The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
—H.L. Mencken, 1921
Since nothing has changed in 100 years and they’re all trying to scare us, maybe it boils down to who you trust most, government or the private sector. If you trust corporations and Wall Street more, then you support conservative Republicans, who are manfully doing their best to reduce government, while deregulating and lowering taxes on private enterprise and the rich.
If you trust government more, then you support liberal Democrats, social programs like Social Security, Medicare and the Affordable Care Act; you believe in aid to those in need, regulation of private enterprise and putting taxes on the rich back where they were before Bush cut them.
The framers of the Constitution were wary enough of government that they crafted a system with effective checks and balances. I haven’t seen government excess that really harms me. Excessive paperwork is not real harm: it’s an annoyance. Forcing school integration was a good thing, for example. And Title IX, which made us give girls a chance in sports. Make up your own list: there are lots of choices. How about the federal regulations limiting how many mouse droppings the food industry can allow in your cereal? There’s a service I’d like to keep.
In my lifetime, it’s big business I’ve distrusted, like the chemical companies that loaded our land, crops and us with dangerous pesticides and wouldn’t have stopped without Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and JFK’s creation of the EPA. More recently, Wall Street and financial institutions behaved so badly as to bring us the housing crisis and this current recession—which, by the way, seems to be easing.
Federal government does some things best—national security, education support, highways, disaster relief, and reining in the excesses mentioned above. I’m happy to pay my taxes for that stuff. Imagine private enterprise, needing to make a profit, running our infrastructure. Whose bridges do you think would get built?
I was a Hillary supporter in 2008. The woman amazed me, as she still does, may be the best Secretary of State in our times. I embraced Obama reluctantly—too untried, too centrist. I’d seen the surplus Clinton left us vanish into deep red ink under Bush, with those tax cuts and unfunded wars. I knew we needed change, but the wave of adulation that washed around Obama alarmed me. So many looked at him with infatuated, unrealistic eyes. I wanted to protest, “He’s just a politician, can’t possibly deliver all you think he can.” (Checks and balances, remember: the presidency has limited power, although you wouldn’t know it from all the things presidential candidates pretend they can do.) Besides, Obama turned out to be a consensus-builder to the bone, kept trying to get agreements across the aisle.
Much of the poetry of campaigning became the prose of administering, as always. You don’t solve an economic crisis of this proportion in a couple of years. You can’t create more jobs if Congress won’t pass a jobs bill. The underlying racism of some opposition to Obama sickened me. I’d hoped his election meant we were beyond that. Now it seems the right will sacrifice even our best national interests to defeat him, while the left is crushed because he wasn’t the 21st century FDR.
Who’s paying attention to what Obama did accomplish? There are multiple lists online, put together by various groups, numbering anywhere from 50 to 200 major accomplishments, from ending the war in Iraq to reductions in wasteful federal spending. It’s impressive. As David Brooks, a Republican, observed, Obama’s more involved in all aspects of his job than any other recent presidents have been. My respect for him has grown.
I’ve watched Romney in the last weeks back away from tea party to the middle of the road. Suddenly he’s talking bipartisanship, like it wasn’t his party that signed an oath to refuse to compromise. Suddenly he’ll cut nothing but Obamacare, yet keep every major Obamacare feature, and still somehow reduce the deficit. Are we so gullible?
I have friends and family who support Romney. None of them are in the 1%, so I don’t get it. To me, voting Republican now is voting for plutocracy, putting big money more firmly in charge of our lives and doing it on the backs of the middle class and the poor. It would be a disaster, but no matter who wins, unlike the fear-driven right, I don’t think the world will abruptly burst into flames.
I hope we learn to recognize Mencken’s scare hobgoblins when they’re used on us. I believe Americans mostly mean well, work hard, and want to keep democracy alive. I believe thorough fact-checking results in a vote for Obama. I believe under Romney we’d be giving the bank to the military-industrial-financial complex Eisenhower warned us about in 1961. And I believe this: if my support system crashed through no fault of mine, and I were losing all I have while these two presidential candidates stood by, it’s Barack Obama I would trust to reach out a hand.
Bravo, bravo–I’m sharing this with a friend or two. Vote, vote, vote early, (I wish I could say-vote often like we can on tv talent contests), but VOTE!!!
Lovely weather yesterday. We took a drive west on 285 and saw nothing but Romney Ryan signs. “What can they be thinking?” we both said. The right has done a masterful job of hornswoggling working folks. So bravo, Pat. I wish the points you express so well were being made more forcefully by the administration.
Thanks, Pat! I consider this the most important election of my lifetime. If not us, who will stand with people in need? We must move forward and find some way to work together in that effort. There is a feeling, though subtle, of better days coming in our economy. I hope Obama is at the helm to see that turn!
Thanks, Pat, for expressing sentiments I’ve long been feeling. We live in a peculiarly anomalous Republican enclave of a largely Democratic town in what we hope will always remain a true-blue state (California). But the proliferation of Romney/Ryan signs in our little corner of the world is particularly dispiriting, as none of our neighbors appears to be in the 1%, and it’s hard to imagine what benefits they might reap from a Republican victory this time around. It’s also disheartening to contemplate how long it would take to restore the social justice we’ve labored so long to achieve should the Democrats lose this crucial election. Meanwhile, the Obama sign has mysteriously disappeared from our lawn . . . just as it did four years ago.
I read Silent Spring when I was about ten and it changed me forever. I had spent most of my chldhood mucking about in the Midwestern woods that surrounded our house, and the idea that humans could be screwing up nature was an appalling one. And then we went to war with that poor Southeast Asian country…Now I’m fifty years older and more pissed off than ever at the Corporatocracy in charge of our lives. I am familiar with the old saw about becoming conservative as one ages, but I haven’t seen it among my friends.