There are epithets that decent people shy away from using. One obvious example is the use of racist, ethnic, or gender-based slurs. If you’re a decent human being, you don’t use them, because one uses them to hurt, to malign, to defame.
But it is not just slurs on one’s person that we avoid. We also avoid slurs on one’s political philosophy. Describing someone as a Nazi, for example, is rightly seen as beyond the pale. It says a person is a believer in an ideology that led to the slaughter of six million innocent people, and ignited a global war that killed millions more. Unless a person actually is a follower of Hitler’s philosophy, describing them as a Nazi is not only inaccurate, it’s pejorative. And the same is true of other discredited, vile, or simply discarded epithets, like communist1, or Maoist, or totalitarian; unless a person actually is a communist, Maoist, or totalitarian, describing them as such is simply rude, and is designed to create far more heat than light.
But sometimes, the shoe fits. There are still Nazis, after all. There are still segregationists. Still anti-Semites. Still communists. Some of these people wear their positions proudly, like the perky neo-Nazi with the swastika tattoo on her head who frequents my local convenience store.2 Most, however, hold their positions without admitting to the label that defines them — as the label itself describes a belief system that has been rejected by everyone.
This is why people who proudly use racial epithets will refuse the epithet “racist.” They are racists, of course, but they will not wear the mantle, because racism is bad, and everyone agrees on that. Of course, they may believe that people of different races shouldn’t mix, and that people of a given race are inferior to people of another race, and that people of a different race moving into a country will destroy it. But don’t call them racist — they’ll pitch a fit.
And this is, of course, the other reason decent people shy away from applying the most loaded political labels to their opponents — because they don’t want to have to have the fight. Because no matter how much your opponent says Stalin had some good ideas, calling her a Stalinist will only lead to a fight about how she isn’t one.
And yet — sometimes you simply have to call a racist a racist. If a person is advancing all the tenets of racism, then that person is in fact a racist. And standing by and pretending that person isn’t racist is playing into their hands, by allowing them the fiction that their racism is not racism, but something benign.
And that lets radicalism in through the back door, and lets decent people advance radical views without admitting to being radicals. And slowly, that makes radical views acceptable.
There is a political philosophy that you are probably familiar with. Among its core tenets are:
- Nationalism – The people of its country are special, and the founders of the nation as uniquely wise — and people of all other nations are inherently dangerous. People who do not fully assimilate are viewed as threats to be dealt with.
- Social Darwinism – Those who are poor are poor because of their own flaws and failings, and if they can’t work, they don’t deserve to eat.
- Propaganda – It uses its own media outlets (when out of power) or state-controlled media (when in power) to support its own viewpoint while ridiculing others.
- Anti-Intellectualism –It ridicules the pointy-headed intellectuals with their large words and their big plans, in favor of the simple, salt-of-the-earth man on the street, and the wisdom of the Average Joe.
- Heroism – National heroes are not just heroes, but uniquely heroic, uniquely wise. No other country’s heroes were as brilliant and crafty, and no other nation’s enemies more deserving of punishment.
- Social Authoritarianism – When people fall away from morality, the power of the state can and should be used to push them back in line.
- Militarism – The military is the best and most respectable part of the nation, and war should be supported unblinkingly whenever an enemy threatens.
- Corporatism – The power of the government can be used to intervene economically, but almost always on the side of corporations — as it believes that companies create wealth
- Anti-Communism – Communism — usually defined as “other political philosophies” — represents an existential threat to our way of life, and must be defeated at any and all costs.
The adherents of this philosophy believe that they are saving their nation from the weak, the Communists, the intellectuals. They see their country as at a crossroads, and believe that if the wrong turn is taken, it will cease to be a great nation, and will become like all the rest of those lousy states. Because they believe that they are the saviors of their nation, they are willing to do almost anything to gain power — lie, pull dirty tricks, and resort to violence against political opponents. Indeed, in every country where this philosophy has taken hold, it has used extrajudicial action by its members to intimidate its opponents.
If you have been paying attention, you know that there is a political movement in this country that mirrors these views. Its members claim that America is a unique country, a shining city on a hill. That the Founding Fathers were wise beyond any reckoning, and that any deviation from the course they set us on is tantamount to blasphemy. That immigration (and, sotto voce, racial and gender equality) is destroying the uniqueness of the American experiment, and that we keep moving away from the good ol’ days of the 1950s to a place that would make the founders blanch in horror.
These people have their own news network that tells them what they want to hear, that lies to them brazenly, that calls their opponents socialists and secret Muslims. They mistrust intellectuals, rage against the well-educated, claim that deep thinking is un-American. They believe that the government should use its power to keep people from getting abortions, and to discourage homosexuality. They believe that the unemployed are lazy, and that they should either work, or starve.
They are worshipful of the idea of the military and of citizen militias. They do speak out against corporate greed, half-heartedly, but oppose any action that might impose limitations of corporations — and are indeed happy to support corporate welfare whenever they get the opportunity, so long as they can call it something else.
They say they are doing all of this because of the threat from socialism, which is a word that in America has become conflated with communism.
And they are most definitely using extrajudicial violence and intimidation to get their way.
In America, in 2010, these people call themselves the Tea Party. They say they are trying to get our nation back to its founding principles, deliberately using iconography from the American Revolution to stake a claim that they represent the last, best hope of Real America.
They may see themselves that way, but that is not the right way to describe them. The philosophy they endorse is a well-known one, one described by one word.
You may object to my calling the Tea Party a fascist movement. I understand. I don’t like doing so myself. But they are far closer to fascism than the modern Democratic Party is to socialism. And Democrats being socialist is an article of faith among the far right of the Republican Party.
I don’t like calling my opponents fascist. But the shoe fits — at least among the farthest of the far right, the group that has taken over the modern Republican Party. The path that the Palins and Angles and Millers and their ilk would have us take is the same that Mussolini charted for Italy. They’ve prettied it up, of course. They’ve sanded off the edges. And they’ve added the extra dimension of religion to it — the idea that we are fighting a war against Islam, which is in league with socialism, and that Christianity must be bolstered.
But that was predicted. Sinclair Lewis once wrote, “When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.” Well, my friends, fascism has come to America, flag and cross and all. And if we do not say so — if we dare not name it, for fear of riling our opponents — we let them mainstream their views. And that inaction would be far worse than any word can be.
—
1Note: communist, not socialist. Communism, specifically the brand that was attempted in the Soviet Union and its client states, has been tried, and it failed spectacularly; it rivals Naziism for the most evil political philosophy of the 20th century. A version of socialism, contrawise, has been made to work rather well in places like Sweden and Denmark, without the terror wrought by Stalin and his ilk. One can argue whether socialism is a good or bad political system, but it is not an inherently evil one.
2Do you think I could possibly be making that up?
An alternative point of view.
http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/78718/four-myths-about-the-tea-party?page=0,0&utm_source=ESP%20Integrated%20List&utm_campaign=d27bca33e1-TNR_Daily_102810&utm_medium=email
One potentially interesting tactic in response to adherents of such groups is to call out the behavior rather than the person. A very few people will respond in good faith to modify the behaviors and statements that could be seen as reminiscent of fascism. Many others will explain more or less aggressively why you’re wrong and perhaps evil for seeing such a connection.
If you take the Holocaust to refer to all the non-war murder by the Nazis (and I do), between 11 and 17 million were killed.
The National Socialist Worker’s Party didn’t just go after the Jews. There were many other targets – Gypsies, homosexuals and lots of others were killed.
I’m no student of Fascism. I’ll provisionally take your word for it that the things you name are among it’s core tenets. However, I think that stating that all those things you name (and for those that have some applicability, the extent to which you describe them) are among the core tenets of the Tea Party movement is quite simply not true. I do not recognize that list as describing the Tea Party movement.
And I note that it’s a very common technique and a very old one in political discourse to ascribe odious charateristics to an opponent in order to discredit them regardless of the truthfulness of their applicability. While that list does not describe the Tea Party movement, I can see why those on the Left would like it to do so.
So, Ron, which ones on the list do you think isn’t a descriptor of the Tea Partiers? As I look over that list, I can think of examples where Tea Partiers demonstrate each and every one of them.
Bear,
So many of those characteristics are straw men (or caricatures), and many could be applied to people of other political stripes.
Nationalism: they do not necessarily think the people are uniquely special. To the contrary, they think everyone would love our system and the freedoms it protects. Perhaps, culturally, that is not so. And, the Founding Fathers were pretty wise. They were very well-educated in political philosophy and managed to put together a very delicately balanced government. They probably do favor assimilation, as not only has that been a huge strength for America, the failure to assimilate has led to the downfall of many an empire.
Social Darwinism: First off, I do not think many Tea Partiers would use the term. However, they would suggest that poor people are either lazy or many of them suffer from disabilities that hamper them. As for the former, they would say it is the government and the welfare state that causes a lot of laziness; the latter, however, deserve our charity (btw: they do not consider welfare to be charity).
Anti-Intellectualism: Yes, many of them reject the logical fallacy of the “appeal to authority.” Instead, they prefer to abide by the Motto of the Enlightenment: Dare to Think for Yourself.
Social Authoritarianism: Apart from the reference to morality, this describes the left-wing to a T. They want to micro-manage every aspect of people’s lives, down to the light bulb they use. The human desire to dominate one’s fellow human beings and to tell them what to do is not something the Tea Party has a monopoly on. In fact, by stressing the 10th Amendment (and the need for the federal government to get out of their lives, they are actually less authoritarian than the right-wing moralists you are imagining.
Militarism: Yes, many of them support the military. It is one of the proper jobs of the federal government. But, I do not see them as war mongers. The wars we are in now came along years before the Tea Party did. This point is not what motivates them.
Corporatism: What? These people hated the bailouts. They did not want the government buying up car companies and real estate, and overseeing the entire health care industry. And, you suggest that corporations don’t create wealth. If so, where does wealth come from? What they would say is, it is not corporations that create wealth, but free individuals. Are they wrong?
A fascist, on the other hand, would likely say that wealth comes from the government’s control of business.
-Jut
“Social Authoritarianism” is one in a long list of negative traits that a political philosophy can contain.
Government prohibition of abortion is the example you provide of the Tea Party’s “social authoritarianism.”
What you’re doing here is creating categories of negative traits that political philosophies can have and using them to encompass objections to your privilege.
Jut,
(emphasis mine)
The left’s desire “to micro-manage every aspect of people’s lives” isn’t accurate in the way that most conservatives try to paint it. It’s not as though the left literally wants to control aspects of people’s lives– no freedoms are being taken from anybody by attempting to eliminate the use of a product that causes negative environmental impacts. The reason that the left wants to eliminate use of incandescent lightbulbs is because of their environmental impact. Assuming this to be true, and assuming the environmental impact of the lightbulbs the left wants to replace them with really is significantly cleaner, why would any responsible legislator or governmental regulatory body fight against it?
Because this is an uncomfortable question, as Tea Partiers would rather not admit that they’re just peeved off or for whatever reason have money to make off of the dangerous thing that evil progressive socialists are trying to ban, they warp reality and pretend that they no longer believe in the reason that the ban is proposed. Oil companies lose money if global warming is accepted as truth, so naturally, global warming either isn’t real, or isn’t caused by carbon emissions. Big Pharma would lose money if there were better safety measures in place for pharmaceutical production, so corporate lobbyists pay off the regulators and some biased studies are released showing that no danger really exists, even though that’s the minority opinion among scientific peers. Big Ag would lose money if injecting cattle with hormones that wreak havoc on our collective reproductive health were banned, like it is in some places in Europe.
I mean, it’s not like the agenda isn’t apparent. And this ties directly into the tenant of fascism listed in the OP about corporations. Conservatives are much more likely to vote to protect a corporation’s right to continue making money for their shareholders at all costs than they are to vote in favor of legislation that will protect actual, real, individual human citizens’ health. This is easy for them, though, since they continue to pretend that they don’t believe in any of the proven scientific dangers of anything they’re making money from.
Re: the TP’s apparent lack of desire to control other people’s lives, how would you explain the widespread TP desire to ban same-sex marriage and abortion? How would making every attempt to make or keep those private, personal things illegal not fall into the category of “[t]he human desire to dominate one’s fellow human beings and to tell them what to do”? What about the recurring arguments against people refusing to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, or omitting ‘under God’ when reciting the Pledge?
The tea party movement may be worrisome for various reasons, but your characterization of it as I guess what I’m thinking about more is the choice to send texts rather than fascist requires some strawmanning. And saying that you can find *some* people in the tea party who believe certain things isn’t at all the same as saying that it is *characteristic* of people in the tea party. Specifically:
Militarism–you’re furthest off here. A huge percentage of the tea party movement seems to be much closer to old school isolationists than neo-con hawks. They respect the military as an honorable profession, but largely aren’t thrilled about Afghanistan and Iraq. Couching that as “war should be supported unblinkingly whenever an enemy threatens.” seems like an enormous stretch. Remember that the Republican establishment freaked out over the apparent willingness of the tea party to cut defense spending.
And since this is really one of the very most defining concepts in fascism, I’m having trouble.
Social Authoritarianism–I’d be really careful about slinging that charge around. The tea party strikes me as overall less social authoritarian than many Democrats, it is just that they worry about different things than you. The ever more restrictive anti-smoking laws, anti-trans fat laws, and worrisome anti-fat health murmurings surrounding the health care bill should give you pause on this one from your own side.
Social Darwinism–doesn’t seem characteristic, at least not as you put it. They would tend to say that current properties of the government/poor interaction tend to reinforce inter-generational poverty. Some might trace this to innate flaws in the poor person, but many/most would trace it to poor incentives caused by the specific government interactions.
Corporatism–I think you are largely confusing this with the Republican and Democratic Party establishments. The Tea Party gets a lot of its strength from the bank bailouts and obvious corruption surrounding such things. They aren’t as anti-corporate as many leftists, but they aren’t nearly as pro-corporate as most high level Democrats and Republicans. And fascism almost always had large state run corporations (remember the incredibly tight association between the Nazi Party and VW). The tea partiers don’t seem excited by that kind of thing at all.
Anti-Intellectualism–I’ll give you that, sort of, though I think lots of them are more along the lines of distrusting power-entrenched authority, which is something lots of leftists seem drawn to as well. See especially distrust of banks and banker views on how to fix the economy from both sides of that one. But I’ll let you have it on global warming. Just don’t see it as particularly in line with fascism.
Nationalism–yes, but there are lots of nationalistic movements that aren’t anywhere near fascism. This seems like one of those necessary but not sufficient things.
Propaganda–yes, but with caveats. I think, again, you’re confusing them with the Republican machine. They aren’t just part of the Republican machine, and in some cases seem to work actively against it. The Tea Party pushed possibly the only candidate not absolutely sure to beat Harry Reid, which would have been an enormous symbolic victory for the Republican establishment. They picked probably the only candidate likely to lose to a Democrat in Delaware.
Basically, on all of the things truly core to fascism, which separate it from other populist movements, I think you fail to make a good case.
The Tea Party is populist. Definitely. And in bad ways, for sure. But your argument that it is presently fascistic seems weak. If you had said that it tolerates fascistic elements more than it should, I would have agreed. But you have to ignore too much to get it there now.
It seems like a prime tenet of fascism is abolishing democracy, or at least other political parties. The Tea Party doesn’t seem to want to do anything like that…
…every other feature you’ve named has been present in multiple American political parties at different times in its history. If the Tea Party is fascist, then there have been many fascist movements in America.
“Re: the TP’s apparent lack of desire to control other people’s lives, how would you explain the widespread TP desire to ban same-sex marriage and abortion? How would making every attempt to make or keep those private, personal things illegal not fall into the category of “[t]he human desire to dominate one’s fellow human beings and to tell them what to do”? ”
I don’t think the claim is that the Tea Party has no socially authoritarian impulses. I think the claim is that it has no more socially authoritarian impulses than are common among political movements in the United States, left, right and center. Which means that you can’t use that as a characteristic to support the charge of fascism.
Hell Obama doesn’t support gay marriage. (Or at least didn’t as of the campaign.) And I don’t think that is evidence that he is a fascist or was one in 2008.
I see some new names carrying the ball on this one. I’ll weigh in myself when I have a bit more time.
I do want to touch one technical point, though, and it’s a good indicator of how the left runs with an idea without working through facts. Or, should I say, “inconvenient truths”. At the urging of the Diocese’s environmental committee my parish replaced all it’s incandescent bulbs with the new screw-in fluorescent ones about a year ago. It’s touted as a great idea. After all, as I was told when I asked about it at the Diocesean conference, they use less energy, last a lot longer and are thus less polluting.
Here we are a year later. Two have burned out already. In our small church that represents 10% of all the bulbs we have. And I have had to literally physically bar people from throwing them in the trash. “You can’t throw them out, they’ve got mercury in them.” “Ah, come on, that’s nonsense.” “NO!” and I jump in front of them and take it away from them. Or reach in the trash and retrieve it. How many of these have burned out and gotten tossed that I don’t even know about? And yes, there’s enough mercury in one of those to pollute an amazingly large body of water. I was once safety officer in a lab facility that used mercury and was in charge of cleanups and EPA reporting of spills. Meanwhile, I look in the places that sell them and there’s no place to dispose of them.
Like a lot of ideas I see from the left oh, Hell, everyone, this idea sounds good – yes, they do burn less energy – but the consequences were not thought through. It interferes with individual freedom without an actual proper justification.
April,
But, don’t you see, April, this is just a morality of a different kind. Liberals start to sound very moralistic when they talk about their pet peeves. And, yes, environmentalism is one of them. Perhaps, it is one of their worst because it can be so restrictive and invasive. And, not only that, their indignation is based upon the impact that an individual’s actions have on the collective society; an emphasis on the collective is a big part of fascism.
And, actually, yes, restricting incandescents, seat belt laws, helmet laws, and smoking laws are ALL restrictions on freedom. That is all the government does. Every law restricts freedom, either by prohibiting an action or requiring one (Okay, there are some laws like Acts of Construction that do neither, but only lawyers worry about such things).
As for the abortion and gay marriage issues, some fight that battle on moral grounds, but much of the theme of the TP’s are that they are 10th Amendment issues. They do not think the feds have any business in those fights. Again, those who oppose them are fighting for centralized power instead of disparate power. Fascists need a strong centralized power to act. The Founders thought the 10th Amendment would provide that check against totalitarianism; the TP’s want the 10th Amendment to mean something again.
-Jut
There is one thing I’ll ask, Jeff; on what authority do you ascribe any particular characteristic to the Tea Party movement? Statements on the web sites of various self-named Tea Party chapters around the country? Speeches given by featured speakers at rallies organized by those groups? Signs carried by 2 or 3 people at a rally attended by 10,000? Positions taken by candidates who claim Tea Party movement support? Interviews of people hanging around the periphery? Surveys taken of people claiming sympathy to the Tea Party movement? Surveys of people claiming to be members of the Tea Party movement?
You’ve made some pretty broad statements, and damning ones. Where’s your evidence backing up your claim that these things describe the mainstream thought within the supporters of the Tea Party movement? It seems to me that the onus is on you to prove your thesis.
RonF,
That is funny.
I have a single burned out CFL bulb in my house. It has been sitting there for years, because I have to take it to the waste facility. I have gone there probably 3 times in the last few years and, every time, I forget that stupid bulb. Most people would have probably just tossed it in the trash. But, i am making a trip to the waste facility tomorrow, so, hopefully, it will be gone.
And, you know, incandescents sure come in handy when it is January, 20 Below, and your furnace quits.
-Jut
The “collective” aspect of environmentalism is equally as individual. If a large portion of people insist on using products that harm the environment, it affects me, you, other individuals who did not make the choice to engage in the negative behavior. For example,
There is a difference between laws that serve to protect us from ourselves, and those that strive to protect us from each other. A law requiring adults to wear seatbelts, laws that require that motorcyclists wear helmets, and perhaps laws prohibiting what one can buy with food stamps are laws to protect us from ourselves, which contributes to this “nanny state” phenomenon that Tea Partiers rail against all the time. I don’t have beef with objecting to a nanny state, but I do not have any problem with laws that strive to protect us from each other. Protecting the citizens of the United States is one indisputable responsibility of the government, as far as the Constitution is concerned.
As far as laws like the smoking bans across the country and others related to protecting the environment, yes, smoking laws are restrictive in the sense that they restrict a smoker’s right to smoke wherever they please– in public. But what about the people who do not choose to harm their bodies by smoking cigarettes who wish to see a band play at a local bar? A choice has to be made, then. Is it more important for the smoker to be free to light up in the bar, or is it more important to ensure that everyone, smoker or non-smoker, has the right to occupy a public space where they can breathe freely?
While I can understand the idea that privately owned businesses should have the right to determine whether or not to allow cigarette smoking in their establishments, and that taking that right away from them can feel restrictive, the incentive for bars, restaurants, and other privately-owned businesses to go smoke-free is non-existent. It’s not as though people were threatening to boycott establishments that allowed smoking; if that happened, it happened long before the smoking ban was even proposed. Business wouldn’t likely change. But to bank on the hope that people wouldn’t boycott (or simply choose not to patronize) your bar or restaurant if you chose to go smoke-free would be a much larger risk to the business.
I’m a smoker, and as you know, I live in frozen-ass Minnesota, so believe me, the statewide smoking ban has done me no favors. But the difference in air quality when I go to a show or to a bar to have a few drinks is amazing. And while I miss being able to sip a beer or coffee and smoke a cigarette at the same time (although I can easily do this at home if I want), if left up to a popular vote, I’d vote in favor of a ban on indoor smoking in businesses. It’s simply unfair to expect that non-smokers either put up with proven risks to their health, stay home, or go elsewhere. When it’s clear that an activity causes health risks, leaving people with no reasonable choice of whether or not to expose themselves to the risk that the activity poses is more restrictive than limiting the activity to a secluded or private area.
This also applies to chemicals used in agriculture, pharmaceuticals, even birth control pills. Synthetic hormones have been proven to cause reproductive health issues for people who do not choose to consume the products, but there’s intense opposition — coming from primarily Republicans, conservatives, and Tea Partiers — against any regulation of these chemicals. And this isn’t due to a fear of losing genuine freedom; it’s due to the fear of losing the freedom to make as much money as possible because of proposed restrictions.
In order for us all to be “free,” shouldn’t I have the right to expect that my drinking water is free of dangerous chemicals that can cause me to become infertile or get breast cancer? Is the person using the product with these chemicals more deserving of the right to use them than I am of being free from its negative effects? And furthermore, why should I have to go out of my way to, for example, purify all of my own water or spend money that I may not have to buy specifically noted organic, pesticide-free produce or hormone- and antibiotic-free meat in order to avoid the health hazards that the readily-available and/or cheaper products contain? Shouldn’t all food products deemed safe by the FDA actually be safe? Why should there even be an option to purchase low-quality, dangerous, chemical-laden foods? Or, why should organic or hormone- and antibiotic-free food cost prohibitively more money than “regular” food? The cost alone causes a huge number of people to be completely unable to freely make the decision not to put dangerous materials into their body. A choice of whether to eat food filled with toxins or no food at all is not a choice. Shouldn’t the government, whose primary responsibility is to ensure the safety of its citizens, be making sure that ordinary, individual, and free citizens are able to live without the influence of someone else’s self-destruction?
There’s a saying that I’m going to butcher, but your right to swing your clenched fist stops at my face. In other words, you’re free to do whatever you want, so long as it doesn’t impact someone else’s freedom. And I’d say that the health of the planet affects the freedom of all of us. Some of us may care more than others, but it affects us each nonetheless.
Because my last comment apparently wasn’t long enough, I’d like to add that issues like abortion and same-sex marriage in no way affect the health, safety, or freedom of any other person, which make those issues solely about the moral beliefs of a person who has the full right to choose not to engage in behavior or enter into certain legal institutions or have medical procedures that they are personally opposed to. Laws against same-sex marriage, abortion restrictions, etc., are needlessly restrictive and limiting to those who could benefit from them, but who are arbitrarily prohibited from exercising those freedoms.
Furthermore, a law legalizing same-sex marriage and maintaining the legality of abortion on demand do not give government any power over anybody; they merely allow individuals more power of their own personal autonomy. Not legalizing same-sex marriage on the federal level and leaving it to the states doesn’t achieve anything other than turning a blind eye to states that choose to restrict the freedom of individuals to make decisions that affect no one but themselves.
I don’t think the claim is that the Tea Party has no socially authoritarian impulses. I think the claim is that it has no more socially authoritarian impulses than are common among political movements in the United States, left, right and center.
Actually, the Tea Party in my experience has a pretty strong set of socially authoritarian impulses.
What it doesn’t have, however, is a *monolithic* set of socially authoritarian impulses. There is no consensus among Tea Partiers that abortion should be banned, or that the Bible should be taught (or not taught) in schools, or that gay marriage should be permitted/denied/valorized/condemned. There is probably a stronger element of conservative traditional morality than in some other political groups, but it is not overwhelming and it is counterbalanced by the South Park Republican types.
What it also has, and which even sensible leftists like Jeff seem really blinded to, is a shared decision that these issues are not the key issues. We don’t go to Tea Party rallies to talk about abortion, we go to talk about taxes. The Tea Party has focused on economic issues, largely tied into fiscal sustainability. There are many freedom and liberty issues brought up, but if you check they are mostly economic freedom and liberty issues.
We’re upset that our taxes are high, that our kids are saddled with huge debts to pay for bailouts to rich corporations, and that the government wants to push us around and tell us how to spend our money and live our lives. Furious that somewhere in America a woman is getting an abortion, less so. More to the point, even the people who are furious about the abortion are not expecting the government to fix the situation. Even those people are in the movement to fix the government and the public fisc, not because they think President Palin will give those sluts what for.
The reason that the left wants to eliminate use of incandescent lightbulbs is because of their environmental impact. Assuming this to be true, and assuming the environmental impact of the lightbulbs the left wants to replace them with really is significantly cleaner, why would any responsible legislator or governmental regulatory body fight against it?
Let’s assume that I’m smarter than you. (It could just as easily be the other way around, this is just an example.)
You want to go to college and study history. I, being smarter than you, want you to study engineering because it will be a better career and educational fit for you. Assuming that I really am smarter than you, and assuming that I’m right about engineering being the right path for you, why would you fight against it?
Oh right, because it’s your life and I’m not in charge of it!
There are times when the government does have to interfere or intervene. There are people who would like to freebase black tar heroin on Main Street at noon while sodomizing little children. We tell these people, no. Sorry, your freedom is too expensive for other people.
Arguably, such a concept applies to environmental considerations. I don’t think even hardened libertarians have an issue with the notion that the government can tell people they can’t dump nuclear waste in streams, or pile used tires on Main Street (next to the black tar heroin dealership) and set them on fire, and so on. At least, I haven’t met anyone that extreme, and I run with a lot of libertarians. Government is one of the main entities our social order legitimately empowers to adjudicate this type of competing claim to public resources like clean air.
It’s harder to see that this power extends down to the level of deciding what kind of light bulbs people will use. And it’s very hard to see this type of micromanaging, however well-intentioned and indeed, however RIGHT, as being motivated primarily by anything other than a desire to run people’s lives. People who are motivated by environmental concerns find ways to incentivize behavior changes, to persuade, to lead by example, and so on. People who think that the path to environmental wonderland runs through controlling the lightbulb choices of suburbia…are busybodies.
To put it another way, the dad who checks his kids’ grades once in a while, asks about homework being done, looks over final reports on request, talks to the teacher a few times a year, etc., is motivated by concern for his kids’ education and future. The dad who redoes every homework assignment, wordsmiths every paper, and calls the teacher with detailed critiques on a daily basis, is a control freak.
April:
No, laws prohibiting what you can buy with food stamps is a law to protect my money from being wasted. What you do with a car or a motorcycle that you bought with your money is your own business. What you do with money I gave you – especially under duress – is my business.
I think it’s fine thing to regulate such chemicals. Can you cite your source for your statement here?
Smoking bans are a curious animal. Banning smoking indoors at public facilities is one thing. The proposition that this protects people from having to breathe in your smoke makes sense. It makes less sense to ban it in private facilities where people are free to go elsewhere if they choose. And it makes very little sense to ban people from smoking in their own car in the parking lot of a government building, or on a public beach. That’s crossing the line from preventing one person from interfering with another person’s enjoyment of public facilities to an attempt to modify someone’s behavior for their own good.
Marriage is not simply a private agreement between two people. Marriage is an institution that creates a legal relationship among two people and the State. The two people make a compact not just between themselves but with the State as well to undertake certain responsibilities towards each other (which from a legal viewpoint has nothing to do with love – find a marriage law that mentions it) and towards any children born to the two people (or that they adopt) or regarding any property that they may acquire or information they may share. In return the State grants certain legal privileges to the couple, which include recourse to the power of the State to enforce the obligations that the two assume towards each other, their children, etc. should one of them fail to meet those obligations. A law that redefines marriage to include same-sex couples creates a new class of such a relationship. On that basis the State very definitely gains power over such people; for example, it can compel them to surrender assets to each other.
And preventing States from regulating abortion prevents the States from taking the position that a fetus possesses sufficient individuality as a human life that the decision of a woman to terminate it does affect someone other than herself. Considering that the States otherwise have the freedom to define the concept and different classes of murder and manslaughter, that seems an inconsistent position to take.
Is Oregon weird? Because incandescent bulbs are available in every grocery and hardware store here. Which states have outlawed incandescent bulbs? Is there a politically plausible movement to ban incandescent bulbs going on that I’m not aware of?
I’m not entirely being sarcastic — maybe something’s happened that I’ve missed. Is there a state in the US where liberals have made it illegal to sell incandescent bulbs? Is there a serious and politically viable attempt somewhere to ban incandescent bulbs? If not, I find it bizarre how much of this thread we’ve spent discussing a nonexistent policy.
Amp,
You missed the energy standards for light bulbs established in the Energy independence act of 2007, which will require 25% greater energy efficiency for bulbs by 2012 (which incandescents can’t meet) and 200% greater efficiency by 2020 (which nothing but CFLs can currently meet). And the US is not alone in phasing out incandescents.
RonF,
If there is a home depot near you, they will take burnt out CF bulbs, as will Ace and True Value hardware stores in Illinois. You can also look for other drop off spots at earth911. And if your grocery store or where ever you buy CF bulbs doesn’t take returns, complain and get them to start.
Really, what we need is a law requiring places that sell CFs to take them back and hand them off to an appropriate processor once they burn out.
As to the mercury, there is less mercury in a CF bulb than there is released by a coal burning power plant providing the extra power to power a incandescent bulb. The coal powered mercury is more diffuse than the point source waste from a landfill, and not everyone gets their power from coal, but CFs can be handled responsibly, and coal can’t.
A CF bulb has 2 mg of mercury, enough to pollute 200 cubic meters of water to higher than the drinking water standard. 200 cubic meters is 7 feet by 30 feet by 30 feet, so a body of water larger than a backyard swimming pool, but smaller than an Olympic swimming pool.
As to the fascism within the Tea Party movement, I see plenty of anti-democratic sentiments in the top levels of the movement:
major tea party aligned candidates have advocated “Second Amendment solutions” (Sharon Angle), have a history of involvement with militia movements and spoke admiringly of the East German border policies (Joe Miller), have claimed that their supporters make their opponent “afraid to leave his house” (from a convicted torturer who runs with a meth dealing biker gang) (Allen West). Hell, even Robert (a tea bag supporter) predicted that the tea partiers would resort to political violence (oh hey, someone sent a package of toxic white powder to Raul Grijalva’s campaign office).
And plenty of militarism (and not much sign of isolationism, except a militarized anti-immigrant stance): I’m having a hard time remembering any tea party aligned candidate who has called for ending the Afghanistan War or who opposed the sale of fighter jets to Saudi Arabia or opposing the CIA drone assassination program. On the other hand, I’ve seen plenty talk about immigration as an invasion and about war against muslims.
And the combination of fascism with Christianity played a major role in the Austrian fascist movement and the Franco dictatorship, and a minor role in Mussolini’s support. And shinto was important for the Japanese fascists. The Nazis are a relative anomaly when it comes to fascism and religion.
As to the mercury, there is less mercury in a CF bulb than there is released by a coal burning power plant providing the extra power to power a incandescent bulb. The coal powered mercury is more diffuse than the point source waste from a landfill, and not everyone gets their power from coal, but CFs can be handled responsibly, and coal can’t.
This is true. On the other hand, coal is burned and disperses into the air, and the coal-diffused mercury has no particular impact on any one spot. (Although obviously less would be good.) While if someone breaks a CFL, they are almost always introducing direct mercury contamination into an enclosed, inhabited space.
So yeah, coal can’t be handled as well as a CFL in theory, but in practice the mercury damage from a broken CFL can be pretty significant, while we don’t have “coal accidents” that release mercury into the environment. Worst case for the coal people is, things continue as they are. Worst case for CFLs is, every house in America becomes a mercury dump.
Hell, even Robert (a tea bag supporter) predicted that the tea partiers would resort to political violence
When did I do that? I’m not saying I didn’t (I can predict that any political movement might resort to violence) but I don’t recall.
I’d say that the Tea Party is pretty much a fancy name for what these dorks actually are: Conservative Republicans, particularly the kind who were still fans of Bush even when his approval rating was below 30%.
Basically both groups are part of a right these days that is completely irrational and knows no shame whatsoever.
In America these days the right largely gets away with this behavior while questionable tales of Vietnam Vets getting spat on are used on anti-war groups decades later!!
***On the Holocaust there’s a lot of new evidence saying that Jewish, Gentile, and other types of killing may have been underestimated. Basically the earlier estimates were based only on camps, without any sense of the Einsatzgruppen, and exactly how many people they exterminated.
Not entirely. Of those you mention, helmet laws significantly decrease the impact of an accident on the person driving the other vehicle. One of the elements of criminal prosecution for vehicle offenses is the degree of injury or death. If I make a small mistake and have a fender-bender with a car, it’s very likely that no one was injured. If I make a small mistake and have a “fender-bender” with a motorcycle, during which the rider simply falls over sideways and hits his head on the pavement, there is a huge difference between that rider wearing a helmet and not wearing a helmet. Much of that impact is on the rider, but some of it can come to rest on me, even though I had nothing to do with the rider’s decision not to use basic safety equipment.
Seat belt laws are similar, though the difference is not as significant as for helmet laws.
Grace
Just one correction – corporatism does not mean “supporting corporations”. In economic terms it is the idea of creating common interests between business and labor – so that economic policy would make everybody happy. Mussolini liked it, because for him it was a solution for class conflict and a good way to fight communism. But it is not a fascist idea – the New Deal was corporatist, for example.
With regard to lightbulbs, see here. Insisting on CFLs is (unintentionally) ableist, and lefties who insist on CFLs are (unintentionally) betraying their own principles of equality.
And another thing – I think the word “heroism” is misused here. “Heroism” usually means “extremely courageous behaviour” e.g. saving a baby from a burning building. I think maybe “Jingoistic hero-worship” would better capture what you mean.
Robert,
Background (non-anthropogenic) mercury deposition is 10 μg/m^2/yr, so an urban single family home lot (100X50 ft) receives ~5 mg/yr of mercury from background deposition (the equivalent of 2-3 CFL bulbs broken and mishandled). If you live down wind of the coal burning power plants in the midwest, you get more like 25 mg/yr falling on your lot, the equivalent of 10 broken and mishandled bulbs.
Certainly, CFL bulbs should be recycled, and a broken CFL bulb should be taken seriously (ventilate the area, pick up all broken bits with tape and dispose of it in a sealed container outside immediately), but switching from incandescents to CFLs will lower total mercury released.
On the other hand, CFLs are probably best viewed as a transitional technology, to be replaced by LED based lights as soon as possible.
As to when you predicted that the tea partiers would resort to political violence, it was in comments earlier this summer, but I’m not going to be bothered to track it down, so I afraid I can’t provide the context.
Set against the dispersal of mercury from coal-burning electrical generation plants the amount of mercury pollution that is created by mining and processing the mercury necessary to satisfy the increased demand created by the production of these bulbs.
It seems to me that by burning less coal (which is mined in this country) and mining more mercury (which is not) the odds are good that we aren’t reducing mercury pollution – we are exporting it to further away and poorer countries and regions.
Ron, that’s an interesting point, but it’s pure speculation. Do you have any evidence or numbers to support this?
When you started, your claim was that liberals don’t think though environmental policy. But it doesn’t seem to me that you’ve displayed more awareness of the issue here than Charles has.
It’s obvious that conservatives are — compared to liberals — the enormously less thoughtful, disastrously less responsible party on science issues. As long as conservatives are global climate change denialists — as 19 of the 20 best-positioned Republican senate candidates are this cycle, for instance — it’s impossible for “liberals don’t think through environmental issues very well” conservative critiques to have credibility. (If you’ve been posting in conservative forums arguing that global climate change is a real and critical issue, and arguing that climate change denialism is a strong argument against voting for a candidate, then I’ll gladly apologize to you and admit you have credibility — just provide the link).
It’s inevitable, when change happens, that some of the change will not go perfectly. If it’s not the light bulbs, then it’ll be something else; there are thousands of ways people are trying to create more energy efficient technology and structures, and it’s inevitable that a few of those will end up being mistakes, due to the law of unintended consequences. The long-term result of making changes, and then making necessary corrections if things go wrong, is better than the conservative preference for doing nothing about the climate change crisis.
That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be asking questions about florescent bulbs. But I don’t think assuming that they must be a bad idea, without recourse to evidence, is the right view either.
The conservative preference is not to do nothing. The conservative preference is to let market forces work. Not choosing one specific intervention is not “doing nothing”, and government is not the only actor capable of taking action.
The basic facts about mercury are that if CFL lights and other uses properly recycled then mercury pollution and mercury mining would be drastically reduced on the whole.
With a bulb the mercury can be recycled, with coal burning it is extremely hard to prevent it from dispersing into the environment.
But in the long run, I think that LED’s will replace both kinds of lights with no mercury and with a much lower energy usage than both.
But really, I think if people really wanted to save energy, the single largest way to do that would be
1. Use a clothes dryer less and perhaps line dry some of the clothes.
2. Get a solar water heater.
3. Dramatically lower heating and cooling levels.
4. Get a smaller as well as more efficient refrigerator.
Lighting is much further down on the list. But in addition to bulbs there can be solutions such as using tubes and mirrors for natural lighting and to expand the utility of a single bulb. You can live on using that almost entirely with at most a few lamps for reading and such.
Also it drives me crazy to see all these works stations where computers are left on when everyone’s gone and even on the weekends and holidays.
It’s irresponsible behavior for which the moral implications involved are beyond anything that the market can answer for, and beyond all these debates about mercury from CFL bulbs versus mercury from coal plants!!!
A quick google suggests that the mercury market is currently flooded with repurposed mercury from the phase out of mercury cell chlor-alkali plants in the EU. There is more of a problem with there being too much mercury in the market (which could lead to over-use of mercury because it is so cheap) than there is a problem of excess demand causing increased mining and extraction (mercury production has fallen by more than half since the 1980s).
There is no intervention to act against climate change that conservatives favor, that I know of. It’s not a matter of “one specific intervention”; it’s all interventions. Including the interventions that conservatives thought up not too long ago, like cap and trade.
There are certainly market-based government interventions that I’d favor. But that’s different from just letting “market forces work’ without the government taking any action at all. Look at the record of the past 8 years; is there any reason to believe that unfettered market forces are capable of wisely planning for the future?
The market cares only about short-term profits. Climate change is a long-term problem, and one that is best addressed earlier rather than later. Furthermore, it’s “a tragedy of the commons”; it requires collective action to address, because many individual firms will profit in the short and medium run by making matters worse.
Climate change is exactly the kind of problem, in other words, that unfettered markets are completely unable to address. So yes, saying “get government out of climate change, let the market sort it out” is, for all practical purposes, the exact same thing as saying “let’s do nothing about climate change.”
Of course, what most powerful conservatives are saying isn’t that market forces will solve climate change; they’re saying that they’re not convinced climate change exists or is a real problem. I honestly don’t understand how anyone with any intelligence could hold such a position. They’re not proposing conservative, market-based solutions to the problem; they’re pretending the problem doesn’t exist.
I hadn’t considered that. Good point!
RonF,
“Your” tax money? Once it’s no longer in your possession, it’s no longer yours. I see your point and agree with your sentiment, but I don’t think it’s productive to consider things like food stamps to be your money. It’s food money for the people who have applied and received food stamps. Do you treat gift cards this way when you give them to people? Do you make them promise they won’t buy something from Target or Best Buy that you don’t approve of?
Some other people responded to my comments with other points or questions that I’ve been meaning to address, but I’m at work and busy, and will get to it later today.
Hell, no! But the people that RonF gives gift cards to are not lazy freeloaders and that makes all the difference in the world.
More seriously (given what I write later, though, perhaps not), seatbelt & helmet laws save me money. I have to spend that much less on health care for motor vehicle injuries. I’m in favor of allowing folks to drive without seatbelts (or, for motorcycles, helmets) if those people agree that they are solely responsible for all costs associated with their injuries and that no care will be given that cannot be paid for up front. You can’t allow more freedom than that! My freedom via finances is preserved and drivers have a full and free choice to make about whether to wear seatbelts or helmets.
Love your writing, my wife says it sounds just like me!
But at worst, I would label the Tea Party (because labeling is what you’re doing when you use a word like “fascist” to describe a group of people) would-be fascists.
I think they’re worse, I think they’re anarchists. Most of them believe in so little government, it borders on—or tips over into—parody. The no-taxes, no-government philosophy that is as close to a uniting principle for this fractious bunch, if actually implemented, would leave America worse than the worst third-world country. We’d all own guns and consider ourselves above whatever laws did exist, our food supply would have no safety checkpoints between Old MacDonald’s Farm and the dining room table, the freeway would be a crumbling, post-apocalyptic hellscape and our streets would be open sewers. Taken strictly to its logical conclusion.
But I’m not here to put another label on the Tea Partiers. I think it’s their lack of a cohesive platform that, by elimination, makes them anarchists, small ‘a.’ They’re the political equivalent of angry, poorly-informed, diabetic Unitarians.
I like the guy’s writing, but I disagree with his conclusion.
For what it is worth, it doesn’t appear that bicycle helmet laws actually save bicyclists lives by reducing the rate of injury (they appear to increase the rate of injury, probably through the Peltzman effect whereby drivers see the safety device and feel empowered to drive closer to them see Scientific American on the topic here.
They do so by drastically reducing the number of people who want to ride a bike. See here [lots of stuff, but the basic facts seem to suggest that the accident rate per bike rider in Australia went way up but the total number of accidents went down, because so many fewer people wanted to ride that overall cycling dropped by about 30%]. Considering the health benefits of bike riding, that probably isn’t a great trade off.
Also look at the overall effectiveness: [same cite]
Essentially, for potentially reducing 14 head injuries, Australia traded off about 225,000 bike riders.
And look at the marginal effectiveness of the law. 14 improvements across 750,000 riders. That is less than 0.000019 of the population of riders. This coupled with the fact that helmets increase the frequency of accidents, actually strikes me as a pretty darn good example where Social Authoritarianism from the left has won out for no good reason.
This is essentially what I’ve advocated for years. Let people be as free as they want, as long as others aren’t made to feel the consequences.
Grace
Oh, good lord. We’re back to puppies dying in a fire.
April:
A gift card is just that – a gift. I personally decided who to give the money to and how much to give them, and made the decision to leave the actual decision of what the money would be spent for up to the recipient by giving them a gift card rather than buying them something and giving it to them. Money for food stamps was taken from me by the State under threat of force in the case of non-compliance, under the justification that it would be used for specific purposes. It’s a flawed thinking process that finds commonality between gifts and allocated taxes.
Jake:
You’ve obviously never met my brother.
Fang Bastardson:
A common misconception, spread by what I can only consider a wilfully deceptive media. The parody here is to call the Tea Party movement followers “no taxes, no government”. The Tea Party movement folks are not looking to get rid of government. What they are looking to do – which is why they often use the term “Constitutional government” – is to limit the functions of the Federal government to a strict interpretation of what is specified in the Constitution, and leave the rest of governmental functions to the States and subordinate government bodies. “Anti-Federal government” != “Anti-government”.
What I wonder is why this point is so consistently missed. I can see it in the case of non-Americans. My understanding of governments across the world is that they have strong central governments and weak local ones. They find it odd when they realize that we have 50 different definitions of crimes such as murder, etc., and that some states have the death penalty and others don’t, different marriage laws, etc., etc. They have no experience of a high degree of distributed sovereignty such as we have in the U.S. American citizens should know better, however – at least if they paid attention during their class on the Constitution in high school. I realize that many on the left would like to subordinate the States to the Federal government to a much greater extent than they are now, but opposition to that viewpoint doesn’t equate with anarchy, it equates with Federalism. Unless you are prepared to show how the Tea Party movement folks are also trying to overthrow their State, county, city, etc. governments as well.
Jake:
Fine idea. How about if we extend the philosophy of making people pay for their own poor choices instead of taking money from you and me to make up for it to other areas? Being foreclosed on in their house because they took on a mortgage they couldn’t pay and bet that their income or their property values would keep going up and/or that they’d be able to re-finance at a lower rate when their variable-rate mortage was due to convert to a higher interest rate also comes to mind.
I dunno, Ron. I find the difference between having the required data to be able to decide between wearing a helmet or not wearing a helmet and the required data to be able to decide whether or not one can afford a mortgage to be on entirely different levels.
Plus, I was being facetious. There is no way that an ambulance is going to show up at the scene of a motorcycle accident and not treat before knowing whether or not the accident victim can pay. It just isn’t going to happen, time is not a luxury in that case.
Understanding that not everybody knows everything they need to know in order to make a good decision is a vital component of empathy as well as of community. When I come to the decision that everybody who isn’t me can go fuck themselves is when I’ll come around to your views on social safety nets and community.
I’ve been through the process myself. If you’ve got enough wit to hold a job good enough to qualify for a mortgage you’ve got enough wit to compare your monthly income with your monthly payment and figure out if you can afford it. There are various things to consider – taxes, insurance, etc. – but it’s not rocket science. People bought houses they couldn’t afford, betting that things would break in their favor. People should pay off their own gambles – it’s an outrage that I, who deliberately limited the size, location, etc. of my home so that I could be sure to afford it should have to pay off the mortgage of someone greedy.
True. But there’s varying levels of what people should be expected to know and there’s varying levels of what amount of penalty for being irresponsible people should be expected to shoulder. Add to that the fact that the more you insulate people from irresponsible behavior the more likely people are to continue such behavior, which means you pay out even more, etc. There’s also the fact that when government gets involved in such things, we end up with other people with less skin in the game deciding how much empathy you and I should show. It seems to me that controlling the fruits on one’s labor is a basic human right.
I doubt that. Someone with that attitude is highly unlikely to donate the amount of time and money to charitable and educational organizations that I do, donate blood like I do, etc. Supporting social safety nets and community != supporting more powerful centralized government, central-government controlled social agencies, paying out the mortgages of greedy people, etc.
Society and government are not the same thing. Supporting the one does not mean supporting the other. The latter is only a tool for the former.
But that doesn’t just affect the mortgage-holder.
When I had to sell my little 1-BR condo in 2007 so I could move to another state to take a job, I paid nearly $10,000 for the “privilege.” Why? This was before the real estate bubble really burst!
Answer: Two other units in my building had defaulted and been sold at auction, thus bringing the “comparables” way, way down. I have no idea what the circumstances were – perhaps someone made a bad decision, perhaps there was a death of a wage-earner, or a fight over an estate, or any one of a dozen things. But their defaults cost me money.
I won’t go into the many ways I was lied to and duped by the mortgage broker who financed my place because I haven’t the time or spoons today. But “screw everybody else, I’ve got mine” is a loser’s bet. Other people’s uneducated kids affect my quality of life if we abolish school taxes. Other people’s communicable diseases affect me and the people I rely on (coworkers, service workers, etc.) if they don’t have health care, vaccinations, etc.
Good post, my only problem is that you seem to label ALL tea-partiers as being fascists, when, well, a lot of them may not hold up all the tenents that you put forth.
Donating blood may be the least effort possible for a “charitable” cause. I don’t consider blood donation to be charitable & I’ve been doing it for decades at this point. Time and money to educational organizations is great. Of course, those would only be the ones that you know of. Deserving educational organizations that you haven’t heard of get screwed under your system because of lack of visibility or geographic location or, horrors, are not the ones you think most deserving.
I would have to say that the fairest and most efficient way of funding social safety nets is via a centralized government organization. It’s certainly fairer and more efficient than the individual decisions of millions of RonFs & Jake Squids. Places like El Salvador and the libertarian utopia of Somalia say, “Hi!” to the millions fo RonFs & Jake Squids providing all social safety nets via individual donation.
Damn it, I knew I posted that too fast.
I don’t want to derail this thread any more than it is, so I’ll just attempt a short clarification: I was not intending to say that people should be free to pull out of the social compact, and then not pay. I was not thinking of the broader social context (medical treatment and so on) at all. I was just saying that if someone chooses not to use basic safety equipment and gets into an accident, other individuals involved in the accident should not have legal responsibility for the injuries of the person who chose to take higher risks.
Clearly, looking at it in a broader context, society will end up paying the medical costs one way or another, if the injured person is not covered by private insurance. Because, as Jake points out, no ambulance crew is going to ask about insurance before they treat emergency trauma.
So, in general, when someone ups the ante, especially in a case where another person had no input or control on that choice, we should try to limit negative impact on other people. Clearly there are gray areas, boundary conditions, other principles to be considered, and so on.
Grace
Elusis:
True – but I fail to see what that’s got to do with the current elections. What candidates or parties are proposing to eliminate school taxes? Who are these mythical candidates or parties who are against all taxes or all public services?
Jake:
First, I know for a fact that a lot more people at my company donate money to the United Way out of their paychecks (they publish the percentages!) than donate blood at the bloodmobile when it shows up; by about 30-fold, in fact. So the level of effort seems to be a lot higher to give blood. And it is most certainly a charitable donation – it’s giving something of value to other people without being compensated. Even more so because blood cannot be manufactured, it has to be obtained from a human being.
The fact that I haven’t heard of a given organization and thus do not give them my money does not equal “screwing” them. And I think that I, who earned my money, am far more justified to be the final arbiter of who is most deserving to get my money than anyone else.
So then we have a fundamental disagreement. I don’t think it’s the business of the government to decide what’s fair to give to various charitable causes or which ones are deserving and which aren’t. I think the Federal government’s concern should be what’s fair to the taxpayers, not to charitable organizations, and I feel it’s quite unfair to me and to all the other Americans who provide tax money. The principles of American government are that the Federal government should only make those decisions that it absolutely has to make and leaves other decisions to the State government or to their citizens. The decision on what charitable organizations should be supported by Americans should be left up to Americans as individuals. They are perfectly capable of making those decisions and they should be left to them.
As far as being efficient; first, it’s odd to hear government actions being touted as efficient. Second, it’s jarring to hear the centralization of governmental power in order to increase efficiency spoken of favorably in a thread that claims to perceive a rise in fascism in American politics. “Making the trains run on time” should not be the overriding consideration for a democratic government.
Finally – the original point of my comment was that someone who gives blood, money and time to educational and charitable organizations is not someone who has a “screw everyone who’s not me” attitude. That you haven’t refuted.
Ron –
you said “How about if we extend the philosophy of making people pay for their own poor choices instead of taking money from you and me to make up for it to other areas? ”
You specifically mentioned mortgages. I gave a counter-example of how other people’s issues with mortgages can in fact hurt you if there is no intervention. I also mentioned taxes for public schools, which I have many times heard framed as “taking money from you and me to pay for other people’s poor choices” (e.g. to have children, particularly if one is not middle/upper-middle class.)
So you ignored the point I made that spoke directly to your point, in order to focus on an extrapolated example that may not be one you believe in but which is frequently spouted by people angry about “redistribution of wealth.”
RonF,
Centralized government in no way means Fascism. All fascist nations are centralized governments but not all centralized governments are fascist nations. Really.
Someone who complains about having their money taken to feed the poor, etc. has a “screw everyone who’s not me” attitude regardless of money & time that they devote to charitable and/or educational organizations. If I gave a million bucks a year to Hadassah but nothing to any other causes I would have a go fuck yourselves attitude.
That’s ridiculous, Jake. By your logic, if I show up tomorrow and take away everything you own by force and give it to the poor, if you complain then you have a “screw the poor” attitude.
It seems obvious that HOW money is taken/given to the poor is at least as relevant as WHAT is taken/given. Come over with a U-Haul and a shotgun, versus coming over with a donation form and a sincere speech, you’re going to get a different reaction from the same person.
Wow did I word that badly upon review.
Another attempt, then…
If I gave a million bucks a year to Haddassah but nothing else to any other cause and complained that some of my tax money was being taken to feed the poor and to provide shelter and medical care for the elderly and to make sure that as few people as possible had to starve or live on the street I’d have a fuck you all attitude.
Yes, I realize that a vocal number of you on the right view taxes as a guy showing up with a U-Haul with a shotgun to take all of your stuff. It’s a ridiculous assertion and should be treated as such.
If you call a centralized government that, as part of its function, runs large scale social safety nets Fascist, that’s ridiculous and the proper response is pointing and laughing.
Taxes with representation are hardly fascist, communist, socialist or whatever ridiculously grasping label is your cup of tea. (Get it? Tea?)
Do I think sales tax is an intrinsically unfair tax? Absolutely. Do I think a government that imposes a sales tax through elected representation is fascist or socialist or kleptocratic? Of course not. That would be ridiculous and stupid. Yet that is the argument against using one’s tax dollars for such things. It’s a ludicrous argument and not worthy of response.
Yeah, that would be a ludicrous argument. Luckily for my side, while it is sometimes expressed that way as an emotional outburst (“taxes are theft!!!”), that isn’t the argument.
Taxes are not theft. For one thing, it’s legal to collect them. And the people being taxed were represented in the process that created the laws under which they are collected. So the process is not analogous to someone showing up with a shotgun and a U-Haul to take all your stuff.
But it is undeniable that the government will use force to collect them if other means fail. Which puts the government under some obligation to ensure that they are being fairly assessed and collected and that the purposes they are being put to are justified and lawful.
I agree, generally. But how can the purposes decided upon by our elected representatives be illegal (assuming that they stay within the bounds of the constitution as the SCOTUS interprets it)?
And “justified” is a matter of opinion. It’s not like everything that conservatives want to spend tax money on (mostly our children’s and grandchildren’s tax money, of course, not that of current taxpayers) is seen as justified by liberals; it’s an inevitable feature of a government like ours that sometimes people we don’t agree with get elected and do things we don’t like.
What’s under discussion now, if I’ve followed the discussion correctly, is giving people food stamps assistance (which has to be spent on certain items) versus giving them cash assistance. While you may think that cash assistance isn’t justified (I’d argue that needy people may know how to allocate money to best match their needs better than the government does, but I understand that as a conservative you think the government is the best qualified to make those sorts of determinations :-P ), I don’t think you could possibly argue that giving people cash assistance isn’t legal.
Ron wasn’t arguing that food stamps should be illegal. He was arguing (@21) that since the taxpayers are paying for the food stamps, the taxpayers (via our representatives in government) get to put restrictions on what people can buy with their food stamps. April had characterized these restrictions as protecting people from themselves; Ron’s rejoinder:
“No, laws prohibiting what you can buy with food stamps is a law to protect my money from being wasted. What you do with a car or a motorcycle that you bought with your money is your own business. What you do with money I gave you – especially under duress – is my business.”
Personally I think cash assistance has more potential for abuse but also is going to more efficient at raising the utility of the people getting the assistance. Food stamps aren’t a horrible compromise of the two competing principles.
But I do wonder why you can’t use them (or WIC) for diapers. Beer makes sense. Diapers make less sense.
I never said, nor implied, that Ron argued that food stamps should be illegal. He argued that food stamps were to be preferred to cash assistance (although he didn’t actually use the term “cash assistance”). He also brought up the question of congress spending money in illegal ways, but didn’t specify if he thought cash assistance would be illegal; I assume he does not.
I agree that food stamps are a reasonable compromise, and also that they should cover diapers.
The Constitutionality is what I had in mind for “legal” purposes. I’d agree that it would be illegal for the Congress to vote to buy and hand out free Bibles (and Bibles only). But Congress in fact has done just that (a very long time ago, I believe it was the first Congress). It’s not as if the Congress hasn’t kept the Supreme Court busy in the past.
Justified is a judgement call. Obviously I’d prefer my judgement, but I’d just like the politicians to spend a little more time on what’s right vs. what’s expedient. Remember, I live in Illinois, recently identified by the FBI as the most corrupt State in the nation.
I think that cash assistance would be perfectly legal. There’s a couple of ways to look at this:
1) My representatives have a duty to limit the use of my money to certain specific ends – not just by public and private entities but also by individuals. Food stamps are a lot more effective way to do this.
2) Food stamps cost money to print and administer, cash grants would probably be cheaper.
If we went with cash, I’m thinking that we’d need some kind of mechanism that expresses the philosophy “We’ve given you what you need, don’t come crying to use if you blow it on strippers and beer and are now hungry or thrown out of your apartment.” I don’t know if enforcing that would be cheaper than the food stamp program, but it probably would be. That means, though, that we let people go hungry if they misuse the cash assistance.
I await the argument that people have a right to strippers and beer and that it’s discriminatory to refuse to pay for them for people who can’t afford them….
Food stamps are for food, not for diapers or toilet paper or soap. Or beer. Mind you, if somebody walked up to me and asked me for money and I said “You’ll probably blow it on beer” and he said “Damn right” I’d probably give him an extra $10. But that’s my decision, it doesn’t belong to the government.
If someone wants money for diapers I’d say the government should buy them cloth ones. Don’t want to wash shit out of diapers? Wait until you can afford your own diapers before you have kids.
Very funny! But to be serious, it’s one thing for the Federal government to decide “‘x’ is a proper thing to spend public money on and we will now take that money from the public for it.” when “x” is nowhere mentioned in the Constitution and is more properly a subject for the States or for individuals. It’s another for the Federal government, having for good or ill made such a determination and taken the money, to then ensure that it’s spent properly. Take money from me to support the military or for building roads or bridges and I say “Yup, that’s right in Article I, now watch it like a hawk.” But propose to take money from me for the public schools and I ask how the Feds are doing that when the schools are properly the responsibility of the States.
This election cycle I did something that I’ve never done – I voted down a school referendum. It was for our community college. I’ve voted for at least half a dozen school funding referenda before, even when they were controversial. But I voted this down because the paragraph on the ballot was the very first time I had any idea that the referendum even existed. I’m a strong supporter of education, but corruption is rife in Illinois and if you want me to give you money it would be nice if I was asked and if the need was explained to me.
Jake, centralized government in and of itself is not fascist. But I think that centralized government that decides that it’s justified in taking money from you for whatever purpose because it’s a more efficient way of doing something that it has no business doing is.
Ah, “You should have thought of that before you had kids.”
This bit of sanctimony, dear to the hearts of social conservatives, depends from a presumption that children can always be planned, that they are never accidental, that the fathers are always responsible, that people are never so unfortunate as to have a spouse killed unexpectedly, never so unwise as to be disabled by a drunk driver or illness, never fallible, never human.
The clear implication is that before any woman ever has a child, she must secure enough savings to ensure that the child can be fed, clothed, vaccinated, medicated and educated until said child attains his or her majority. Also, she must fund insurance which will provide for the child’s every need if she is killed, or she must be invulnerable to harm.
On closer examination, the structure of that presumption turns out to be an hallucination, a mirage generated by the fevered righteous indignation of people who delight in that “most delicious of moral treats”. As it turns out, in real life circumstances change, and sometimes real human beings fall on hard times and must make hard choices and could use a bit of help. If one of the richest societies in the history of the human species can’t manage that, it surely doesn’t say much for that society.
Full disclosure, in case anyone thinks I’m taking sides in an important debate: we used both cloth and disposable diapers with our children.
Grace
Well, then. Let’s rip up the roads and let private industry handle it. The elderly were so much better off and the country was a freer place before Social Security.
Grace @66: forget the insurance; she must be independently wealthy. Remember, insurance doesn’t always cover everything, and if your insurer jacks you around, what do you do for money in the meantime?
RonF @65: why cloth, other than the idea of making food-stamp recipients wash shit out of diapers gives you a warm fuzzy feeling? Does it just make your heart feel good to imagine that low-income parents can’t simply put a diaper in the garbage, but have to pay a service, or make daily hauls of stinky diapers to the coin laundromat? That’ll teach those poor people not to breed like rabbits, you betcha!
Instead of ‘food stamps’ there could easily be a specific subsidy program, like WIC. WIC doesn’t just hand out money; it has to be used on specific products. No reason diapers couldn’t be included in that.
Mythago: First, it’s a lot greener. Second, it’s a lot cheaper. Abuse the environment on your own nickel.
Grace: Sanctimony? No, it’s sound advice. And it’s quite reasonable for society to expect that you take responsibility for your own actions.
The fact that conception may be an unintended consequence of sex does not absolve one of responsibility for the resultant child, even if steps to prevent conception were taken. Everyone who uses them knows that such steps chance failure. If you’re not able or willing to support the resultant child, and if you don’t have some kind of reasonable surety that your partner will do the same, you should have sex (at least, of that nature). Will that limit your sex life? No doubt. Not my problem, however. You are not entitled to be protected from the consequences of your actions if you can’t afford to protect yourself.
Not to me. Not to most people, I’ll wager. The implication to me is that before you have a child you have thought about the possible consequences and have a reasonable expectation that the other parent of your child can and will uphold their legal and moral obligations. Marriage, for example. Now, is there ever complete surety? No, and no one’s asking for that. People die, they lose their jobs, they get divorced. But at least you took some steps and there’s some recourse, some attempt to take responsibility up front.
That’s not the same as conceiving a child with an aquaintance or a friend, and shouldn’t be treated the same way under public policy.
Jake: Building roads is a proper function of government, provided for in the Federal and various State constitutions. Although at least in the Federal Constitution the phrase is “will provide for”. I figure that means “see that they are built and maintained properly”, not necessarily with the addendum “exclusively out of taxes and tolls”. Oregon and other states are looking at various public-private initiatives that will help get roads built and maintained. Not that such things are without risk. Here in Illinois Mayor Daley sold off 75 year leases for operating the parking meters and the Chicago Skyway (a toll-road section of I-90 from Indiana to Chicago) and then promptly burned though the majority of the up-front payments in 2 years. that doesn’t mean that such things cannot be prudently done and be of benefit to the public.
Cheaper: often true, but not always true. In some places, water and electricity are expensive. This is especially true when you don’t own a washing machine.
Greener: almost always true, but not always true. People living in arid areas, where water consumption has immediate consequences but there is plenty of space for landfill, may find that disposable is greener in the next-hundred-years sense.
When it comes to responsible adults, I agree with your basic premise. However, not all sex is undertaken by responsible adults, or even willing adults. To a raped seventeen year-old who believes that abortion is a sin and who chooses to bear the child, I don’t have it in me to say, in any form whatsoever, “This is your fault.” I also don’t much like to say it to someone who planned and then lost all but her infant to a drunk driver. I want to assist such people, and I want to live in a society that wants to assist such people. So I vote accordingly.
You would maintain that such things should always be taken care of through private charity. I used to be more in agreement with you, but then I learned more about privilege and how it intersects with race and class and issues of generational poverty, and the fact that people are often not rational. Building public policy on the assumption that people always act rationally is building public policy on a foundation of sand.
These are not simple issues. Too often, “conservatives” want to treat them as such, when they simply aren’t. There are area where the KISS principle doesn’t work, because it’s not simple. Human behavior surrounding reproduction is probably Exhibit A in that regard.
“Conservatives” too often want to adhere blindly to a bunch of apparently simple feel-good principles which are often contradictory in their details. It’s simply not as easy as saying, “You should have thought of that before you had sex.” And trying to make it that simple results in harm and injury.
Even discussing these issues is difficult. One recent example is when I overgeneralized about personal choices and helmets, and Mandolin called me on it.
Principles are an excellent place to work from. But the devil is always in the details, and if you ignore the details, the devil gets a lot more room to play in. Refusal to engage with nuance is a choice to do harm.
Grace
I really should answer the question.
* Nationalism – I would say that Tea Party movement adherents hold that the United States itself is special, “the only country founded on a good idea”, and that it’s founding principles and structure are superior to those of other countries. They view the Founders as wise, certainly, and do not see that any one has come up with better ideas on how to structure government. People who choose not to assimilate should not be accommodated (e.g., voting guides and other government publications should be in English only). Such individuals are not inherently dangerous, but fomenting the splintering of American culture is, especially if that leads us away from the founding principles. I don’t see that they hold to any of your other ideas (or any expressed that I don’t deal with directly in the other sections).
* Social Darwinism – There are many who are poor because of their own poor choices. People who make poor choices are not entitled to have the taxpayers bail them out. There are people who are poor or cannot work due to factors beyond their control, and they should be helped. Birth to poor parents or into a minority group is not such a factor. People who are poor because they choose not to work should not be helped.
* Propaganda – The Tea Party movement doesn’t own any media outlets nor is it in power, so this is a null premise. You make a good argument for getting rid of state-controlled media, though.
* Anti-Intellectualism – The movement is not anti-intellectual – especially since surveys have noted that those associated with it are better educated than the average American. What it ridicules are people who think that their high level of education, especially at Ivy League schools, means that they know better than others how to run the country, that their ideas are superior to those that the U.S. was founded on and that they should therefore change them. It also ridicules the concept that high levels of education at Ivy League schools mean you’re smarter than people educated elsewhere.
* Heroism – I have no idea where any of that comes from.
* Social Authoritarianism – The power of the State should not be used to support immorality (e.g., abortion, the redefinition of marriage to include gays, etc.).
* Militarism – The military is and has proven itself to be worthy of respect. If war is enjoined then we should support the military – wars cannot be fought with one hand behind your back. But there’s no evidence I can see that says that anyone considers war to be a good thing in and of itself or that it should be prosecuted whenever there is a threat. I’ll wager that Tea Party movement adherents and their sons and daughters are disproportionately present in the military.
* Corporatism – The Tea Party movement believes in no such thing. They are pro-business, but business != corporations. In fact, they know that government regulation tends to favor corporations over small businesses, as the corporations have lawyers and lobbyists who can influence laws and regulations to favor them over small business – where most jobs come from – and stifle competition. They do believe that it is business, not government, that creates wealth.
* Anti-Communism – Communism is rarely used to describe anything. The word “Socialism” is used a lot, generally to describe usurpation of what should be private, local or State functions by the Federal government.
I wonder exactly how many poor people are poor because they simply choose not to work. That choice doesn’t exist in a vacuum, for one thing, but I’d also venture to guess that the majority of poor people are not poor because of a simple choice not to get a job.
Are you saying that redefining marriage to include homosexual partnerships is immoral, or are you speaking for the Tea Party, in general? I wonder what the definition of “immoral” is, then. And where does it come from? The Bible? I’m sure it doesn’t come from any other religions (because I don’t think any substantial percentage of Tea Partiers are followers of any other religious tradition), but I can’t think of another influential group, publication, etc., other than religions, that have taken the official stance that gay marriage is “immoral.” To allow the Bible or a religious doctrine to be the basis on which we make decisions about the legality of anything would be blatantly going against the Constitution’s clear assertion that the government cannot establish or prohibit the free exercise of any religion, especially since a church or other religious institution is not required for a state-recognized marriage between any people, at all, in the US. Can you elaborate on that?
The Tea Party doesn’t literally own any media outlets because the Tea Party is a decentralized and loose organization, as their members repeatedly tell us. It wouldn’t be possible for them to own any media outlets, so that is a null point. They do, however, enjoy a huge influence over at least one behemoth of a media outlet, Fox, which goes without saying.
For the voters to elect officials and let their will be known to them on the basis of their own religious beliefs is not an establishment of a religion. For a representative to be informed by his or her religious convictions as to what is moral or not moral is not an establishment of religion. If said representatives chose to give a particular denomination favor or power not available to others (e.g., giving only a particular denomination’s real property exemption from property taxes), then that would be an establishment of religion and would property be unconstitutional.
Now, what’s moral and immoral is the basis of many divisions. Very likely there are numerous supporters of the movement who are just fine with civil unions, for example. But I doubt that very many of them are fine with, say, overtly teaching in the public schools that heterosexual relationships and homosexual relationships are equally moral. I should think they would consider that the realm of the parents, not the schools.
Some, I should think. Others are poor not because they choose not to work but because they made poor choices that affected their employability.
I do not discount that many are poor because of factors such as having had parents who lived in an area where there are poor schools or who didn’t take any interest in seeing that their kids got an adequate education, or for other such factors. I support helping people such as that help themselves. But if people are not willing to help themselves to the extent of their own capabilities – regardless of how limited or extensive those capabilities are – then I don’t see that the public is obliged to support them.
Grace:
As do I.
I agree that people too often resort to simplistic answers. But that’s hardly the exclusive domain of conservatives. How often have I seen people here jump quickly to blame racism or sexism as the overwhelming reason for incidents such as opposition to the election of President Obama or the Duke rape case? How often have I been criticized when I suggest that the answers are more complex? It’s a property of public discourse overall, not just “conservatives”.
Here’s an interesting development that keys to the emergence of a Tea Party caucus in Congress. GOP is urged to avoid social issues
It goes on to note that this gives the GOP a bit of a quandary, as social issues are key to some of their core constituients.