I have a dear friend who, as I suspect is true of many on the Right, has shed the 'Republican' label and now claims to be an 'Independent'. Suffering through the many years of Bush's incompetence has beaten them down to the point where they want to disassociate themselves with the brand. But despite it all, they still can't let go of the ideology and the reflex to attack the 'other' side.
We've been involved in a back-and-forth email exchange, which has helped clarify and distill a few ideas in my mind. What follows below the fold is an excerpt from my last email to him, which spells out where I stand at the moment on the current state of the political landscape, and why I'm standing on the side I'm on. I hope you find it interesting.
... You may have noticed that I’ve been a little testy in my responses—there’s a reason for that. I detect in you (and in the Republicans/Conservatives/Teabaggers) a sense of unreality, like this is just some game that one side has to lose so the other can win, and so therefore hurling the most outlandish, absurd and indefensible charges at the other side is perfectly acceptable if it helps you to ‘win’. The problem is that this isn’t a game—there are very real social and economic consequences to the outcome of these debates. But rather than participating in them seriously, and attempting to use reason and logic to debate the points and shape the outcomes (and face it, with the likes of Ben Nelson, Blanche Lincoln, and Joe Lieberman up for grabs, a serious effort on the Republican side of the debate could have created an outcome that would have included some of your side’s wishlist, like tort reform), the Right, in all its shades and forms (and whether or not you’re a Republican, by your positions you’re one of them), is content to bare its collective ass and shake it at the American people and the political process.
And because there’s a voracious beast that is the 24-hour cable news monster that must eat controversy to survive, all of this crap gets front page attention as if it were actually serious political discourse. If CNN, FoxNews and MSNBC had been around during Roosevelt’s time, we may never have survived the Great Depression or won WWII—we’d have been too busy listening to the braying of Republican naysayers telling us what a great job Hoover did and how the economy would just right itself if Roosevelt would avoid imposing taxes and setting up Social Security.
I suspect I’ve always taken these debates more seriously than you have—maybe you truly don’t think it matters at the end of the day which side you’re on, because you don’t think you can affect the process. I happen to believe that it does matter, and that we can have an impact, which is why I worked so hard to get Obama elected and why I’m going to work hard this fall for the Democrats in Florida. No, he’s not the perfect solution to all of the problems this country is facing, and he has not lived up to all of his promises, but he is a million times better than Bush/Cheney, and I can’t imagine what a colossal disaster this country would be if McCain/Palin had won. There are things he needs to take care of, and there’s lots of pressure from the left to help make sure that happens.
But, despite its flaws, we’re on the verge of the largest transformation of the relationship between the government and the governed in our lifetime, and the recognition (finally!) that access to adequate affordable healthcare is a fundamental right owed to Americans, just like fire and police protection, a basic level of economic security in your old age, and a military to keep us safe from (real) threats to the homeland. That could never have happened under a Republican, because it is not in the inherent philosophy of that party to recognize that there are some problems that are so large that they require collective effort to solve, and can’t be left to the individual to address (which is astounding, because there are so many examples of the truth of that need in our everyday lives, like roads, sewers, schools, police, fire, hospitals, etc.). Even health insurance itself is effectively a ‘socialist’ activity (even when run privately), because it’s a collective pooling of risk in which everyone pays and some benefit more than others (‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his need’—sound familiar?).
Rush Limbaugh, after his recent hospitalization (and as an aside, I’m predicting he will be dead soon of a real heart attack because he is taking some kind of amphetamine to boost his weight loss—watch this interview with Jay Leno and see what I mean: Limbaugh on the Jay Leno Show), has effectively said that we should all get the health care we can afford, which is fine if you make $400 million a year, but as (if you’re being honest) you’ll agree, that’s not realistic for the vast majority of people. If you’re unfortunate enough to be stricken by cancer, or heart disease, or some other drawn out (and ridiculously expensive) chronic disease, you can’t do it on your own. You need the collective resources of the ‘village’ to help you get through.
Now, there are lots of things that can be discussed in terms of the details of the best way to approach that, and what should and shouldn’t be included in the final product. But rather than have a serious debate about substance, and try to get appropriate and worthwhile changes incorporated into the bills, the Republicans have been perfectly happy to stand on the sidelines and piss on the entire debate. There are no ideas on that side that anyone believes in enough to seriously champion and try to introduce into the conversation. And don’t tell me that it’s because they wouldn’t be heard or accepted—there are many things that a handful of Republicans willing to deal could have gotten included in the bill if it would have allowed the Dems to pass up the abortion fight with Nelson or the spite-filled resistance and incoherence that is Lieberman (who abandoned his support of expanding Medicare to 55 year olds, that he’d discussed just three months earlier, because some liberal Democratic congressmen expressed support for it!).
The bottom line is, this stuff matters to me as something more than just something to argue about to pass the time of day. The good news from my perspective is that the right wing seems to be buying into their own propaganda, and have convinced themselves that their hard-right ideology will actually appeal to a majority of the electorate (evidence of NY-23 and the moderate Republicans who won the NJ/VA governor’s races notwithstanding). I am quite looking forward to the Republican Party driving itself off a cliff in November as it moves further to the right to satisfy the lunatic fringe, and I’m planning to do everything I can to make sure that our base is energized enough to get out to vote, so a handful of goofballs don’t ‘take back’ their horribly distorted version of America.
That was quite cathartic—I feel much better having typed all of that out, so thanks for the inspiration, and good luck with being associated with the Party of No. And please save your fingers the effort of typing that you’re not ‘one of them’—it’s a lie when Hannity and O’Reilly say it, and it’s not any truer when it comes from you. If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck and quacks like a duck, we all know what it is, even if it insists on calling itself something else.