An Electoral Reflection

Now that I’ve had a few days to let the reality of the situation sink in, I feel moved to write down a few reactions and observations about the historic election on Tuesday. First, I was struck by the various reactions of people on all sides of the political forum. Some were indifferent, which puzzled me, considering the historical implications for both candidates. However, maybe they had opinions that they’d rather keep private, which is their prerogative. Others were joyful, even to the point of sounding like they were experiencing a religious renewal of sorts. Some people who hadn’t held a public political opinion in years were openly ecstatic.

Of course, there was a candidate who lost Tuesday night, and he had his faithful supporters too. Some seemed very gracious in their collective loss, putting their faith in Obama as the next leader of the country. I found this very refreshing and a far cry from my own reaction to the Republican victory four years ago. Speaking of that bitter reaction, I have come across people who were, like I was in ‘04, downright dejected and cynical about the whole human race. While there’s a part of me that feels the overwhelming temptation to arrogantly laugh off their seemingly hyperbolic behavior, I stop short, again remembering what it felt like to be on the losing end of a very passionate election season. I know what it feels like to wonder how people, many of whom you respect and love, could fail to see the situation the way that it seemed so blatantly obvious to you at that moment. To those people, the following may sound like bitter consolation at a time like this, and they may even feel like I’m mocking them in my victory (which I am most certainly not doing). However, I know what it’s like to invest so heavily in a set of ideals and to have the bottom fall out from under you. You may make your vows to avoid speaking with certain people of the other camp. However, with any luck, those vows won’t hold much water. You may never fully absorb the shock, but the little things in life go on. Trust me, if there’s one thing I’ve had to learn over the past eight years, it’s that we share a greater measure of simple, common humanity than is usually apparent in the midst of our political bickering and posturing.

Second, and this is my own reaction and opinion, I feel incredibly optimistic. Admittedly, even foolishly so. I have become so used to the idea that my government is diametrically opposed to my core values for the past eight years that I forgot what it felt like not to have to fight the country’s leadership every step of the way. Granted, the new administration is not going to fix every thing that I perceive to be a problem immediately after inauguration, but it’s still nice to know that the new president is at least open to suggestions, rather than believing that he has a moral mandate to rule in a way that doesn’t pay any regard to certain segments of the population.

Finally, I will offer a personal conjecture, and you may feel like this is where my childlike optimism might be boiling over a bit too much. I took in the whole cultural situation Tuesday night, including the unpopular wars, the struggling economy, the civil rights and equality issues, the vested interests doing their best to divide the country, and I couldn’t help but feel a connection with my parents’ generation. When they were young, many of them tried to fight against the war in Vietnam and even more tried to fight for equality of the races and genders. They tried to take on the system, the “Man” as it were, and the vested interests of the day. Of course, from their perspective, they failed on many counts, sparking a decade of disillusionment, lack of direction, a swing of the pendulum back to the right.

Did our generation, those under the age of 30, just pull off what our parent’s generation couldn’t pull off? Did we just (finally) finish the 60’s? I can just hear certain conservatives wanting to brand me a hippy-dippy, socialist flower-child who wants to smoke grass and copulate with random women for saying that we just “finished the 60’s.” It was, as I said, just a little flight of cultural and historical fancy on my part, not an actual claim that I think we’re all going to repeat the 60’s and “try to love one another right now.” Maybe it’s saying too much and reaching too far. Maybe I’m just putting more significance into an election already brimful of meaning. But I can’t help but wonder: Did our “apathetic” generation just bring about a national reckoning with the ghosts from our recent past? I’m skeptical myself, but I still feel compelled to make that leap of logic….

Wedge Colored Glasses

Let’s say that, sometime in the near future, the great dream of the pro-life movement comes true, and Roe v Wade is overturned in the Supreme Court. As a refresher, the biggest and most obvious repercussion of this would not be the outlawing of abortion as such, but it would simply set the legal precedent that the federal government cannot dictate to states what their practices and laws should be on abortion. So, Southern and Midwestern states, like Ohio, Missouri, Mississippi, Texas, etc., would most likely thoroughly restrict abortions and would not pay for them with taxpayers money, nor would they attempt to force religious hospitals or religious institutions to include abortions under their medical coverage. Let’s say even further (and I acknowledge that this last one is a stretch) that the Democrats take the Supreme Court decision relatively well and basically give up trying to make abortion a federally-mandated and protected right to all women. They drop the issue from their platform, as the Republicans probably would, too and focus instead on the coastal, liberal states, like California, New York, Massachusetts, etc., where abortion rights would probably still be upheld at the state level.

OK, now, with this scenario in mind, how many religiously conservative people out there would consider voting Democrat some of the time? Notice that I didn’t include the gay marriage debate here, as I believe that that is being sorted out at the state level, which doesn’t seem to be bothering people as much as the abortion issue does at the federal level. I also didn’t include the stem cell research controversy, seeing as more and more scientists are coming out and stating that they have found other ways to extract viable stem cells without having to “terminate” embryos. With all of these things in mind, I really wonder what kind of a platform the Republican Party would have left. Lower taxes? Less government? More aggressive foreign policy? NRA? I don’t know how it seems to you, but none of those positions carries nearly the moral weight that abortion does. I almost can’t help but wonder what this country’s politics would have been like over the past 40 years or so without the constant skirmishing brought on by Roe v Wade. Maybe the Democrats would have held more power over those years, and then the issues of alternative energy and the Iraq War would never have come up. I almost feel like the abortion issue is the trump card for the Republican Party. Whenever the Democrats come up with other, viable ideas for policy, the Republicans remind morally observant voters in a timely manner that a vote for the Democrats is a vote for abortion. Hell, I’m pretty sure that President Bush rode that fear tactic all the way to the White House in 2000 and 2004.

I’m not bringing up this conjecture to mock religious conservatives for voting their consciences about abortion. That’s not my place at all. But I am angry at the Republican Party for turning so many unrelated issues, like the environment and health care, into debates about abortion. It’s like an abortion “tag” has been permanently attached to the Democrats, so that even saving the environment from degradation has been tainted by the their take on abortion. I even sometimes wonder if I should be angry at the Democrats, as if their insistence on universal, federally-funded abortion rights has been driving a wedge into this country and crystallizing opposition against them. I almost want to ask the Dems: Why not give a little rhetorical ground on the whole abortion debate, thereby taking the wind right out of the sail of your opponents and allowing for a more even-keeled political debate to take place in this country? What’s so terrible about letting the states decide this issue?

The End of the American Honeymoon

A week or so ago, when he was interviewed on several American media outlets, such as Larry King, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stated implicitly and explicitly that he believed that the period of the American Empire was at an end. For a demagogue and false populist like Ahmadinejad, who is trying to please his electorate by taking a slice out of America’s pride and security, I don’t know exactly what to make out of his proposition. Does he believe that America is going to lose all influence in the world, in which case the second-tier states and nations would step in to fill our regional role? Or was he simply trying to rub our noses in our own misfortunes due to our greed and avarice? Is this like when he constantly jabs us in the ribs for our troubles in Iraq and Afghanistan, basically saying to the world, “See? They can’t do everything that they claim they can do.” It’s probably a combination of all of the above. Now, God forbid that I would agree wholesale with Ahmadinejad, a thoroughly disreputable Holocaust denier, religious fanatic and possible sponsor of Hizbullah and other miltant groups in the Middle East, but I do introduce my note with his views as a sort of segway for my own beliefs on the future of America. In one narrow respect, I would tentatively agree with the unbalanced, Iranian: America is mortal. If you hit us hard enough, we will bleed. I believe furthermore that the sky is not the limit, we do not have manifest destiny from God because of the “nobleness” of our institutions, and we cannot go on spiraling upwards towards infinite prosperity. Let’s face it, America’s honeymoon is long over.

What do I mean by “honeymoon”? I mean that great immigrant urge and ideal from the 19th century that hard work, high moral standing and a wing and a prayer would take you all the way to the top. It was certainly true for America during most of that century and most of the twentieth even, but I think we’re witnessing the end of it at the beginning of the 21st. When I think of this immigrant ideal, I tend to have this image come to mind of wagon trains of immigrants surging towards the Rocky Mountains and Sierra Nevadas, their tools ready to tame the wilderness and their voices raised in a rousing chorus of “who gives a damn, we’re on our way!.” OK, so that is the last part was from “Paint Your Wagon,” but you get the idea. I have even seen their legacy first-hand on my trips out west. In the southwest corner of Colorado, in the San Juan mountains, there are holes in the mountains everywhere above tree line. These are the hard-rock mines that the miners desperately created by hand that go hundreds of feet into the spine of the Rockies. These miners often hailed from towns that were built above 10,000 feet, where the temperature on a sunny day in July rarely exceeds 60 degrees. One such town had a post office, a theater and a bowling alley at its height in the 1880s. One can either admire their ingenuity and persistence or you can pity their arrogance and idiocy in the face of Nature’s might. I tend to swing between the two poles.

I see a lot of the immigrant spirit in the conservatives of America today. They are religious, optimistic in the face of daunting evidence, opportunistic, stubborn, down-to-earth. They are also inclusive of outsiders only to a point, have no qualms about “striking it rich” at the expense of others, and are voraciously individualistic. These are generalizations, but they are generalizations with a grounding in some fact, I believe. There is something so deliciously cavalier and charismatic about the Republican Party’s optimism and sureness, I must admit. It would be charming, if it weren’t becoming so dangerously out-of-touch. Conservatives tend to get so angry by what they see as the “Europeanization” (am I coining a cultural term here?) of America, and the “frenchifying” and softening of American pioneers into lazy elites and intellectuals. What I really think underlies these stereotypes is a fear and a refusal to believe that the America of today is not quite the same America of the Founding Fathers or of even a century ago. We have run out of free land to exploit without harming ourselves or our natural resources in the process. American laissez-faire policies (for those of you despise French words so much, it means “let it go,” or “let it do it’s thing”) have exposed their ugly side, not once, but several times, in the last one hundred years, and most times, government intervention was a God-send. Americans are no longer (for the most part) fleeing religious persecution and now have found plenty of things to keep them happy and fulfilled besides organized religion. I may be unfairly called a turncoat for this one especially, but America can no longer win wars by tweaking out our armed forces with the latest gadgets and drones or by the “righteousness” of our cause or because “God is on our side.” We have experienced that the idea of the uneducated, down-to-earth man rising through the ranks to the highest positions of power is not always such a rosy American myth. Not everyman on the street should become a leader, and sometimes you need elite “intellectuals” to run elite “intellectual” enterprises, like businesses and whole countries. Lastly, and I state this one with some sincere sadness, the institutions of the American farm and small business are in serious jeopardy, oddly enough because of the very competitive, globalizing tendencies of American business which are so very familiar to the Republican Party platform. We are largely no longer a resourceful, do-it-yourself society of immigrants living on a “Main Street,” insuring that our childrens’ tomorrows will be better than our yesterdays simply because they’re “good, hard-working people.” Like it or not, America now has more in common with all the opulent, decaying empires of the past than with the robust, thriving democracy which we started out as. We need to accept the changes and reinvent ourselves without losing the better angels of our American character.

I think that two of the greatest assets which we can pull out from our old pioneer tool belt are our diversity and our adaptability. At a time when we’re so concerned about how people are getting into this country, perhaps we would do well to ask ourselves what these people can contribute to the American experience. Sometimes, when a group is bogged down in its own quagmire, the best solution is for an outsider to offer his/her perspective. American history is replete with examples of emigrant populations offering their two cents worth on the problems that this country has faced throughout its history. Definitely related is the idea of the individualistic, free-wheelin’, free-thinkin’ American inventor. Just as the American pioneers viewed a pristine valley in the San Juan Mountains of southwest Colorado during the 1870s and envisioned a town called “Tomboy” at the very edges of what is humanly possible, so can someone today convert that same old attitude to a healthier direction by taking a fresh and optimistic attitude to the economic, demographic, financial, societal and political problems which we face today. I like to believe that even though America has changed, and not always for the best, we still have a common cultural heritage to draw from to go forward in the future. After all, the immigrant spirit transformed the spot which I am sitting on in southwestern Michigan from a sandy wilderness into the comfortable apartment and town that I know today. Being a heady pioneer doesn’t have to be all bad.

Do I believe that America is going to turn into a nation of decadent and lazy couch potatoes, more intent on what’s on their iPods and reality shows than the suffering that’s going in their own inner cities? Not exactly, no. I have more faith in us than that. Do I believe that there is nothing good in cherishing the tenets of the past and that all conservatives are ostriches with their heads stuck in the ground? As I said, that was a generalization on my part. But I do firmly believe that America has changed significantly from its youth, and that there are those whose refusal to adapt to those changes who may be holding the rest of us back. The old idea of “expansive horizons” in every sense of the image is gone. We have run out of breathing room in virtually every aspect of American life. If America is to have hope and room to grow, it will have to come through with some ingenuity and painful compromises. I certainly hope that we’re up to the challenge.

My Conditions for Voting Republican

I’ve been stewing over the last several days about this election season. Who can blame me? Political feelings are at their height with the two conventions so close together, and so people from all sides of the political continuum find this to be a very convenient time to throw their opinions into the public forum. I’ve wanted to do it in a more complete manner than by simply typing in heated status updates on Facebook, but haven’t entirely known what to say until now. I suppose this bit of writing is a first attempt at expressing my political expectations and reactions so far for this season.

In the end I decided on a sort of list of ‘demands,’ things that the Republican Party would have to do or work towards if they wanted to gain the vote of a slightly left-of-center independent voter such as myself. Here they are, in no particular order:

-Ditch the Rove: There is no one, and I mean no one, in the Republican machine whom I despise more (even including Cheney and Bush) than Karl Rove. The man must be absolutely soulless to have come up with the Republican election scheme of divide and conquer, watering down a complex world of issues and concerns, and slandering your political opponents through a mix of 3rd party “swift boaters” and sleazy push-polling tactics. Seriously, I see the man or hear his voice and I feel a mix of nausea and rage all wrapped up together. I understand that there are other masterminds and think-tanks involved in Bush’s otherwise unexplainable hold on power over the last eight years, but Rove is the most vocal and the most visible. If McCain had told Rove ‘thanks, but no thanks’ from the very beginning of his campaign, I would have had a great deal more respect for him, but as it happens, McCain has involved Rove in his campaign, I don’t know in what exact capacity, but he’s behind the scenes somewhere. I will not vote for a Republican, even at the state level, until that jerk-off is publicly shunned by the party leadership.

- Drop the “I’m-so-white-it-hurts” smack talk: Did Palin say anything about the issues in her VP acceptance speech? Or did she just walk up to the podium, give a shout out to her sisters in the AK, form gang symbols with her hands and challenge Harry Reid to an all-out rumble with John McCain? This is another tactic widely used by Republicans in recent years: when you realize that you either have no new platform or your platform is so extreme that it will scare off the majority of American moderates, just talk trash about the other party and hope that no one notices that you said nothing about the actual issues. Sarah Palin did just that at the convention. I know that there have been accusations from the Republican side (and even from people like Jon Stewart) that people are only following Obama because he is promising change and hope and a place on the Big Rock Candy Mountain, but that is not at all why I have supported him from the beginning. I supported him because he was more concerned with talking about the issues as if we were in this together. Imagine that. Americans of all creeds and races sharing many of the same problems. Could it be because, despite our ideological differences, we might share a common humanity and country? Why don’t we drop the smack talk, Obama says, and focus on our approaches and solutions to the issues? What a fresh idea!

- Rupture with the Rapturists: I understand that religion, faith and morals will always have a place in the public forum. There are ideals that many of us hold very close to our hearts and consider the foundations of our lives. I have a problem, though, when religious leaders realize how much power they can potentially exercise from the political podium rather than from the pulpit. I strongly disagree with the recent practice of Republicans going before religious leaders (and only conservative religious leaders at that) to accept their blessing from that leader. It reminds me just a wee-bit too much of the Holy Roman emperors going before the Pope to have him bless their kingship. Let me reintroduce a neglected idea: a person can be a very capable leader and public administrator without holding to religiously orthodox views, or any religious view for that matter. Even John Paul II was not fond of the Republican Party’s policies, a mood shared by the current pontiff, facts that many conservative American Catholics tend to conveniently ignore. It’s one thing when religious leaders and institutions try to voice their concerns in the public forum of American politics. They have every right to do so, so long as they frame their arguments as the concerns of their particular group. When I’m told by those leaders that I’ll rot in Hell for voting for a candidate who happens to be pro-choice with an otherwise amazing platform, I tend to shy away from them. I’m an adult, and I have the right and the ability to form moral judgments for myself. Don’t try to guilt me into voting for your Republican candidate by threatening my soul with eternal damnation.

- Stop Rudy from talking about 9/11: Seriously, Rudy, shut your mouth. You were rightfully popular for your immediate response to said national tragedy in the days and weeks following, not to mention for your record against crime in New York City, but quit framing the entire political discussion in terms of “I’m the hero of 9/11, so if you vote for the other guys, you’ll find a 737 barreling into your city’s office buildings.” Your party does not hold a monopoly on the willingness and ability to exercise military resources to protect this country. I believe that Joe Biden and his years of foreign affairs experience is just one of many other potential examples to demonstrate that Democrats know a thing or two about national security. What fear mongering and baiting we’re hearing when Bush implies that the other party will leave you for dead to the terrorists, or will let the terrorists win! For those of you who argue that the Republicans have a stronger record on national security and the use of military force, and that they were simply arguing that they would be the more experienced party for handling security issues, I have just one question. Why didn’t the Republicans just say that, rather that insinuating that a vote for the other guys was a vote for defeat? The first involves cool and calm dialogue, the second fear and powerlessness. It’s obvious that they were trying to scare people into the GOP camp.

- Stop parading minorities and women around on the platform to get votes: From the moment I saw that McCain selected a woman to be his vice presidential pick, I suspected that it was raw, political pandering for the votes of former Hillary supporters. It reminds me of how Bush selected people like Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice for his administration, two highly-qualified public servants to be sure, but also people who were conservative enough to have very little in common with most of the African-Americans whom they were breaking ground for. I know that some critics wondered if Bush had selected them mostly to make his administration and party look more progressive and diverse. Palin strikes me as more of the same. It’s like they thought that the progressive women who had sincerely hoped that Hillary would shatter the glass ceiling would vote for McCain to get back at the “patriarchal” Obama-Biden ticket. Does McCain expect those same, progressive women to review Palin’s beliefs on contraceptives and gun control and not be paralyzed with fear? Yes, Palin has experience as a governor and mayor. She’s not, admittedly, completely green. But I really believe that her selection by McCain was more about her reproductive organs and hard-hitting hockey mom rhetoric rather than anything that she has previously accomplished. Yet another Republican minority member or member of the historically-excluded gender using their power to go against what most of their confederates believe in. Nice going.

Last, but certainly not the least:

- Kick the Neo-cons to the curb, baby: These people, the neo-conservatives, are not in the mold of Reagan. They are not like Ike was, and they are not your traditional, fiscal conservatives. They are frightening, frightening people whose political motivation lies in the apparent humiliation of the American military during the Vietnam War, and they would love nothing more than to pay the world back (except for Britain, of course) for that loss of power that we experienced. And how do they plan to do this? One, by turning the world into an American commercial and quasi-military empire. In this way, they are no better than Vladimir Putin and his recent nationalistic expeditions into Georgia, and Putin has wasted no time in pointing out the hypocrisy of us chastising Russia for invading a sovereign nation when we did the same with Iraq. Two, they believe that stronger executive power will absolve the office of the Presidency of the embarrassment it suffered during Watergate. If only the judicial and legislative branches of government would bow down obediently before the president and his cabinet, they argue, the loss of faith in the office of the Presidency that happened when Bill Clinton was gettin’ his piece would never have happened. This means, of course, that the two branches which are designed to introduce our ideas for legislation and to protect and define our rights by law are being subordinated by the branch which can, according to neo-conservative theory, do whatever the hell it wants, so long as there are signing statements and war powers to fall back on. They’re not interested in your well-being. In fact, they have a distaste for your intelligence and your criticism of the executive office. In their model, as well, only the biggest businesses are vital to the success and well-being of the American dynamo. Without big money and investments to trickle down to the middle and working classes, America is hopeless and worthless (and that includes you, the average, middle-class American voter who was too stupid not to invest money in the stock market to make yourself independently wealthy). They are not Christian in practice, even if they sometimes promote that image for their policies. They are cold-hearted, aggressive and extremely ambitious. We should be terribly afraid of them and angry with them. They tend to destroy everything grass-roots and diverse about this nation. And they were behind the scenes of most of the Republicans in the primary, including McCain. If you think that McCain will bring change, think again. The cancer that made Bush’s presidency such a disaster has spread to the McCain camp. Don’t think that he won’t be influenced by them.

So there you have it, my demands, my manifesto, so to speak. These days, I feel as if I am defining myself by what I hate in the Republican Party rather than what I admire in the Democratic one. Many people reading this would probably think that I am a die-hard Democrat. That’s not true. They don’t fully speak for me. I am an anti-Republican by virtue of the things listed above, and in this two party system of ours, what other alternative do I have when I turn away from the current stench of the GOP? You tell me.