The working poor haven’t abdicated responsibility for their lives. They’re drowning in it.
I tend to agree strongly.
And this is what makes petulant conservative opposition to Obama so difficult to understand. Obama is, by all indications, a “classic” Democrat – somebody who believes that it is the federal government’s responsibility to act as leveler. Not to deliver social and economic equality in one fell swoop, but to “prime the pump” by trying to provide the working poor with services that many Americans now consider indispensable, namely health care.
The irony of this election season is that Republicans also espouse this goal, but have begun to try to achieve it by simply removing the federal government from the equation on grounds that the truest service they can do for voters is stand back while everyone races to the top from different starting points. What bothers me about this arrangement is less the lack of interest in fairness – life is unfair – and more the complete lack of consideration for the fact that what seems to be happening is that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Staggering numbers of people in this country are not prepared for any retirement at all, let alone ten or twenty years of it. Once, Americans passed on considerable wealth to their children. Already, that seems to have ceased to be true.
Again and again, Romney has revealed himself to be first of all opportunistic, and second of all, completely of the belief that anybody who has not experienced some measure of success is simply lazy. And it’s a conclusion I hear again and again from his supporters: Democrats are people who, by definition, want things given to them. The Right has become irrevocably convinced that taxes are too high, that tax money is always badly spent, that the private sector can do anything better than the public sector, and that redistribution of any kind is the first step in an inevitable march to government appropriation of business.
The irony of all this is that taxes on the wealthy have never been lower; that conservatives have lately spent money hand-over-fist; that no politician is prepared to overhaul entitlements; that privatization of certain services can introduce severe malfunctions in the system when the purpose is not efficiency, but some other outcome (e.g., corrections, national defense, public administration); and that most Americans seem to agree that a safety net is required for the most vulnerable among us.
I will never understand those people who rush to endorse private prisons when we are beginning to see a spike in imprisonment for cases of debt; of people who rush to promote cutbacks in the military in favor of using logistics companies that require cost-plus contracts to work in war zones at a time when oversight capacity is so limited; and those who wish to depend upon private-sector consultants to conduct government business when those consultants will always have a vested interest in preventing the government from achieving self-sufficiency.
The real tragedy of this election cycle is the conclusion of virtually every member of the GOP that it is impossible to do other than adopt the most backwards social platform or the most extreme economic platform in order to assure their own continued electability in the face of an ignorant Tea Party that has come to dominate the primaries. The Internet and twenty-four hour news cycle have combined to create echo chambers from which dissenting voices can be eliminated; ill-informed extremists who insist on applying theory without respect to facts, having learned some measure of pseudo-science from pundits posturing as issue experts; and monitoring systems that can facilitate the swift and catastrophic punishment of anyone, anywhere, who does not toe the party line. Dissent is now politically impossible. We’ve moved into an era of hyper-partisanship more reminiscent of parliamentarian than American federal democracy. This is true for both Democrats and Republicans, but Republicans seem to have done the most to hobble the nation with this new paradigm.
And all this from somebody who isn’t even necessarily convinced of the wisdom of voting for Obama.
