Persuasion vs. Noise
My friend Mike asked me yesterday when I was going to start writing about politics again. “Are we going to have to wait for a Republican president?” Well, maybe. Maybe not even then.
I have written the odd post about politics here and there. But ultimately what happened was I realized I was making myself miserable by following political news too closely, and I wasn’t persuading people with my writing. I was only contributing to the noise.
Karma and the Tea Party
Jonathan Haidt posts in the Wall Street Journal that what the Tea Partiers really want is for liberals and the federal government to get out of the way of Karma:
[S]uppose you learned that politicians were devising policies that might, as a side effect of their enactment, nullify the law of karma. Bad deeds would no longer lead to bad outcomes, and the fragile moral order of our nation would break apart. What Tea Partiers Really Want
Perhaps. But it probably has more to do with prosperity theology than Indian mythology. If you live properly, God will reward you in this life; if you live incorrectly, God will punish you in this life.
Of course there are poor good people and rich bad people. According to Haidt, the Tea Party feels liberals have broken the system. God is trying you give you your reward, but the damn liberals keep taking it away.
It’s cute that the all-powerful Christian god can have his will subverted so easily. But it’s politically very useful. It helps those who buy into it keep their prosperity myth intact while working against their own interests.
Presumably once the Tea Party has done away with government services we can all go back to telling poor people they’ll get their reward in Heaven — which is how we used to explain misery despite an all-loving God.
Other pressure points
Arguing about whether or not violent political rhetoric leads to violence strikes me as a loser. The right has ginned up an enormous amount of anger and hatred based on things that don’t make much sense — Obama’s birth certificate, his supposed Muslim sympathies, his socialist agenda to take over the country and give it to illegal immigrant terrorists, etc.
It would be nice if some of the folks on the right who have been doing the fearmongering could take a breather and make a few clarifications. But I suspect that’s not going to happen any time soon. Also, I think it’s a bad idea to filter everything you do or say out of the fear that it will make irrational strangers violent.
There are, however, a few other pressure points we could consider.
Why do we have mass shootings?
Yesterday, Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was wounded and six other people — including a sitting Federal judge and a nine-year-old girl — were killed by a gunman at a political event in a grocery store parking lot.
A lot of folks, including the Pima County Arizona Sheriff, have placed the blame on overheated political rhetoric. Which does make a certain kind of sense. If you’re mentally unstable and you’re hearing from many different directions — talk radio, FOX news, weblogs — that Obama is a crypto-muslim socialist and Democrats are going to take everyone’s guns away, give Arizona back to the Mexicans, and create a police state… Well. It might occur to you that someone ought to do something about it.
Have they all lost us?
The Tea Party upsets sound like a resurgence of … er, I’m not sure what … within the Republican party. And the Democrats face losing both the House and the Senate in midterm elections, which is also being painted as a reanimation of Conservatism a mere two years after the movement was declared dead by the press.
That seems like a major mood shift for the country in two years. Have that many people really gone from voting for Obama to watching Glenn Beck?
I doubt it. I suspect what we’re seeing is large numbers of reasonable people becoming discouraged. The Republicans have been running to the Christian Right for years, and now they’re running to meet the Tea Party Right. This has left traditional conservatives feeling a little ignored. I know, I’ve talked to a few.
A lot of Democrats are feeling similarly discouraged. In my congressional district, the Democratic congressman running for re-election has responded to his Tea Party challenger this year by re-iterating that he voted against health care reform (!) and supports the draconian anti-immigration laws in Arizona (!!).
To say we lack enthusiasm for Mr. Boucher would be a gross understatement. But the Democrats have also been running to the right for years, leaving behind not just the extreme liberals (who were never on board with the Democrats anyway) but also the rank-and-file.
We haven’t all changed our minds. We’ve just become discouraged and disengaged, leaving a power vacuum for the Tea Party to exploit.
On missing the point
I hate it when people argue like this:
But it brings to mind a question my pal Greg over at Rhymes With Right raised a while ago: If you can burn a flag, why can’t you burn a Qu’ran?
The answer of course is that you can.
It’s revealing that the Left is absolutely bat bonkers about the Qu’ran barbecue but has always been totally supportive of burning the American flag as a matter of Constitutionally mandated free speech if nothing else. Quoted in “Emotional Puberty and Wingnuttia”
See what he did there? He took one position: (“hey, let’s go to a flag burning party!”) and confused it with another issue entirely (“is there a legal right to burn the flag?”). I don’t have any friends on the left who have burned a flag. People who burn things in protest are jerks. This guy who wants to burn a lot of Qu’rans? He’s publicizing being a jerk.
But that’s his right.
Recognizing that someone has a right to be a jerk is an entirely different thing from supporting the actions of jerks. This particular jerk seems to have missed that subtlety.
Tyranny of Freedom of Religion
Immediately after posting about the inevitability of government and why weakening government just gives other people the opportunity to exercise their strength, I read this:
The American people, in the vast majority, are a profoundly religious people. We must never allow the noisy liberal minority and radical groups like the ACLU to impose their secular vision on the majority. We must resist the oppression of religious liberty.
We must never allow the Liberal, anti-God, anti-religious freedom minority to remove the words Under God from the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag. We must never allow them to abolish our National Motto: In God We Trust. John Fleming for US Congress
That’s from a sitting U.S. Congressman.
It is true that we, in this country, oppress theocrats. We tell them they are not allowed to use the weight of the State to impose their religious beliefs on us. For people like John Fleming, this means our government is too big and too powerful; he would much rather do the oppressing himself.
People like John Fleming require the rest of us to have a strong government in self-defense.
Government is Inevitable
I once saw a guy described by the newspaper as “the head of the local anarchist group,” which should tell you everything you need to know about the anarchy’s feasibility as a theory of government. At some point even the anarchists seem to look for leadership.
Anyway, here’s Tom McNaughton explaining that the misbehavior of corporations is aided and abetted by a strong central government:
A few years ago, I watched a stupid left-wing documentary that compared corporations to sociopaths. As an example, the filmmakers showed how a company that builds water systems moved into a small country and then (according to their narrative) made it illegal for people to collect their own water. This prompted me to scream at the TV, “How the @#$% can a corporation make anything illegal?! Corporations can’t pass laws! The @#$%ing government passed the law! The @#$%ing government enforced the law!” Raw Milk gets Another Raw Deal
McNaughton’s solution is less government: “If [government officials] have the power to outlaw products you don’t like, they also have the power to outlaw products you do like,” he says. So, you know, knock them down a peg.
Let people opt-out of taxes
We’ve already talked about the problem: while many of us see paying taxes and getting government services in exchange as being a good deal, some folks resent the taxes. They feel abused, over-taxed, and exploited by a profligate socialist state that gives them precious little in return.
It’s certainly the right and responsibility of citizens in a democratic country to help make decisions on what’s effective government spending. But good and effective government is not what this increasingly vocal community is concerned about. They object to taxation and government services on principle. They feel it robs them of their wealth, rewards the weak, and punishes the resoruceful.
Forcing people who think like this to participate in the system is no good for anyone. So we should let people who would rather not participate declare independece and opt-out.
That’s right: stop paying taxes.
