Minor political rant

[velvetpage]

I am sick and tired of the "socialism is anti-American" line of argument. It's fallacious on several levels.

Why, yes, I am going to enumerate them for you! How did you guess?

1) You (whoever you are who says this) do not get to dictate what is and is not acceptable to be an American. America is a nation of 300 million people. You don't speak for all of them. Nobody does.

2) I don't honestly care what the founding fathers said about the nation they were founding. That was two hundred thirty-three years ago. They do not live in it now and nobody is obligated to take their intentions to heart when deciding on the future path of the nation they helped fashion, unless those intentions were codified in the Constitution. Even then, they are open to modern interpretation. There are multiple avenues worked into your system of government to allow for exactly that.

3) Speaking of the Constitution, telling someone that they are un-American if they believe such-and-such is incredibly hypocritical for someone who upholds the Constitution and the founding fathers as the highest authorities on which to base current policies. What it's saying is, "You have no right to call yourself American if you believe that." Problem is, the Constitution says people do have exactly that right. That statement contravenes the rights of freedom of speech, freedom of conscience/religion, potentially freedom of association depending on how you phrase it - I could go on.

If you believe in your own constitution, then you must also believe in the right of any American to believe exactly what they want, and say what they want, and continue to live freely without persecution as a result of what they say or believe, provided their actions surrounding those beliefs are peaceful. How does the saying go - I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it? Anything less than that is hypocritical for someone who points to the constitution for their political and ideological guidance.

For the record, Canada has similar values. We have a Charter of Rights and Freedoms that contains all the same freedoms as yours, with the exception of the right to bear arms. I don't have the right to vote in the United States, and I will likely never seek that right. But the rights I claim as a citizen of my own country are comparable. Much as I disagree with most conservative politicians on most items (not all) I want them to change their opinions - not stop talking about them. They have a right to their opinions and to speak freely about those opinions, and I will never, ever tell them they don't. Democracy depends on a free exchange of ideas amongst citizens. I will never accept less than that of myself or any political discourse in which I engage.

Comments

As an American myself...

[amyura.livejournal.com]

1) THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU!!!! There is NOTHING inherently anti-American about socialism. Hell, many of the most successful European socialist countries got that way after WWII with the US's blessing. There's also nothing inherently GOOD about America's allies. I'm thinking particularly of all our allies during the cold war in the developing world. Mobutu, Noriega and Pinochet were "good" simply because they weren't communists; Ho Chi Minh was "bad" simply because he was a communist. WTF?

2) Damn straight. And what was that about the establishment clause again? And the fact that the second amendment just says "keep and bear arms." It doesn't say "keep and bear high-tech automatic weapons with no restrictions whatsoever." AND as you pointed out, they wrote the Constitution with built-in mechanisms allowing it to change.

3) Exactly. I'm too tired and busy to continue on a long rant agreeing with you, but just....YES.

[amazonvera.livejournal.com]

It always seems silly to me when people talk about what the founding fathers wanted or thought, not because I think it's unimportant but because one would be hard-pressed to find a group of people who disagreed with one another with the same vehemence and regularity on as wide a variety of issues. There was no Founding Father Hivemind. Additionally, they lived and thought and governed in a very different era and couldn't have dreamed of some of the issues that we're faced with now. I'm fascinated by the founding fathers (and am descended from one of them), and I think it's worthwhile to look back at the roots of where our country came from when deciding where it's going, but they are most certainly not an authority on modern governing. They also very intentionally set up a system where everything that they did or said or thought could be thrown out the window at any time by future generations.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

In short - knowing our history is an excellent and illuminating thing. Binding ourselves to historical ways of doing things is silly and counter-productive.

I agree.

[dagoski.livejournal.com]

First off, the Constitution is hack just like the healthcare bill that just got out of the Senate. This was the charter that everyone disliked the least. However, that said, one thing those guys did right was to leave it very open ended. Most of the conservative objections to most any sort of community based policy derive from very tortured interpretations of the constitution. While the Founding Father might not have agreed with much of the policy developed in the modern world, they also knew they could not foresee what their descendant would have to contend with. It's very doubtful that the drafters of the constitution could envision the urban society we live in nowadays.

That unamerican thing really pisses me off in particular. I get this from time to time from conservatives who have done jack all for their nation. I get this because I am liberal to socialist in my beliefs. And yet, even though, I am Unamerican, I have spent the bulk of my career in public service working, generally as subcontractor, for Federal Agencies like NASA, the National Science Foundation, and DARPA, often at salaries that are fraction of what I'd get in the private sector.

The big split in belief you see here is a rural-urban divide. People in cities get, at a pretty fundamental level, that we're all tied together. So do people in first and second ring suburbs. The exurbs and rural America are very different places that live on their illusions. These places are increasingly nonviable, but the allocation of congressional seats gives them more power than they'd otherwise warrant. The original thinking was that the government would have to pay more attention to smaller places if they had more representation. However, I have not seen that in my travels across the US. Most of what is often called "Fly Over Country" is very neglected and has few opportunities. This neglect drives the resistance towards social programs. Most people in these regions have seen little but unfunded mandates come from the Federal Government and precious little support other than military spending in their districts. And their state governments are pretty useless too So, yeah, selling a national healthcare policy to them is pretty hard.

[amyura.livejournal.com]

I tend to agree, but for a few areas.

I live in a somewhat rural area. We're close to Boston, but I get the bulk of my food from farms within a 15 to 20 minute drive from my house, and a good portion of the nation's cranberries are grown here. Some of the rural areas are quite liberal; I think it depends in part on proximity to good colleges though there are obviously tons of other factors that play into it. So you have places like Vermont and Maine, and then weird little pockets of liberalism in places like Austin, Texas and Athens, Georgia.

Also, I don't have the links right now, but overall, people in the so-called red states receive far more than they have to give to the federal government. The richest states sending the most to Washington are in the Northeast and along the west coast.

Thomas Frank goes into a really good and detailed explanation of why people in the flyover states tend to lean conservative; it's more a product of the culture wars that have been exacerbated by the far right than any inherent problem people might have with social programs. The Republicans get people angry about gay marriage, abortion and the phrase "Happy Holidays," and those same people turn around and vote to lower taxes on the wealthiest Americans and shoot down a socialized healthcare system that would generally benefit most of them.

[dagoski.livejournal.com]

I always forget about the Northeast despite the fact that I've travelled in Vermont and New Hampsire and Maine. But, you are so right. I think that New England has a lot of appreciation for the arts buried very deeply in its regional mindset as well as a value placed on education. I tend to think more of the Midwest, the South and the West when I think rural. Call it a location bias based on places I've lived or had family in. I think you're dead on about the proximity colleges.

I'm aware that many flyover states get more money than they put it, but they sure don't get much for it. Years and years ago when I drove from college to my first grad school, I crossed the Western states on a tour designed to eat up my summer rather than get me to school. I was really struck by the decay I saw in the small towns. There's just not a lot opportunity to be had in the flyover states. I have got to read Thomas Frank myself. I think he's got a lot of insight into the situation from what I've heard of his books. There's another book that I want to read as well. It's called Hollowing Out the Middle and it's a detailed sociological study of population flight from the center of the country and what's gone into it over the years.

[kisekileia.livejournal.com]

"The Republicans get people angry about gay marriage, abortion and the phrase "Happy Holidays," and those same people turn around and vote to lower taxes on the wealthiest Americans and shoot down a socialized healthcare system that would generally benefit most of them."

Yep. For people who aren't that smart or aren't that interested in politics, gay marriage and abortion seem a lot easier to understand than the complexities of economics and social programs, so they vote with their beliefs on gay marriage and abortion. That results in a lot of evangelical Christians who are genuinely good people, but believe a little too much of what their churches say, voting Republican even though it's probably not in their best interests.

[paka.livejournal.com]

It's just annoying. The USA faces the same issues as everyone else in the world; roads, healthcare, employment, education, senior issues, veteran issues, anticipating and bracing for natural disaster. And yet we seem obsessed with rhetoric from the 1950s and 1920s (which didn't do our country any favors then either), and we're xenophobic as hell.

I mean, part of it is the nature of right-wingers. I feel that beyond all the associations, conservatives are conservative - people who really don't want to hand the government any more responsibility or money, because they honestly don't see any reason to trust the government. Which, okay, I can see that; but the average conservative isn't the person who might have to pay more taxes, the governments that average conservatives have been voting in have totally overstepped their boundaries and sapped the trust that conservatives would need to have in the government, and meanwhile all these people are getting distracted by these big ticket social issues because they feel like they can't control any of the fiscal stuff.

And the thing about conservatism, sticking to scripts (socialism is bad, taxes will ding us, stay the course etc), is that it stems from a survival mentality - and why do they need to survive and not risk anything new? Because they got themselves royally dicked over, along with us nutjob liberal bleeding hearts, by a batch of rich right-wingers whom they voted into office. Nice self-sustaining cycle, that.

Even though the situation isn't as bad as it was a year ago, when I was honestly thinking of claiming right of return and enlisting in the IDF, this place seems so completely not my country. We can't make any progress without this bullshit weighing us down.