More vs. Less

I am sick and tired of all the continual arguments over whether we have too much or too little government. I think it's time we focused on making what we have work.

This is a "political essay" that I wrote recently when I was just writing freely in the vague hope that I'd get something out of it. It was too long to post as a meme and it lacked enough true focus to make it suitable as a blog post. But it proved difficult to edit down to a meme-able length, so rather than to just let it sit on my computer gathering digital dust I've gone ahead and put it up on the blog. (Obviously...you're reading it there.) I'll admit right up front that this isn't the most coherent thing I've ever written, but it is what is, so here it is.

Democracy is, by its very definition, all about the majority oppressing the minority. This sounds like tyranny...and when democracy works badly, it is. To prevent such excesses, we have adopted a type of representative democracy, or a republic, in which our elected representatives (in theory at least) act to represent our interests, not merely to do everything we say. Unfortunately, this imposes a kind of tyranny all its own, with representatives acting on their own cherished dogma or to benefit themselves financially and public benefit be damned.

This then is the vicious cycle of modern American politics. You cannot have too much government by representatives without the representatives thinking that the government belongs to them, not those they represent. They end up oppressing the people to serve their own interests. And you cannot have too much "government by the people" without the people oppressing each other over whatever differences, real or imagined, important or unimportant, never cease to divide us.

"Less Government!" is not the answer, partly because without the restraining hand of government to prevent it we would be brought back to oppressing each other, but mostly because there are things that need to be done that a government can do, should do, that if left to either the people or to "private enterprise" would either not get done properly or not get done at all. The mob has its own special kind of tyranny, and frankly I don't see us (we're the mob) as wise enough, not as a nation or as a group of people or as a group of groups of people, to avoid that kind of tyranny.

Nor is "More Government!" any better an answer. Being governed by the elected generally leads to being governed by government employees, who themselves are employed to do the work of the elected. These generally see themselves as being in the employ of "the government," not "the people," which in theory are one in the same but in reality have very different interests. Where the elected decline to rule, it is the bureaucrats who do the work; and they don't often need to worry about anyone seeing them do it.

And while the Left and the Right are fighting over whether we need less or more government, we are left with the government we have not working. I cannot believe that this was what the Founding Fathers wanted. They labored to create a government that could function under any conditions that might arise, but conditions have now arisen under which government simply can not function.

It comes down to this: there is no easy answer. It falls to each of us to try to craft the best government we can, and if we're going to elect people to govern us and in turn allow them to employ others to govern us then we have to keep them all, elected or otherwise, under close scrutiny even as we trust them to serve our best interests, lest they steel all the silverware.

The Blues Viking 

The opinions expressed herein are mine and if you don;'t lijke them you can get your own damn blog. 

"What's in a name?"

Our Venerated Iconic Leaders do not define us. Far from it; we often want to be nothing like them.

The big mistake that Conservatives make (one of them, anyway) is to justify their conservatism by wrapping themselves in the shrouds of Conservative icons such as Barry Goldwater, Dwight Eisenhower and their sainted Ronald Reagan. They fail to realize that the politics of these men is often at odds with the stated goals and ideals of "modern" Conservatives...often radically so.

Goldwater, for example, had a real problem with the intrusion of religion into politics, and said "Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [GOP] party, it's going to be a terrible damn problem." He also said something interesting that modern Conservative lawmakers should listen to, but won't: "Politics and governing demand compromise."

Eisenhower believed in feeding the poor, in Social Security, in labor laws, in farm programs, and he believed that Big Oil was trying to undermine these. He also spoke rather strongly against political extremism, which is something that the politics of today absolutely thrives on.

And as for Saint Ronald, whose name is guaranteed to come up in any discussion that touches on Conservative/Republican Superiority (and such conversations are ten-a-penny; you can't spend a day on Facebook without having or dodging half a dozen of them), the point on which he deviated the farthest from what is now the conservative norm is his stance on gun control. Reagan supported background checks and supported (signed into law, in fact) firearm restrictions that are considered nothing short of Liberal gun-grabbing by the modern Right.

But along with this particular set of political blinders, there's another position held by the Right, and one not without some historical justification: That the Left/the Democratic Party were not always the champions of the downtrodden that they claim to be, nor were the Right/the Republican Party always their foes. The problem with this view is that it treats the Left and the Democrats, as well as the Right and the Republicans, as monolithic entities who have always been, and always will be, what they are now.

The fact is that neither Conservatism nor Liberalism, neither Republican politics nor Democratic politics, have stood still. In fact, they have all moved considerably, and they have never moved in lock-step. The party of Lincoln was not the party of Nixon, which was not the party of Bush, which was not the party of McCain or Romney or Boehner. Nor is the Democratic Party still the party of Andrew Jackson, nor was that party the party of Franklin Roosevelt or that of John F. Kennedy or...well, you get the idea.

Ultimately, claiming kinship with such towering personalities from the past can be self-defeating, since the party of today would seldom look kindly upon the policies of its historic icons, and vice-versa. (And while I do see this in either party, I see it more in the actions and policies of the current Republican party.) It would be as incorrect to credit the modern GOP with Lincoln's great deeds as it would be to blame the modern Democrats for deeds done in an era when that party was so strongly influenced by the old Southern Democrats that championed Jim Crow and who had never gotten over the excesses of Reconstruction. 

We should never ignore our past or the words and actions of those who came before us, but we should never look into the past and say, "See? He's of the same party as me...I'm just like him!" because nine times out of ten we're not like them, would never want to be like them, would stand resolutely against anyone who dared to do or say such things now. We need to realize that our cherished historical icons were, perhaps, not the people that we want, even need, them to have been. We need to look at them anew, warts and all, and not ignore their faults or credit them with more virtue than they possessed.

Or, if your respect for history is so low that you can't let go of your idealized icons, then I suggest you go watch something on The History Channel about the aliens who built the Ark that rescued all the unicorns from Atlantis. You'll be happier.

The Blues Viking
The opinions herein expressed are mine and if you don't like them you can get your own damn blog.