keep this up is if they never meet the people they hurt.

The GOP has had a lot of success appealing to a very specific subset of voters.  Their strategy has not simply been to conserve resources by not appealing to young people, minorities, women, immigrants, etc but to actively demonize these groups to drive to the polls the smaller group that might actually like them.  They’ve only been able to keep this up because for many people it is possible to go about your life having no meaningful interaction with people whose lives differ greatly from your own.  In the suburbs it’s very easy to assume that everyone is white and middle class, in the Southside of Chicago it’s easy to think everyone is black and working class, in the South it’s easy to assume everyone’s a Christian, and in New England it’s easy to assume that everyone likes Tom Brady.  And when Republicans are put into situations where they are forced to recognize that there are people who are being seriously hurt by their policies, they generally make the exception and take the liberal tack.

The Republican playbook has set in stone the notion that everyone is exactly the same, which is coincidentally exactly the same as them.  Any policy that benefits them specifically must be right more broadly.  This is how they can justify rhetoric that treats gays and immigrants like dirt and gives less than two seconds of thought about the rights of the imprisoned, irrespective of the Bill of Rights.  But the moment a sliver of humanity enters into one of their lives they can make that one exception.  Given enough of these exceptions they tend to fall out of the party altogether, but let’s not hold our breath.  For now I think it’s good enough to recognize that given adequate information, even the far right will show cracks in the armor, and once we get through we might be able to move forward as a country.

Government For the People

What do we want as a people?  If we’re to believe the cult of Ayn Rand, this is a meaningless question, as ‘the people’ is a concept that simply doesn’t exist.  I for one, and the framers of our government for another, quite strongly disagree.  It is not simply for a poetic flourish that the Constitution begins with the three words “We the People.”  Our government exists as means to serve the needs of the people as a collective nation as well as to protect the rights of the individual citizen.  So again, I must ask, as the American people, what do we want from our government and what are we prepared to do, to actually make our desired ends workable?

First and foremost, any government worth its salt must be capable of defending the people.  Defense is a necessary foundation for what we want from our government, but there are those who essentially see this as the entirety of the government’s role.  Perhaps in some part of humanity’s past, there was a people that merely expected this from their government, but these must truly be the exceptions.  Even the governments of warlords are expected to enforce some form of justice both in a legal and social sense.  From the first recorded civilizations we see evidence that the role of the government is to ensure some basic level of food for subjects and citizens, as the case may be.  Today, we are faced with slightly different questions of what is just and fair, yet there is still a group out there that wishes to say that the mere fact that life can be capricious means that we must accept life as it is.

It’s true, life is not fair.  We like to think that the countless examples of hardworking individuals who reap their earned rewards will always be reflected in the lives of others, but we know that there are people who are born with a massive head start and people who can work their entire lives only to end up poorer than they began.  In the passed few decades we’ve seen that simply following the rules and doing the “right” thing is not enough: e.g. getting a college education, putting in a full work week, buying a house, etc.  In that same time we’ve seen the role of government constantly attacked as people say in light of unemployment and deficits that we need to scale back the government, because we simply can’t afford to do otherwise.  We’ve seen public services cut, benefits cut, infrastructure budgets cut, assistance programs cut, research funding cut; all the while we’ve been assured that the private sector is the be-all, end-all solution to our problems.  I do not think it is coincidental that we’ve seen poverty growing and inequality increasing with this trend of government cuts, particularly when the moments that we actually see increased spending are solely directed at aiding large corporations, both defense and financial.

It’s not surprising, in light of these trends, that there is also a movement to privatize national parks, but this typifies what is wrong with our understanding of government at the moment.  The role of the government is not to make money, for that you do indeed need private enterprise.  As Tony Judt pointed out, there are some things that we want, as a people, which are not profitable, but which are nevertheless valuable.  It is the role of the government to provide or defend those things, as the case may be.  And perhaps more pressingly, it is far less expensive to maintain the natural resources we have now than to try and reclaim them sometime in the future.

America is blessed and cursed by two massive oceans on either side.  It is a blessing in as much as it has meant our safety from external threats.  It has been so historically successful as a defense that it is perhaps surprising that we even feel the need to devote any resources to our defense.  It has been a curse though, because it has meant our near perpetual isolation from other nations, other cultures, other ideas, but more than anything isolation from a simple basis of judging alternatives.  Too often Americans complain about how high our taxes are without recognizing that we shortchange our government by paying as little tax as we do, too often Americans say how proud we are to be the best without recognizing that some countries do certain things better than we do.  France for example has incredibly high tax rates when compared with the US, but they also have the best healthcare system in the world.  China has one of the most vibrant and growing economies in history, but it also has unimaginable poverty.  Finland has arguably the best education system in the world, but it’s also Finland.

Every country and every people goes about judging for themselves what they want and what they’re willing to pay for it.  Most countries see universal healthcare as a worthwhile and just thing, and oddly enough by pursuing that end, every country on earth has found they pay less than us for it, often with better results.  Some countries understand how important education is for the success of their economy, which is why many have made the decision to make even higher education the right of every citizen who earns their way into a university.  Even if this meant they ended up paying more in tax than we do in tuition, which incidentally they don’t, these nations still seem to think they’ve gotten the better of the bargain.  What ends do we choose to fight and pay for?

To start with the latter, we choose to pay for nothing.  Any person arguing that we need to focus only on cutting taxes has proven that they don’t actually care about debts and deficits or simple responsibility.  Whatever we do decide, as a people, that we do want, we need to be willing to pay for, otherwise we have neglected our role as citizens and as thinking adults.  But back to the former, we’ve chosen to fight for an unjust legal system, a dysfunctional economy, a bloated military, and an unkind society.  We fought to lower taxes on the rich, which is not in and of itself good or bad, but once we saw the consequences to our economy we kept fighting for it on the promise that it might someday trickle down.  We fought for a system that gives a pass to those who can afford the sickness of “affluenza,” while cracking down on the poor simply for being poor.  We fought to buy more weapons, so many weapons that we had to sell them to our enemies.  We fought to keep people from getting healthcare, to keep people from getting mental health assistance, to keep people from getting an education, to keep people from the American Dream.  And there’s no sense at this point in placing the blame on others, though there are quite clearly some who are more culpable than others, because every one of us that sat by and did nothing to stop the degradation of the United States is complicit in our current state of affairs.

Luckily, there’s nothing that says we have to forever make the same mistakes; the government is for the people and the people can always choose again.  America fought for and won the 40 hour work week, the end of child labor, social security for the retired, public education, universal suffrage, civil rights, and so much more.  The fact that we’ve allowed some of these victories to shrivel on the vine makes moving forward a bit harder, but still possible.  We can have this generation’s Square Deal or New Deal or Fair Deal, and we can do even better.  But we must first decide what it is we actually want, both in a broad sense of what we want from society, but more crucially in the specific goals we seek.  Recent movements like Occupy Wall Street were plagued by the lack of a coherent message of what they wanted, instead devolving to a general grievance of the status quo; we need to do better.

I can’t claim to speak for the people, or really any people other than myself, but as one of the people, this is what I want for my country.  I want us to start paying back our debts so that we can be ready when the next economic crisis hits and that means both cutting waste, but also having a tax structure that brings in enough revenue, which does indeed mean some tax increases.  I want us to reform the healthcare system to get better results for patients and adequately compensate doctors and nurses, which means a universal healthcare system (France would be my model for that).  I want us to make sure that from the first day of the first year of class that every student has the resources to succeed inside the classroom and out, so that they can all earn their way into a college education(Finland would be the model for that).  I want a justice system that is truly blind, that seeks justice and not profit.  I want businesses to be free to innovate and to prosper, but to recognize necessary regulations to protect workers, the environment, etc.  In short, I want a government that works for the people again.

Government By the People

Astute readers who have passed the third grade in America will likely be able to guess what the title of the next post is going to be, given the title of the previous post.  Lack of originality notwithstanding, I want to talk about a subject that I think the political Right in America actually covers better than the Left.  Shocking I know, that a person who so routinely berates the Right as much as I do can actually have some genuine praise for a political persuasion that I find to be morally lacking and mentally unsound in most cases.  Americans, when asked about the issues, tend to favor policies that are at least on the Left side of the spectrum, if not outright socialist.  Americans favor universal healthcare, expanding public education, defending the social safety net, regulations to curtail bad business practices, etc.  In fact, when the issues are lined up in front of the average American, without any party labels on them, there is a massive majority who favor the Democratic platform.  When you look at party affiliations, the Democrats are routinely the largest party, but as everyone knows the Democrats lose… a lot.  How can this be?

Having worked on Democratic campaigns before, I can comfortably say that the Democratic Party has extremely competent field programs to get out the vote.  When it comes to knocking on doors, dialing phone numbers, and distributing campaign literature, you’d be hard pressed to find a Republican field team that does a better job of getting people out there to spread the word.  The trouble is that there is a difference between knocking on doors and having the people behind those doors actually show up at the polls on election day.  Campaigns know this and the strategies they use aren’t expected to turn out 100% of people they contact, in fact the target is usually to increase support by 1-4%.  So here’s where we hit brass tacks, because the Democrats have theoretical support and infrastructure to win every election from now until the end of time, but they don’t have an electorate that actually goes out and votes.

The government that we have is a reflection, not of where the country actually is but a reflection of where the electorate actually is.  The electorate here refers specifically to the people who actually show up and elect representatives and not the much larger group that could otherwise vote.  And it does no good for people to dream about Texas going blue simply because there are theoretically more than enough likely Democrats to do the job, if the only people who reliably show up at the polls are the same people that elect Ted Cruz, Louis Gohmert, Rick Perry, and of course George W Bush.  The government that we create, the government by the people, can only ever be the government of the people that create it.

Republicans do an excellent job of keeping their base alert to when the next election is and who needs to be elected.  From the pulpit and in the home, the Right does a fantastic job of driving home how crucial it is that they show up to elect the family values conservative, who is almost certainly cheating on his spouse with a rent-boy.  Whereas mainstream media simply uses fear as a means of keeping up viewership, the Rightwing media machine uses fear to drive political participation.  The whole world is crumbling around you and the only way you can save your nation is by electing candidate X(R).  Fear works for driving a Rightwing message, but it doesn’t work as well when you’re advocating common sense, rational, compassionate positions.  And without an equivalent stick to get out the vote, the Left has frequently found it difficult to translate the potential votes into actual ones.

And it’s not just the electorate on the Left that falls into this trap of assuming that the theoretical numbers matter, it’s the names that do, or rather don’t, show up on the ballot.  It’s almost become a worn out cliche that Democrats don’t focus on the bottom of the ticket elections, and this is dangerous.  State legislatures and local governments are ultimately as crucial as the federal politician when it comes to providing education, maintaining a sound police force, etc.  The Right-wingers have few qualms about running relative nobodies in elections, which actually suits down-home campaigns they run.  It’s much easier to portray yourself as a man of the people when you actually are one. And as we’ve seen, by focusing on these smaller elections, the Republican Party has been able to redraw political maps to assure even easier campaigns down the line.  But Democrats rarely consider these political realities and that’s why most of the gerrymandering in the country, since 2010 at least, favors the Republican Party.

But irrespective of what part of the ticket you look at, it’s rare that you see many normal people deciding to actually go out and try to run for elective office, particularly the people who would likely do the job incredibly well.  There are countless businessmen, journalists, teachers, doctors, scientists, and media personalities who would likely be both popular candidates and effective politicians.  They tend not to run because they see the state of politics as it is now, with all the ludicrous people who get elected, and think that it’s not for them.  This just becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy though, as the good people take themselves out of the equation leaving the second-rate, if we’re lucky, figures that tend to run.  So again, the government that we the people create is not reflective of who we actually are, but reflective of who actually shows up when it counts.

There are some stupid, misinformed, not altogether stable people in our country, just as in any country.  They deserve to be represented in government as much as anyone else, but the rational, compassionate, informed, and sane group of people that comprises the majority of Americans should not be subjected to the whims of kooks.  Unfortunately, the state of the American political system today almost guarantees that the stereotypes of the insanity of our representatives will be vindicated, because politicians know that they may be mocked repeatedly for the batshit crazy things they say on national news and entertainment programs, but they’re in no danger of being kicked out of office because that bewildering insanity plays well to the constituency that actually shows up at the polls when it counts.  For whatever reason, rational people simply can’t be bothered to actually vote, which again only perpetuates all the reasons they have for believing that the political system is screwed up.

To be fair, there are many reasons why the average person might not vote, simply from a logistical perspective.  Elections happen on a Tuesday, a workday for the average American.  Polls often close by 7PM, which, depending on you job might make it difficult to find a moment on your workday to make it to the polls, though some parts of the country guarantee your right to briefly leave your job to vote.  The constant battles over voter ID requirements have been repeatedly shown to make the process even more difficult for groups of Americans who would likely vote Democratic.  In many parts of the United States, you need to be aware of registration deadlines, which can be months ahead of time, and ensure that you are at the right polling station and hope that nothing went wrong in the paperwork so that your name actually shows up on the voter rolls.  But at the end of the day these are excuses and if we want to change things to make voting easier, we can.

We can have a government that is representative of who we are, but we have to be the ones who make it.  To do anything less than that results in what we have now, a bunch of ridiculous suits with more dollars than sense, who serve their patrons and their base but not the American people.  A government by the people requires the people to actually pay attention and to actually show up on election day.  It’s important to bring this up now when there isn’t, strictly speaking, a looming election, because if you aren’t generally aware of the realities of American politics, it becomes difficult to tell who’s telling the truth when crunch time arrives.  But more fundamentally because a government by the people is not simply showing up every other November, it’s actually giving a damn about what goes on in your country enough to participate in whatever small way you can.

Government Of the People

We recently celebrated the sesquicentennial of the end of the Civil War here in America.  Ok, to say we celebrated it would be a bit much, because someone would have had to notice it; nonetheless, we’ve reached the milestone of 150 years without another civil war.  Somehow, we’ve managed to overcome immense hurdles, time and again, without turning brother against brother.  This is not to say that we’ve gone through the history since then doing only good, but more often than not we’ve moved forward as a nation to become what we are today.  Yet in this singular position, there’s been a growing movement that seeks to undo everything that we’ve accomplished by fundamentally rewriting who we are as a people.  I don’t wish to sound alarmist, because this is still an incredibly small movement in the grand scheme of things, but there is a vocal sector of American society that no longer believes in a government of the people, instead favoring a government of their people.

There are some people whom you expect so little of that you cannot even fathom them stooping below the bar you set for them.  There are some people who defy logic and somehow manage to even go below that bar.  Rick Santorum is such a person.  He fancies himself a man of the people because he’s anti-educated, anti-gay, and anti-immigrant.  In my mind this already betrays that he is not, in fact, a man of the people, because there are so many people he clearly is not in favor of.  You cannot be a populist if you have disdain for the populous, yet conventional wisdom tells us that these are the exceptional people you can hate.  It’s perfectly alright to hold the ivory tower institutions and the Ivy Leaguers in contempt because those are just some city folk who want to tell you what’s what.  It’s perfectly ok to hate on the gays because they are going against god’s law and that makes them something other than the people.  And of course, we the people have to hate the epitome of the un-American, the immigrant, even though we’re an immigrant nation.  Used to be that the Far Right would pretend that they don’t actually hate immigrants, just illegal immigrants, not so much any more.

Apparently America, this sprawling land of prosperity, is too small and too poor to handle even one more immigrant.  I hadn’t realized as I passed by all the empty apartments and homes in America, the over flowing supermarkets and megamarts that we were ready to burst at any moment.  But according to Rick Santorum, whose father was an Italian immigrant, we can ill afford to let in any more immigrants, legal or otherwise.  He’s not alone in this thinking, as Scott Walker has also indicated his belief that we need to scale back legal immigration.  Is there something I’ve missed?  Did we enter Soylent Green’s horrific prediction of overpopulation while I was distracted?  Actually there is something I’ve missed; this is nothing new.

I don’t know how long it was after the first European settlers landed in what would become America that people started complaining about the next boat that landed, but damned if it doesn’t feel like it was the very first one.  Certainly the Puritans that landed in New England were suspicious of the Quakers and Catholics that followed, and the whole lot were less than happy to see boats of French and Spanish settlers landing nearby.  By the time we get to the founding of the United States, you hear quotes of Benjamin Franklin worried about the prevalence of German immigrants.  We all know the stories of each wave of immigration being met with hostility and fear, from the Irish hatred on the East Coast to the Chinese hatred in the West.  All of this, of course, ignoring the fact that the actual native populations were the only ones with any legitimate reason to gripe about the sudden and repeated waves of immigration on their land.  Though I suppose if you go back far enough, even they came as immigrants, in a sense, in the great diaspora of humanity.

Irrespective of the whining from this type of Americans at any given time, each and every group has in some small way become American, become the people, by expanding the definition of what an American is.  An American is any race or ethnicity, any religion or lack there of, any gender or sexuality, and any political persuasion under the sun.  And yes that means every political position; even those who deny the full diversity of what it means to be of the people.  The language of Americans is English, yes, but also Yiddish, Spanish, Arabic, German, Cajun, Urdu, Japanese, Gullah, Norwegian(Um Yah Yah) and every language spoken in every home of every American.  These are all the disparate parts that come together to make the American people, and we are only made richer by expanding that definition.

Incidentally I mean it both literally and figuratively that we are all made richer by that expanding definition.  Think of all the wealth that has been generated by whole new cultures creating niches in America: all those pizza places, dim sum houses, sushi joints, taco trucks, etc had to come from somewhere.  Now imagine all the great ideas, entertainment, and inventions made by immigrants and the children of immigrants: Tesla, both the man and the auto company jump to mind.  Now try to comprehend all the endless man-hours, all the boundless energy of having the world come to us to work and make America the land of towering cities as well as bountiful farmland.  Immigration is and always has been our edge in international competition, so why are there people trying to attack it?

As I said earlier, what they want is a government and a nation of their people.  This is why there has been a great push to restrict voting rights and curb immigration.  They’re scared that because the population changes, there won’t be a place for them.  All I can say in response is that it’s ridiculous, and frankly it’s antithetical to what a democracy is supposed to be about.  We need to have a government that is made up of the people, all of the people, and at the moment we’re failing.  At the moment the government is made up of a lot of wealthy lawyers, mostly white, male, Christians.  There’s nothing that says the only way we can have a government that adequately addresses the needs of every American is by ensuring every demographic group has a proportional number of representatives, but if you have a homogenous government trying to represent a heterogenous population, someone’s going to be forgotten.

This is what is happening in places like Ferguson and Baltimore, and I don’t strictly mean this in terms of a discussion about race.  More than half of Congress is made of millionaires, and you don’t see many managers from McDonalds winning elected office.  And I understand that the reality of running an election means a lot of cash that the average person doesn’t have, but is it any surprise that the people who don’t rely on Amtrak are so willing to defund it?  Is it any surprise that people who have never even set foot in the poorest parts of their constituency feel no qualms about cutting affordable housing, food assistance, rehabilitation programs, unemployment benefits, etc?  If the government is going to be of the people, why is it never of these people?

The average American doesn’t exist, unless you’ve met a household with exactly 2.58 people that I have never heard of.  America is a nation of hundreds of millions of different stories.  America is a country of strong regional influences, hence that Civil War, but when you look closer you notice that each of those regions are made up of the exact same stuff.  The people of America are as different in terms of background as you can imagine, but in so many ways each American and each American family shares a common story.  These people, all of these people, deserve a government that reflects both the diversity and the commonality of the people.  Who those people are is not what it was fifty years ago, and the makeup of our government should reflect that.  Who those people will be is not going to be what it is today, and all these faux patriots who bemoan the immigrant making their own American story should recognize that.

The Women’s Vote

For better or worse, the word that most accurately describes political campaigning is ‘pandering.’  Candidates work very hard, if they hope to actually win, on making sure their rhetoric appeals to as many people as possible.  This sometimes means changing what the focus of a given speech or even how the same points are phrased to fit specific places and demographics.  There’s nothing wrong with this, per se. I don’t use the same tone of voice when I talk with my friends at a bar as I do with a boss in a business environment, for example.  And it only makes sense that if you want to make sure your message resonates with all the various, diverse groups that make up America, then you will do the leg work to make sure people hear your message in a way that will actually mean something to them.  But there’s one broad demographic that confounds many politicians, and this is the so called women’s vote.

Let’s first get some context, at this time in history we are still just over five years away from the centennial of the 19th Amendment’s passage.  August will be the 95th anniversary since there has ever been such a thing as a woman’s vote in federal elections, let alone the women’s vote.  In a more practical sense, this means that the approximately 330,000 American women at or above the age of 95 were born in a country that had no intention of defending their right to vote once they came of age.  These are living people who know all too well how recent these seemingly ancient reforms are.  For heaven’s sake, the Wright Brothers historic flight was some sixteen years before their sisters were allowed to vote.

The work of the women’s suffrage movement marked a new beginning of the way that politicians pandered.  Any time you go after a demographic you are making an assumption, i.e. that most or much of the group in question holds similar beliefs and values.  Obviously each and every person within a demographic is an individual, with his or her own specific thoughts, which may or may not be reflective of the whole.  This is the risk you run when targeting demographics in a campaign, whether political or marketing, that the generalizations of the group as a whole might not apply to the specific individuals you are courting.  But whereas many demographic groups are small enough for strong generalizations to work, e.g. Evangelical Christians, the “women’s vote” can be too broad to be useful in many circumstances.

Joni Ernst and Ann Coulter do not represent what people understand as the “women’s vote,” and not simply because Ann Coulter has repeatedly questioned the foresight of women’s suffrage.  The idea that the demographic of women can be effective when applied to black women, Muslim women, Latina women, Christian women, white women, Hindu women, conservative women, liberal women, etc seems utterly fatuous.  Yet, there is something to this, because the common wisdom that lumps all women together is telling.  The assumption remains that the American voter is a white male, even as the franchise of the vote has gone on to include people of all races and genders.  This of course sets aside the inclusion of non-land-owning citizens as well, but that’s really not the central point at the moment.  With 63.7% of the population, the average American is indeed still white, but with only 49.1% of the population the average American is not male.  Even at the polls, women are consistently more likely to actually show up than men, which would make it seem like the women’s vote as a demographic should be more valuable and more powerful.  Yet, it was a record breaking achievement for both the House and Senate to have 20% female representatives.  What’s up with this?

Because the women’s vote has been splintered up by political parties, by race, by religion, etc the actual power of this minority majority is rendered impotent.  And because of infighting between these groups, there has not been much of an incentive for politicians to reflect the needs of women generally or to give voice to women as individuals.  America is among the last countries in the world that does not guarantee paid maternity leave.  The argument why we cannot do this is that it would make America uncompetitive on the international market.  This ignores that fact that, assuming maternity leave is a drain on businesses, even the country that we stereotypically assume takes all of our jobs, China, has seen no problems with enforcing a 98 day at 100% of income maternity leave for all their female workers.  More pressingly, the underlying assumption that maternity leave is a drag on businesses is demonstrably untrue, so long as these policies are implemented in a way that empowers employers to keep their trained work force and keep that work force happy and healthy.

Issues like this are not the only area where the women’s vote is kept from having the power it should.  Something as simple and, one would think, bipartisan as the Violence Against Women Act, became a political football just like everything else during the long period of Republican obstruction.  Perhaps there was a misunderstanding about the title of the act, because when it finally did come to be reauthorized 160 representatives, all Republican, voted against it.  Not for nothing, but it did also include ten Republican congresswomen.  Something as basic as defending human beings from the kinds of domestic abuse, sexual assault, forced prostitution, etc that often go unpunished or even undiscovered, is apparently a controversial issue to people like Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz.  This is why women are more likely to vote Democratic than men, because there is a war on women in this country and it’s come for your rights from the Right.

It is unfortunate that there is this image of feminists as shrill, deceptive, ignorant, professional victims, because it entrenches otherwise reasonable people into assuming that women face no significant problems anymore  Let’s be fair, this image of feminists comes both from the few bad apples who live up to the stereotype, as well as the lack of willingness from the majority of informed and rational feminists to take the mantle of the feminist movement.  At this point I feel the need to remind the reader that I am a man, but I am also a feminist.  I believe that in this country there are still systemic problems that keep us from gender equality, and that the refusal to address these issues leaves us poorer morally and economically.  The full participation of women in the private and public sectors is essential to a thriving economy, but that can only happen in the framework of a level playing field, which doesn’t yet exist.

One of my favorite Youtube channels recently made a video about the gender pay gap in medicine. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVhgKSULNQA  He rationally, but passionately, outlines that a significant pay gap does indeed exist within the healthcare system in America and goes on to show studies that account for all the various reasons why this might not be the case: women taking part time positions, choosing low paying fields, taking time off to raise kids, etc.  I then decided to look at the comments, dangerous I know, to see what the reaction is, and it is a bit disappointing.  Even if they actually paid attention and agreed that it took account for these important factors, many people refused to accept even the possibility of institutional sexism.  “Men tend to negotiate more effectively,” being the most used excuse to ignore the problem.  This is what we call shifting the goal post and it’s exemplary of what women, and many minority groups face, in addressing their own issues.

It’s not fair, just like it’s not fair that black protesters have to not only be above reproach but also can’t have people on their periphery be anything less than saints if their point of view is to be taken seriously, just like it’s not fair that gay people have to show no personal flaws for homophobes to even passingly acknowledge their humanity, just like it’s not fair that any marginalized group has to work so much harder just to be seen as equals.  I can’t claim to know the full depths of what it means to live as a woman in America, it’s entirely possible that I’m missing some key details that would change my opinion, but it seems that there are several areas where women are still being treated as the group that only barely qualified to get the vote in the first place.  The women’s vote is fractured, which is troubling to me, because I’m not sure how far we can move ahead as a society without politicians feeling the political incentive of remembering the women’s vote.

A Strong Defense

You may have heard that Greg Abbott, the current governor of Texas, has ordered the Texas State Guard to monitor the United States Military.  The elite corps of our military, including Navy Seals and Green Berets, will be conducting a massive military exercise called Jade Helm 15.  It’s a large scale drill to prepare our best of the best for the unconventional warfare they expect to face in the near future, and part of the exercise takes place in Texas.  Apparently those flag-waving, military-supporting patriots that make up the whole of “real” America, of which the capitol is Texas, are frightened of their military.  Somehow the fact that the military is made up of actual Americans is not consolation enough, nor the fact that similar exercises have taken place repeatedly in Texas under several presidents without incident.  The easy jab to make here would be to point out what makes this exercise different is that the unfortunately loud minority of people who are stirring up a fuss are only doing so because there is a black man in the White House, but I don’t think that’s the case.  I think what we’re seeing here is the first step of realization for even the most ardent over-compensating patriots, that the military might be a little inflated.

Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing even resembling substance to these odd accusations that this exercise is some kind of plot to impose United States control over Texas… one of the states that are already a part of the US.  Again, our military is made up of Our fittest soldiers, working hard to be prepared to protect Us.  These are our family, our friends, our neighbors and not some foreign invading force.  But these impressive exercises are at once awe inspiring and a little shocking.  It is the tip of a more than $600 billion iceberg, the tiniest slice of the largest military in the world.

The first role of a government is to provide for the common defense, well technically fourth in the Preamble.  Nevertheless, it is impossible to establish justice or insure domestic tranquility if the country is perpetually left defenseless.  This is why it is so incredibly easy to elicit applause from crowds by saying that you support the military; however, like everything else in this world, there is too much of a good thing.  I live just a stone’s throw away from a military base, and it’s an incredibly frequent occurrence to hear their jets roaring overhead.  They tend to stop with the loudest exercises at night, so it’s no real skin off my nose, and at some level it’s comforting to know that our military is hard at work and close by.  I don’t fear for even one second that the military of my homeland poses a threat to me, but there’s been a shift in the role of the military that does perturb me.

When we describe the military, it is always in the euphemism of defense, both in terms of the Department of Defense and of course in that section from the Constitution itself.  This is fundamentally a good thing, because it should never be our goal to make the military into a tool of offense.  We cannot afford an offensive military that indefinitely starts wars, both in terms of the loss of human life and of capital more broadly.  An offensive military creates more problems than it solves as we end up making enemies when we’re on the warpath.  The casual observer may have noticed that these criticisms certainly apply to our military at the moment.

We no longer think of the military as defense in practice.  Ever since 9/11 we’ve implicitly ceded authority to the government to use the military, not simply for the defense of our homeland and our allies, but to go out and accomplish other missions.  I am perfectly willing to admit that there are occasions when we need to accept the responsibility that comes with being the biggest kid on the block, particularly in respect to agents of terrorism, even if they do not necessarily pose an immediate threat to us specifically.  There are also times when it is indeed better that we act preemptively to stop a small problem before it becomes a world-threatening problem.  But these are exceptional events; we’ve become far more comfortable assuming that if there’s something going on in the world that we need to simply throw troops at the problem.

Practically everything that can be said about how bloated our military is, has been said at this point, so I’m going to try and focus less on statistics about how we spend more than however many other militaries combined and focus more on the real world consequences.  First of all the size of the military coupled with our glorification of war makes it nearly impossible for some people to resist taking the car out for a spin.  When you have whole tank divisions and squadrons of jet fighters sitting around doing nothing it could almost seem like we’re wasting money, and if you’re a patriotic politician you can’t have that.  What’s more, there seems to be no problem in global politics that can’t be answered with a well placed war if you listen to the hawks.  Instead of trying to negotiate with Iran, we should bomb it.  Instead of supplying and supporting peaceful, democratic movements in the Middle East, we need to arm and lead warlords to set up another temporary peace. Instead of looking to reform the immigration system that penalizes legal immigrants, we should militarize the border.

But this has an echo effect on American culture, because as we’ve seen, the same people who were instrumental in making the military as massive as it now is, the “real” Americans, are now getting scared of it.  All those politicians arguing that we need to militarize the border and put federal troops right on the line seem to be forgetting that that would mean federal troops in states like Texas.  And so what is the solution to the federal armed forces that have to be put in place?  State armed forces to keep them in check.  And once those state forces get too big and scary, then there will be another big push for private militias.  And once those private militias get too big and scary, then there will be another push for arming individuals to the teeth.  Perhaps this is why gun sales have skyrocketed during the Obama Administration.  It’s just brilliant, we’ll have even more guns in the hands of more people, regardless of their mental state, all so that we can stomach funneling even more money into the military.

A strong national defense is essential for the continuation of the United States, but a strong national offense is dangerous to say the least.  And the consequences are not simply felt in Texas, but they are felt in every school, every hospital, and yes every VA facility.  “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” -President Eisenhower.  We’re supposed to make the tough decisions about exactly how much money is necessary to keep us safe, because beyond that each and every dollar beyond what is necessary is stolen from our underfunded schools, is stripped from the defunded food assistance programs, is robbed from our brave veterans who come home to find a broken VA system.

We can do better, and we need to do better.  Each and every candidate is going to go out of their way to claim that they are strong on defense, but someone needs to ask if they really mean defense and if so, defense of what?  I have yet to encounter a Republican candidate that is actually willing to advocate a defense plan that isn’t focused on putting more soldiers into combat, especially since Rand Paul has decided that he needed to buy some new principles.  Even on the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton is a hawk to fight with the best of them, so she needs to be questioned whether she wants a strong defense or offense.  Because we can abandon the idea of having a strong defense, and in doing so we will abandon the possibility of actually having something worth defending.

Insecurity

In America, the flag is ubiquitous.  I don’t particularly mind because it is a symbol of my country without any explicit exclusion to it, and if people want to express their patriotism by waving the flag that’s their prerogative.  But every once in a while I’ll notice as I’m driving on the highway that someone thought it was a grand idea to mount old glory off of their truck.  Now, I’m willing to endure the sometimes tacky decisions people make in wearing the flag as part or all of their ensemble and I have no problem with people slapping on patriotic bumper stickers onto their cars, trucks, etc, but when you have the flag desperately clinging by a few strands on the back of your truck as you drive at 80 MPH then we have a small problem.  Don’t worry, this is near the end of the “get off my lawn, you kids,” introduction, because while I don’t think I have any right to tell people how they need to express their patriotism, I have no qualm in pointing out when people are clearly compensating for something.

The average American is rightfully proud of their country, though I often fear it is out of ignorance instead of out of knowledge that many are proud.  The average American may express their patriotism in many ways: privately, through anonymous civic action; openly, through the publication of patriotic poems and songs; courageously, through service in the military; and any which way in between.  But it strikes me that the people who tend to go over the top by covering everything in stars and stripes and creating potential road hazards also tend to be over-compensating for the sake of a political point.  While this is potentially true for any American, it becomes even more abundantly clear with actual politicians.

If you listen to the propaganda of the Right, you could be forgiven for assuming that they have a unique and undying love for this country and for the men and women who keep her safe.  So over the top is their language in this regard, that I almost feel compelled to write this critique in the form of a sonnet, almost.  Every speech they make is so star spangled perfect that to even bring up the word criticism would be, itself, unpatriotic.  So it should come as no great surprise that this imagery is as substantive as Oz the Great and Powerful, both the movie and the facade.  Only those who claim to love the military so much would work as hard to dodge the draft and only those who claim to love our soldiers so much would send them into harm’s way as often as they do.

To be fair, it takes two to tango and there are people on the Left as much as on the Right who are to blame for our endless wars and the never-ending list of casualties.  Having made that concession, it’s hard to argue that the side most responsible for the endless bloodshed are not the people who go on about the glory of war, having never endured it.  It’s all the more ironic that the party, which once warned about the military-industrial complex, is now the biggest proponent of it.  But let’s not think for a moment that this over-compensation is limited only to patriotism and war, there’s so many other fun examples of the hypocrisy on the Right.

There’s something of a cliche that the most vocal opponents of marriage equality and LGBT rights are themselves a secret member of the LGBT community.  This, in and of itself, is nothing new.  Perhaps the most odious example that comes to mind is that of Mr Roy Cohn.  Mr Cohn was a senior aide of Joseph McCarthy; in that role he was instrumental in the hunting down and prosecution of supposed communists, homosexuals, as well as any other “un-Americans.”  If you are unaware of this particular individual it should still come as no great surprise that he was a closeted gay man and a prominent employee of Republican politicians and figures at one time, though if memory serves he always claimed to be a Democrat.  Mr Cohn does not find himself without company in the club of those ladies who doth protest too much, methinks.

Randy Boehning is the most recent example I can think of off the top of my head.  This Republican state representative from the great state of North Dakota has not been a friend of the LGBT community, but that didn’t keep him from private outreach on Grindr.  Larry Craig was perhaps the most well known example.  This Republican Senator from the great state of Idaho was similarly unfriendly to his gay brothers and sisters, so long as he wasn’t on the prowl in men’s restrooms.  And who can forget the man who had both President Bush’s and God’s ear, Mr Ted Haggard?  But rather than rattling off name after name on this matter, which might give the impression that being gay is a problem, and not simply being a prick, let’s just move on assured in the knowledge that there’s frequently a very good reason why anti-gay politicians are so dogged in their pursuits.

Instead let’s focus on just one more common example of over-compensation on the Right, and this comes not swaddled in the flag but shadowed by the cross.  Maybe it’s just because I’ve grown up in a very Christian culture, but when I hear the term used as a description of an act it still comes off as a positive.  “It’s the Christian thing to do,” as just one use in that connotation.  This is why I am always just a little perplexed at how the Right has claimed the term “Christian” for itself, because when I hear the policies they advocate, well let’s just say the term Christian doesn’t come to mind.  Who knows, maybe it’s because I’ve actually read the Bible a few times, but I always understood Christ to be a man who cared for the sick and poor, not the guy who bemoans the poor for being lazy and demanding that the sick should die rather than be given healthcare.

There are undoubtedly some who think that I am being hyperbolic here.  The Right may not want the government to establish a single-payer healthcare system, for example, but nobody would shout in agreement to let a hypothetical person needing intensive care die, at a Republican primary debate on September 12, 2011, right?  To be able to condone that kind of un-Christian rhetoric the Right had to work extra hard to convince everyone that they were the real Christians.  I mean, sometimes you read Dickens and thank your lucky stars that it’s from a bygone era, but then you read the news and remember it’s not so bygone.

Putting “In God We Trust” on our currency doesn’t make you any more Christian or American.  Shoving “Under God” into the Pledge does not make you any more Christian or American.  Denying your fellow human being help in their time of need does make you less of a Christian and less of an American and less of a human being yourself.  This should be eminently clear to any reasonable person.  Strike that, this should be plain as day to any person who looks themselves in the mirror and sees a person, but in this country we’ve just let it go that any claim to morality goes to the most immoral people we’ve got.  The people who claim to follow the Bible literally, yet feel no hypocrisy when they pray in public for all to see(Matthew 6:5).  The people who compete to see who can hate gays or immigrants or the sick or the imprisoned or the poor most claim to be devoted Christians (Mark 12:31, Matthew 25:37-40).

It’s time to stand up to those who usurp the great values of love.  These people who claim to love their country, love their neighbor, etc but who go out of their way to hate their neighbor need to be confronted with their hypocrisy and ridiculed with their inanity.  I don’t have much more to say about this, so I will just leave you with the famous words of Sinclair Lewis.  “When fascism comes to America, it will come wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross.”