Politics 2010: Gunning for One Another

By Martha Quillen

I vaguely remember a time when politicians shook hands and held babies; when they promised us better roads, schools, and lives. But it’s been a long time. Now they’re promising to “take out Harry Reid,” “take back America,” and repeal the fourteenth Amendment.”

Currently, Republicans are eagerly campaigning to reduce government budgets – no matter what those budgets are for. In Colorado, Proposition 101 and Amendments 60 and 61 threaten to slash funds for schools, prisons, libraries, hospitals, medical programs, road maintenance, water treatment, county offices, and much, much more.

Likewise, Tom Tancredo promises to limit state spending, reduce the number of state employees, and oppose any attempts to relax TABOR.

Elsewhere in the nation, a few conservative campaigners have even suggested eliminating Social Security and Medicare, shutting down government, and taking up arms.

President Obama and Vice President Biden gloss over such vitriol and its appeal by contending that people are worried and frightened. But that’s nonsense. If conservatives were truly worried or frightened, they wouldn’t field candidates like Dan Maes and Christine O’Donnell, whose records are so dismal that they can barely garner support from their own party.

Conservatives are not afraid, they are furious, which is nothing new. Rush Limbaugh started delivering vicious national radio rants in the early 1990s. FOX News broadcasters have been fulminating since 1996.

Insults and put downs are popular and saleable – there’s no doubt about it – and they’re circulated by Democrats and Republicans alike: Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Jon Stewart, Bill Maher …

It is not quite the same, however, when presumably serious newscasters and candidates call liberals idiots, traitors, socialists, atheists, communists, Marxists, and Nazis – with no regard whatsoever as to whether such epithets are baseless insults and bald-faced lies.

But liberals can be a mite hasty about stereotyping, too, presuming, as I do, that not all conservatives are racist, homophobic, imperialistic, war-mongering rednecks, who are uneducated, ignorant, and incapable of knowing what’s good for them.

In retrospect, all of this name-calling and blame seems pointless, since neither Democratic or Republican ideas have served us well in the last thirty years. Our era has been one of increasing greed, excess, fraud, and fiscal irresponsibility, in which Americans have lost jobs, savings and pensions.

Surely we can do better.

So how did we get here?

Despite the presumption that a slow financial recovery is responsible for the people’s belligerent mood, it isn’t. Rude politicking burst into full, glorious bloom during the last years of the Clinton administration – when America’s financial prowess was thought to be limitless.

And current voter dissatisfaction, although doubtlessly bolstered by rhetoric about high tax rates, is certainly not induced by them. For the last 23 years, federal tax rates have been comparatively low. The top marginal tax rate during Reagan’s first term was 50%; under Johnson, Nixon, Ford and Carter it was a daunting 70%; under Eisenhower and Kennedy, a staggering 91%.

Although high federal income taxes may indeed hamper a nation’s chances at international banking supremacy, and can discourage foreign investment, high top tax rates don’t preclude a thriving middle class. On the contrary, our nation’s concentration on achieving and retaining economic hegemony may actually have contributed to declining wages, benefits and opportunities for American workers.

Taxes may be unpopular, but before Wall Street’s recent melt-down, the biggest bite for the middle class came from a combination of stagnant wages, loss of manufacturing jobs, and soaring health care, health insurance, and housing costs.

Today, careful government budgeting is essential. But if the Tea Partyers actually got all of the tax relief they’re demanding, America would lose teachers, jobs, businesses, health care facilities, and critical public services, and perhaps, as a consequence, lapse into that great depression the stimulus plan was initiated to prevent.

Our government may not provide the most user-friendly services available, but it’s actually pretty affordable when one imagines how much it would cost to pay private corporations to supply alternatives. Without taxes (an idea some extremists would doubtlessly favor), Americans would have to rely on private, profit-making companies for schools, roads, bridges, water treatment, airports, armies, investigative agencies, the CDC, Homeland Security, foreign embassies …

And who would oversee our banks, pharmaceutical companies, and meat-packing plants to ensure safe products? And what would happen to FDIC insurance?

Would modern banking, lending, and commerce even be possible in a nation without federal income taxes? (I haven’t a clue, so I’ll let John Mattingly address that one).

The world’s economy almost collapsed in 2008, yet Americans are holding on. Here in Salida, we’ve still got water, electricity, and a myriad of small galleries and shops. To me, that seems like a miracle – considering how over-invested in risky derivatives our banks have become and how deeply in debt average Americans have gotten.

So why are Americans so angry? Especially conservative Americans?

I think it’s because we’ve been played – by political action committees and think tanks and policy institutes, by health insurance companies, banks, and automobile manufacturers, by the gas and oil industry and Wall Street. For decades they’ve gotten our representatives to support them by cutting banking regulations, corporate taxes, and corporate responsibilities.

They’ve encouraged our disillusionment with regulatory and oversight agencies like the SEC, FEMA, and the FDA. They’ve made us complicit in backing the policies and treaties that sent American jobs packing to India, China, and elsewhere.

And they’re still playing us. Corporations are funding distorted, duplicitous, political advertising to get us to support their interests instead of our own.

And influence peddling has become an enormously profitable and ubiquitous business. Lobbyists flood Washington, representing corporations from here and abroad (pharmaceutical giants, petro-companies, banks, airlines), and there are religious and environmental lobbyists, special interest groups, advocacy groups, and charitable foundations – all trying to glean favor. Likewise, writers, pundits, broadcasters, networks, and publishers clamor for attention. They divide us, court us, and when it’s advantageous, they incite us.

But I don’t want to pass the buck, because we are largely responsible.

In the present political arena, lies, exaggerations, name-calling, and emotionalism often prevail. Campaigners employ fear tactics, scandal, false allegations, aspersions, and guilt by association to stir people up.

Why?

Because that’s the best way to get our attention.

Some political rhetoric is so inflamed and hyperbolic, it’s outrageous. Candidates talk about conspiracies, dark plots, revolution, and secession, and the citizens repeat it, embrace it, and maybe even believe in it.

Our political stances have grown so simplistic and vociferous that citizens often harangue their allies. Take Ed, for example; he tends to be a second amendment absolutist, insisting that the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed, but Ed also supports Obama and establishing bike paths, which apparently translates into having dangerous liberal leanings, which attracts gluts of hate mail from NRA zealots armed for hyper-vigilance.

That’s annoying, and wasteful, and shows that our political communication is absurdly shallow. Citizens are shouting at each other rather than communicating. We’re not listening to or hearing one another.

We blame Washington and Wall Street for our problems. But we the people pick our representatives; we use the credit cards, borrow from the banks, and buy the products.

We blame liberals, conservatives, immigrants, gays, religious extremists and the poor for our problems, but we are the ones who can’t seem to coalesce, or look beyond our differences, or see our common needs.

We worry about losing our freedoms, yet we politicize the private, and try to control one another’s marriages, religious choices, “official” language, conduct, and even birth control methods through legislation (and manipulating public school curriculums).

We complain about our government, but we choose the issues. We focus on the President’s birth certificate, a mosque, the First Lady’s pricey choice in china (Reagan) or hotels (Obama), and other minutia. And we’re the ones who have made sex education and intelligent design more important than all of the other subjects we can’t seem to teach in our public schools.

Sarah Palin says Americans should have the government they deserve. But that is, I think, exactly what we have. I’m not going to try tell you how to make things better, though, because I don’t know. No, my best advice for Campaign 2010 is TAKE COVER!