I’m a Socialist and So Are You

Seeing as it is that most spooky time of year, I figure it’s as good a time as any to talk about that word that more than any other, save perhaps the name Frau Blücher, sets the hairs on the backs of American necks at full attention.  I am referring of course to the word Socialism, a word that is both more ubiquitous and more nebulous than just about any other political term.  Today in America, a person who calls him or herself a socialist is regarded as less trustworthy than just about any other group, e.g. atheists or Muslims.  This largely stems from the fact that for decades we were party to a Cold War against a state calling itself the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in the aftermath of a war with, among others, Germany under the leadership of the National Socialist German Worker’s Party, i.e. the Nazis.  Needless to say these groups are about as vile a representation of the horrors of government possible, but the strange thing is that these two socialist regimes were their own greatest enemies.  How can that be?

Well, let’s start at the onset by recognizing that the use of a word to describe a group often says more about the people using the word than it does with the accuracy of the word’s usage as a description.  For example, North Korea is an autocratic, hierarchical, militaristic state with little to know participation by the people in its governance.  Nonetheless, the official title for that country is the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.  Is North Korea Democratic? No. Is their government best described as a Republic? No. Is the wellbeing of the people actually at the heart of their governing principles? No.  But they can claim to have correctly identified what part of the world they are in, and is one out of four really that bad?  In a similar way both the USSR and the Nazis used the word socialism to align themselves with a larger movement that, in the rest of the world at least, is generally regarded as good.  But despite that similarity, as well as the near equal brutality of these states, the Nazis and Soviets represent two vastly different wings of a movement that includes most countries on earth.

Now is when we actually get to the important part, definitions.  When the Chairwoman of the DNC, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, was asked what the difference between a Democrat and a Socialist is, she seemed rather stumped.  This is in no small part because the question itself is rather malformed without an agreed to definition of what socialism is.  In its most basic context, socialism is a form of government in which the collective will and resources of the people contribute toward an agreed common good.  The extent to which the property of individuals is contributed and the extent of what the government is expected to do is what differentiates Christian Socialism from Democratic Socialism from Social Democracy from Communism, etc.  But in that most basic definition, the term socialism becomes nearly impossible to differentiate from any democratic government.

There was a time when the government was expected to use private militaries to fulfill the most basic expectation of keeping the state safe, but we have since moved away from feudalistic societies like that.  Instead we chose as a society to contribute our resources, in the form of various taxes, to support common interests, like a national defense, in a way that creates a military that is duty bound to serve the country and the constitution of that country, and not the interests of the person at the head of the country.  So, even the most ardent “conservatives” are themselves socialist if they argue that the only thing the government should do is maintain our national defense, paid for by a small tax from the people.  But let’s be honest, despite rhetoric on the Right, no one actually wants the government to only be the military and police.  We as a society have recognized that there are certain things that are necessary for individuals to flourish, but which a person of insufficient means might not be able to afford, and so we prefer to contribute some of our individual wealth to contribute to making those goods available to everyone.  The military is one such thing, but so is an education system, a transportation system of some sort, legal representation, a health and safety system, etc.

This is where we actually get into some meaningful differences, because people can understandably disagree on what services are best provided by private enterprise and which are best provided by the government.  The difference between a Republican and a Democrat is not in fact the difference between a capitalist and a socialist, it is a disagreement on what is the best balance of mixed markets.  Some people think that healthcare is best taken care of by the free market, using the drop in cost of laser eye surgery over the years as an example of how competition forces businesses to give the lowest possible cost to patients to stay in business, but I have never heard a person arguing for a free market system of healthcare say that those who cannot afford emergency care should be kicked out on the street until someone drops the price in treatment.  Even the most conservative healthcare policies these days come with the tacit admission that there will need to be a public service that provides indigent care for those with chronic diseases, without the means to ever afford even the most competitively priced insurance plans.  But that admission is not a “free market solution,” it is socialism by any other name and it smells as sweet.

Every entitlement we enjoy, from Social Security to Medicare, is a socialistic policy, but you would have to be either dishonest or ignorant to make the jump that we are therefore the same as the Soviet Union.  The USSR was a dictatorial, communist regime.  The idea of private property in a communist system is gotten rid of, with the expectation that every person contributes what they can and in return gets what they require.  Or to put it in the terms that Marxists around the world know, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”  This is a noble principle in the abstract, but thus far every communist regime has been, in practice, about as inhumane as one could imagine.  People are forced to work jobs by government fiat without the possibility of personal advancement.  A rational person sees this and is understandably repulsed, but an irrational person sees that and thinks it represents socialism as a whole.

Let’s pull up the Wikipedia definition of Social Democracy just to be sure. “Social democracy is a political ideology that supports economic and social interventions to promote social justice within the framework of a capitalist economy, and a policy regime involving welfare state provisions, collective bargaining arrangements, regulation of the economy in the general interest, redistribution of income and wealth, and a commitment to representative democracy.”  In a nutshell that is the US, but it’s nowhere close to the USSR and we should keep it that way.

We have welfare provisions to make sure there is a social safety net to catch people if they lose a job so that there’s something to make the transition to their next job possible.  As much as there have been recent fights to limit the ability, worker’s are still entitled to some basic bargaining rights to ensure that children aren’t working in mines, that working conditions are reasonably safe, etc.  We put in basic economic regulations to prevent the formation of monopolies that would otherwise inhibit competitive enterprise.  We have a progressive tax system that does effectively redistribute wealth, though clearly since the 80s the level of redistribution has been compromised, hence the unbelievable income inequality.  And none of this comes with a government telling people what jobs they have to work or through an autocratic, police state that inhibits democracy.

If socialism means anything, then it surely includes the United States, what with our public education system, our public roads, our public utilities, our public libraries, etc.  We choose these things because it’s better than the alternatives and it works.  There are some things that are never going to be profitable, but are nevertheless good and necessary, public defenders come to mind.  The real argument we are having in this country isn’t whether we become socialists or not, but whether or not we choose to pay for all the socialist things we take for granted.  Those public defenders I just brought up are stretched farther than they can go because we do not have a tax system that takes in enough to pay for the things we expect the government to do.  All of the conservative proposals to slash government spending always come up short on saying what they’ll actually cut, save to say that they’ll just get rid of entire departments.  This is why, when they get in power, they only ever get to the tax cuts and never get around to the actual spending cuts and drive the debt further up.

I am a socialist, because every American alive is a socialist.  The capitalist system is great, and has been the engine of growth that has made this country great, but free markets are insufficient at times and create bad incentives at other times.  This is why we, as a society, decide what exceptions we are going to create in the capitalist system, to ensure that even the poorest learn to read and have access to quality medical care.  That certainly falls under the umbrella of socialism, and I don’t hear anyone arguing that governments, state or federal, should start shutting down all public schools.  Even the craziest, most Far-Right politicians are still arguing for a form of socialism, it’s just a form of socialism that doesn’t work.  And heck, maybe that’s a strategy so that they can point to their own failure and say “See, socialism doesn’t work.”  As for the rest of us, we see that it does work, and though we choose to use any other terminology that does indeed make us all socialists.

If

Once upon a time in Greece, back when it was a series of loosely affiliated city states and long before there was even a Germany to be indebted to, Phillip of Macedon sent a letter to the Spartan government.  Phillip was on something of a power trip, having conquered many surrounding territories, and was turning his troops South to conquer those great Greek cities we think of as the cradle of Western civilization.  He was quite successful and ready to finish up his conquest of the peninsula by attacking Sparta, but not being one to waste soldiers unnecessarily he decided to try a threat first.  By all accounts he told the Spartans something along the lines of, “If I win this war, you will be slaves forever.  If I bring my army into your land, I will destroy your farms, slay your people, and raze your city.”  To which the Spartans responded by simply echoing the key word of the threat, “If.”  And with that confident counter to a legitimate threat, Phillip decided it best to leave the Spartans alone.

It almost seems superfluous at this point, given the high likelihood that the budget agreed to by Congressional leadership and the President will pass, but we need to talk about the repeated problem we’ve been having with Republicans and the debt ceiling.  For weeks we’d been dreading the possibility, not only of a government shutdown again, but of a default on the debt.  It is still a bit premature to assume that the budget will pass, but it’s nice to see that we have a few days of buffer time just in case, as opposed to the matter of hours and minutes that we’ve come to expect.  Only the perfect storm of Boehner leaving office, and therefore no longer caring about the insanity of his own party, along with a competitive election season where no one wants to seem as stupid as to have these repeated budget fights has brought us to a temporary pause from the nearly unending threats of Far Right extremists and their desire to bring this country to its knees.

Hyperbole? Perhaps, but I honestly don’t think so, when you consider what’s already happened just in the last five years.  When the Tea Party movement led to big wins for conservatives and a Republican majority in the House in 2010, they promised if elected that they would combat spending and stop the ballooning debt.  It was clear then as it is now that these people had no idea what they were talking about, because they didn’t know even the basic difference between the debt and the deficit.  This lead, inevitably, to the first debt ceiling showdown and the first time in American history that our credit rating was downgraded.  I find it particularly rich to hear Republican presidential candidates blaming President Obama for the downgrade because every agency involved and every person with a functioning brainstem at the time explained that the reason for the downgrade was just the threat by the new Republican majority that they wouldn’t lift the debt ceiling and therefore allow the US to default on our debt.

Just the threat alone was enough to knock us down from our AAA status, which weakened the US economy at a time when we were already hurting, and there was only one side making that threat.  The debt is enormous but it is still manageable, all the more so with deficit cuts every year that Obama has been in office.  If you want to actually start paying down the debt, there is certainly a sound fiscal argument to be made, and a responsible government could certainly work on budgets that would create the kinds of surpluses that could be used to do so.  That, however, is an entirely separate discussion from whether or not the US should pay its creditors for debts we’ve already accrued.  If we were to actually default on our loans, well we might look to modern Greece for a more adequate analogy for a worst case scenario.

If we defaulted on our debt the bonds issued by the government would lose most of their value over night, which would in turn lead to a massive spike in interest rates globally as the US currency is the backbone of international commerce.  That spike in interest rates would make the market seize up of the 2008 recession seem mild by comparison.  The perceived toxic status of the bonds would result in a massive rush of people, banks, and governments trying to collect on the bonds as soon as possible, which only worsens the problem.  And forget about a downgrade to AA+, it’s tough to say how hard it would be to reestablish confidence in the US government and economy after a disastrous decision like that.  And this is just the easily foreseen consequences of what would happen if the GOP were actually to fulfill their promises.

It’s that stark reality that gives some people a sense that it could never actually happen, that it’s a threat like the MAD days of the Cold War.  The scenario is too disastrous for anyone to ever be stupid enough to actually let it happen, but have you met the people who actually represent the conservative wing of the conservative wing?  Ben Carson, in an interview with Marketplace, gave a series of responses that make it clear that he either doesn’t know what the difference between debt and deficit is and would let us default out of negligence, or else he does know and remains steadfast in his conviction that you just need to draw a line in the sand and make people feel the consequences.  He is currently rising to the top of GOP polls at the moment, in case you were wondering.  Ted Cruz was the leader of the, for lack of a better word, “successful” fight to shut down the government in 2013 and has not made it clear to what extent he is willing to keep the government from ever functioning.  He too has been rising in polls, but has not yet reached the top of polls of the whole party, just with conservative groups.

These cannot be taken as empty threats.  Many people in Wisconsin voted for Scott Walker because they didn’t believe he would actually strip the unions of bargaining rights, but he did.  Voters in Kansas thought Sam Brownback wouldn’t strip their schools of funding, but he did.  In general most people get into this dangerous cynicism of assuming that politicians never keep their promises, but that’s simply not true.  It is true that politicians don’t keep every promise they make, because in a world of diverse opinions you don’t always get what you want, yet more often than not politicians do keep their promises because they want to get reelected.  So you can’t be shocked when the people who promise to shutdown the government and default on the debt actually do it, or at least try.

This is the modern equivalent of Phillip’s threat, the fiscal alternative to plowing salt into the land so that nothing can grow again.  Only by completely ignoring a huge swathe of their own party were John Boehner and Mitch McConnell able to negotiate a budget to get us through the end of President Obama’s tenure.  And in spite of that fact, they are going to support even more of these maniacs in their bids to seats of government, including the presidency itself.  With the notable exception of Donald Trump, all of the people running for president under the GOP banner promised to support whomever wins the primary battle.  This leaves two possibilities, either they were lying, which given the fact that they are politicians is always a possibility, or else they were saying that they are willing to support any of the extremists that will again appear on the debate stage to lead this country.  Near as I can tell both of those possibilities negate the idea that there is a moderate candidate among them.

I am not opposed to the Republican party on principle, and the moment they actually run a decent candidate I will be the first to admit it.  I am also quite hesitant to conjure such apocalyptic scenes to illustrate the consequences, but in practice the Republican party has proven that they want to be the party of apocalyptic consequences.  The quest for ever more ideologically pure “conservatism” has driven out the likes of Lincoln Chafee, Ben Bernanke, Charlie Crist, Jim LaSalvia (the founder of GOProud), and innumerable other people who thought they were conservative until they found out that good governance was antithetical to conservative principles.

And just as the Spartans bravely, if bluntly, responded with a committed opposition, so too must we confidently call out this threat.  This budget is a wolf in sheep’s clothing if it allows these same destructive conservatives in, under the cover of the last act of good government from a lame duck congressman.  The public has an unfortunate ability to quickly forget what happens in politics, and it will be too easy for the GOP candidates to just stay mum on these issues if there isn’t a consistent effort to point out the threat and who’s making it.  So, here I stand in response to all the Republicans running for office saying that if they are elected they will shred up peace deals on day one, eliminate healthcare, cut funding for research, eviscerate the social safety net, revert to a regressive tax system, end immigration to the United States, and allow us to default on the debt; “If.”

Alienation

As you grow up and interact with more people, one of the most important lessons you can learn is that it’s not enough to be right.  So often people like me get a little too full of ourselves try to expound on why our positions are correct, which is important to be sure, but it’s not the whole battle.  If the goal is to actually convince people to listen to the argument, and thereby win them over to your point of view, they need to be sure that you’re speaking with them and not at them.  When you look at the demographics of who votes for whom in the US, it’s quite clear that there are certain parts of society who have been convinced over many years and generations that one party or the other simply isn’t interested in helping them out specifically.  The Republicans obviously get blasted for catering so specifically to white, male, Evangelical Christians, at the expense of everyone else, but the Democrats also have a problem when the sense is that their policies only work to help women, racial and ethnic minorities, the LGBT community, other religious groups, and everything else that isn’t white, male, and Evangelical Christian.

Even by putting the problem in the way I have, I have undoubtedly furthered the cause of alienating a portion of American society that I mostly fit into and that comprises a large part of the general populous.  The Black Lives Matter movement came with the immediate backlash of people who want to say “surely, all lives matter.”  This has the wonderful qualities of both being completely accurate and utterly missing the point.  The point is not that only black lives matter, just that in this country, at this time the black community remains largely marginalized.  The concerns of the black community are often ignored or else put in a context where those problems can be tolerated by other sectors of society such that nothing progresses.  And when we don’t take the time to comfort the groups that are being asked to open their eyes, we hit the inevitable roadblock where an issue that should be a unifying call for us to redress grievances and find solutions becomes a wedge issue.  The result is the movements that work to expand the full scope of liberty to all groups of Americans further entrench a resistance to progress until such time as they make a character like Donald Trump the leading candidate in one of the major political parties.

Liberal, progressives, Democrats, etc need to recognize that we can’t move forward as a society without having white, Christian men on our side.  Even if we could do so we ultimately wouldn’t want to either.  Setting aside the reality that a group as diverse as say men does not actually fall so neatly into this kind of generalization, the demographics show pretty consistently that the GOP is better at convincing the American population with a Y-chromosome to pull the lever in the poll booth.  Why?  Well, it might have something to do with the way women are truly becoming a factor in all parts of society, the economy, and even the military.  Take for instance the stunning reaction to two women passing the Army Rangers program.  A story that should have been a remarkable example of what these women historically did ran into a significant amount of negative reactions ranging from dismissive disbelief to accusations of conspiracy.  The offensive assumption being that just because these two people lack a Y-chromosome, they must therefore lack the ability to pass a grueling test.  If you looked at information about the maximum weight men can lift vs women, then sure the men would have the edge, as an aggregate.  But in a world filled with individuals, a rather out of shape man like myself would not be able to lift more than an adequately in shape woman.  So the attacks against these two individual women are clearly in the wrong, but it’s not quite that simple.

This is just a particularly newsworthy example of the many ways where women are taking leading positions in the modern world, a world where the traditional roles of men as bread earners are being challenged.  It used to be taken for granted that it was the man who was going to have a career and the woman who was going to raise the kids, but as things changed we saw both genders in the workplace and now it’s becoming more common for a woman to be the bread winner and for the man to raise the kids.  For someone who is used to the way things were and took no small pride in being the one responsible for bringing home the bacon, this can be a jarring change.  More than that, with the way whole industries are dramatically changing or indeed disappearing, for certain people it can feel like the whole world is being pulled from underneath.  And when that happens those individuals feel more welcome in the party that runs on the “good old days” and the defense of outdated industry.

When President Obama went to West Virginia recently, he was greeted by several protesters.  Now, it’s too easy to simply mock the sings they brandished, misspelled or otherwise, and it rather misses the point.  Many of us on the Left shrug off the dogged opposition that Mr Obama has faced as racism and ignore it, but we do so at our own peril.  There are certainly a number of people for whom the matter is simply black and white, forgive the pun, and could not consider supporting the president under any situation, but I question the assertion that it is all of the people who so casually oppose him.  I don’t think it’s because of his skin color per se, but the assumption that because he isn’t white like the previous presidents he is therefore incapable of empathizing with white people, and so his motives are suspect.  When Glenn Beck claimed that the president has a deep seated hatred of white people, he was clearly in the wrong, but there’s more to it than that.  These comments betray an unease with a president and a party that are for the rights of historically oppressed people, because they assume the advancement of these groups must come at the expense of the “privileged.”

NPR did a piece in response to the West Virginia protesters where they pointed out that the Democratic Party, which used to be the part of the white working class, has been losing that vote steadily even as overall membership has increased.  It’s a point worth making that when progressives go after noble goals like the fight against climate change that the people who fight for the coal industry, for example, might not be doing so out of malice.  Coal is incredibly dirty, the mining industry leads to deaths even as it has gotten much safer in the US, and at this point it’s not hiring the number of people it used to.  And that last part is the real issue.  Change and progress are good as a whole, but that whole ignores the reality that many people get left behind.  The guy who’s been working twenty years in a mine shaft isn’t going to suddenly get the new tech job when that mine closes.  When we attack the Koch Brothers, we often forget the many people they employ directly and indirectly.  As I’ve said before, we need to be against the coal industry but for the coal worker, but we haven’t been making that distinction lately and it shows in the waning support from populations who no longer feel like the Left cares about them.

It’s easy to make fun of the way people are so mislead by the boogeymen created by the Right.  It’s easy to point out statistics that show a positive correlation between immigration(legal or otherwise) and job creation, yet there they make an trivial scapegoat as the people taking jobs away.  The immigrant has been one of the most commonly vilified groups because by definition they aren’t “from here,” and that makes it harder for someone who hasn’t seen the world to immediately empathize with them.  Second there are certain working class jobs that do get taken by immigrants on an individual basis, but again this ignores that it nets positive for job growth.  That net positive job growth, however, comes as small solace to the guy who just lost his roofing job.  This is, again, why a character like Donald Trump becomes popular, he’s feeding into a part of the human psyche that recognizes a small part of the truth that hits close to home while ignoring reality as a whole, and let’s be fair that makes sense.  The platitudes of progress don’t put food on the table, and if you have experienced a job loss over the years you want to find someone, anyone you can blame.  It doesn’t mean they’re right, but it does mean they have a point, and it behooves us to listen.

Bernie Sanders, for all the many things working against him in this campaign, has one huge advantage and that’s the fact that he understands this reality, at least implicitly.  When he reaches out to Freedom University, he’s showing that he’s willing to meet these groups halfway.  When he calls for policies that protect American jobs, he’s speaking to these groups that are often ignored by progressives in a way that lets them know, even if they don’t agree with the policies overall that he’s not out to get them.  More progressives need to learn that our policies, as is true for all policies, are not perfect.  I can think of no solution to an important political problem that does not have some downsides, and if we can’t figure out what our downsides are, our opponents will.  This is what fractures the country, when each side works harder on speaking only to the base and not considering what it would take to convince the base of the other side to join you.  I’m not at all claiming that it would work so well as to convince a majority of white men to vote progressive in future elections, but it would go part of the way to healing the divide between us.  At the end of the day I find that prospect a little more important than simply being right.

Liberal Liberty and Conservative Equality

The evolution of language is one of the most interesting, albeit pretty nerdy, phenomena that never really get explored.  For instance the words conservative and liberal have been used to describe both the Democratic and Republican Parties at different times in American history.  Before our country was even founded, the very idea of liberalism and conservatism were quite different, as the things that were being conserved was generally understood to be monarchy, aristocracy, etc; whereas classical liberalism has more in common with modern libertarianism than the kind of progressive liberalism we now think of.  Even today in other parts of the world the word liberal is more likely to connote Center-Right ideologies, or if you are a member of the Chinese Communist Party something Far-Right by comparison.  At this time, in this country, conventional wisdom dictates that conservatives are defenders of liberty and liberals are the standard bearers of equality.  But I’m here to say that, regardless of the rhetoric used by both sides, in practice this is the exact opposite of the truth.

It’s true that conservatism used to mean the defense of hierarchy and not equality, but as of right now it is quite clear that the proponents of conservatism value, above all else, equality.  Sure, in all the stump speeches, in all the platforms the claim is that conservatives desire liberty: religious liberty, economic liberty, etc.  They want to increase freedom by reducing the size and scope of the government that would otherwise encumber the people and strip them of liberty, but in practice this ignores what actually limits people’s freedom and is only ever justified by appeals to equality.  “We need to level the playing field.”  This is why there is a desire to reduce regulations and to switch to flat taxes or else the elimination of any income tax at all.  And at this point I’m not making a judgement call on whether these are the right policies, although we’ll get to that, but we need to be clear who’s actually on what side.

This isn’t just a problem for conservatives in America, the liberals are similarly confused on the topic.  There are certainly legal areas where it would be appropriate to talk about the liberal side being for equality, e.g. prison reform to stop the mass incarceration of minorities that resulted in the unequal prosecution of anti-drug laws.  But certainly in the case of that fight against mass incarceration there is actually bi-partisan appeal, as even the Koch Brothers have signed on board.  In most other cases what liberals fight for is equity and liberty, but not equality.  Take for instance the case of marriage equality, which even has the word in its name.  The conservative position has been that we’ve always had marriage equality because everyone is free to marry someone of the opposite gender.  And this is technically accurate, but rather missing the point.  If one person is free to marry the person they love while another is not, because the person they love is the same gender, it would be equal treatment to deny the same-sex marriage, but it wouldn’t be fair or equitable.

This is, in a broader sense, how to square the circle of most conservative hypocrisy, wherein they demand an expansion of liberty, with the notable exceptions of really personal issues like homosexuality and abortion rights.  In reality they aren’t fighting for liberty, they’re fighting for equality.  Men can’t have abortions, by definition, so women shouldn’t be able to have abortions either.  Straight people don’t have intercourse with someone of the same gender, so no one should ever.  It’s equal to the point of insanity, but it is indeed equal and at the expense of liberty.  If a person has any meaningful liberty then it must include the ability to live out a consensual, loving relationship, irrespective of the naughty bits involved.  But to defend that liberty is the purview of equity and not equality.

The difference between equality and equity is not terribly difficult to understand.  If you have a pie to share with your family, you don’t break out the protractor to ensure that every person at the table gets an equal slice of pie.  The toddler gets a smaller piece than the adults, and the person on a diet isn’t forced to eat as much as the ravenous teenager.  You do your best to get to an equitable distribution of pie so that the people who want more can get a little more than the people who want, or need, less.  It’s a matter of fairness, and in the real world working for equity rarely stymies liberty, which cannot always be said of equality.  People rightly point out that one of the foundational flaws of communism is that in the pursuit of equality, communistic regimes restrict liberty, such that in reality almost everyone is equally miserable, with the notable exception of those actually running the show.  And in a strange way, the conservatives who claim to fight for liberty push for policies that curtail real liberty for the sake of equal treatment, such that almost everyone will be equally miserable, with the exception of those actually running the show.

Liberty, if it means anything, means the ability to have a real choice.  You can say that a person with a gun to their head is still technically free to choose non-compliance with the gun wielder, but in most practical senses that person has their liberty taken away from them.  This, as you may have noticed, is the line of thinking that begins any conversation you will have with a libertarian, who claims that the government forces you to pay taxes at the point of a gun.  Whereas the reluctant tax payer has more options than simply not paying taxes, i.e. move to a different country, a person with an actual gun to their head has no such liberty.  Tangential point now concluded, what I’m actually referring to here are the things that limit a person’s liberty.  Government is indeed a part of that list, as any government worth its salt will not give you the liberty to kill someone for example, but it is not alone on the list of liberty limiters.  Hunger, want, ignorance, disease, etc are often far more effective limiters of liberty to the average person.

Again, I want to be clear that government overreach can indeed limit a person’s liberty and needs to be constantly kept in check, but it is farcical to pretend that the only thing that has ever limited liberty has been a government or state.  Liberals, implicitly, understand the reality that a person born in poverty is not as free as a person born into wealth.  And with the exception of some actual communists, no one is calling for a massive overhaul of society to ensure that everyone gets the same choices at birth.  Liberals call for policies that expand liberty for as many people as possible by society pitching in a certain percentage of income to pay for public access to healthcare, the social safety net, and education.  Liberals push for quality education for all people, recognizing that not all people can afford it on the free market, and so use the government to make the provision for all people.  This expands liberty in a practical sense, as future generations, who would otherwise never have a choice (other than between unemployment or crime), are now able to get the education that lets them pursue white collar jobs, vocational careers, medical and legal careers, etc.

Which brings us to how we pay for these things, because let’s face it, a progressive income tax is not the hallmark of equality.  Conservatives are indeed correct that a consumption tax or a flat tax is much more equal than the progressive income tax, but they aren’t equitable and they do not expand liberty.  Let’s take the easiest example of Dr Carson’s flat tax of 10%.  If you are chugging by on a minimum wage annual salary of about $15K that means you would pay $1500 in taxes a year.  That’s about 2-3 months rent in most places for a person on the lower end of the spectrum, and that’s going to be really important while you try to figure out what you can do with your remaining $13500.  Now let’s say you’re the CEO of say GE and make about $37 million annually, you would be paying some $3.7 million dollars.  That is, to say nothing, a pretty chunk of change, but I would hazard a guess that you’re not going to be strapped for rent if you still take home $33.3 million dollars. Is that equal? Certainly.  Is that more equitable? Not hardly.  The flat tax, in its pursuit of equality, takes away far more choices, and therefore liberty, from those at the bottom than it takes from those at the top.

These are the real world implications of policy, stripped of the rhetorical tricks used by both sides.  Legal equality is generally a good thing, but the pursuit of pure legal equality leads to the kinds of sentencing guidelines that allow for an unfair society where many people are stripped of nearly all liberty by being thrown in prison.  I am a liberal because I value liberty in the real world and less so liberty on paper.  For all the flowery prose on the Right, conservative policies remain antithetical to liberty, even after all the evolution these words have gone through.   Because the words may change, but the reality doesn’t.  And the reality is that the defenders of liberty continue to be those who are called liberal.

The Difference

When it comes to politics, making generalized statements is going to get you in trouble, with the possible exception of that previous one.  This is because people are far too complicated to be summed up as one homogenous group, even if we want so badly for it to be true.  The identification with a party or a movement tells you surprisingly little about what a person actually believes on a whole host of issues.  There are conservatives who support government assistance programs, there are liberals who defend gun ownership, there are pro-life Democrats, and fiercely pro-choice Republicans.   And all of that leaving aside what any of those people might think the appropriate strategy for dealing with foreign threats is, or what a fair and effective tax structure would look like.  We take this for granted, because it is so much easier to simply pretend that a singular label can sum up the totality of what a human being believes.  And the reality of how different people can be even within a unified political party is the primary takeaway from the first Democratic debate.

There is certainly a temptation to focus on the frontrunners in the race and pretend like there were only two people on that stage, but that would completely disregard the vast tent that is the Democratic Party right now.  On one hand you have a candidate like Jim Webb, who aside from serving in the Vietnam War, served as a Secretary of the Navy under Ronald Reagan.  He’s a bit more of a conservative Democrat on fiscal issues, and his military service definitely shines through in his foreign policy, but he is unmistakably a Democrat.  Lincoln Chafee pointed out that while he has remained steadfast in his convictions, the reason why he is no longer a Republican has everything to do with the radicalization of the modern GOP, and with the more than accepting arms of the Democratic tent.  Martin O’Malley represents a different wing of the Democratic Party, more aligned with the traditional Left of the bunch, but again on any given issue it’s far too simplistic to just label him as liberal.

As to the frontrunners, we did indeed get to see Bernie Sanders make the populist pitch that has earned him a groundswell of support.  Though a little less polished than the average politician, he nonetheless remains a beacon of sorts for the real Left of American politics.  However, viewers may have noticed that he too cannot simply be described as the most progressive candidate, as there are issues on which he is either more libertarian or perhaps more conservative than others on that stage.  And Hillary Clinton gave us a brilliant reminder of why so many believed she was the shoo-in in ’08.  She gave a poised and confident presentation of her positions that range from fairly hawkish foreign policy to populist education policy and yes arguably a more liberal gun policy.  For the sake of brevity I’ve tried to avoid getting bogged down in the nuances of each candidate on each specific issue, because the point I’m making is that among the five candidates that were on the stage in that debate, there is incredible diversity of opinion.

We witnessed five extremely competent politicians, all of whom want what is best for their country but have understandable differences on the best practices of how to deal with it.  We saw five different visions, with the same underpinnings, giving an incredibly broad landscape of choices for a prospective voter.  And I would be hard pressed to single any of them out as being even a poor choice for president, because even though I have disagreements with each of their overall policies, they demonstrated the kind of responsibility, rationality, compassion, and dedication to make fine Commanders in Chief.  They each have histories of public service in the Senate, in the House, in the military, in governorship, in the cabinets of presidents, etc.  There is no single profession that can possibly prepare an individual to become the leader of the free world, so it is comforting to see that all of these candidates have records that give a wealth of experience to make that learning curve much easier.  It’s been quite a while since I’ve felt as proud as I do now to be a Democrat, because when you look at what’s going on, on the other side, you realize just how rare it is to have such a wide variety of real choices.

Everyone has joked at how many people are running in the GOP contest for president, 17 at one point.  On the surface it should seem that there would similarly be a great diversity of opinions on the Right.  I mean there are senators and governors and doctors, oh my.  They have some racial and gender diversity, which would come as a shock from the Right if you didn’t then consider the policies.  There were once 17 candidates in that race, too many to even fit on one stage, and yet if you want to look ideologically at the candidates it’s a race between clones.  Whereas in the Democratic debate you had adults discussing what priorities we need to make and how best we can fund them, the Republican debates boil down to who can out tax-cut the others.  I’m for significant tax cuts, well I’m for across the board tax-cuts, so I’ll propose a flat tax, while I call for the elimination of the income tax.  That’s not a real choice, at least any more than the choice between 1% and 2% milk at the grocery store.

On foreign policy, they all are prepared to commit US troops on day one to accomplish ill-defined objectives for unsubstantiated reasons.  There was a time when you might hear a disagreement from someone like Rand Paul on that front, but at this point it seems he’s far more interested on getting his live stream heard than defending a viewpoint that might be unpopular with his base.  Someone like John Kasich seems liberal, only by comparison to those who wouldn’t even check to see if the Iran deal is working before they rip it up on day one.  And the lack of any genuine ideological diversity is why the debates themselves always devolve into name calling, both of other candidates and of minority groups.

Governor O’Malley had an incredibly poignant moment in his closing, where he fleshed out the difference between the Democratic and the Republican debates.  “On this stage you didn’t hear anyone denigrate women, you didn’t hear anyone make racist comments about new American immigrants, you didn’t hear anyone speak ill of another American because of their religious belief.  What you heard instead on this stage tonight was an honest search for the answers that’ll move our country forward.”  Again, the Democratic debate was a real conversation between real adults on real world solutions to real world problems.  This stands in stark contrast to fake celebrities peddling false hope to people who pretend they know or care about the impact of government policy.

The Far Right has made sure that no diversity of opinion will be allowed in their Republican Party, which is incidentally why the Speakership fight is such a quagmire.  The fight is over whether a prospective candidate has ever said a genuine compliment about Obama or if they can speak other languages aside from English, either of which could be reason enough to disqualify them.  They claim that George W Bush kept us safe whereas Obama made us less safe, even though the 9/11 attacks happened under Bush’s watch.  And the reason why I’ve come from starting this post talking about the dangers of painting with a broad brush in politics to doing just that when describing the Republican field is because, while the voting block may not necessarily have the same problem, the party itself has done its level best to homogenize and purify their ranks, to become one indivisible block of wrongheadedness.

Senators Chafee and Webb might have, at one point, been able to stomach an association with the Republican Party, but that was a different party than it is today.  When even Republican economists like Ben Bernanke no longer wish to associate with the GOP, you know it’s long past hope.  There will come a time when the Democratic tent splits, and I long for that day.  Because then the whole country, and not just the Democratic Party will get a chance to choose among decent politicians with a variety of opinions and sufficient backgrounds.  Sadly it’s not today, where there’s more diversity among five Democrats than among 17 Republicans.

Anti-Democratic Party

There is room enough in any organization for dissent.  If you talk with people in a book club, a church, and yes a political party, you will quickly find out that although that group identity is in common, the points of view in their heads are by no means identical.  Within the Democratic Party there are factions who err on the side of fiscal conservatism, there are pro-life politicians, etc.  I have already talked about the large factions within the Republican Party, but even with all these things that could divide the parties, there is always a point of common ground that unites the larger group.  For the Democratic Party that tends to be the empowerment of the people, all people.  This means, in real terms, the enfranchisement of as many people as possible: women, racial minorities, the LGBT community, etc.  It’s therefore altogether fitting then that it should be called the democratic party.  But there has long been a problem with the name of our country’s Far Right party, because it is not republican, it is however anti-democratic.

By anti-democratic, I mean three distinct qualities that define just about every faction within the modern GOP: first that it opposes the Democratic Party, second that it seeks to disenfranchise opposition, and third that it is against the very idea of the rule of and by the people, at least.  To the first point, it would seem a rather trivial observation to notice that political parties on different sides of the political spectrum oppose each other.  What is problematic here is that the GOP does not want its policies to win so much as they want the Democrats to lose.  This too wouldn’t even be that noteworthy if it weren’t to the extent that they will scuttle their own agenda, oppose ideas they like, sink legislation they introduced if it grants even a marginal victory to the Democratic Party and its leaders.

President Obama had not even taken the oath of office when the leaders of the Republican Party publicly stated that their first goal was to deny him a second term.  Their primary goal was not to govern, to pass legislation, to reduce the size and scope of government, to promote conservative values, etc.  And it shows in every failed negotiation and every ridiculously flip-flopped and backward position the GOP has taken throughout the tenure of President Obama.  The ACA was a Heritage Foundation creation, first put into practice under then Governor Mitt Romney and hailed as the true workable solution to the healthcare problem because it maintains and defends the private healthcare system.  Even though it is working better than expected, it’s not perfect and should be either reformed or better yet replaced with a national health plan that actually covers everyone, cuts costs, improve quality of care, etc.  But the GOP maintains that the ACA is both a complete failure and socialism, and therefore call for immediate repeal and then at some point in the future we can discuss replacing it.

Cap and Trade is another example of a Right Wing solution that must now be opposed because the Democrats were willing to meet them half way.  Despite the fact that just about every serious study on climate change, including those funded by the Koch Brothers, conclude that climate change is real and that human interaction is to blame for the extreme rapidity with which we are facing global warming, the GOP has stepped back from the truth so they can attack the Democrats.  Conservative economists like Milton Friedman have called unpriced carbon “theft,” and have pushed for something like cap and trade to make sure businesses have a market incentive to actually care about how much carbon they are emitting.  This used to be the conservative position, but has since been labeled a Democratic hoax designed to hurt American business and help China… which has also started to seriously confront its own pollution problems.  This is because they don’t care about principles, ideas, facts, evidence, government or really anything other than opposing whatever the Democrats put forward.

To the second point, that the GOP is anti-democratic because it seeks to disenfranchise the opposition, let’s look at what is going on in the realm of who gets the vote.  Even setting aside the living, breathing hyperbole factories like Ann Coulter, who has said that she thinks the 19th Amendment was a mistake, the GOP has gone a long way in the wrong direction since the Voting Rights Act.  The Party that once freed the slaves and worked with liberal Democrats to ensure that race would never again be a barrier to the right to vote, has now worked to keep racial minorities away from the polls at all costs.  Before the Supreme Court eviscerated the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder, the Voter ID movement was all but stalled.  Since then it has expanded and the result has been that blacks, hispanics, the poor, and the elderly have had their ability to vote curtailed in the real world, all for the sake of stopping fewer than ten votes nationwide that might have been wrongful.

It’s not just a coincidence that the DMVs that are closing in Alabama are entirely in counties that have majority black populations.  The Republican Party has seen that they are losing year after year in real terms of support as their loyal base either keels over or else just stops turning up.  Faced with the reality that they can only win elections when there are record breaking low turnouts to the polls, the GOP has sought to make sure they can win a majority of a small minority of the American populace.  They could have tried outreach, or perhaps meeting people halfway, but no the best solution for them is clearly to just make voting as difficult as possible and rig the system so that the Democrats need landslide victories every time just to break even in terms of the number of representatives they actually get.  In this way the GOP has fundamentally lost any possible moral argument their positions might otherwise warrant because they are not winning hearts and minds, they are silencing dissent.  If that’s democracy, then North Korea truly is a Democratic People’s Republic.

And to the final point, that the modern Republican Party stands in opposition to the very idea of a government of and by the people, let’s look at what qualities the GOP looks for in its candidates.  Strength… and that’s about it.  The GOP doesn’t care about theory or academia, it doesn’t care about what works and what doesn’t, the GOP cares only that their representatives are loud, forceful, and strong.  How do we solve the immigration problem?  Strengthen the borders.  How do resolve income inequality?  Have stronger growth.  How do we confront Putin? Be strong.  And more to the point, when talking about Putin, the GOP can’t seem to decide if they love or loathe him, in all his sweaty, shirtless glory.  They don’t want a leader who knows what he or she is talking about, they want a “leader” who can bad mouth the opposition and get them to shut up, and to put that person in power they don’t care what means must be taken.

In a recent poll, 43% of Republicans said they could imagine supporting a military coup in the United States to install someone they prefer.  Now I may disagree vehemently with just about every single candidate running for president with an R after their name, but if they win the election then they have my support as an American citizen, because I would rather my country succeed than fail.  This sentiment is apparently not shared by a large swathe of the GOP, who seem to see Democracy as only a means to the end of imposing their will on others, at best.  There are clearly other candidates and voters who don’t even care that much about Democracy, because the will of their god takes precedence over the will of the governed.

And this is the crucial point, because the modern GOP is replete with supporters of theocracies and dictatorships, where a very specific strain of Christianity has supremacy and anyone who dissents can expect to lose tier citizenship or their life, whichever is more expedient.  This is not only thoroughly anti-democratic it is utterly inhuman.  This is the modern incarnation of the Leviathan, a government that exists only to crush its foes.  It is the nightmare of Hobbes and downright antithetical to our nation that was bred from the ideals of Locke.  There is nothing to do with republicanism, or a public state where government is derived from the consent of all the governed, and has everything to do with autocracy, or self power where government is derived from the will of the despot.  Such an ideology is incompatible with a government of and by the people by definition and with a government for the people in practice.

Religious Tolerance

Clichés are an odd phenomenon of language.  They form out of a societal recognition of some truth, however small, and the appreciation of that truth’s expression in an eloquent form.  But the cliché is a double edged sword, because the ability to use familiar turns of phrase makes it possible to obfuscate uninformed ideas and bad policy.  The worst examples come from the usurpation of the words to suggest the exact opposite of their proper meaning.  The use of phrases surrounding our country’s relationships between religion, liberty, secularism, and government is becoming all but meaningless in many circles.  The Orwellian twisting of language may originate in an ideological vacuum but it has a noticeable impact on the whole of society.

Anyone who has even the faintest memory of their civics lessons should know that the United States was built on the premise that our government is and ought to be separated from the goings on of any church.  Anyone who has experienced even five seconds of life within the United States also knows that in practice it is altogether impossible to avoid the influence of religious institutions in daily life and yes in politics as well.  More often than not I would say that the interactions of religious groups in this country are banal if not outright good.  A person saying “God bless you,” after you sneeze is not in any way damaging and gives the smallest sense of being part of a community that cares for the well being of others, even if it is in fact a pretty meaningless gesture in the grand scheme of things.  In politics it is rare to hear a speech that is not concluded with the phrase “God bless the United States of America.”  This is where we begin to run into some issues.

In and of itself this is as harmless a phrase as “God bless you,” and it is often the expression of a sincerely religious person, who wants do right by God and country.  However, the ubiquity of this phrase is a fairly young tradition; one seemingly borne out of the desire to merely appear moral.  Presidents as recently as Jimmy Carter rarely made allusions to God in public discourse and certainly did not make a habit of using God as a garnish for their oration.  This is in large part because up until the latter half of the Twentieth Century, religious tolerance in this country existed primarily to keep the peace among Christians.  See, there is a very common phrase that this is a “Christian nation,” though if the speaker is feeling particularly PC they might precede that with “Judeo.”  That phrase only makes sense if you can think of Christianity as one solid block of believers, who actually want to be associated with one another.  And that underlying logic did not exist for the vast majority of America’s history.

We have not yet had a non-Christian president, though if you listen to opportunistic opponents of the current president you might be convinced otherwise.  I suppose if we want to be pedantic, it is true that other presidents, including Abraham Lincoln, have been accused of not being sufficiently, outwardly Christian or not actually adhering to a specific sect of Christianity, but that’s rather the point.  We have only ever had one Catholic president, JFK, and there was much speculation over whether the country was ready for a Catholic president.  The Pope was first allowed to visit the United States only after Kennedy died, and the history of prejudice against the Roman Catholic Church in the United States precedes even our founding.  Samuel Adams, whom you may know as a brand of beer, was one of the loud voices calling for the revolution against the British.  He was also an avid adherent to the British philosophy that Catholics were a threat to governments and therefore could not be afforded rights as citizens.

This is the somewhat shocking part to me as a non-religious observer of the current state of Christianity in the US.  On the one hand it is heartening to see religious groups put aside their disagreements in moments like that of the recent Papal visit.  Even when the Pope says something that you disagree with, you have to respect the fact that religious institutions are at their best when they challenge people to not become complacent and to hear differing points of view.  On the other hand it is befuddling that the whole Christian community comes together in this way, when there are still evangelical churches that promote the idea that the Catholic Church is at best not Christian and at worst is satanic.  This further scares me because with the large numbers these Christian movements can build, and the lack of recognition for the vast gulf between say the Episcopal Church on one side and the Pentecostal Church on the other, a lot of damage can and has been done to true religious liberty.

Our Constitution mentions God exactly one time, “In the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty seven.”  Had they included the day of the week there would similarly have been a reference to the goddess of the moon.  However, there is a previous reference to religion in the Constitution, “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.”  This is particularly important because in many states there are still religious tests on the books, and this is what keeps them from being enforceable.  In Williamson County, Texas there is an ongoing investigation to determine whether the religious questions a prospective constable was asked and the resulting answers were in fact the reason why he didn’t get the job.  The candidate in question, Robert Lloyd, is a Christian, but he doesn’t attend the same church as county commissioners, and it seems very likely that this is ultimately the sole reason why he didn’t get the job.  As ever the primary reason why these religious protections exist is to keep Christians from discriminating against other Christians.

As an atheist, I will say that the incidental benefits of a secular system do also protect me and Muslims and Jews and everyone else.  I’m not trying to claim that this is how we ought to view the imperative of religious tolerance, but it is a realistic understanding of how the freedom of religion has been interpreted over the years in this country.  This is not a new thing either, because the founders didn’t all think the same as Samuel Adams in denying certain religious groups their rights as citizens.  Thomas Jefferson, for example, saw the extension of full rights to groups like Muslims as the only way to protect the religious freedom of everyone, which is true.  It’s also true that, at the time, the Muslim population of the United States was probably nil, but even so the fact that he went through the rhetorical exercise is really the important part.  We protect the rights of those we disagree with so that when someone disagrees with us we can rest assured that they can’t strip us of our rights.  This is the foundation upon which religious tolerance rests, yet the religious Right doesn’t seem to see it that way.

Between the bakers in Oregon who were penalized for denying service to a lesbian couple, and then releasing that couple’s address to a less than hospitable world, to the Kentucky clerk who was jailed after the whole debacle over same sex marriage, the religious Right sees many examples of anti-Christian persecution.  What they refuse to understand is that the enforcement of law to prevent their overreach is not there to penalize them but to protect them from other Christian groups.  The reason why Melissa Klein, one of the bakers, is able to speak in public and vote and get a word in edgewise with her husband is because no one is enforcing 1 Timothy 2:12.  The reason why Kim Davis, Rowan County Clerk, is allowed to be on her fourth marriage is because we do not enforce Matthew 19:9.  This is the benefit of living in a secular and egalitarian country, but it does mean the end of privilege.

When I studied in France, I had an opportunity to help teach English to a class of high school students.  There were a number of times when, simply out of habit or cliché, I made a comment that vaguely references religion, because God knows there’s a lot of them to be made.  At one point I mentioned in passing something about Pascal’s Wager and I was pretty quickly told by the teacher in charge that their laws concerning secularism make it pretty much impossible to do that.  That is an example of religious persecution, however mild.  If you are being told that you cannot even mention religion, society has indeed gone too far in the other direction.  People have a right to believe as they will and yes even to proselytize, if they are so compelled; however, teachers do not have the right to require students to be religious or pray in the classroom, and the line between those should be quite clear.  Religious tolerance is much more than a passé PC cliché, it is the bedrock of this multicultural republic.  These are important concepts worth defending from the attacks of utterly uninformed religious zealots who are too shortsighted to see that they are tying their own noose.  We must be better than that as people or we can never hope to be better than that as a country.