With the thoughts you'd be thinkin'
You could be another Lincoln,
If you only had a brain.
The Party of Lincoln, or more accurately the Party with the Same Name as the Party of Lincoln, has run out of ideas. Yet the conservative movement has built such a machine of think-tanks, pundits, idealogues and comedians that they have successfully shielded themselves from seeing the damage that their policies have caused. Inside their echo chamber everything is going great, and if it isn't the only answer is to try doing the same thing more. Conservative are so far out of touch, in fact, that they have resorted arguing against fake liberal proposals, strawmen. That, evidently, is the only way they can win an argument anymore.
What annoyed me today was an essay written by former Oklahoma congressman Earnest Istook. Istook is the perfect example of the Decline of the Republican Party. Istook's political views are as typical and unimaginative as can be, as is his ho hum corruption. Like a stereotypical conservative, he was trounced by a Democrat in 2006. But the machine leaves no man behind. Istook, like your run-of-the-mill unemployed Republican, is now drawing a paycheck from the Heritage Foundation.
The offending essay is titled The Great American Freedom Machine, an everyday homage to automobile dependency masquarading as libertarianism. Istook's strawman? The liberals who are:
Trying to force everyone onto mass transit
Istook doesn't identify who these liberals are. He doesn't provide any quotes. In fact, the only quote in the entire article is from the Washington Post, who according to Istook wrote in an editorial that high gas prices are:
a happy development for proponents of public transportation
Wrong, Ernie. High gas prices were a warning from pulic transportation proponents. As in, when transportation prices inevidibly go up, we are going to need other options. The only "liberal" named in Istook's article is, of course, Al Gore. Istook writes:
Al Gore and his entourage arrived at his recent "Save the Planet" speech in air-conditioned limousines and an SUV, even after encouraging "other people" to ride bikes or take mass transit. The convenience of the automobile is so great that it outweighed the guilt for limousine liberals!
Yawn. Conservatives have been harping on this meme for a long time now, and yet, true to form, cannot comprehend why it isn't persuasive. But, as conservatives, the only remedy they have for failure is to do the same thing more.
Istook's problems with mass transit have been so overplayed that standard responses are readily available. For those interested, here are two links to .pdf files on transit benefits from the Victoria Transport Policy Institute:
Evaluating Rail Transit Criticism
Rail Transit in America
But since Istook thought it fun to argue against an imaginary liberal, I thought a few of his arguments would be best answered by Paul M. Weyrich and William S. Lind, who wrote Twelve Anti-Transit Myths: A Conservative Critique (.pdf)
Istook: Public bus and rail systems get 75 percent of their operating costs from taxpayer subsidies, and only 25 percent from riders' fares, so that expense is simply shifted to taxpayers when people shift to transit.
Weyrich:This is one of the more ironic arguments against transit, since what destroyed America's once-extensive electric railways -- streetcar systems and interurbans -- was government subsidies to cars! The highway advocates, having driven privately-owned, tax paying rail transit out of business with massive subsidies to highway construction, now complain that transit needs subsidies to compete. Well, duh, as a Generation Xer might say.
Istook: ...traffic congestion has been increasing more rapidly in the cities that haven't been building roads...Roads have gone unbuilt because the "user pays" principle of transportation has been violated (by building transit).
Weyrich: we can say that about 60% of MetroLink's customers were taken off the highways, minus about 25% who had no car available or did not drive. Since most Americans drive to work alone, MetroLink is removing about 12,500 cars from St. Louis's rush hour traffic every day
Istook: By condemning Americans for our supposed addiction to automobiles, green extremists (and many in the media) try to make us feel guilty so that we'll accept their agenda meekly.
Weyrich: In fact, we got to where we are through social engineering, massive amounts of it. In no other society in history have places to live, places to work and places to shop been separated from one another, separated so widely that you need a car to get from one to another. Why did it happen here? Because after World War II, social engineers rewrote the building codes to mandate it. In most places, if a developer now wants to build a traditional town, a place where you can walk from home to work or shopping, he can't. The codes won't let him.
That's most of Istook's argument. I would do the rest but I, like you, am bored by it. Istook would like to see more and more miles of highway built, to support more and more automobiles. He lives in a conservative dreamland, where children can breath freely. Where ocean levels aren't rising. Where over 40,000 Americans aren't killed every year on the highways. Istook and the other typical conservatives will have us continue to be completely dependent on the automobile, because they can't think of anything else. That's why he can finish his anti-walking, anti-transit, anti-bicycle, anti-choice screed, without showing any sign of irony or embarassment, with this statement:
Forcing people to use a particular mode of travel is not the American way.
Is it November yet?