With apologies to Paul McCartney, the winding road I have in mind for this blog is not to your door but to the 2016 elections in the US. For one reason or another, we seem to be off to an earlier and stranger start than is usually the case. The impetus for this blog post was an article in Salon by Heather Cox Richardson about the intellectual battle for the soul of the Republican Party. The article caught my attention because I started my political life as an “Eisenhower Republican” while I was still too young to vote. I liked Ike, and, with the exception of Richard Nixon as VP, generally approved of most of what he did. Here’s the way Ms. Richardson described Ike’s approach:
After the second World War, when party leaders tried to resurrect the free-for-all economy of the 1920s that had collapsed into the Great Depression, President Dwight Eisenhower stepped in to articulate instead a new vision for the Republican Party. He led Republicans to back the New Deal consensus. Eisenhower agreed with Democrats that the government must regulate business, provide for social welfare, and develop the nation’s infrastructure, and he believed that bringing labor leaders, businessmen, and intellectuals to the same table—sometimes literally, as he invited men to dinner—to debate would enable political leaders to reach the best possible outcome for the nation. Eisenhower insisted on grappling with the complexities of reality and begged his opponents to do the same.
I don’t think I have changed much in my political outlook, but the Republican Party has certainly changed, and, in my opinion, not for the better.
At this point, Congress, especially the House of Representatives, is essentially dysfunctional. Very few of our representatives can look at financial data and recognize that austerity has been a failure. Too many don’t understand that microeconomics and macroeconomics aren’t the same, and politicians use the fear of “going broke” to reduce spending in areas (Social Security benefits, money for Food Stamps, and increasing the Minimum Wage) that would result in an improved economy for everyone. So, what has happened to the Republican Party? In my opinion, the main thing that has happened is a result of the old curse, usually attributed to George Santayana: those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. It isn’t as though we don’t have a good record of how economic policies influence our well being. When you actually look at economic data and review our economic history and unemployment rates, you can see what works. You can also see what hasn’t worked.
The Republicans have been very good at playing Lucy to Charlie Brown with the “trust me this time” routine.
The larger question, of course, is why poor people vote against their best interests as often as they do. Those who belong to unions, for example, often vote for Republicans who have been doing everything they can to make unions illegal. Some of the ways people are persuaded to vote against their economic well-being are well known, such as religion and other so-called “values” issues. I continue to be surprised that Republicans can persuade Christians to vote for very un-Christ-like activities, such as feeding the poor and caring for the sick.
In his Farewell Address, Eisenhower warned us about the military industrial complex. I suspect that if he could have seen more of what the future would bring, he would have warned us about Big Ag, Big Pharma, and Wall Street Greed as well. The rich are definitely getting richer, and the poor have consistently been persuaded to vote to help them get even richer. The poor have also been gerrymandered into not voting in many places and by otherwise making it difficult for them to vote.
It’s time for us to take Santayana’s warning seriously. When people are too oppressed for too long, they tend to do something about it. In relatively recent history, we have the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Communist Revolution, the Cuban Revolution, and a variety of other revolutions before and since. My sense is that people can be angry only for so long before they have the need to do something about it, and the something is almost always violent in one way or another. A number of social commentators have noted that the United States has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. That suggests that many individuals are acting on their anger but individually rather than in groups. That may not always be the case, however. My sense is that, as a nation, we would do well to reduce inequality, both financial and of opportunity so that those who are suffering will have a better sense that their efforts would pay off.
We also need to stop destroying our ecosystem and do a better job of working with Nature rather than exploiting it for profit. Our natural world is vast, but it isn’t infinite. Regardless of whether you believe that humans are responsible for Global Warming, humans are responsible for doing what’s possible to solve the problems it is causing, as the problems will only get worse as the global mean temperature rises. This is, of course, an International problem, with different countries experiencing different effects than others. Some countries are choking on air pollution caused by the burning of fossil fuels. Other countries are losing land mass as the seas rise. No corner of the planet will be untouched by global climate change, and the changes in ecosystems will exacerbate religious and political conflicts.
The alarm clock is definitely ringing, and it’s time to wake up and pay attention to the direction of our collective journey. Some of what we have been doing simply can’t continue: We have become Jonathan Swift’s Big-Enders and Little-Enders, going to war—whether real or metaphorical—over which end of a soft-boiled egg should be opened first. We argue about the trivial and fail to attend to the significant. We focus on the mote instead of the beam. Here in the US, we will have a chance to vote for politicians who can focus on the beam, but that will happen only if we insist that those we vote for have a reality-based evidence procedure for the positions they take on issues that will influence all of us.
