An Unfinished Work

The other day I had a brief exchange with a high school classmate.  He observed we were probably on different sides of the political spectrum.  As is almost always the case this gave me something to consider both about myself and the political spectrum.

Let’s start with the political spectrum.

When I was young there were two dominant parties in the American political system.  Today there are still two dominant parties, but things have changed dramatically in the form those two parties take.  When I first became aware of the two-party system, I found the following truths.  Each party had a mixture of beliefs. There were socially liberal Republicans and socially conservative Democrats.  There were financially responsible liberals and financially responsible conservatives.  Racism existed in both parties, although the racism of the northeast was better masked than the racism of the south.  At the time members of both parties could find common ground to work with like-minded individuals on the other side.  Democrats made up the majority parties in the Southern states and Republicans were the clear minority.  Cities around the country were run by “political machines” where the Democrats excelled at getting out the vote for their candidates.  Republicans have always been the minority party and would only win by capturing the “swing” or independent vote.

Over the years, and I blame the media for this, the parties changed.  As each party moved to occupy spaces the other party abandoned, we’ve become a two-party system of the extremes.  Perhaps it is unfair to blame just the media because in my opinion the primary system should also be held responsible. With the adoption of the primaries the people nominated are the most politically vocal and play to the activists on the fringe.  Is this better than the party bosses getting together in the smoke-filled back rooms and finding the best compromise candidate?  Although if the DNC process in 2016 and 2020 is any indication the primaries are really just a sham as the power brokers really do still decide who their candidate for President will be.

Today, as I look at the two parties’ somethings become crystal clear for me.  The first is classic liberalism no longer exists in either party.  In the Republican party, it was pushed out by a shift to political activists from the southern religious groups abandoned by the Democrats.  For the Democrats, although they still use the term liberal it no longer means liberal in the classic sense of tolerance for opposing views.  It is self-righteous liberalism where only progressives know what is right for the nation as a whole.

The idea of fiscal responsibility with our federal spending has also gone the way of gas-guzzling muscle cars of the 1960s.  It is claimed Senator Everett Dirksen, the late Senator from Illinois, once said, “A billion dollars here and a billion dollars there, pretty soon you’re talking about real money.”  Today Congress has no problem spending trillions of dollars without blinking an eye.  Unfortunately, for the nation, a very large percentage of the money they are happy to spend is money we have to borrow from someone.  We never seem to worry anymore about how we will pay that back.  We have Democrats talking about universal health care, expanding welfare, eliminating our use of fossil fuels, and forgiving college debt, while the Republicans complain about it but then when given an opportunity do little to balance our needs and moderate the cost of defense spending.  From 2010 to 2021 our excess spending averaged a little over $641 billion a year and now stands at over $30 trillion for the national debt.  The interest payments alone are eating significantly into our ability to provide the fundamental services Americans expect and need: things like infrastructure with safe water, clean air, and good roads. 

I grew up near the home of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt.  In and near Hyde Park, New York we have the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Bridge across the Hudson River, the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Home and Library, Val Kill (where Eleanor lived after Franklin passed), and of course, I went to the Franklin Delano Roosevelt High School, home of “The Presidents.”  Our discussions of history were filled with how FDR had saved the nation during the great depression.  How his fireside chats calmed and inspired the nation, and how he was the first to recognize the need for a social safety net for the elderly while employing out-of-work artists and entertainers to help with the building of monumental works like the Hoover Damn.  That last thing is something all Democrats continually bring up to show how they care for the poor and elderly.  What doesn’t get discussed too much is how at the end of the day both parties came together to create a plan to sustain this act and voted overwhelmingly to approve.  In the house, the vote was 372 yeas, 33 nays, 2 present, and 25 not voting.  Of the dissenting votes the Democrats had 15 nays, and 20 "not voting," while the Republicans had 15 nays, 4 "not voting", and 2 voting as "present."  The farm labor and progressive parties made up the difference.  In the Senate, there was a similar result with 77 yeas, 6 nays, and 12 "not voting."  That is truly bi-partisan support.

The basic premise for Social Security to work and be sustainable is just like any insurance.  There must be more money coming in than going out.  For over 70-years that has been the case.  The problem we are now facing is a shrinking workforce, paying fewer dollars into the fund than the elderly are drawing out.  In this bipolar world of soundbites and talking points, we seem unable to come to grips with this reality and everyone wants to talk about how they’ve earned their payments and it's now the Republicans' fault some are beginning to point out the fund is running out of money.  Some will talk about how the social security “lockbox” has been raided to pay other bills, but if you think about it this is nonsensical since all the money comes from one source and is backed only by the faith in the nation to pay its bills.  If we were actually backed by some physical standard, you could make that case, but you either have faith the government can pay its bills or you don’t.  That is where I begin to differ from my Democratic friends.

As I pointed out earlier, I grew up in the heartland of the Democratic ideals, but those ideals have changed, and so have I.  I’ve been to or lived in, a fair bit of the world, I’ve seen the richness of western Europe, rebuilt after the last World War by American dollars spent under the Marshall Plan, while also seeing eastern Europe suffer under the disregard and oppression of the Soviet Union.  I’ve seen the far east, rebuilt after the war by American dollars in investments as well as the industry of the people to make their lives and families better.  I’ve been to several islands throughout the Pacific where they have found tourism as an industry, or American bases create a cash income for the citizens.  I’ve seen the middle east where distrust of the Judeo-Christian faith has driven the religious leaders to a more extreme form of Islam than had been previously allowed.  I’ve driven down the streets of Karachi Pakistan where I’ve seen white-clad boys playing cricket behind walls topped with glass shards to keep out the homeless boys and girls standing just outside the gates of the school.  I’ve been north of the Arctic Circle where the only thing there was a radar site to watch for a Soviet attack of the homeland, and south as far as Brazil where I saw a remarkable city cut out of the middle of a rain forest where people lived in gorgeous homes or ramshackle boxes (with nothing in between).  What has amazed me the most in all these travels is the human spirit and a desire to be free from the oppression of government, but at the same time needing the protections of a government just to live the best lives they can.

When I graduated from college I began to think as a fiscal conservative, but I retained a true appreciation of the social programs this country could, and perhaps should provide.  Social Security had, by then, become the accepted standard of how a program should be set up.  The larger working population would take a percentage of their paycheck and give it to the government to care for the elderly.  The only real problem I saw was the idea held by too many that social security wasn’t a “safety net” it was a retirement plan.  This, in my opinion, led them to not save for their future but spend on the things they wanted today.  This was akin to Aesop’s fable of the ant and the grasshopper.  Those fables were all supposed to teach us some underlying life lesson, learned from experience.  How many of us actually pay attention to these things, but when given an excuse believe it is someone else’s job to take care of the future.

Our founding fathers, having fought a war to achieve freedom from the English King and having learned the hard lessons of a weak confederation of the separate states determined to write a constitution forming a new government.  Even then some feared a too-powerful government, while others fought to establish the supremacy of such a government. Alexander Hamilton, writing in Federalist Paper 84 argued the Constitution alone was sufficient to protect the nation and the desire for a “Bill of Rights” detailing the specific freedoms of the citizens was unnecessary.  Time has proven the wisdom of those who argued for the necessity of detailing those rights. 

In reflection, does the government taking on more responsibility for our personal welfare improve society, or simply make the government more powerful? We’ve chosen to expand the role of government beyond what even a staunch Federalist such as Hamilton believed was essential. In so doing we must realize that every government decision comes with a cost.  Sometimes those costs are financial, other times those costs are a loss of individual freedoms.  This pandemic has brought into sharp focus the debate of individual freedom versus social responsibility.  At the heart of my concern is the question:  does the expanding government actually enable the mechanisms to teach a shared social responsibility or does it destroy them?

As I’ve aged, some would say I’ve become less compassionate for the poor because I don’t believe the government has actually done a good job caring for them.  The money spent does not, on the whole, seem to have made their lives better.  If we look at the results of government in our Democratic-controlled states and cities, do we find the poor better off today than they were before the creation of the Great Society?  Naturally, those who favor the programs are unwilling to admit the inherent failures.  They can shift the blame of failure to those “other uncompassionate politicians in the GOP” who have the gall to question the cost-benefit of throwing money at the poor to improve their lives.  Do those social safety net programs work, or are they simply another way to make one class of people a slave to the state?

I hear a lot about the disparity between the richest of the rich and the poor in America.  The simple question I ask is has any or all of the government welfare programs closed that gap over the past 55-years?  We routinely hear from the left a complaint about the wealth gap, where statistics like how rich the three richest men in America are compared to the bottom half of the population as if this is something new and disreputable.  They almost always point to the years of Reagan as the point where wealth disparity started.  Since Reagan, we’ve had how many Democratic-controlled Congresses, and how many Democratic Presidents.  Each and every one of those individuals or groups had an opportunity to alter the path of divergence of wealth but chose not to.  We complain about Reagan, yet no one questions the wealth acquisition of our politicians who enter government with little and leave as multi-millionaires (e.g., Biden, Pelosi, Obama, and pick as many offsetting Republicans as you need). 

I’ve written about this in the past, here is what drives me to my conservative views and how I find the liberal/progressive movement out of touch with what I think is critical to the survival of our nation.

I believe a social safety net is a grand idea, I believe universal health care is good, and I believe universal employment is a wonderful goal.  Where I begin to diverge from historically liberal thought is who is best served by a safety net, how its benefits are measured.  What does universal health care get us and is it affordable?  Finally, how do you achieve universal employment when people don't want to work?  

Unfortunately, as I look at the history of the past 70 years, our government is incapable of creating all these things without destroying families, moral values, and creating a debt load that will destroy the nation.  The welfare state actually destroys the foundation of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs because it places the burden of achievement on individuals who really don’t care about humanity, they are only doing their job spending someone else’s money.

As I noted earlier how do individuals deal with welfare and other safety concerns?  The programs of the Great Society seem, upon reflection, to have destroyed the very fabric of the African-American society.  We have more single-mother families whose children grow, not to great success, but to greater crime and poverty.  We no longer expect our poorest to pay income taxes, but we steal their wealth with sales taxes and poor education so they are unable to break the chains the government and society, in general, have placed around them.  What government program will change this reality?  I believe change can only come from within and unfortunately, we are teaching our young to be victims, not champions.  To have ever greater expectations of government and fewer expectations of themselves?

Has affirmative action actually improved the lives of those it was supposed to help with a step up or has it lowered the credibility of the education system by lowering the expectations of those who compete within it? I don’t know but in looking at the racism of the colleges I’m not sure it has helped achieve the equality it was supposed to.  If it had, would we still be hearing about how systemically racist America is?  Having been to parts of the world where racism is alive and well, I find these claims of Americans being horridly racist uninformed about the world we are a part of.  Go to Japan if you want to see racism.  Go to China, India, or South Africa.

Universal health care is a wonderful idea, but if we implemented it how would it be administered?  Would we expect the government to have an over-abundance of capability, or would we see the empty shelves of medical supplies we see today in our retail markets?  When the Affordable Care Act was passed the government promised it would be wonderful for all.  Its opponents questioned the costs and we’ve seen those costs actually occur.  The supporters said there would not be government panels that would question the decisions of the doctors, but the Pandemic has shown us that government experts only look at a limited data set in making their choices.  Will our care be the envy of the world, or would it be akin to the United Kingdom where the rich can travel to the U.S. for the care, they desire versus the care the government provides, or as we sink into pure socialism will we become like Venezuela or Cuba?  This is the question I have for those who wish to spend dollars we don’t have.  Do the people who believe in the inequality of wealth believe taking 100% of that wealth from them would actually create a viable and sustainable health care plan?  Wasn’t Medicare and Medicaid supposed to do that when they were created?  What have they achieved besides increasing health care costs at a rate above annual inflation?

The thing about the progressive mindset is the belief they know what utopia is, and how to reach it.  I question that “one size fits all” utopian belief, and I believe history has shown us the zealots of progressivism have actually done more harm than good in their pursuit of the perfect world.  We make a big deal about the Nazis, but at the time they were a progressive movement.  We talk about Margaret Sanger as if she was the ultimate feminist, but so easily dismiss her racism and her desire to eliminate the unacceptable from society with universal abortion.

That said, if we were only to concern ourselves with tradition, we would still be driving horse-drawn carriages.  There must be a balance, unfortunately, we seem to have lost that ability to compromise for the common good.  They say the pendulum swings both ways, and perhaps it is beginning to swing back towards a more common view on what is good for America, but unless we find a way to talk, understand and accept opposing views, and work toward compromise we will remain a nation in turmoil  Both the nation and I are certainly an unfinished work.