Final thoughts before the 2010 election

Henry David Thoreau wrote:

"There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power . . . and treats him accordingly."

Regrettably, the politicians of his native land persist in honoring his wisdom more in the breach than in the observance.

Tomorrow the people of these United States will vote in mid-term elections. Their decision at the ballot box will either confirm, or reject, the policies of President Obama and the Democratic Party majorities in both Congress and the Senate over the past few years (two for the President, four for Congress). At the time of writing, according to all opinion polls and authoritative commentators, it seems their decision is likely to amount to a decisive, if not an overwhelming, rejection.

I'm already reading and hearing 'explanations' offered by pundits and politicians from both major parties. They're wheeling out every excuse or rationale in the book as to why their side is or isn't winning, or triumphant, or supported by the electorate - and virtually all of them have got it wrong, in my opinion. I've read many accusations, denunciations and expectorations about how evil, or stupid, or blind, or evil this or that policy, or party, or individual may be. To my mind, those writing such screeds miss the point entirely.

You see, both the Democratic and Republican parties are very alike in many ways. Both are, effectively, no longer parties of the people at all. They're beholden to - in fact, controlled by - special interests and internal 'establishments' of long standing. When one party is out of power, you may be sure that its 'establishment' is at least taken care of to some extent by the party in power, because the latter knows full well that when the wheel turns, and positions are reversed, the same will be done for it as it has done for others. It's a very cozy arrangement, and one which defies the will of the people. To blame one party for the evils of the present situation is to be blind to the fact that both of them are equally responsible - and neither will admit it.

In these United States, power was specifically recognized by our Founding Fathers as belonging to the people, rather than to the State. 'The people' was explicitly recognized as being made up of individuals, rather than a collective mass or group, in the Bill of Rights. This recognized certain rights as belonging to 'the people' in such a way that individuals could use the courts as legal recourse to ensure that their rights were respected. This shows the folly of many statists, who argue that the rights thus conferred were given to 'the people' as a whole, rather than to individuals. The crowd has no 'speech' as such - only a dull, confused roar. Individuals speak, and are heard, and persuade. The crowd is made up of individuals exercising their right of assembly; the State is defended - and, to a certain extent, prevented from excess - by individuals exercising their right to keep and bear arms; and the right of an individual to free speech, even of the most heinous and vile sort, is counterbalanced by the equal right of another to point out his errors and correct them. Freedom is an individual matter. So is responsibility.

This emphasis on the individual, and his rights in the face of outside attempts to control him, is at the root of the conflict in American politics today. Victor Davis Hanson recently called it "the angst of modern elite liberalism". Speaking largely of the present Administration as embodying this attitude, he pointed out:

Its tenets are familiar: a) an anointed technocratic class, without much first-hand knowledge of the lives of its constituencies, is the self-appointed protector of the federally subsidized underclass against the ravages of the demonic private-sector robber classes; b) requisite knowledge to oversee us is adjudicated by certificates from Ivy League schools and soaring rhetorical tropes, never by a record of creating capital or jobs; to the degree one can make a clever argument, the economy is supposed to rebound, jobs follow, and peace spreads abroad; c) to the degree one demonizes the supposedly unthinking middle class, its lifestyle, its culture, and its worldview, the more one can enjoy without guilt the aristocratic good life.

What Mr. Hanson didn't point out is that the same angst is evident on the other side of the political aisle, among the 'establishment' of the Republican party, who would find nothing strange in speaking of the 'underclass' as 'unthinking' (compared, of course, to their own intellectual superiority). The recent emergence of the so-called 'Tea Party' has this establishment in a proverbial tizzy, and they're already trying to figure out how to co-opt and control it for their own ends. I normally disagree completely with almost everything Frank Rich says, but in his latest essay, I think he's hit the nail firmly on the head:

... whatever Tuesday’s results, this much is certain: The Tea Party’s hopes for actually effecting change in Washington will start being dashed the morning after. The ordinary Americans in this movement lack the numbers and financial clout to muscle their way into the back rooms of Republican power no matter how well their candidates perform.

Trent Lott, the former Senate leader and current top-dog lobbyist, gave away the game in July. “We don’t need a lot of Jim DeMint disciples,” he said, referring to the South Carolina senator who is the Tea Party’s Capitol Hill patron saint. “As soon as they get here, we need to co-opt them.” It’s the players who wrote the checks for the G.O.P. surge, not those earnest folk in tri-corner hats, who plan to run the table in the next corporate takeover of Washington.

. . .

What the Tea Party ostensibly wants most — less government spending and smaller federal deficits — is not remotely happening on the country club G.O.P.’s watch. The elites have no serious plans to cut anything except taxes and regulation of their favored industries. The party’s principal 2010 campaign document, its “Pledge to America,” doesn’t vow to cut even earmarks — which barely amount to a rounding error in the federal budget anyway. Boehner has also proposed a return to pre-crash 2008 levels in “nonsecurity” discretionary spending — another mere bagatelle ($105 billion) next to the current $1.3 trillion deficit. And that won’t be happening either, once the actual cuts in departments like Education, Transportation and Interior are specified to their constituencies.

. . .

For sure, the Republican elites found the Tea Party invaluable on the way to this Election Day. And not merely, as Huckabee has it, because they wanted its foot soldiers. What made the Tea Party most useful was that its loud populist message gave the G.O.P. just the cover it needed both to camouflage its corporate patrons and to rebrand itself as a party miraculously antithetical to the despised G.O.P. that gave us George W. Bush and record deficits only yesterday.

. . .

But those Americans, like all the others on the short end of the 2008 crash, have reason to be mad as hell. And their numbers will surely grow once the Republican establishment’s panacea of tax cuts proves as ineffectual at creating jobs, saving homes and cutting deficits as the half-measures of the Obama White House and the Democratic Congress. The tempest, however, will not be contained within the tiny Tea Party but will instead overrun the Republican Party itself, where Palin, with Murdoch and Beck at her back, waits in the wings to “take back America” not just from Obama but from the G.O.P. country club elites now mocking her. By then — after another two years of political gridlock and economic sclerosis — the equally disillusioned right and left may have a showdown that makes this election year look as benign as Woodstock.

There's more at the link. Given my virulent opposition to most of what Mr. Rich writes, I can hardly believe I'm saying this, but I really do recommend you read the whole of his article. It's worth it.

Both parties are conditioned by now to regarding voters as a class, or an assortment of classes, rather than individuals. Neither party has any respect for the individual at all, except as a member of a class that can be more or less reliably dragooned, or conditioned, or coerced, into voting for what the party wants. Individualism is actively discouraged. The behavior of the herd is what's wanted.

As long ago as 1910, Theodore Roosevelt (in my opinion, one of the greatest American presidents) had this to say:

In every wise struggle for human betterment one of the main objects, and often the only object, has been to achieve in large measure equality of opportunity. In the struggle for this great end, nations rise from barbarism to civilization, and through it people press forward from one stage of enlightenment to the next. One of the chief factors in progress is the destruction of special privilege. The essence of any struggle for healthy liberty has always been, and must always be, to take from some one man or class of men the right to enjoy power, or wealth, or position, or immunity, which has not been earned by service to his or their fellows.

. . .

At many stages in the advance of humanity, this conflict between the men who possess more than they have earned and the men who have earned more than they possess is the central condition of progress. In our day it appears as the struggle of freemen to gain and hold the right of self-government as against the special interests, who twist the methods of free government into machinery for defeating the popular will. At every stage, and under all circumstances, the essence of the struggle is to equalize opportunity, destroy privilege, and give to the life and citizenship of every individual the highest possible value both to himself and to the commonwealth.

. . .

Practical equality of opportunity for all citizens, when we achieve it, will have two great results. First, every man will have a fair chance to make of himself all that in him lies; to reach the highest point to which his capacities, unassisted by special privilege of his own and unhampered by the special privilege of others, can carry him, and to get for himself and his family substantially what he has earned. Second, equality of opportunity means that the commonwealth will get from every citizen the highest service of which he is capable. No man who carries the burden of the special privileges of another can give to the commonwealth that service to which it is fairly entitled.

I stand for the square deal. But when I say that I am for the square deal, I mean not merely that I stand for fair play under the present rules of the games, but that I stand for having those rules changed so as to work for a more substantial equality of opportunity and of reward for equally good service. One word of warning ... When I say I want a square deal for the poor man, I do not mean that I want a square deal for the man who remains poor because he has not got the energy to work for himself. If a man who has had a chance will not make good, then he has got to quit.

. . .

Now, this means that our government, national and State, must be freed from the sinister influence or control of special interests. Exactly as the special interests of cotton and slavery threatened our political integrity before the Civil War, so now the great special business interests too often control and corrupt the men and methods of government for their own profit. We must drive the special interests out of politics. That is one of our tasks to-day. Every special interest is entitled to justice - full, fair, and complete - and, now, mind you, if there were any attempt by mob-violence to plunder and work harm to the special interest, whatever it may be, and I most dislike and the wealthy man, whomsoever he may be, for whom I have the greatest contempt, I would fight for him, and you would if you were worth your salt. He should have justice. For every special interest is entitled to justice, but not one is entitled to a vote in Congress, to a voice on the bench, or to representation in any public office. The Constitution guarantees protections to property, and we must make that promise good. But it does not give the right of suffrage to any corporation. The true friend of property, the true conservative, is he who insists that property shall be the servant and not the master of the commonwealth; who insists that the creature of man's making shall be the servant and not the master of the man who made it. The citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty commercial forces which they have themselves called into being.

Again, there's more at the link. Bold print is my emphasis.

The special interests controlling both major political parties have corrupted them, and their politicians, almost beyond redemption. One of my favorite bloggers, the Grouchy Old Cripple, recently quoted his friend Ron as saying this about politicians in general:

Politicians are time-wasting parasites who are more concerned with their private agendas than the business of government. They knowingly sacrifice any hint of personal integrity and credibility by engaging in meaningless posturing where matters of vital importance to the taxpayers are concerned. Their primary concerns are re-election, party unity, acquisition and exploitation of power, pay raises and benefits for themselves and their families, and free trips and vacations to exotic places at the public’s expense.

They are for the most part mendacious equivocators with little or no concern for the problems of any social, economic, or political faction not directly involved in keeping them in office, such as special interest groups and other campaign contributors. After a few years in office, they morph into self-possessed, self-styled, self-appointed pontificators and bombasts with growing addictions to alcohol, illicit sex, doubletalk, foto-ops, graft, waste, fraud, and destructive gossip about their political opponents.

Brutal . . . but, in my opinion, also truthful about many 'establishment' politicians.

I believe that one of the most refreshing - and potentially most significant - aspects of the current election is the emergence of the 'Tea Party' activists among conservative voters. They are not only non-establishment, they're actively anti-establishment. If they end up being co-opted by the establishment, as Frank Rich fears, then the 'Tea Party' movement will fizzle and fail. On the other hand, if the grass-roots activists can hold the feet of their newly-elected representatives to the fire, and ensure that they don't get co-opted by the establishment, but conduct themselves - and vote - in accordance with the will of their constituents, then the 'Tea Party' may yet become something of which Theodore Roosevelt would heartily approve. I hope and trust that this will happen.

What we need now is a 'Tea Party' movement in the Democratic Party as well. I'm genuinely non-partisan; I loathe and distrust both major parties equally. I'll certainly vote for a 'good' Democrat before I'll vote for a 'bad' Republican, because I vote for the individual, not for the party. If those who support the fundamental principles of what the Democratic Party is supposed to stand for can mobilize those of like minds, and form a 'renewal' movement to do for the Democrats what the 'Tea Party' is trying to do for (to?) the Republicans, I think that can only be healthy for the United States body politic. I don't mean the moonbats of the far Left, as epitomized by Democratic Underground or MoveOn: I mean thoughtful, concerned liberals who are as distrustful of special interests as are the thoughtful, concerned conservatives in the 'Tea Party'. I hope they'll make their voices heard, and come up with a meaningful alternative to the extremists and 'establishment politicians' and special interests that currently control the Democratic Party (as much to its detriment as similar controlling interests, on the other side of the political aisle, damage the Republicans).

I think that there is perhaps one element around which thinking people can unite in the politics of the United States. It dates from the earliest days of our Republic, but appears to have been largely forgotten and/or ignored in recent decades. That is to return to the primacy of the individual, rather than the State or special interests, in our politics. Our laws should reflect this primacy, and honor it rather than seek to steamroll it into 'group politics'. A group is a nebulous, amoeba-like blot on the landscape. It can be defined, re-defined, merged, even blotted out, at the will of its controlling interests. Individuals count for a whole lot more. Can all of us, Left and Right, Democrat and Republican, at least agree on this fundamental reality?

The corollary to greater respect for the individual in political terms is to remove the current predominance and primacy (in both major parties) of intellectuals, and special interests, and elite groups seeking to control political developments and dictate them to the 'masses'. This will meet fierce resistance from both sides of the political aisle. As Eric Hoffer pointed out:

"The fact is that up to now a free society has not been good for the intellectual. It has neither accorded him a superior status to sustain his confidence nor made it easy for him to acquire an unquestioned sense of social usefulness. For he derives his sense of usefulness mainly from directing, instructing, and planning - from minding other people's business - and is bound to feel superfluous and neglected where people believe themselves competent to manage individual and communal affairs, and are impatient of supervision and regulation. A free society is as much a threat to the intellectual's sense of worth as an automated economy is to the workingman's sense of worth. Any social order that can function with a minimum of leadership will be anathema to the intellectual."

I hope that these elections will be a step towards building precisely such a social order - one where the will of the individual, and the will of the people, count for more than the mental masturbation of intellectuals, or the pernicious influence of special interests. The Left has its radical progressives, its Alinskys, its Kennedys. The Right has its neocons, its Rumsfelds, its Roves. All of them must go.

Finally, in (hopefully) moving towards these ideals, let's get Government back into its proper place: a public servant, not a public master. Our Government has expanded like a disease across the skin of the American body politic, to the point where laws, regulations and rules have become a suffocating nightmare, intruding upon almost every aspect of our lives. Even something so fundamental as the tax code is so complicated as to be completely incomprehensible to the average citizen.

It wasn't supposed to be that way.

Our Founding Fathers took care to strictly limit what government could do; and it's to their successors' shame that their precautions have been whittled away to almost nothing. It will be our own fault if we allow this state of affairs to continue. Let's take to heart President Andrew Jackson's warning in his farewell address to the American people in 1837:

It is well known that there have always been those amongst us who wish to enlarge the powers of the General Government, and experience would seem to indicate that there is a tendency on the part of this Government to overstep the boundaries marked out for it by the Constitution. Its legitimate authority is abundantly sufficient for all the purposes for which it was created, and its powers being expressly enumerated, there can be no justification for claiming anything beyond them. Every attempt to exercise power beyond these limits should be promptly and firmly opposed, for one evil example will lead to other measures still more mischievous; and if the principle of constructive powers or supposed advantages or temporary circumstances shall ever be permitted to justify the assumption of a power not given by the Constitution, the General Government will before long absorb all the powers of legislation, and you will have in effect but one consolidated government. From the extent of our country, its diversified interests, different pursuits, and different habits, it is too obvious for argument that a single consolidated government would be wholly inadequate to watch over and protect its interests; and every friend of our free institutions should be always prepared to maintain unimpaired and in full vigor the rights and sovereignty of the States and to confine the action of the General Government strictly to the sphere of its appropriate duties.

Amen!

Peter