“A Renewed Alligance”: Echoes Of FDR, President Obama’s Inspiring Address Links Freedom With Security And Dignity
So much for the “Grand Bargain” – or at least for the not-so-grand gutting of Social Security and Medicare that the “very serious” thought-leaders of Washington political and media circles have always found so appealing. Whatever President Obama may have contemplated up until now, his second inaugural address, delivered yesterday on the steps of the Capitol, bluntly repudiated Republican arguments against the social safety net – and forcefully identified those popular programs with the most sacred American values.
“We, the people, still believe that every citizen deserves a basic measure of security and dignity,” said Obama – not only because it is the responsibility we have to each other as human beings, but because security and dignity, for every man, woman, and child, are the existential foundations of freedom.
“For we remember the lessons of our past, when twilight years were spent in poverty and parents of a child with a disability had nowhere to turn,” he said. “We do not believe that in this country freedom is reserved for the lucky or happiness for the few. We recognize that no matter how responsibly we live our lives, any one of us at any time may face a job loss or a sudden illness or a home swept away in a terrible storm. The commitments we make to each other through Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security, these things do not sap our initiative. They strengthen us.”
In a modern nation, suggested the president, those commitments are indeed fundamental to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This is essentially the same message articulated by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in his 1941 “Four Freedoms” State of the Union address, which included employment, social security, and health care as defining aspects of a truly democratic society.
Every liberal and progressive (and presumably every conservative and wingnut, too) recognized that moment as renewing Barack Obama’s allegiance to principles that have sustained the Democratic Party since FDR. Far from undermining freedom, enterprise, and productivity, as right-wing propaganda insists, the president argued that those guarantees – still cherished by the overwhelming majority of Americans — have strengthened the nation.
Obama acknowledged the financial problem that rising health care poses for Medicare; eventually, he said, the federal budget must be stabilized, with “hard choices” ahead. Yet that objective will not be achieved, he pledged, by undoing the ligaments of security and liberty that American leaders have stitched together over the past century, nor by pitting younger people against their parents and grandparents (as the opponents of Social Security and Medicare habitually attempt to do). He pointedly rejected “the belief that America must choose between caring for the generation that built this country and investing in the generation that will build its future.”
Precisely what the president means when he talks about hard choices should be revealed next month, when he will no doubt feel politically obliged to discuss how to reduce the deficit in his State of the Union address. Troubling signals have emanated from the White House that he might accept sharp and unnecessary cuts in Medicare and Social Security to achieve the “grand bargain” – which Washington’s conventional wisdom often defines as the only legacy worth pursuing for him.
Indeed, Obama has sometimes appeared to be listening when such very serious types, the over-privileged and under-informed, complain about burdensome “entitlements.” Those worthies might well have assumed that he would ultimately implement their mindless, heartless, and destructive proposals.
But in yesterday’s inspirational new beginning, this country’s 44th president set forth a very different expectation, promising hope and not disappointment to the people who re-elected him. The responsibility of his most devoted supporters will be to hold him true to it.
By: Joe Conason, The National Memo, January 21, 2013
“The Owners Are Getting Scared”: If You Want To Say We’re Just Voting For People Who Promote Our Best Interests, You’re Right
Now that President Obama has won–and is being inaugurated today, hooray!–talk about who should and should not be allowed to vote is becoming more common amongst the tea party rank-and-file.
I work at a homeless shelter. Tonight at dinner, as I sat at our service desk and watched all of the people eat, and talk, and laugh, I remembered how disturbed one of my neighbors was when he heard about our efforts to ensure that the residents of our shelter–and all shelters–got out and voted. My neighbor–white, christian, male, conservative, mid-fifties–went from disturbed to downright offended when President Obama won re-election, and the county that it all seemed to come down to was our county, Hamilton County, Ohio. To my neighbor, by bringing local community organizers into our shelter to have residents sign voting pledges, by having state agencies come in to help our residents register to vote, we were essentially delivering the country to President Obama.
“We didn’t tell them who to vote for”. I said.
“Of course you knew who they were going to vote for. Who gave them the free cell phone?” he said.
Ah, the so-called ‘Obamaphone’. Conservatives hate it. To them, it smacks of decadence, and misguided liberal spending. In reality, it’s a very practical investment for our society to make. Newt Gingrich talked about replacing the safety net with a trampoline: we live in a very high-tech world, and in order to function in this world, we have to be plugged in. If we expect disenfranchised folks to even have a chance at competing, wouldn’t they also have to be plugged in? In the shelter business, we are about helping people get housing, but we’re also about helping people eliminate barriers to housing. If our residents have cell phones, that cuts out a lot of walking time, and a lot of paper work. Ultimately, it should help them get back on their feet, and that is something we all want.
“People who are on the government tit shouldn’t be allowed to vote”. he said.
“If you believe that, then no C.E.O. in the country should be allowed to vote.” I said, always the troublemaker.
“The rich worked for what they’ve got. The people who stay at your shelter have been made soft by the system. ” He said.
My response: You are likely to die in the class you are born into. Inherited wealth gives a person an unfair advantage. Being born into a privileged class gives a person an unfair advantage.Yes, a person can rise from the bottom to the top, but what do they have to become to do so? What do they have to sacrifice? I guarantee you a privileged person who rose to the same level did not sacrifice as much. And what if you don’t have the killer instinct? What if you just want to live a simple life, and not participate in the rat race? Should you have to work so hard? Yes, the man born with sand bags tied around his legs can still hypothetically ‘win the race’, but why not take off those sand bags and see how he does? Why not give him the option of not even running the damned pointless thing in the first place?
It’s a frustrating conversation, especially when you consider that my neighbor should be on my side on this: he is not one of the owners of this society. At best, he only serves as one of the owner’s many attack dogs, operating under the illusion that ‘if only I work hard enough, I too can join the ranks of the owners’. But dogs cannot become men.
The point is, this argument about who should and shouldn’t be allowed to vote is coming up more and more. After Romney lost what he and his followers had deluded themselves into believing would be a great white landslide (no way colored and poor folk will vote again like they did last time!), they started talking about restricting the vote.
But it’s too late for that. Us poor people, Us women, Us black people, Us latino people, Us asian people, Us gay people, us disabled people, us non-religious people–we’re voting. We’re being heard. And if you want to say we are just voting for people who are promoting our best interests, then you’re right: but tell me that the rich in this country don’t do the same thing.
And there are more of us.
The owners are getting scared.
And they should be.
By: Spencer Troxell, Daily Kos, January 21, 2013
“The Greatest Fraud”: How The NRA Hijacked The Republican Party
There are few better ways of grasping how far the Republicans have abandoned the middle ground, where they used to win elections, than the way their leaders have become agents of the gun industry. Conservatives used to consider themselves law-abiding citizens who put great store by the permanence of institutions, by the rule of law, and by the traditional caution and common sense of the sensible majority. Such devotion to stability, continuation, and moderation explains why so many conservatives were alarmed when the social revolution of the Sixties erupted. Suddenly, it seemed, everything was on the move. Children no longer believed in the wisdom of their elders, nor obeyed the unwritten rules that had guided every previous generation. The days of everyone knowing their place and remaining in it were overthrown and it appeared that anarchy had broken out in America.
Nowhere was this more evident to traditional conservatives than in the way African-Americans responded to the civil rights legislation enacted by Lyndon Johnson. Instead of being grateful for the overdue democratic changes wrested from reluctant Southern lawmakers, a significant number of African-Americans demanded more profound change. There were riots in Los Angeles, Detroit, and other major cities which were met by calls from conservatives for tighter gun controls. The Black Panthers, dressed as soldiers and carrying guns, as was their right under the Second Amendment, demanded that African-Americans be allowed to live in a separate self-governing state. In May 1967, 30 Panthers took loaded rifles, shotguns, and pistols into the California State Capitol to protest against new gun control laws. The California governor, Ronald Reagan, declared: “There’s no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons.”
After John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King were assassinated, Johnson joined with conservatives to pass the federal Gun Control Act that stipulated a minimum age for gun buyers, restricted traffic across state lines to federally registered gun dealers, limited the sale of certain destructive bullets, required guns to carry serial numbers, and added drug addicts and the insane to those, like felons, who were already forbidden to own guns. When it transpired that Lee Harvey Oswald had bought the rifle that killed the president mail order from the pages of the National Rifle Association magazine, the NRA Executive Vice-President Franklin Orth backed an end to mail-order sales. “We do not think that any sane American, who calls himself an American, can object to placing into this bill the instrument which killed the president of the United States,” he said.
In the mid-Seventies, the NRA switched from being a moderate organization backing moderate gun controls into a radical body that promulgated an absolutist interpretation of the Second Amendment with a new motto: “The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” It was this originalist interpretation of the Second Amendment that led Warren Burger, the conservative, constructionist chief justice appointed by Richard Nixon to declare on PBS in 1991 that the NRA had perpetrated “one of the greatest pieces of fraud – I repeat the word fraud – on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime. … [the NRA has] misled the American people and they, I regret to say, they have had far too much influence on the Congress of the United States than as a citizen I would like to see. And I am a gun man.”
Today the Republican Party remains in hock to the NRA leadership and through them to their paymasters in the gun-making industry. The NRA runs an official list, like the old Communist Party, of preferred candidates and grades them according to their adherence to the strict constructionist interpretation of the Second Amendment. If a candidate fails to offer total support for absolutist gun rights, the NRA funds a campaign in the next party primary to unseat them. Polls suggest, however, that the NRA leadership no longer represents the wishes of its members towards moderate gun controls, and since the Sandy Hook massacre of schoolchildren, the extremism of NRA leaders like Wayne LaPierre, whose tin-eared response to the shootings so jarred voters in all parties, suggests the existence at the top of the organization of a self-serving, superannuated elite that no longer commands the confidence of its rank and file.
Gun rights activism is just one strand of Republican extremism out of kilter with moderate Republicans and middle ground independent voters who decide elections. In the mid-Seventies, while Second Amendment fundamentalists were starting to blacklist GOP candidates who would not support their hard line, the party was also transformed by the rise of radical Christian fundamentalists, whose literal reading of scripture led them to adopt social conservative positions on abortion, race, and homosexuality. These changes coincided with the arrival of neo-conservatism, a body of theory that saw America as not just the world’s policeman but the harbinger of democracy everywhere with a particular brief to counter radical Islam. Until then it could be argued, citing two world wars, Korea and Vietnam, that the Democrats were the war party and the Republicans the party that put America first. Since the neo-cons that notion has been turned on its head by the persecution of two wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, both of which were to be abandoned after an inconclusive outcome.
Around the same time, economic notions that had ensured unprecedented prosperity under Eisenhower and Nixon gave way in the GOP to fiscal conservatism – absolutist ideas about the money supply and reducing public spending that George H. W. Bush derided as “voodoo economics.” Since 2009, libertarian insurgents that in the GOP primaries last year accounted for about 10 per cent of party activists have extrapolated careful budgeting into demands for minimal government. Since Tea Party protestors entered the GOP in numbers in 2009, they have instituted further restrictive demands upon Republican candidates, diminishing the discretion of elected officials by directing them to obey pledges not to raise taxes.
Once a moderate party protecting old fashioned values, since the mid-Seventies the Republicans have adopted extreme positions that are alien to the party of Lincoln, Eisenhower, Nixon and Bush Sr. A party proud of its pragmatism is being driven by dogmatic theories imported by unbending ideologues such as Ayn Rand, Ludwig von Mises, and Friedrich Hayek. On guns, abortion, immigration, women’s health, homosexual rights, home schooling, and a host of other issues, the once inclusive Republican Party has lost its one-nation tradition and supplanted it with a hotchpotch of sectarian interests policed by a coalition of narrow, theory-driven mavericks, curmudgeons, libertarians, radicals, and eccentrics.
The GOP is deeply divided, a split that conservative commentators like Charles Krauthammer attribute to fast footwork by President Obama. Other conservatives, such as Bill O’Reilly, think the party will find it hard to put itself back together by the time of the next presidential election, never mind the mid-terms in two years. Citing the way Obama and Bill Clinton arrived from nowhere to save the Democrats from an unpopular ideological stance, Krauthammer believes the Republicans will be saved by an as-yet unknown savior. Four years is, indeed, a long time in politics, but it may take far longer than that to purge the party of its popular perception as a redoubt for gun-toting, women-loathing, gay-hating, xenophobic, war-mongering anarchists.
By: Nicholas Wapshot, Reuters, January 18, 2013
“Situational Patriotism”: If You Only Love America When It Agrees With You, It Says More About You Than Fidelity To Your Country
Remember when conservatives used to say, “America, love it or leave it”? When just about any protest coming from somewhere else along the ideological spectrum was cause to question that person’s loyalty and love of country? Ah yes. Those were the days.
But now, after decades of positioning government as the enemy, the more recent rise of Tea Party populism, and the prospects of a two-term Democratic president, some on the right find themselves in rather a different place. Instead of impugning the loyalties of others for their perceived lack of patriotism, they are left to employ a sort of situational patriotism all their own.
Take, for example, Ben Shapiro. You may not know who Shapiro is. I certainly didn’t (apparently he’s an “Editor-at-Large” for Breitbart.com). But then he went on CNN and offered this little chestnut: Average citizens are entitled to semi-automatic weapons because the U.S. government may follow the path of Nazi Germany (his analogy, not mine) and descend into tyranny.
That may sound intemperate to you, but Shapiro is hardly alone among those tramping about the outer limits these days. On his radio program, Sean Hannity said he could well understand why “more conservative states” might say, “I don’t want to be a part of this union anymore,” and secede from the United States. The justification: Taxes on the very wealthy had been raised to levels not seen since (gasp) the 1990s.
There’s more. The now infamous freak-out of one Alex Jones on Piers Morgan’s show; Texas Rep. Steven Stockman’s pronouncement that executive branch efforts to reduce gun violence are an “existential threat to the nation”; Mark Levin’s claim to a “fury” about the “imperial presidency ” of Barack Obama that he can “barely contain.” And much more is sure to come on the heels of the president’s announcement yesterday.
Now to be clear, not every conservative is marching to the beat of the same drum. See what David Frum’s been doing on Twitter (and elsewhere), for example. But the rumblings from some quarters are sufficient that it’s hard not to wonder: What’s really going on here? Authentic anger, or something more tactical? I think the answer is…yes.
Consider Shapiro’s statement on a gun control debate that centers on an horrific massacre and whether there are any sensible measures we can take—like banning the semi-automatic weapon the shooter used—to help ensure something like that never happens again. A debate on the merits might be: Are there productive uses for semi-automatic firearms when put in the hands of average citizens that we can weigh against the damage they cause when employed with malicious intent? For some of us at least, it’s hard to think of any productive uses that outweigh the nefarious ones.
But what if you expand the playing field so much that ideas like defending ourselves from the U.S. military is treated like a rational justification? If that’s the kind of thing that average Americans should be preparing for in the ordinary course of business then hell, semi-automatics aren’t going to do the trick. Keeping a herd of angry dinosaurs in the backyard is more like it.
And how about Hannity. Congress just raised taxes on the very wealthy to a rate higher than under President George W. Bush, but the same as under President Bill Clinton, and much, much lower than under a whole host of other presidents. In other words, we might not like higher taxes, but the current tax rate on the very wealthy is well within range of the rates they’ve historically been asked to pay.
But Hannity’s casual suggestion that all those folks signing secession petitions are making a reasonable case serves the same purpose as Shapiro’s, if about a different issue: If slightly higher taxes on a small sliver of the wealthiest Americans during a time of troubling deficits really is cause for secession, then God forbid considering any other tax increases on anyone else for any reason.
In other words, Shapiro and Hannity (and Stockman and Levin, etc.) are less interested in convincing you that they are right than they are in expanding the range of conservative ideas that can be deemed reasonable, while at the same time narrowing the space left for ideas of a more moderate or liberal persuasion. It’s an attempt to affect a rightward shift of what we think of as the mainstream, something conservative pundits have proven pretty good at.
And maybe it will work. But you gotta wonder at what point all of this comes back to bite them. The fact is, Shapiro’s remarks betray a deep suspicion of the United States, and Hannity’s casual indifference to the essential nature of this country and the strength we derive from its ideological and geographic breadth, is fairly breathtaking.
Here’s something worth remembering: Tax rates go up and tax rates go down. We spend more and we spend less. Sometimes what you believe is in vogue and sometimes it isn’t. That’s part of the democratic process at the heart of our country, the evolutions the country goes through with each succeeding generation.
If you only love America when it agrees with you, that isn’t love at all. It’s a kind of situational patriotism that says more about you than fidelity to your country. Makes one yearn for a time when patriotism was made of sterner stuff.
By: Anson Kaye, Washington Whispers, U. S. News and World Report, January 17, 2013
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