Closing the 11th
I wish Republicans had a happier holiday to celebrate, but we shall close Breaking the 11th in a grim mood. Republicans in government and other positions of influence are enjoying a great deal of power at the beginning of the 21st-Century, much to the detriment of the principles, even broadly defined, that we hold. But we should remember who gave them this power, and who has the ability to take it away.
I will not call for a great purge of the Party, nor for retribution at the polls. We should not allow our party to implode over internal squabbles. The core principle Republicans need to return to the most is honoring non-governmental action within society. The government is a leviathan because too many of its citizens have become dependent and comfortable with the extent to which it has intruded into our lives. As I wrote in February:
While politicians found appealing rhetoric based upon small government and budgetary discipline, there’s no underlying cultural fortitude. People (myself included) still can’t bring themselves to say to Uncle Sam, “No sir, I want to do this myself,” for a large number or programs.
This is as true for fiscal matters as social ones. Entitlements will not end until the citizenry accept the responsibilities of taking care of themselves and the unfortunate among us. Pork will not cease until we stop rewarding our Congressmen for bringing home the bacon. The Nanny State will not die until we approach our errant neighbors in love and humility. We have failed on all counts, and now, ironically, expect politicians to save us.
Above all others, perhaps the Republicans we should reproach are ourselves.
I find the contradictions in this piece so extraordinary they’re almost unbelievable.
Let’s just look at it again. Entitlements will not end until we stop rewarding our congressmen for bringing home the bacon. But I will not call for retribution at the polls.
What? Does that make any sense to you?
Here is the simple fact: right now, our system has developed such that Congresspeople are rewarded for driving up the deficit. They’re rewarded with votes based on how many new highways they construct. People get elected promising to bring more home. People keep representatives in office longer because the longer they’re in office, the higher up they move on committees, and the more money they bring home. Lobbyists support a particular party because that party brings their company more money. And so on, and so on and so on.
Now you’re telling me that this just has to change *somehow*, but it’s not so much your responsibility that you’re willing to call for retribution at the polls? Somehow the public’s desire for entitlements…things that actually reward the portions of the public with the greatest amount of political power at the expense of those with the least, is just going to evaporate, because people are going to tire of them?
This is nonsense. The only way that things are going to change is if you are willing to use your vote, and use your power, to change things at the ballot box. Without some sort of reason for things to change, they never will. If you just write letters telling your congresspeople to stop writing handouts to the oil industry, the insurance industry, bus stations in Alaska, and so on, and then those Congressmen take money from those same oil companies and use it to keep people voting for them, and then they receive votes because they also pay for the new bus station in Alaska, nothing will change. Writing letters or talking or anything else will not change a single thing.
There is no impetus for change anywhere in your post, in fact you tiptoe around offering one because you’re so scared of letting the other party gain any more power. The Republicans in power have you so scared that somehow the Democrats could make things worse that you’re willing to tolerate $300 billion a year structural deficits the rest of your life without calling for retribution at the ballot box.
This is in fact how they’ve gone about holding onto power - they give huge giveaways to companies that fund their campaigns. They use those huge campaign dollars to convince you that John Kerry is a traitor, the Democrats are horrific, and they’ll somehow make things worse than they are now. So, because you’re so scared of the unnamed evil of the Democrats and what they might do if they were in power, you’re willing to tolerate virtually anything the Republicans do, no matter what it is.
Do you see the problem yet?
A young woman was about to finish her first year of college. She considered herself to be a very liberal Democrat, but her father was a staunch Republican. One day she was challenging her father on his beliefs and his opposition to high taxes and welfare programs. He stopped her and asked how she was doing in school.
She answered that she had a 4.0 GPA, but it was really tough. She had to study all the time and never had time to go out and party. She didn’t have time for a boyfriend and didn’t really have many college friends because of spending all her time studying. On top of that, the part-time job her father insisted she keep left absolutely no time for anything else.
He asked, “How is your friend Mary?”
She replied that Mary was barely getting by. She had a 2.0 GPA, never studied, but was very popular on campus, didn’t have a job, and went to all the parties. She was always complaining about not having any money, but didn’t want to work. Why, she often didn’t show up for classes because she was hung over.
Dad then asked his daughter why she didn’t go to the Dean’s office and request that 1.0 be taken off her 4.0 and given it to her friend who only had a 2.0. That way they would both have a respectable 3.0 GPA. Then, she could also give her friend half the money she’d earned from her job so that her friend would no longer be broke.
The daughter angrily fired back, “That wouldn’t be fair. I worked really hard for my grades and money, and Mary just loafs. Why should her laziness and irresponsibility be rewarded with half of what I’ve worked for?”
The father slowly smiled and said, “Welcome to the Republican Party.”
Poppycock, dottie. The Republicans are as responsible for maintaining the welfare state in the last 40 years as the Democrats, despite some challenges. I think that is largely the root cause of a day like ‘Breaking the 11th’. Perhaps the father should have said, “Welcome to classical liberalism” - certainly no party in America today stands for the sentiment expressed in your piece.
The best quote I have ever heard,
“If you are young, and you are not a Democrat, you don’t have a heart. If you are old, and not a Republican, you don’t have a brain.”
Not sure of the origin, but absolutely love it.
Republicans believe in corporate welfare and screwing the common man. Justify billions in tax breaks to oil companies when they are making record profits and have NEVER been unprofitable. Justify a bankruptcy bill that allows corporations to dodge responsibility, but not somebody who is submerged in credit card debt. How are the two different?
The loss of heart with age and the lack of brains in youth is among the great tragedies of human life.
Republicans responsible for welfare state?
Are you refering to the billions in tax dollars that are beening siphoned into church coffers under the guise of “faith based charities”?
These same churches are then allowed to use religion as a deciding factor as to who benifits from these funds?
Auntdottie, a better analogy would be, “you have a dining hall card with $100 a day on it - more than you could possibly spend in a semester. Your friend Mary, through a bureacratic error the school refuses to fix, was never issued a dining hall card. Would you buy her some food?”
A Democrat would invite her to lunch. A Republican would call her lazy and say she doesn’t deserve food.
Let’s just look at it again. Entitlements will not end until we stop rewarding our congressmen for bringing home the bacon. But I will not call for retribution at the polls.
What? Does that make any sense to you?
I think so. “Retribution at the polls” can have more than one meaning. If it means everyone on “our side” stays home to punish the party because we are dissatisfied with its performance, then opposing retribution at the polls is perfectly consistent with an effort to “stop rewarding our Congressmen for bringing home the bacon.” It is possible to punish specific politicians in both parties without targeting the entire Republican party.
Actually, since there is a difference between retribution and witholding a reward, it should even be possible to avoid punishing politicians (to avoid punishing them, people who would normally vote for a politician would do it even though that politician has supported unjust or unjustified spending) without rewarding them for supporting unjustified spending (to avoid rewarding them, do not vote for them because they supported that kind of spending). Of course, this second difference really does not matter, because if there were an actual movement to do one of these things — a movement large enough to cause politicans to lose elections — it would be better to punish individual politicians AND avoid rewarding them for bad behavior. On a small, voter-by-voter scale, however, it does not matter which way we go, because no one will notice (and if you are against politicians who bring the “bacon” back to your own district, you probably haven’t been rewarding them for this, anyway).
Auntdottie, a better analogy would be
…one in which “poverty” and “wealth” are positioned on the opposite ends of a scale running from 0 to 100, and that implies that an error of the government is responsible for scarcity itself (a problem that the government has deliberately left in place?), and in which people are accorded absolutely no responsibility for at which extreme they ultimately find themselves?
Karl, I disagree with your contention that it is possible to avoid rewarding a Congressperson with a vote but not simultaneously punish them for whatever it is you’re unhappy with.
In my eyes, not voting for a candidate is still retribution at the polls, because it takes away a vote that the candidate in question might need. It’s not as strong of retribution as voting for the strongest challenger, but it’s still retribution. It’s an act taken as punishment for misdeeds. You’re just arguing that because it’s not as strong it’s somehow not retribution.
This may be more of a semantic issue than anything else, but either way, I read the original post as saying, in simplistic terms “Something needs to change but it won’t be my vote”. If you’re willing to withold your vote, or vote for a 3rd party candidate, that’s still retribution, and this post deliberately refuses to call for it.
AuntDottie’s little story explains the Republican Party? If so, it reveals the fundamental immorality of today’s Republicans.
The point of the story: IT’S MINE! The father is a three-year old, emotionally.
The problems with the story: it assumes that, in all aspects of life, it’s reasonable to say “it’s mine and I deserve it because I worked harder than the other guy”. It pretends that what’s at stake are some kind of points that are won in a game where an infinite supply of points is available.
In the real world, the playing field is nowhere near that level. Minimum wage work and welfare subsistence are really hard, despite the Ronald Reagan “welfare queen” anecdotes. The “points” people contend for are often crucial to health and well-being, even survival. And there’s not always an infinite store of benefit that anybody can access, just by working harder.
But for the IT’S MINE Republican, it is more pleasant to view “success” as an affirmation of one’s hard work and goodness, and conversely to see a lack of success as evidence of laziness and inherent badness. How self serving and immature! But, in a much larger sense, how callous and cruel!
So thanks, AuntDottie, for showing how exactly how shallow the Republican Party’s worldview is.
The “democrat/heart conservative/brain” quote as I’ve heard it is actually about liberals/conservatives, not particular parties.
On a basic level, a primary difference between a liberal and conservative points of view is that a liberal seeks change for the better, while the conservative seeks to preserve goods he/she sees already exist.
Of course, older people who have had time to find their niche in life have much more they are interested in preserving goods they’ve acquired/depend on, and that tends to occupy more of their interest. The young have not yet found their niche, and thus have a greater interest in making the world better generally, because they aren’t sure where they will end up.
Ultimately, we’re all conservative about some things and liberal about others. For example, protectionist labor policies are actually highly conservative — they seek to preserve the status quo. But you don’t see the “conservative” republican party favoring those — rather, it is interested in very liberal, free trade policies that create constant change and upheaval for the truly conservative labor interests in this country. Further, as Josh has often pointed out, the big-business republicans are rarely interested in “conservative” environmental policies.
In my eyes, not voting for a candidate is still retribution at the polls, because it takes away a vote that the candidate in question might need. It’s not as strong of retribution as voting for the strongest challenger, but it’s still retribution. It’s an act taken as punishment for misdeeds.
It would be, but what I was saying was that it would not be an act of retribution for a person to choose not to be caused to vote for a politician by the fact that he has brought money back to the district. As I pointed out at the end of my comment, however, only people who currently reward politicians for that kind of spending could withold their reward, so this would not be something that people who are against unnecessary spending could even do. In other words, I was pointing out a distinction that I admitted was irrelevant, since it could not possibly have been what Zach intended.
So thanks, AuntDottie, for showing how exactly how shallow the Republican Party’s worldview is.
And thank you, AndyS, for missing the point entirely (though Dottie’s version of that story did not raise it, you should have heard it by now): conservatism is a political philosophy, and has nothing to do with whether individuals privately give their own earnings to others (and if anything, conservatism favors this). Conservatism is concerned with how freely those earnings are taken by governments (employing the threat of force to collect), and what kinds of government purposes are necessary to justify it.
One of the virtues of slow-moving government is that if the incumbent is utterly corrupt and/or incompetent, one can vote for an opponent secure in the knowledge that even if that opponent supports everything one despises, he/she will be able to do only so much before another election comes around, at which point he/she may be voted out as well.
The ballot as penalty is a crude bludgeon, but it’s the only one we’ve got. One sign of the political maturity of an electorate is the willingness to use it in that fashion.
The 11th amendment never really made any distinction between attacking an opponent’s policies and attacking them on a more personal basis.
Did Ronald Reagan speak ill of Gerald Ford or just the Ford policies? In general, Reagan stuck to the policies, but his campaign workers, including high-ranking paid staff, did not. Thus Reagan could, in effect, describe Ford as a well-meaning fool while the underlings spread conspiracy theories of Ford being controlled by international bankers, etc.
I’ll take your party seriously when you stop nominating brain-dead asswipes like George W. Bush for the presidency.