There is going to be a lot of analysis on the Republican Pledge to America today, and here is some more! Instead of going into the actual policy, which others can and will cover better, I thought I’d talk about the wording. There is a lot to be learned by how a group talks about its policies. Communication requires a certain tailoring to the audience to be affective but the choices one makes in that tailoring can often be as telling as the message.
The first thing that I noticed is unlike the 1994 Contract with America this document is just a pledge. A pledge is a lot weaker than a contract. Sure the Founding Fathers pledged their lives, fortunes and sacred honor to establishing a new nation, but the march of time has warn down the meaning of pledge. People pledge to fund drives all the time but don’t pay; nations pledge to things like the United Nations Millennium Development Projects but they don’t come through with the money.
"Originally posted at Squarestate.net"
So a pledge is more of a weak showing of intent rather than a binding commitment. This is not a big surprise from a party that has played the Religious Right like carnival hucksters for more than two decades. There is also the way this will be rolled out. Unlike Old Newt Gingrich’s Contract, where there were over 100 Republicans standing on the steps of the Capital there will only be 12 Republican leaders at a hardware store to roll this pledge out. It is thought that this will make it seem less like the Republican establishment handing down marching orders from Washington by taking this tact, however it also makes the commitment less binding when nothing is offfical, just kind of a meeting of the minds around the cracker barrel.
Then there is all the talk in the pledge about liberty. To quote The Princess Bride, when I hear Republicans talk about liberty all I can think is "I do not think that word means what you think it means". To me liberty is allowing people to follow their own path, to be able to love who they want to love. To be able to marry the love of their life and stand before their town and say "We are a couple and we are going to form a family" proudly and without barriers. It is to be able to serve their nation without having to lie to protect the feelings of bigots.
To me liberty is allowing women to control their own reproduction, whether that is choosing to have an abortion or bring a child into the world, or use birth control or not. They are citizens and should be able to make the choices about something that affects them in a way no man can ever understand.
To me liberty is being able to form unions, without undue coercion by management or threats of loss of jobs. Liberty is about being able to build religious centers wherever the zoning allows, regardless of what bigots say. Liberty is the ability to be without a faith and not be reviled for it. Liberty is to be able to question the governments actions in war and not be called a traitor.
These don’t seem to be the Republicans ideas of liberty. From what I see they seem to think that liberty is only the freedom to be powerless because you can not band together. Republicans find that liberty is all about the liberty of giant companies to produce hazardous products. Liberty seems to be about the ability of factory farmers to produce millions of contaminated eggs without a care in the world.
The conservative noise machines would do Orwell’s Ministry of Truth proud. They have done their best to make liberty into being the equivalent of being a medieval serf where we should be happy with the crumbs form the Lords table.
All of this is telling of the mind set of the Republicans. Even as they try to sound as though they have new ideas, the reality is that they want to do everything they can to reduce the very instrument which protects liberty, the government. Without a way to balance the power of money there is very little liberty for most people. This is the great lesson of our nation, that laws and regulations make the playing field level. They allow the chance for liberty to be granted to all citizens to do with as much or as little as they like.
The idea that taxation is limiting to liberty is crazy. Part of the reason to have government is to do things that benefit the general welfare. To do this requires that the general population pay taxes and those that benefit from the education and infrastructure that is created by the spending of these taxes should pay the most. It is not an imposition on liberty but an enablement of it.
We have seen what Republicans policies do. They had a free hand for 6 years. They lowered taxes and slashed regulations and what did we get? 8 times less jobs created than the when President Clinton raised taxes and increased regulation. That kind of empirical evidence should be enough to kill meme, but the wealthy that fund the Republicans won’t let it die.
In the end this pledge is the same as everything the Republicans have done over the last two years, it is a sham that is intended to bamboozle the voters into thinking that they have new ideas or that their ideas will work if they are given just one more chance. They do not believe in liberty unless it is kind of liberty where the little people just do what they are told, live according the tenets of the dominant religion and shut the frack up. This is not the liberty the Founders envisioned and we should not let them say one thing while doing another. There have been too many words that the conservatives have co-opted and defined for their own ends, Liberal, Patriot, American, we can’t afford to let them define the ultimate word of our Republic, that being Liberty.
So, while there will be a lot of talk about the crappy policy this pledge represents be sure to save out some time to mock their failure to understand the basic concept of liberty even as they try to make it a campaign issue.
The floor is yours.