Madoff goes to jail for 150 years. Since he’s a little older than I am, he probably won’t live that long. Sentencing requirements demand that he serve 80% of the sentence. Just incidentally, no matter how long he sits in jail, it isn’t going to get anybody’s money back.
What, it seems to me, was needed ten and even twenty years ago was a little more healthy cynicism. Everybody loves an optimist—and Mr. Madoff was an optimist! Nobody likes a pessimist, especially not optimistic souls who trust their money to people like Madoff.
Wasn’t there one little kid in the crowd who took a good look and decided, out loud, that the emperor really didn’t have any clothes on? (Did the boy in “The Emperor’s New Clothes” who ruined the whole parade by pointing out the obvious spend the rest of his life under a cloud of opprobrium for being such a “nay sayer”?)
We hold the Prophet Jeremiah and Cassandra, princess of Troy, in low esteem because they brought incessant messages of gloom and doom. Nobody seems to reflect on the fact that—whatever else can be said of them—they were correct. Both Troy and Jerusalem fell to their enemies—exactly as Jeremiah and Cassandra predicted.
Would we esteem them more if they had gone around prattling optimistic twaddle as the Babylonians threw up siege works or as the Trojans tore down their walls to bring the wooden horse inside? It might seem that the reason pessimists are so much disdained is that, all too often, they are perfectly correct in their analyses.
Some fools need to be told NO, or DON’T or simply THAT WON’T WORK. Or even THAT’S NOT POSSIBLE. Was there no one wise enough in the ways of investment to realize the Madoff’s miraculous track record wasn’t possible?
Was there no one who, after spending a night with fellow investment bankers chatting or playing poker—no one who began to ask himself, “Where does Madoff do his investing?” If not at this and that bank or these or those brokerages, where does he invest?
There was no one who, in the interest of his own cash—or simply out of morbid curiosity, got on the phone and made fifteen to twenty phone calls? If he had, might he not have concluded that something was wrong here? That something wasn’t real?
Or, if you had enough invested with Madoff, would it hurt to press him—as hard as necessary—to find out exactly where and how he was making all this money in returns? (What’s the worst that could have happened—he might have given you your money back?)
Ten years of spectacular success—implausible success—which resulted in so much scraping and bowing, didn’t that make somebody say, “Wait a minute, that just doesn’t happen”?
(The other day I got an offer in the mail. It came with a $995 check that looked perfectly real. If I would deposit the money in my bank, then I could keep $100 for myself and $15 for expenses, if only I would test out a shipping service by sending a money order for $800 to an address in Canada.
How many optimists do you suppose did just that? My wife, who—God bless her—can be a good bit of a cynic about such things, got on the internet to check for fraud. Oh yes, this was a recurrent scam. By the time the check for $995 bounced, the people in Canada would have pocketed the $880 and run.
The bank would have come after me for the $880 I spent on the money order and, oh what fun.)
Didn’t anybody check anybody, anywhere about Bernie Madoff? Or would that have seemed just too déclassé? I suppose a few million is a small price to pay for having kept your good manners. And what’s a few million dollars if you’ve maintained your optimist outlook?
The Bible says that Christ did not trust people because he knew what people were really like. Think how much money could be saved by merely following Christ in this instance.
Very possibly some people who just read the last paragraph are thinking, “What a cynic”.
How much would the victims who stood up in court before Madoff was sentenced today and actually wept over their losses—how much would they trade now for a touch more cynicism back then?
Monday, June 29, 2009
Sunday, June 28, 2009
It Was--And Is--A Good Land
Today several churches held services honoring the nation and its 233rd birthday. The preacher I heard this morning took occasion to stress how grateful we should be just to be living in “this good land”. He briefly recounted the story of his immigrant ancestors who left Italy just before Mussolini took over—and prospered very nicely in America.
I thought back on some of my ancestors who left privation in the old country and wound up as prosperous land owners in this country. It was indeed a good land, free from war, major pestilence, starvation and violent internal strife (after 1865).
One does well to take time to be grateful. Even in hard times like this, the great majority of us enjoy a lifestyle beyond the wildest imagination of literally a billion or two of our fellow humans. I’ve seen just enough of the Third World to have vivid memories of mothers who had nothing better to do with a crippled child but to drag him into the street with her and use him as a mute appeal for pity while begging for a few coins.
Or of a mob of ragged urchins surrounding anyone dressed in Western clothing, pleading with us to buy tiny packs of Chicolet gum for a couple of American pennies. I will hear their cries of “Chicolet”, “Chicolet”, “Chicolet” for the rest of my life. However bleak our circumstances appear at this moment, we all have something to be thankful for.
It’s easy to forget this in the midst of our annoyance at this or that unfortunate policy, a badly thought out war, or the failure to deal with an injustice or to right a wrong. It’s too easy to see nothing but the corruption and venality in many aspects of public life.
We are offended by the behaviors of our politicians, our clergy and our business leaders. Sometimes all we can see is the greed and the waste. It is all too easy to forget the sacrifices made by those who came before us and paved our way.
My great grandfather landed in New York with no parents. They died in the miserable, stinking hold of the ship that brought them out of Holland. Their bodies were dumped overboard with a few pious words in English that neither my great grandfather nor his siblings understood.
My preacher grandfather, on the other side of the family, was a skilled hunter until the day he died—often to the astonishment of his parishioners. When he came to Western Michigan, you didn’t just go to the store to buy meat, you hunted it. And you didn’t waste ammunition.
My other grandfather was a man about 5’7’, never over 135 pounds. In his eighties he experienced dementia and his daughter considered placing him in an institution. He didn’t like the idea, and he fought off four large, young orderlies. He won. Handily.
He got those muscles lifting bales of feed and pushing a horse drawn plow. Farming in his day was man-killing work. What hands the man had! I have his wedding ring. Two of my fingers would fit in it.
We owe these people a debt. We also owe men like my father-in-law a debt. As a teenaged sailor he lay on the bottom of his tiny infantry landing boat. He got his hands on an old World War I rifle, and he would fire up at the Kamikazes as they flew over. He told me he was scared to death, but he had to feel he was doing something to hit back.
When the last Kamikaze was destroyed his boat would motor over to a stricken ship and he would get to help scrape up the pieces of dead and wounded American sailors. Having offloaded the troops on the beach, his vessel became a sea-going ambulance.
Ambulance drivers at car wrecks today rarely see anything like the bloody chaos he had to deal with after hundreds of pounds of explosives went off. It took him forty years before he could tell anyone what he had done in the war. All anyone knew is that if a siren went off in his neighborhood after he got home, he would come downstairs screaming—looking for his battle station.
My own dad lost over a year of his life learning how to drive a tank and direct its cannon fire for a war that ended before he could get sent overseas. It took him years to recover from the financial loss that stint in the Army cost him and his family.
Millions upon millions of men—and women—lost lives, limbs, minds or just had their lives turned upside down to keep the shooting away from the rest of us. We do indeed owe them a huge debt of gratitude. July 4th is as good a time as any to remember.
Does this mean we forget the nation’s faults and blemishes and become super patriots? Please God, not. We can—and must—continue disagreeing on policies, even principles. We can legitimately be upset about things we see going on around us and in Washington.
I admit to being startled at the thrill I felt when I was in foreign parts and came around a corner and, all unexpectedly, saw the stars and stripes flying off a legation or embassy. I never want to lose that thrill.
Nor do I ever want to forget that my fathers brought me to a “good land”.
I thought back on some of my ancestors who left privation in the old country and wound up as prosperous land owners in this country. It was indeed a good land, free from war, major pestilence, starvation and violent internal strife (after 1865).
One does well to take time to be grateful. Even in hard times like this, the great majority of us enjoy a lifestyle beyond the wildest imagination of literally a billion or two of our fellow humans. I’ve seen just enough of the Third World to have vivid memories of mothers who had nothing better to do with a crippled child but to drag him into the street with her and use him as a mute appeal for pity while begging for a few coins.
Or of a mob of ragged urchins surrounding anyone dressed in Western clothing, pleading with us to buy tiny packs of Chicolet gum for a couple of American pennies. I will hear their cries of “Chicolet”, “Chicolet”, “Chicolet” for the rest of my life. However bleak our circumstances appear at this moment, we all have something to be thankful for.
It’s easy to forget this in the midst of our annoyance at this or that unfortunate policy, a badly thought out war, or the failure to deal with an injustice or to right a wrong. It’s too easy to see nothing but the corruption and venality in many aspects of public life.
We are offended by the behaviors of our politicians, our clergy and our business leaders. Sometimes all we can see is the greed and the waste. It is all too easy to forget the sacrifices made by those who came before us and paved our way.
My great grandfather landed in New York with no parents. They died in the miserable, stinking hold of the ship that brought them out of Holland. Their bodies were dumped overboard with a few pious words in English that neither my great grandfather nor his siblings understood.
My preacher grandfather, on the other side of the family, was a skilled hunter until the day he died—often to the astonishment of his parishioners. When he came to Western Michigan, you didn’t just go to the store to buy meat, you hunted it. And you didn’t waste ammunition.
My other grandfather was a man about 5’7’, never over 135 pounds. In his eighties he experienced dementia and his daughter considered placing him in an institution. He didn’t like the idea, and he fought off four large, young orderlies. He won. Handily.
He got those muscles lifting bales of feed and pushing a horse drawn plow. Farming in his day was man-killing work. What hands the man had! I have his wedding ring. Two of my fingers would fit in it.
We owe these people a debt. We also owe men like my father-in-law a debt. As a teenaged sailor he lay on the bottom of his tiny infantry landing boat. He got his hands on an old World War I rifle, and he would fire up at the Kamikazes as they flew over. He told me he was scared to death, but he had to feel he was doing something to hit back.
When the last Kamikaze was destroyed his boat would motor over to a stricken ship and he would get to help scrape up the pieces of dead and wounded American sailors. Having offloaded the troops on the beach, his vessel became a sea-going ambulance.
Ambulance drivers at car wrecks today rarely see anything like the bloody chaos he had to deal with after hundreds of pounds of explosives went off. It took him forty years before he could tell anyone what he had done in the war. All anyone knew is that if a siren went off in his neighborhood after he got home, he would come downstairs screaming—looking for his battle station.
My own dad lost over a year of his life learning how to drive a tank and direct its cannon fire for a war that ended before he could get sent overseas. It took him years to recover from the financial loss that stint in the Army cost him and his family.
Millions upon millions of men—and women—lost lives, limbs, minds or just had their lives turned upside down to keep the shooting away from the rest of us. We do indeed owe them a huge debt of gratitude. July 4th is as good a time as any to remember.
Does this mean we forget the nation’s faults and blemishes and become super patriots? Please God, not. We can—and must—continue disagreeing on policies, even principles. We can legitimately be upset about things we see going on around us and in Washington.
I admit to being startled at the thrill I felt when I was in foreign parts and came around a corner and, all unexpectedly, saw the stars and stripes flying off a legation or embassy. I never want to lose that thrill.
Nor do I ever want to forget that my fathers brought me to a “good land”.
Saturday, June 27, 2009
What I Don't Like About Republicans
The biggest thing I do not like about Republicans is that they have lost their roots. An argument can be made that some aspects of the Republican Party go back to the Hamiltonians of Washington’s day. But if they do, the Federalists of the 1790s would not recognize them.
Hamilton was all about balance. He understood that private investment and industry drive national prosperity. He also understood that for this to happen, there must be close cooperation between government and business.
Each should work in its own sphere, but there should be COOPERATION, government making the improvements and even some of the investment to make business grow. Above all, they could not be enemies. The paranoid suspicion the private sector has today of governmental intervention or inter-action would have struck him as destructively insane.
If Hamilton were alive today he would likely be the first to point out that wars cannot be won without the help of private factories, cooperating with government. He would remind Republicans that the railroads that knitted forty-eight states together in a way that could not have happened without them were all built on government money.
The telegraph, that began the era of rapid communication, was stretched across the continent by government will. Our largest steel company was put together at the Navy Department’s behest so we could build a fleet to rival England’s.
The automobile industry—possibly the most heavily subsidized set of businesses in history—owe all of their size and heft to government assistance. (When I say this, students look puzzled. Then I ask them, “WHERE do you drive your car?” On roads and highways. “Who builds them? Where would GM or Ford be if government had not built streets and interstates?”)
Same thing is true of the airlines. Very few 747s or Airbuses land at privately built and maintained air fields. Local governments routinely give tax breaks or modify zoning codes to induce factories to build in their cities and towns.
What would we do without computers? I’m typing on one; you’re probably reading this on it. The whole computer revolution resulted from government investment—from the first one in 1939 that calculated the trajectory of naval shells to the space program that produced the desk top.
We could go on and on. Local government paved my street and forced the power company to put in street lights. The same government plows the roads so I can move in winter and, five years ago—just as my septic system was beginning to die—put in sewers. If, God forbid, there is a fire, the big red engine that responds is owned and manned by government.
Same thing for the police car that will come if I feel endangered. Government money runs the school district that makes my neighborhood as desirable as it is.
And Republicans claim to view all of this as inimical to their well-being as citizens. One can almost hear Hamilton snort in disgust. One can certainly hear the great capitalists of the Nineteenth Century harrumph and shake their heads in disbelief.
This is NOT an argument for Big Government that Democrats are accused of believing in. Not for a paternalistic government that makes us all play nice together. No, it is an argument for a government that sees its role as a servant of all its citizens—corporate as well as private. It is an argument for government that lends a hand when no one can or will.
There should always be tension—a little healthy watchfulness on both parts. Bureaucrats can be as acquisitive and power hungry as businessmen. But the fundamental attitude should be that of cooperation. Hamilton thought so. Republicans have come to believe their own anti-government rhetoric—and forgot this necessity.
Virulent distrust of everything and everyone inside the Washington beltway is not a sound basis on which to build policy—or to run a government. Republican voters, ask yourselves this. If your candidate loathes Washington so completely, what’s the real reason he’s running for office?
I don’t really have to say much about Republican feelings for the “little guy” that Democrats purport to champion. It is not surprising that when times are booming, Republicans—with their promises of lower taxes and unrestrained greed—win. When things go bust, masses of Republicans who now see themselves threatened with becoming little guys, vote Democratic.
The modern Republican Party was born in the election of 1896 as “the party of the full lunch bucket”. So I guess they’ll have to live with minority status when the lunch pail looks emptier. But it is hard to understand why there is such a knee jerk hostile reaction among Republicans at any hint that something might be done for the unfortunate or the calamity stricken.
Republicans might remember how the Biblical writer, James, answers his own question. “What is True Religion?” Yes, he calls for morality—“keep yourselves unspotted from the world”. It might also be noted at this point that most Republican urban reformers back in the 1890s were unfortunately far more concerned with the immorality of the city machines than with picking up their willingness to help the hungry and jobless.
Republicans might finally note that Herbert Croly, the “father of the New Deal” was essentially a Republican Progressive. (He was, incidentally, also a Hamiltonian.) So it is not inconceivable that Republican policy makers take up the cause of “ordinary folk”. It could win them a few elections. They could use that right now.
They should also remember what James says FIRST when he talks about True Religion: It is “to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction”. I would like the party much better if it occasionally did that.
Which leads me, finally, to the Republican stance on religion—or faith—itself. Since Reagan’s election in 1980, I’ve heard a lot of moralistic talk from Republicans. This was immoral, that was unfitting. This ought to be reversed; that ought to be changed.
I’ve seen very little action and almost no results. Were they pandering to people like me or did it just not seem important once they were in office?
Whichever, my attitude toward the Republican Party and its positions on faith and morality have become pretty much what Eliza Doolittle, in “My Fair Lady”, shouted at the feckless Freddy, “Don’t talk at all! Show me!!”
I really don’t much care for either party. I’m not registered as either. But, by a narrow margin, I still have to come down on the Republican Party’s side. Not so much for what they say or even what they actually do—but for what they could be.
Perhaps futilely, I shall keep hoping.
Hamilton was all about balance. He understood that private investment and industry drive national prosperity. He also understood that for this to happen, there must be close cooperation between government and business.
Each should work in its own sphere, but there should be COOPERATION, government making the improvements and even some of the investment to make business grow. Above all, they could not be enemies. The paranoid suspicion the private sector has today of governmental intervention or inter-action would have struck him as destructively insane.
If Hamilton were alive today he would likely be the first to point out that wars cannot be won without the help of private factories, cooperating with government. He would remind Republicans that the railroads that knitted forty-eight states together in a way that could not have happened without them were all built on government money.
The telegraph, that began the era of rapid communication, was stretched across the continent by government will. Our largest steel company was put together at the Navy Department’s behest so we could build a fleet to rival England’s.
The automobile industry—possibly the most heavily subsidized set of businesses in history—owe all of their size and heft to government assistance. (When I say this, students look puzzled. Then I ask them, “WHERE do you drive your car?” On roads and highways. “Who builds them? Where would GM or Ford be if government had not built streets and interstates?”)
Same thing is true of the airlines. Very few 747s or Airbuses land at privately built and maintained air fields. Local governments routinely give tax breaks or modify zoning codes to induce factories to build in their cities and towns.
What would we do without computers? I’m typing on one; you’re probably reading this on it. The whole computer revolution resulted from government investment—from the first one in 1939 that calculated the trajectory of naval shells to the space program that produced the desk top.
We could go on and on. Local government paved my street and forced the power company to put in street lights. The same government plows the roads so I can move in winter and, five years ago—just as my septic system was beginning to die—put in sewers. If, God forbid, there is a fire, the big red engine that responds is owned and manned by government.
Same thing for the police car that will come if I feel endangered. Government money runs the school district that makes my neighborhood as desirable as it is.
And Republicans claim to view all of this as inimical to their well-being as citizens. One can almost hear Hamilton snort in disgust. One can certainly hear the great capitalists of the Nineteenth Century harrumph and shake their heads in disbelief.
This is NOT an argument for Big Government that Democrats are accused of believing in. Not for a paternalistic government that makes us all play nice together. No, it is an argument for a government that sees its role as a servant of all its citizens—corporate as well as private. It is an argument for government that lends a hand when no one can or will.
There should always be tension—a little healthy watchfulness on both parts. Bureaucrats can be as acquisitive and power hungry as businessmen. But the fundamental attitude should be that of cooperation. Hamilton thought so. Republicans have come to believe their own anti-government rhetoric—and forgot this necessity.
Virulent distrust of everything and everyone inside the Washington beltway is not a sound basis on which to build policy—or to run a government. Republican voters, ask yourselves this. If your candidate loathes Washington so completely, what’s the real reason he’s running for office?
I don’t really have to say much about Republican feelings for the “little guy” that Democrats purport to champion. It is not surprising that when times are booming, Republicans—with their promises of lower taxes and unrestrained greed—win. When things go bust, masses of Republicans who now see themselves threatened with becoming little guys, vote Democratic.
The modern Republican Party was born in the election of 1896 as “the party of the full lunch bucket”. So I guess they’ll have to live with minority status when the lunch pail looks emptier. But it is hard to understand why there is such a knee jerk hostile reaction among Republicans at any hint that something might be done for the unfortunate or the calamity stricken.
Republicans might remember how the Biblical writer, James, answers his own question. “What is True Religion?” Yes, he calls for morality—“keep yourselves unspotted from the world”. It might also be noted at this point that most Republican urban reformers back in the 1890s were unfortunately far more concerned with the immorality of the city machines than with picking up their willingness to help the hungry and jobless.
Republicans might finally note that Herbert Croly, the “father of the New Deal” was essentially a Republican Progressive. (He was, incidentally, also a Hamiltonian.) So it is not inconceivable that Republican policy makers take up the cause of “ordinary folk”. It could win them a few elections. They could use that right now.
They should also remember what James says FIRST when he talks about True Religion: It is “to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction”. I would like the party much better if it occasionally did that.
Which leads me, finally, to the Republican stance on religion—or faith—itself. Since Reagan’s election in 1980, I’ve heard a lot of moralistic talk from Republicans. This was immoral, that was unfitting. This ought to be reversed; that ought to be changed.
I’ve seen very little action and almost no results. Were they pandering to people like me or did it just not seem important once they were in office?
Whichever, my attitude toward the Republican Party and its positions on faith and morality have become pretty much what Eliza Doolittle, in “My Fair Lady”, shouted at the feckless Freddy, “Don’t talk at all! Show me!!”
I really don’t much care for either party. I’m not registered as either. But, by a narrow margin, I still have to come down on the Republican Party’s side. Not so much for what they say or even what they actually do—but for what they could be.
Perhaps futilely, I shall keep hoping.
Friday, June 26, 2009
What I Like About Republicans
What I like about Republicans is almost more historical than current. I am not at all happy with much of the political dogma that seems to afflict the party today. But there are a few bedrock principles that still underlie much of the party, making it possible for me to call myself one.
Republicans are under no illusions about what actually supports the entire national and governmental edifice. Private Enterprise. Private businesses that pay TAXES, and pay employees who pay TAXES, all of whom own property which is also TAXED. To paraphrase the song from “Cabaret”, it is TAXES “that makes the world go ‘round”.
If Obama is going to improve education, repair health care, and slog on in Afghanistan—let alone repair roads and other infrastructure across the nation, it is TAXES and only taxes that will pay for it all. The Sierra Club, the Gay Pride outfits, the NAACP, and the AFL-CIO may all contain good hearted and wonderful folk, but they don’t PAY for anything.
They can’t. They don’t EARN. They do not generate money. Business—employers—generate cash. However greedy they may have been, however reckless their behavior, it is business and finance who create the monetary resources with which governments carry out their policies.
We can see what happens when governments or parties lose sight of that reality in the history of 16th Century Spain or 17th and 18th Century France. Both enjoyed military victories and, especially in Spain’s case, huge infusions of capital.
Both nations forgot to invest it in businesses that could grow the money. They saw business as merely a cash cow to be milked for the government’s purposes. Business stagnated, often never took root. Spain fizzled into a third rate power by 1700 and France collapsed into a fundamentally self-destructive revolution in 1789.
Shall we talk about what a governmental stranglehold on the means of production did for the Soviet Union after 1917? We didn’t actually knock it down; it collapsed of its own inefficiencies in 1989. This should be an economic horror story for us to frighten children with for generations.
Look at what the Labor Government of Great Britain did to British industry during the 1940s, 50s and 60s. It nationalized everything in sight—and Britain, long a world class industrial power house, fell into stagnation and decay.
There is the risk that our current Democratic administration, in the guise of correcting excesses, may step too hard on the part of American business that has always paid our freight by growing, hiring and paying a reasonable tax on profits.
Republicans do understand this, better than Democrats. Historically, going back to the Whigs of the mid-Nineteenth Century, often too recklessly, often too ruthlessly, they created wealth. Even in their depredations, they generated the capital that built the society we enjoy today.
Restrain them, regulate them—but be very careful not to cut off the air supply and strangle them! (FDR understood this, even if many of his adherents did not.)
The practical side of me likes the Republicans for the above reason. The religious and moral side of me (while often holding my nose) prefers the Republicans for another reason.
Despite the rampant hypocrisy, the overwhelming number of cases in which moral preachments are honored strictly in the breach, the Republican Party at least pays lip service to the notion that there is a higher morality that supersedes questions of “fairness” and “constitutional rights”.
Whether we like it or not, this nation was founded by men who believed that. Washington and Adams certainly did. In his old age, even Franklin came around to something close to that opinion. And Jefferson, who is the patron saint of the modern day liberal Democrat, could swear “on the altar of Almighty God” when he felt strongly enough.
Jefferson could look at the Compromise of 1820—which secured the future of slavery—and state publicly that “when I consider that God is Just, I tremble for my country.”
I firmly believe that there is other and older and higher law than merely the Constitution, the Acts of Congress and the decisions of the Supreme Court. I support them all; I could take the Presidential Oath and swear to support them—but there is a morality that is higher than they are.
(People like Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. believed that. It was at the core of their inner strength. It made them able to endure beatings, imprisonment and official condemnation. I suspect there may be people like that on the streets of Tehran today.)
Republicans more closely sense this reality than do their colleagues across the aisle. As someone who fundamentally agrees with the underlying attitude that enabled King and Gandhi to act as they did, I am—for now—more comfortable in the Republican Party.
I was—and this will horrify many—completely comfortable with George W. Bush’s religious certitude. He made some bone headed decisions; he either took no sensible advice or he didn’t listen well—but the fact that he held firmly onto his Christian beliefs stands to his credit for me.
This is not a popular position; many Republicans repudiate it. But enough do not so that, for this time, I must continue to stand with (and vote for) most Republican candidates.
On the issue of a practical view of business, finance and taxes and on the issue of the existence of a morality that is not dependent on anyone’s view of “fairness”, I remain a Republican.
Republicans are under no illusions about what actually supports the entire national and governmental edifice. Private Enterprise. Private businesses that pay TAXES, and pay employees who pay TAXES, all of whom own property which is also TAXED. To paraphrase the song from “Cabaret”, it is TAXES “that makes the world go ‘round”.
If Obama is going to improve education, repair health care, and slog on in Afghanistan—let alone repair roads and other infrastructure across the nation, it is TAXES and only taxes that will pay for it all. The Sierra Club, the Gay Pride outfits, the NAACP, and the AFL-CIO may all contain good hearted and wonderful folk, but they don’t PAY for anything.
They can’t. They don’t EARN. They do not generate money. Business—employers—generate cash. However greedy they may have been, however reckless their behavior, it is business and finance who create the monetary resources with which governments carry out their policies.
We can see what happens when governments or parties lose sight of that reality in the history of 16th Century Spain or 17th and 18th Century France. Both enjoyed military victories and, especially in Spain’s case, huge infusions of capital.
Both nations forgot to invest it in businesses that could grow the money. They saw business as merely a cash cow to be milked for the government’s purposes. Business stagnated, often never took root. Spain fizzled into a third rate power by 1700 and France collapsed into a fundamentally self-destructive revolution in 1789.
Shall we talk about what a governmental stranglehold on the means of production did for the Soviet Union after 1917? We didn’t actually knock it down; it collapsed of its own inefficiencies in 1989. This should be an economic horror story for us to frighten children with for generations.
Look at what the Labor Government of Great Britain did to British industry during the 1940s, 50s and 60s. It nationalized everything in sight—and Britain, long a world class industrial power house, fell into stagnation and decay.
There is the risk that our current Democratic administration, in the guise of correcting excesses, may step too hard on the part of American business that has always paid our freight by growing, hiring and paying a reasonable tax on profits.
Republicans do understand this, better than Democrats. Historically, going back to the Whigs of the mid-Nineteenth Century, often too recklessly, often too ruthlessly, they created wealth. Even in their depredations, they generated the capital that built the society we enjoy today.
Restrain them, regulate them—but be very careful not to cut off the air supply and strangle them! (FDR understood this, even if many of his adherents did not.)
The practical side of me likes the Republicans for the above reason. The religious and moral side of me (while often holding my nose) prefers the Republicans for another reason.
Despite the rampant hypocrisy, the overwhelming number of cases in which moral preachments are honored strictly in the breach, the Republican Party at least pays lip service to the notion that there is a higher morality that supersedes questions of “fairness” and “constitutional rights”.
Whether we like it or not, this nation was founded by men who believed that. Washington and Adams certainly did. In his old age, even Franklin came around to something close to that opinion. And Jefferson, who is the patron saint of the modern day liberal Democrat, could swear “on the altar of Almighty God” when he felt strongly enough.
Jefferson could look at the Compromise of 1820—which secured the future of slavery—and state publicly that “when I consider that God is Just, I tremble for my country.”
I firmly believe that there is other and older and higher law than merely the Constitution, the Acts of Congress and the decisions of the Supreme Court. I support them all; I could take the Presidential Oath and swear to support them—but there is a morality that is higher than they are.
(People like Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. believed that. It was at the core of their inner strength. It made them able to endure beatings, imprisonment and official condemnation. I suspect there may be people like that on the streets of Tehran today.)
Republicans more closely sense this reality than do their colleagues across the aisle. As someone who fundamentally agrees with the underlying attitude that enabled King and Gandhi to act as they did, I am—for now—more comfortable in the Republican Party.
I was—and this will horrify many—completely comfortable with George W. Bush’s religious certitude. He made some bone headed decisions; he either took no sensible advice or he didn’t listen well—but the fact that he held firmly onto his Christian beliefs stands to his credit for me.
This is not a popular position; many Republicans repudiate it. But enough do not so that, for this time, I must continue to stand with (and vote for) most Republican candidates.
On the issue of a practical view of business, finance and taxes and on the issue of the existence of a morality that is not dependent on anyone’s view of “fairness”, I remain a Republican.
Thursday, June 25, 2009
What I Don't Like About Democrats
As I wrote yesterday, one of the most admirable things about the Democratic Party is its often genuine concern for the little guy. However, like all good things, that can have a dark side. Concern for those perceived as helpless can turn into the desire to control their lives for them.
Three bad things can come out of this impulse. One) The “liberal” wing of the Democratic Party seems full of well intentioned folk who apparently feel they are uniquely qualified to act in loco parentis for the rest of us. (It’s not Big Brother, it’s Big Mommy and Daddy.)
They are going to make us joy in our diversity whether we wish to or not. (This is an interesting stance for a party much of whose membership rose out of homogenous ethnic ghettos.) We are going to be taught about the homosexual life style, whether we wish to be or not. In some cases, this includes instilling bias against the military, business and religion.
They protect themselves against views to the contrary with the fervor of the 16th Century Catholic Church’s Holy Office. Their view becomes a religion in its own right. They often march in a lock step that would be the envy of any totalitarian society in history.
This bigotry—and that is what their intolerance for any other view than their own actually is—rises out of their belief that they alone know what is best for mankind. The Ayatollahs of Iran, the Bolsheviks of Russia and the Fascists of Italy held and hold the same world view.
Two) They are still following the preachments of the brilliant 19th Century Democratic Party spokesman for the slave states, John C. Calhoun. He preached against the “Tyranny of the Majority”. He was incensed that a majority of anti-slavery northerners could dare to impose its will on a minority like the southern slave states.
His point of view—that the majority, that any majority is inherently untrustworthy and evil—strikes at the basis of democracy. But, in that very name of democracy, our more liberal friends in the Democratic Party have increasingly been successful in making the majority of Americans feel ashamed of themselves. It becomes a wicked thing to outnumber someone else. You should feel wracked with guilt if you merely are who you are—if you are a member of a majority.
This is a point of view of people whose party gained its power in ghettos full of ethnics who faced discrimination from WASPs and Protestants. I understand that. My own ethnic group couldn't get admitted to the better clubs in Grand Rapids when I was a boy.
We huddled in Dutch ethnic ghettos--with our own churches, businesses and even our own ball fields. Now Dutchmen could buy and sell Grand Rapids and they face discrimination nowhere. It's a rite of passage all Americans have gone through. Now, ho ho, we are part of that "majority". And they want us to be ashamed.
If you are white (we Dutch are), think of all the underprivileged non-whites and be ashamed—simply because by an accident of birth you happen to be in the majority. Ditto if you tend to espouse any form of Christianity that is more rigorous than an occasional attendance at Christmas and Easter.
The same thing goes for sexual preference or public speech. If you disagree with the position of the moment—or if you recommend caution or attention to another point of view—you are guilty of a “hate crime”. Heaven forbid you should dislike a member of an ethnic group.
I have watched elementary teachers exhaust themselves trying to explain to little Susie why she MUST like little Henry. When subbing at that level, I have more than once had a shocked child come up to me and gasp that Janie said she doesn’t like me. Obviously I was expected to deal firmly with Janie.
Instead I told the tearful complainant that it is Janie’s absolute democratic right to dislike anyone, including you. She may not hurt you or injure your interests in any way—but she doesn’t have to like you. The complaining child went back to his or her seat and, in a few moments, they were chattering away with “Janie” like old friends.
You cannot make me like you. I cannot make you like or approve of me. I may not hurt you, but I am entirely permitted to dislike and ignore you. This is a bedrock democratic principle that has lost all currency in the Democratic Party. I still try to live by the old maxim: I don’t have to like you, but all of my rights stop at the tip of your nose.
Three) This concern for minorities can, unrestrained, turn into an absurd and ugly form of pandering. It not only makes smug, bigoted hypocrites out of those who do the pandering, it can inspire great resentment in those who are pandered to.
There was no more effective way of calling a black man the “N word” than by treating him with a form of disdainful condescension in the guise of self-serving pity for his plight and obviously surface deep acceptance of his person—and that, only in public settings.
One reason the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s collapsed—even before King’s death—was that resentful blacks told unctuous (mostly Democratic supporters) to stop fussing about Alabama and go home and integrate their Chicago and Boston suburbs.
I worked with a man with whom I developed a close and honest relationship while in Washington. One weekend I was throwing a party for friends of mine from New York and Washington whom I thought he might get a kick out of meeting. I invited him.
He paused for a long moment. He said, “I don’t mean to hurt you—we’ve been honest enough as friends for a long time. But I’m not coming. As a Presidential aide, there are some things I can’t get out of. I’ve been the nigger at too many parties.”
He told me of White House receptions where, amidst the hors d’oeuvres, there was a platter of fried chicken. (This was the Johnson administration—of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.) It was his job, when a new white official came on board the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, to take him into the neighborhood where he was raised and show them the ghetto.
It never crossed anyone’s mind to ask how he felt about doing that. He did it—afterward, I and a few of his friends sat for hours listening to him unwind. Rarely have I seen deeper into a man’s soul than I have on those nights. I couldn’t do that to someone, having known him. Not even to win an election.
And it does win elections for the Democrats. Find a precinct or district where some minority—be it sexual, religious or ethnic—feels put upon. Publicly espouse their cause. Come and stand with the leaders—and you have the votes of their followers.
Some of this is decently motivated; some of it is pure hypocritical pandering by people who may be no more tolerant than the most bitterly right wing radical. But it works. It wins elections.
No. Let me think for myself. Don’t mother me. Let me choose those whom I like to be around. And let me take up only those causes I seriously believe in.
I cannot join in some of the games and gambits I see going down in the Democratic Party. No thank you. Much as I respect and like many members and positions of the Party.
Tomorrow—why I still hang with the Republicans.
Three bad things can come out of this impulse. One) The “liberal” wing of the Democratic Party seems full of well intentioned folk who apparently feel they are uniquely qualified to act in loco parentis for the rest of us. (It’s not Big Brother, it’s Big Mommy and Daddy.)
They are going to make us joy in our diversity whether we wish to or not. (This is an interesting stance for a party much of whose membership rose out of homogenous ethnic ghettos.) We are going to be taught about the homosexual life style, whether we wish to be or not. In some cases, this includes instilling bias against the military, business and religion.
They protect themselves against views to the contrary with the fervor of the 16th Century Catholic Church’s Holy Office. Their view becomes a religion in its own right. They often march in a lock step that would be the envy of any totalitarian society in history.
This bigotry—and that is what their intolerance for any other view than their own actually is—rises out of their belief that they alone know what is best for mankind. The Ayatollahs of Iran, the Bolsheviks of Russia and the Fascists of Italy held and hold the same world view.
Two) They are still following the preachments of the brilliant 19th Century Democratic Party spokesman for the slave states, John C. Calhoun. He preached against the “Tyranny of the Majority”. He was incensed that a majority of anti-slavery northerners could dare to impose its will on a minority like the southern slave states.
His point of view—that the majority, that any majority is inherently untrustworthy and evil—strikes at the basis of democracy. But, in that very name of democracy, our more liberal friends in the Democratic Party have increasingly been successful in making the majority of Americans feel ashamed of themselves. It becomes a wicked thing to outnumber someone else. You should feel wracked with guilt if you merely are who you are—if you are a member of a majority.
This is a point of view of people whose party gained its power in ghettos full of ethnics who faced discrimination from WASPs and Protestants. I understand that. My own ethnic group couldn't get admitted to the better clubs in Grand Rapids when I was a boy.
We huddled in Dutch ethnic ghettos--with our own churches, businesses and even our own ball fields. Now Dutchmen could buy and sell Grand Rapids and they face discrimination nowhere. It's a rite of passage all Americans have gone through. Now, ho ho, we are part of that "majority". And they want us to be ashamed.
If you are white (we Dutch are), think of all the underprivileged non-whites and be ashamed—simply because by an accident of birth you happen to be in the majority. Ditto if you tend to espouse any form of Christianity that is more rigorous than an occasional attendance at Christmas and Easter.
The same thing goes for sexual preference or public speech. If you disagree with the position of the moment—or if you recommend caution or attention to another point of view—you are guilty of a “hate crime”. Heaven forbid you should dislike a member of an ethnic group.
I have watched elementary teachers exhaust themselves trying to explain to little Susie why she MUST like little Henry. When subbing at that level, I have more than once had a shocked child come up to me and gasp that Janie said she doesn’t like me. Obviously I was expected to deal firmly with Janie.
Instead I told the tearful complainant that it is Janie’s absolute democratic right to dislike anyone, including you. She may not hurt you or injure your interests in any way—but she doesn’t have to like you. The complaining child went back to his or her seat and, in a few moments, they were chattering away with “Janie” like old friends.
You cannot make me like you. I cannot make you like or approve of me. I may not hurt you, but I am entirely permitted to dislike and ignore you. This is a bedrock democratic principle that has lost all currency in the Democratic Party. I still try to live by the old maxim: I don’t have to like you, but all of my rights stop at the tip of your nose.
Three) This concern for minorities can, unrestrained, turn into an absurd and ugly form of pandering. It not only makes smug, bigoted hypocrites out of those who do the pandering, it can inspire great resentment in those who are pandered to.
There was no more effective way of calling a black man the “N word” than by treating him with a form of disdainful condescension in the guise of self-serving pity for his plight and obviously surface deep acceptance of his person—and that, only in public settings.
One reason the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s collapsed—even before King’s death—was that resentful blacks told unctuous (mostly Democratic supporters) to stop fussing about Alabama and go home and integrate their Chicago and Boston suburbs.
I worked with a man with whom I developed a close and honest relationship while in Washington. One weekend I was throwing a party for friends of mine from New York and Washington whom I thought he might get a kick out of meeting. I invited him.
He paused for a long moment. He said, “I don’t mean to hurt you—we’ve been honest enough as friends for a long time. But I’m not coming. As a Presidential aide, there are some things I can’t get out of. I’ve been the nigger at too many parties.”
He told me of White House receptions where, amidst the hors d’oeuvres, there was a platter of fried chicken. (This was the Johnson administration—of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.) It was his job, when a new white official came on board the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, to take him into the neighborhood where he was raised and show them the ghetto.
It never crossed anyone’s mind to ask how he felt about doing that. He did it—afterward, I and a few of his friends sat for hours listening to him unwind. Rarely have I seen deeper into a man’s soul than I have on those nights. I couldn’t do that to someone, having known him. Not even to win an election.
And it does win elections for the Democrats. Find a precinct or district where some minority—be it sexual, religious or ethnic—feels put upon. Publicly espouse their cause. Come and stand with the leaders—and you have the votes of their followers.
Some of this is decently motivated; some of it is pure hypocritical pandering by people who may be no more tolerant than the most bitterly right wing radical. But it works. It wins elections.
No. Let me think for myself. Don’t mother me. Let me choose those whom I like to be around. And let me take up only those causes I seriously believe in.
I cannot join in some of the games and gambits I see going down in the Democratic Party. No thank you. Much as I respect and like many members and positions of the Party.
Tomorrow—why I still hang with the Republicans.
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
What I Like About Democrats
The Democratic Party (Democratic Republicans as they were called back in 1791) as the party of “the little guy”. And, typically, it started out with a very big, rich guy (Thomas Jefferson) leading the party for the benefit of all the little guys. Same pattern today—note Averell Harriman, the Kennedys, G. Menon Williams, etc. All for the little guy.
Under Andrew Jackson, it became very much the party of the once little guy on the make. Get those horrid Whig/Republican institutions like banks off our backs so we can speculate to our heart’s content. Many Nineteenth Century Democrats sounded a lot like late Twentieth Century Republicans.
It also continued as the chosen Party of the pro-slavery South. Even Northern Democrats like Stephen Douglas made sure that his moves benefitted the southern slave holders—note, especially, the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. Again, it sounds like this era’s Republican Party.
But the heart of the Democratic Party—and here it parts company with all ages of the Republican Party—lay in the ethnic ghettoes of our northern cities. In the Dickensian slums of New York and Boston, Democrats forged an ethos that remains with them today.
It began as practical politics. There was no social security, no welfare, no unemployment, no workman’s comp, no safety net at all. Factory workers made a dollar a day for decades on end. Women made as much as $1.75 a week; kids under ten rarely made a whole dollar in a week.
Needless to say there was no reserve for layoffs, injury and death. The spectre of instant economic disaster hung over every working family. Suddenly there might be no food, no heat, no medicine and an eviction notice on the door.
Democratic Party bosses who faced moneyed Republican opposition found there was one way they could guarantee themselves hundreds and thousands of votes for a relatively small investment. The disaster stricken immigrant worker had only one thing to sell—his vote.
For a bag of coal, some bread, a doctor’s visit, a job for the paterfamilias at city hall—you not only saved lives, but you bought a whole family’s gratitude for generations. Sure the bosses were corrupt—but they kept people alive; that was their power.
Republicans never understood this simple fact—either in dealing with the Democratic big city bosses or with the subsequent New Deal. The issue wasn’t “big government” or “tax and spend”; the issue was food on the table.
(To vote Republican you had to get a good enough and secure enough job to buy a house in the suburbs and never have to worry about where tonight’s meal was coming from. Republicans could afford to buy a week’s worth of provisions on the weekend. They could buy cars instead of trolley fare—it was often very much a simple matter of economics. In the 1950s, we saw millions of Democratic urban ethnics moving to the suburbs and switching party affiliation.)
You bet the urban bosses were corrupt. Moralizing Republicans who harped constantly on the corruption factor had plenty of valid ammunition. But the city voter was in the position of the man I knew who got robbed. He went to the police; they couldn’t help him.
He went to the bookie who fronted for the Mafia. They got his stuff back for him. “So,” he asked me, “who do you think I vote for? The cops? Or the Mafia?” (Safest streets in any big city were for many years those of the local Mafia headquarters. No muggers welcome.)
So, for whom did the urban ghetto dweller vote—the Republican who preached fiscal restraint and moral probity in political office or the Democrat who gave him coal and later food stamps? What would any responsible parent do?
All too often the Republican response to both fecklessness and calamity was that of a once good friend of mine. (His uncle, incidentally, was a Republican Senator.) He was as moral as any man I’ve ever known and, all in all, a decent fellow. But he insisted that if you got ill and lacked insurance, it was your duty to die. Quote, end quote.
Democrats for all their moments of wrong headedness and corruption have never forgotten that they are the party of the “little guy”. No matter how well you pad your own expense account, it remains a duty to make sure that he at least eats.
A lot of the rhetoric coming out of the Democratically dominated Washington of today is based on that fundamental notion. The little guy needs help with medical care, with job security, with protection against calamity; the little guy even needs protection against the biases of society that keep him from jobs and housing. (Whether he be an Irishman in 1850 or an Hispanic today.)
That’s by no means an ignoble motive. It goes to the heart of much of what Christianity purports to be about. For this core, gut principle, I have always liked and admired the Democratic Party. Many times I have wished I could join them.
Tomorrow I shall talk about what I do not like about the Democratic Party—and why I cannot and will not join them.
Under Andrew Jackson, it became very much the party of the once little guy on the make. Get those horrid Whig/Republican institutions like banks off our backs so we can speculate to our heart’s content. Many Nineteenth Century Democrats sounded a lot like late Twentieth Century Republicans.
It also continued as the chosen Party of the pro-slavery South. Even Northern Democrats like Stephen Douglas made sure that his moves benefitted the southern slave holders—note, especially, the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. Again, it sounds like this era’s Republican Party.
But the heart of the Democratic Party—and here it parts company with all ages of the Republican Party—lay in the ethnic ghettoes of our northern cities. In the Dickensian slums of New York and Boston, Democrats forged an ethos that remains with them today.
It began as practical politics. There was no social security, no welfare, no unemployment, no workman’s comp, no safety net at all. Factory workers made a dollar a day for decades on end. Women made as much as $1.75 a week; kids under ten rarely made a whole dollar in a week.
Needless to say there was no reserve for layoffs, injury and death. The spectre of instant economic disaster hung over every working family. Suddenly there might be no food, no heat, no medicine and an eviction notice on the door.
Democratic Party bosses who faced moneyed Republican opposition found there was one way they could guarantee themselves hundreds and thousands of votes for a relatively small investment. The disaster stricken immigrant worker had only one thing to sell—his vote.
For a bag of coal, some bread, a doctor’s visit, a job for the paterfamilias at city hall—you not only saved lives, but you bought a whole family’s gratitude for generations. Sure the bosses were corrupt—but they kept people alive; that was their power.
Republicans never understood this simple fact—either in dealing with the Democratic big city bosses or with the subsequent New Deal. The issue wasn’t “big government” or “tax and spend”; the issue was food on the table.
(To vote Republican you had to get a good enough and secure enough job to buy a house in the suburbs and never have to worry about where tonight’s meal was coming from. Republicans could afford to buy a week’s worth of provisions on the weekend. They could buy cars instead of trolley fare—it was often very much a simple matter of economics. In the 1950s, we saw millions of Democratic urban ethnics moving to the suburbs and switching party affiliation.)
You bet the urban bosses were corrupt. Moralizing Republicans who harped constantly on the corruption factor had plenty of valid ammunition. But the city voter was in the position of the man I knew who got robbed. He went to the police; they couldn’t help him.
He went to the bookie who fronted for the Mafia. They got his stuff back for him. “So,” he asked me, “who do you think I vote for? The cops? Or the Mafia?” (Safest streets in any big city were for many years those of the local Mafia headquarters. No muggers welcome.)
So, for whom did the urban ghetto dweller vote—the Republican who preached fiscal restraint and moral probity in political office or the Democrat who gave him coal and later food stamps? What would any responsible parent do?
All too often the Republican response to both fecklessness and calamity was that of a once good friend of mine. (His uncle, incidentally, was a Republican Senator.) He was as moral as any man I’ve ever known and, all in all, a decent fellow. But he insisted that if you got ill and lacked insurance, it was your duty to die. Quote, end quote.
Democrats for all their moments of wrong headedness and corruption have never forgotten that they are the party of the “little guy”. No matter how well you pad your own expense account, it remains a duty to make sure that he at least eats.
A lot of the rhetoric coming out of the Democratically dominated Washington of today is based on that fundamental notion. The little guy needs help with medical care, with job security, with protection against calamity; the little guy even needs protection against the biases of society that keep him from jobs and housing. (Whether he be an Irishman in 1850 or an Hispanic today.)
That’s by no means an ignoble motive. It goes to the heart of much of what Christianity purports to be about. For this core, gut principle, I have always liked and admired the Democratic Party. Many times I have wished I could join them.
Tomorrow I shall talk about what I do not like about the Democratic Party—and why I cannot and will not join them.
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Conservative--a Really Dirty Word
I have always considered myself to be “conservative”. Not “a conservative”, but simply “conservative”. If a system or an item has worked well for a long time, it is still in good repair, it puts no one at risk due to new circumstances—then let us think long and hard before replacing it merely for the sake of replacing it.
My davenport, for instance was purchased in 1956. It is in excellent condition—it would be hard to find one made as well today. (Doing so would cost thousands.) Why on earth would I buy a new one? I view my politics the same way.
But I loathe and detest what the word has come to mean politically. It seems to have become a synonym for all that is uncaring, greedy and without ruth. The party of the Progressives and Teddy Roosevelt that recommended Social Security and regulation of a raft of industries seems to have vanished.
In the arena of economics, the term has stopped making any sense at all. I recall in 1980, when they were vying for the presidential nomination, George Bush senior called Reagan’s economic plans “voodoo economics”. In the past year, we’ve seen just how much voodoo was involved.
Let’s make no mistake about it—the economic crises of today were caused by people we’ve come to call “conservatives” run amuck. Deregulation, “Greed is good” ethics in business and finance, and a reckless disregard for basic financial principles have brought the house down—not “tax and spend” Democrats..
(One cannot imagine Nineteenth Century Republican business moguls like J.P.Morgan and John D. Rockefeller acting with such reckless disregard for the national welfare or fiscal soundness. The old “Robber Barons” look like models of probity compared to the “conservatives” of today.)
This week’s “Newsweek” quotes an English writer—who lived in and covered American for a quarter of a century—on his impression of the modern American “conservative”. The man, Henry Fairlie, nicely distinguishes between the English Conservative (a Tory) and the American Republican Conservative.
As an English conservative he saw the “government’s role [as being] to preserve tradition and social order , not to speed the accumulation of great power and wealth among the elites… .” “The [American] conservative,” he wrote, “can all too easily drift into a morally bankrupt and intellectually shallow defense of those who have it made and those who are on the make.”
(This article in the June 29th issue, on page 49-51, is well worth the cost of the magazine. I would urge every Republican—and as many Democrats as might like to—to get it and read it.)
In an article for the “Washington Post” during the 1980 Republican Convention—the year of Reagan and the Moral Majority—Fairlie excoriates the conservative Republican delegates he sees. “Narrow minded, book banning, truth censoring, mean spirited; ungenerous, envious, intolerant, afraid; chicken, bullying, trivially moral, falsely patriotic, flag cheapening, God cheapening; the common man, shallow, small, sanctimonious.”
One can imagine the Biblical St. Paul writing that about people whose morality he questioned. And it was written by an English conservative who came to America in the 1960s expecting to meet kindred spirits among American conservatives.
It didn’t happen. American conservatives simply are not conservative in any true sense of the word. They are out to conserve nothing. They seem only interested in amassing. They seem willing to throw any part of the past and tradition out in order to advance that one goal.
They call it “conservatism” when they oppose any measure whatsoever that might put limits on their acquisitiveness. To them it is “conservatism” to oppose any measure that might benefit the indigent, injured or uninsured. A “conservative” is an unrestrained Darwinian who claims to relish the life of fang and claw—so long as no one is permitted bite and scratch back.
That’s not conservative. That conserves nothing—not the good, not the useful, not the time tested. It drapes itself in a spurious patriotism, bellowing loudly that the flag is dishonored if they are in any way restrained from exercising their own greed.
By bellowing their defense of Godliness so loudly that no one can think clearly, they contrive to obscure the fact that their own actions make the Christian Faith a hissing and a by-word among the population at large. I find it infuriating that the moment I identify myself as a conservative Christian, I am immediately tarred with the brush of indifference and lack of charity.
The Christian Spirit that created the Salvation Army and the downtown missions, that followed Livingstone into Africa to stop the slave trade is subsumed in a culture of prodigious consumption and sublime indifference to those who lack the merest necessities. THAT is by no means true conservatism.
But it’s the spirit that elected Reagan, forced the elder Bush and Clinton to the right and finally brought down the man who may be the last Reaganite, Bush the younger.
I remain conservative. I call myself by that name proudly. I thank Mr. Fairlie, with his English perspective for articulating thoughts and concerns that have floated around inside my mind for the past thirty years. It sounds silly to call myself a Tory—but I’m closer to that than I am a Reagan Republican. (I once considered myself an “Eisenhower Republican”—remember those?)
So, if I am this upset with what has become of my Republican Party—why haven’t I followed Arlon Specter’s example (he’s another old fashioned Eisenhower Republican) and become a Democrat?
I’ll deal with that question tomorrow.
My davenport, for instance was purchased in 1956. It is in excellent condition—it would be hard to find one made as well today. (Doing so would cost thousands.) Why on earth would I buy a new one? I view my politics the same way.
But I loathe and detest what the word has come to mean politically. It seems to have become a synonym for all that is uncaring, greedy and without ruth. The party of the Progressives and Teddy Roosevelt that recommended Social Security and regulation of a raft of industries seems to have vanished.
In the arena of economics, the term has stopped making any sense at all. I recall in 1980, when they were vying for the presidential nomination, George Bush senior called Reagan’s economic plans “voodoo economics”. In the past year, we’ve seen just how much voodoo was involved.
Let’s make no mistake about it—the economic crises of today were caused by people we’ve come to call “conservatives” run amuck. Deregulation, “Greed is good” ethics in business and finance, and a reckless disregard for basic financial principles have brought the house down—not “tax and spend” Democrats..
(One cannot imagine Nineteenth Century Republican business moguls like J.P.Morgan and John D. Rockefeller acting with such reckless disregard for the national welfare or fiscal soundness. The old “Robber Barons” look like models of probity compared to the “conservatives” of today.)
This week’s “Newsweek” quotes an English writer—who lived in and covered American for a quarter of a century—on his impression of the modern American “conservative”. The man, Henry Fairlie, nicely distinguishes between the English Conservative (a Tory) and the American Republican Conservative.
As an English conservative he saw the “government’s role [as being] to preserve tradition and social order , not to speed the accumulation of great power and wealth among the elites… .” “The [American] conservative,” he wrote, “can all too easily drift into a morally bankrupt and intellectually shallow defense of those who have it made and those who are on the make.”
(This article in the June 29th issue, on page 49-51, is well worth the cost of the magazine. I would urge every Republican—and as many Democrats as might like to—to get it and read it.)
In an article for the “Washington Post” during the 1980 Republican Convention—the year of Reagan and the Moral Majority—Fairlie excoriates the conservative Republican delegates he sees. “Narrow minded, book banning, truth censoring, mean spirited; ungenerous, envious, intolerant, afraid; chicken, bullying, trivially moral, falsely patriotic, flag cheapening, God cheapening; the common man, shallow, small, sanctimonious.”
One can imagine the Biblical St. Paul writing that about people whose morality he questioned. And it was written by an English conservative who came to America in the 1960s expecting to meet kindred spirits among American conservatives.
It didn’t happen. American conservatives simply are not conservative in any true sense of the word. They are out to conserve nothing. They seem only interested in amassing. They seem willing to throw any part of the past and tradition out in order to advance that one goal.
They call it “conservatism” when they oppose any measure whatsoever that might put limits on their acquisitiveness. To them it is “conservatism” to oppose any measure that might benefit the indigent, injured or uninsured. A “conservative” is an unrestrained Darwinian who claims to relish the life of fang and claw—so long as no one is permitted bite and scratch back.
That’s not conservative. That conserves nothing—not the good, not the useful, not the time tested. It drapes itself in a spurious patriotism, bellowing loudly that the flag is dishonored if they are in any way restrained from exercising their own greed.
By bellowing their defense of Godliness so loudly that no one can think clearly, they contrive to obscure the fact that their own actions make the Christian Faith a hissing and a by-word among the population at large. I find it infuriating that the moment I identify myself as a conservative Christian, I am immediately tarred with the brush of indifference and lack of charity.
The Christian Spirit that created the Salvation Army and the downtown missions, that followed Livingstone into Africa to stop the slave trade is subsumed in a culture of prodigious consumption and sublime indifference to those who lack the merest necessities. THAT is by no means true conservatism.
But it’s the spirit that elected Reagan, forced the elder Bush and Clinton to the right and finally brought down the man who may be the last Reaganite, Bush the younger.
I remain conservative. I call myself by that name proudly. I thank Mr. Fairlie, with his English perspective for articulating thoughts and concerns that have floated around inside my mind for the past thirty years. It sounds silly to call myself a Tory—but I’m closer to that than I am a Reagan Republican. (I once considered myself an “Eisenhower Republican”—remember those?)
So, if I am this upset with what has become of my Republican Party—why haven’t I followed Arlon Specter’s example (he’s another old fashioned Eisenhower Republican) and become a Democrat?
I’ll deal with that question tomorrow.
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