(until the next time…)
Now That That’s (Almost) Over
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(until the next time…)
Tag Archives: Right Wing
Why Do Republicans Hate America?
Because America doesn’t look like them:
O.k., that isn’t completely fair. The Romney/Ryan campaign staff skews younger than the Republican Party as a whole:
There. Now it’s completely fair!
He’s One of Them
Last month, the philosopher Robert Paul Wolff gave his answer to that pressing question: “why does the Right hate Obamacare?”. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind me quoting a few paragraphs:
“There is now a sizable fraction of the American public, and a considerable number of Representatives and Senators, who say that they consider Obamacare an assault on everything they hold dear, a fatal blow to the American Way, a Socialist plot to destroy life as we know it, an evil so great that it is worth bringing the government to a halt and threatening the world financial system to defund it or even slow marginally the pace at which its provisions go into effect….
The Civil Rights Movement, launched by African-Americans half a century ago, threatened, and eventually began to break down … legal, customary, residential, and employment barriers. It was at this time that the old familiar political rhetoric about “working men and women” also began to change. The new rhetoric spoke of “middle-class Americans,” which, although no one acknowledged it, was a thinly veiled code for “not Black.” As economic pressures mounted on those in the lower half of the income pyramid, Whites wrapped themselves in the oft-reiterated reassurance that at least they did not live in the Inner City (which is to say, Black neighborhoods), that they were “Middle Class.” All of the political discourse came to be about the needs, the concerns, the prospects of the Middle Class, which to millions of Americans, whether they could even articulate it, meant “not Black.”
All of this crumbled, frighteningly, calamitously, disastrously, when a Black man was elected president. “Free, white, and twenty-one” ceased to be the boast of the working-class White man. Statistics do not matter, trends do not matter, probabilities do not matter, income distribution differentials do not matter. If a Black man with a Black wife and two Black children is President of the United States, then a fundamental metaphysical break has occurred in the spiritual foundation on which White America has built its self-congratulatory self-image for three centuries and more.
Hysterical Whites tried every form of denial. Obama’s election was theft. Obama is not an American. Obama is a Muslim. Obama is a socialist…. When Obama was reelected, vast numbers of Americans went into terminal denial. They seized upon the ACA simply because it was, as everyone knew, Obama’s signature domestic accomplishment. To repeal it, to defund it, to make it as though it had never existed, would be in some measure to deny that he had ever been President. The actual details of the ACA matter not at all. Neither do the actual felt medical needs of those driven insane by the very fact of Obama’s tenure in the White House. None of that has anything at all to do with the real cause of the hysteria. Why are millions of Americans driven beyond hysteria by the ACA?
BECAUSE OBAMA IS BLACK.”
The full text is here:
http://robertpaulwolff.blogspot.com/2013/09/why-does-right-hate-obamacare.html
Take This Job and Keep It!
It appears that Congressional leaders and the President are nearing an agreement to end the government shutdown and raise the debt ceiling. Rational people will applaud this development, even if the agreement merely buys some time until our next crisis.
Then there are people like Rep. Tim Huelskamp, Republican of Kansas. He is reported to have said: “Anybody who would vote for that in the House as a Republican would virtually guarantee a primary challenger.”
Let’s see. Vote to end the shutdown and raise the debt ceiling, thereby putting thousands of people back to work and avoiding a possible financial meltdown and worldwide recession, or have competition in next year’s primary election. That’s a tough choice, all right.
Rep. Heulskamp was first elected to Congress in 2010. Nobody ran against him in 2012, not in the primary and not in the general election. He has a well-paying government job for life and nobody’s going to take it away, whatever happens to the rest of us.
But he isn’t a key player here. He’s one of the Tea Party radicals who is sure to vote against any reasonable agreement. It’s the Speaker of the House and the so-called “moderate” Republicans who have to decide whether to protect the general welfare, even if it means risking their jobs.
Using the Democracy We Already Have
Michael Lind, writing at Salon, argues that the agenda of the American right wing amounts to a “Southern Autonomy Project”: an attempt to attract investment to the South by insuring cheap labor and minimal government regulation, while limiting any negative response from Southern voters and interfering with possible corrective action in Washington.
Lind believes we need a progressive agenda to counteract the right, a “National Majority Rule Project”:
Setting political difficulty aside, it is intellectually easy to set forth a grand national strategy that consists of coordinated federal policies to defeat the Southern Autonomy Project.
He thinks these policies would do the trick:
1) A federal living wage, which would level the economic playing field among the states;
2) Nationalization of social insurance, so that Southern states couldn’t water down programs like Medicaid and the ACA to their advantage;
3) Real voting rights for all Americans, insured by Federal law;
4) Truly nonpartisan redistricting in order to eliminate gerrymandering of Congressional districts;
5) Abolition of the Senate filibuster (I’d add a change to House rules that would make it easier to bring legislation to a vote);
6) Abolition of the Federal debt ceiling.
http://www.salon.com/2013/10/13/the_south_is_holding_america_hostage/
Unfortunately, it’s really hard in practice to “set political difficulty aside”. As things stand now, any such reforms would require cooperation from the people the reforms are aimed at.
The same problem applies to a Salon article that calls for a new Constitutional Convention. The author of this article argues that the Constitution should be amended to make it more democratic, including changes like:
1) Ten-year terms for Supreme Court justices;
2) Public funding for elections and the elimination of campaign contributions;
3) Abolition of the Electoral College;
4) Elimination of special voting rules and earmarks in Congress;
5) A requirement that Congress approve a yearly budget or face a special election;
6) Elimination of the need for state legislatures to approve constitutional amendments.
The author concludes, however:
Of course, it is unthinkable that the United States would do what its states have done 230 times, i.e., call a constitutional convention to design a modern framework of governance. This would require two-thirds of the states to agree. Amending the current constitution is also nearly impossible as it demands a two-thirds majority in both chambers of Congress as well as the approval by 38 states.
It’s reasonable to conclude that the only way to make our country more democratic is for more right-thinking people to participate in the democracy we already have. People need to vote for politicians who would support changes like those above. (We’d also have to get over the idea that our Constitution as written is a sacred document.)
Having the right people in office can certainly do wonders. Since the voters of California elected a Democratic governor and Democratic majorities in both houses of the legislature, California has started moving in the right direction again.
According to an article in the New Yorker (whose author argues, by the way, for Obama to ignore the debt ceiling if it comes to that), a similar phenomenon occurred after the Southern states seceded:
Throughout the Civil War and afterward, Republicans in Congress had enacted some of the most forward-looking legislation in American history: a national currency, the Homestead Act, a transcontinental railroad, support for higher education, the definitive abolition of slavery—all thanks to the extended absence of delegations from the self-styled Confederate states.
See, all we need to do is use the democracy we already have! (And keep having babies who grow up to be Democrats, especially in Texas, Florida and Ohio.)
Whereof One Can Speak 🇺🇦 
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