The Wrongologist

What’s
Wrong Today:

Sometimes
chaotic events help to illuminate the political landscape more clearly. So it
is with the Shutdown/Debt Ceiling divide. Richard Kirsch talked about this at
the Otherwords blog:

He points to House Republicans’
recent votes to deny food and health care to millions of Americans. Those are
statements of values.

First, there was the vote to take 3.8 million Americans off the
SNAP program
(food stamps). The Republican argument is that adults who don’t have children
to take care of must work and be responsible for themselves. The fact that there are three people looking for work for every job
available is beside the point
to the 217 members of Congress who voted for the cut in food assistance.

Second, there
is their current move to defund Obamacare. This denies 25 million Americans
health coverage. Unlike the SNAP cuts, blocking Obamacare keeps
health care coverage from millions of working
people whose jobs do not come with health coverage. According to a study by the Kaiser
Family Foundation, almost two-thirds of uninsured Americans have a full-time
job, while another 16% are employed part time. To Kirsch, the core Republican argument
is the same, as that expressed by Missouri State
Senator Rob Schaaf:

It’s easy to point
out that Schaaf’s statement is false — the Affordable Care Act won’t be
providing free health care to most beneficiaries ― yet rebutting his arguments
misses the basic point. He’s making a values statement, the same one underlying
the attempt by House lawmakers to cut off food assistance. More from Kirsch:
(emphasis by the Wrongologist)

Conservatives believe
that it’s an infringement on a person’s freedom to be taxed in order to take care of
someone else.

Democrats believe
that while we are each responsible for ourselves, we also have a shared
responsibility, through our government, to care for each other, that we all
need to be in it together. Accordingly, if we have not created an economy with
enough jobs for people to support themselves, we are responsible for being sure
that people have the support they need, like food.

Booman points us to the latest Democracy Corp report on the beliefs of Republicans. The
study broke Republicans into focus groups and then categorized them as Moderates,
Evangelicals, or members of the Tea Party. Here are the findings:

The report makes the Moderates sound like sane people who just don’t like paying taxes or dealing with government regulations. The report makes Evangelicals and Tea Party folks sound like they’ve been programmed. 

Read the report, it doesn’t take long, and it confirms what many have been thinking. You will find it says that the Tea Party is comprised of the same kind of nuts that have been periodically falling off the tree since the beginning of the Republic. Or, as the Wrongologist likes to think, Tea Party = Birchers.

The people in the study say that they feel like Mr. Obama came in and won a total victory over them and their way of life. They believe that now that ObamaCare is enacted, they’ll never win another presidential election. They think the country will get more tolerant of gays. So, they want their representatives to fight, and fight hard to preserve the values they believe in.

The current dispute appears to be about Obamacare, but no Republican has any delusions that a shutdown will stop Obamacare. The Democracy Corp findings support just that: It’s not a negotiation tactic, it’s an end in itself, and the Tea Party and Evangelical right have been open about this for several years now.

Fringe groups have always been with us, with pretty much the same geographic distribution. Look at the right wing during the 1920s, when the KKK was popular; during the FDR administration, when many considered the president a communist; after WWII, when the Cold War started and lots of people were itching to drop the bomb on Russia and China; during the Kennedy years, when many considered JFK a communist.

The fringe then wasn’t any different than they are now, and probably not a smaller percentage of the population either. All we can try to do is eliminate their political power so they won’t impose their values on the rest of us while doing damage to the Republic.

There’s always a boatload of political posturing in Washington. We know that the reason Republicans keep voting to defund the Affordable Care Act, knowing that they won’t prevail, is to appeal to the values of their conservative base and those of their corporate sources of funds. They do it to stay in power.

If we want to drive better attendance in the museum of clear ideas, it is of paramount importance to continue to drive voter registration.

We need to get ID’s for those who need them in order to vote.

We need to support candidates we like wherever they live.

That’s how unions organized, it’s how women won the right to vote and how we won civil rights for all in the 1960’s.

And if we want to preserve the progressive values that emerged at the founding of the Republic, we will have to do it all over again. We
have a responsibility to make the commons work; otherwise the American system won’t work, whether we are talking about health care, public schools, roads and bridges, or our democracy.