With the Democratic Convention starting this coming week, the presidential campaign, which has already been waged for several months, reaches the serious part. The mud flies in both directions like water at a fireman's barrel contest.
From now on out expect both candidates to lie, distort, misconstrue, and polarize with every sentence spoken. And the second-rate English language will bear the brunt of these attacks on reasonable civil society. The meanings of words will be stretched or misapplied until they are mere ghosts of their original dimensions.
An example is the use of terminology about taxes. Nobody likes taxes. They never have from the earliest days of human governmental inventions. But particularly for those living under an unprecedented form of government like this country was designed to be, taxes are a responsibility of those who are protected by the operations of that government.
By that I mean this: The opening words of our Declaration of Independence express the foundational concept of this country's government "of the people, by the people, and for the people."
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
Some people will tell you that these words demonstrate this nation's Christian foundations. That's the kind of lie that will characterize all political discourse for the next three months.
First, the men who wrote it were not, for the most part, Christians. They were Deists. Second, the words quoted have absolutely no religious connotation. Whatever you believe about the nature or presence of a Supreme Being, humanity was "created." Whether you attribute that act to God or to Fate or to Evolution, you can still agree that humanity's creator granted us certain rights that no other human should violate.
Maggie Gallagher recently cited this statement as proof that the words "under God" belonged in our Pledge of Allegiance. Her thought was that God's claims on us and his protections of us supercede any attempts by government to violate our rights. I would agree. But we need to move the words to make that clear. As it is, the words inserted by Congress in 1954 divide two words whose meaning makes it clear they belong together.
...one nation, under God, indivisible, with....
Originally the Pledge said, with two commas removed:
...one nation indivisible, with....
So let's retain that natural linkage and put the words "under God" where they belong.
I pledge allegiance, under God, To the United States....
That would probably satisfy the Jehovah's Witnesses that they could now safely say the pledge. Most people who believe in God believe that they owe their allegiance FIRST to God, and SECOND to the human government that rules them. In that position the words would not be an endorsement of religion, but a statement of our firm belief in the religion clause of the First Amendment.
Tangent ends here.... ;-)
The point is that the purpose of government as our forefather's saw it is to protect those inalienable rights of its citizens. Those whose rights are thus protected have an obligation to pay for that government. Taxes, then, become a privilege of the protected, rather than a burden on the productive.
It's characteristic of political misconstruction that people would turn this government's recognition of a citizen's ability to pay into a means for discouraging production. And in the current environment everyone's saying, "It's your money." That truism is thus misused to suggest it shouldn't be funding the operation of the institutions designed to protect our rights.
This nation is mind-bogglingly deep in debt. Since the government is supposed to be us, the money that would pay off the government's debt IS our money. And we should be angered that politicians would misappropriate it, largely by giving it back to people who didn't earn it. It's our money and we want to be out of debt.
You can clearly see, then, how terminology gets twisted in the service of manipulating the public. That our political system has become entirely sold on the appropriateness of trying to influence our votes is a demonstration of how corrupt it has become. And the two-party system that has evolved is evidence that from the start this government did not live up to its founding principles.
The polarization endemic to each political season is a direct result of this forced division that gives a very few people real political power. The two major political parties work hard to prevent other parties from becoming major contenders, because that would dilute power; they'd lose. Which is exactly why the American public should demand that the system be stopped. And there's a simple way they can do that. Just start voting for people from previously obscure parties. Currently the Libertarian Party, the Socialist Worker's Party, the Green Party, and others are active. There are parties to match any number of political orientations. If you vote for their candidates and shut out the two major parties for a few years, the Democrats and Republicans would be forced to stop polarizing.
Another way our system violates the rights of voters is how much we tolerate the attempts of politicians to manipulate us in search of our vote. In a free society campaigning should be about an honest declaration of the candidate's principles and experience. Instead we are bombarded with misleading and even false advertising trying to convince us to vote in a certain way.
The amount of money required to pay for this advertising, and to pay highly skilled political advisors who then tell the candidate what to say (even the candidate loses liberty under this scenario) has to come from donors who also want to manipulate the election. Thus the current system is so corrupt as to be totally opposed to the founding principles of the United States.
Here again the voters have the real power. Candidates are required to disclose the amount of money they collect in donations. Voters should examine those numbers and vote for the candidate who spent the least money (giving a clear advantage to poor "third" parties). Politicians are extremely dense, so it might take a few years, but eventually they'd learn that to get elected they'd have to stop spending money on campaigning. They'd be falling all over themselves to cut campaign costs, and the voters would regain the freedom to make up their own minds.
Now someone might object that such "narrow issue" voting might put someone entirely unqualified in charge of the country. I have a multi-part answer to that objection. We intentionally have a multi-branched government in which each branch checks and restrains the power of the other. If we got a bad president, we could rely on congress and the courts to alleviate the damage.
Anyway, can any candidate, from Pat Paulson to Mickey Mouse, be any worse than the steady stream of idiots, foul-mouthed thugs, and incompetent idealists who have paraded through the White House for the last fifty or sixty years? The current occupant of the Oval Office has done everything imaginable to swell the ranks of terrorists who hate us and given his actions the name "War on Terror."
Am I saying that John Kerry is the better candidate? Not at all. How can we expect that anyone who has made it through the madness involved in becoming the candidate of a major political party can offer us any improvement on the abysmal status quo? And that brings me to the issue I mainly intended to address in this article.
In seeking to rally his "loyal" base, George Bush has labeled Kerry a "liberal." Bush claims that he stands firmly on the side of "conservative" values. We're about to embark on an exercise to show that the words have had their meanings twisted beyond recognition in service of our two-party system. Conservative means Republican, liberal means Democrat.
Let's examine these words more closely to see what they're supposed to mean. A common political mantra is that conservative means wanting it the old way, and liberal means wanting to press forward into new territory. But that's more based the historical positions of the two parties than on the meanings of the words.
The root word in "conservative" is "conserve." Conserve means to hold back and protect. When it comes to the environment, conserve is the last thing so-called conservatives want to do. So in the matter of the environment, Republicans are liberal to extremely liberal.
We often divide conservatives into the groups of "fiscal conservative" and "social conservative." Fiscal conservative means to enhance government income and reduce government expenses until the government can pay its own way and begin to pay off that colossal debt. At that Bill Clinton, with the help of an overheated economy, turned out to be quite conservative. The current president, with his cuts in government income and his profligate spending on things like the "war" on terror, turns out to be a fiscal liberal out in the lunatic fringe.
Conservative should mean conserving the rights of the public. No government official has ever been very conservative in this regard. Bush has trampled our rights in the service of "security," and wants to further violate our rights to please a control-addicted religious... well, it appears, despite their protestations to the contrary, that they are, in fact, a minority.
Liberal, meanwhile, carries the meaning of "generous." Its root word is "liberty." In that sense the current administration is definitely NOT liberal. Clinton had a few liberal days, such as when he signed the Americans with Disabilities Act. But he also had some very un-liberal days, such as when he spearheaded and approved welfare reform.
Liberal can also mean "permissive." Thomas Walker Lindh's liberal parents are supposed to have caused him to go to Pakistan in search of the meaning of life, and to end up a Taliban fighter in Afghanistan. Here again Republicans are clearly NOT liberal with their focus on regulating the private aspects of our lives. Democrats might be marginally liberal with their opposition to such sweeping advances in government power, but when it comes to industry and wealthy investors they aren't liberal at all.
With such confusion and distortion at the heart of political debate, it's no surprise that nobody is enlightened by all the heated rhetoric flying around during a campaign. And nowadays the campaign begins on the first Wednesday after the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. The prevalence of this kind of language-mangling positioning is a testimony to the fundamental solidity of our form of government. How else can you explain our continued existence after so many years of such idiotic political discourse?
At any rate, liberal and conservative really aren't opposites. You have seen from the title page of my web site that I accept the label "liberal." But in many ways I'm conservative. I'd like to see the size of government considerably reduced. But I recognize that the only way to do this responsibly is to convince the regulated to self-regulate. It is their lack of self-regulation that has demanded the growth of government.
For example, if industry had always focused on the safety of workers, we wouldn't have needed OSHA. If industry had taken pains to leave the environment as they found it, we wouldn't have needed the EPA. If the general public would have routinely and promptly paid its taxes the government wouldn't have been forced to create the IRS. You get my point.
On the issue of government spending I'm conservative. I think the government could safely cut a lot of its spending. The reason this doesn't happen is that everyone who wants the government to cut spending wants it to cut the spending that benefits someone else. Few people ever lobby the government to cut the programs that benefit themselves.
So my response to anyone who harps on cutting government spending is to ask, "What government program that YOU benefit from do you want cut?" Understand that in this context we all benefit from the actions of our military, so requests to cut defense spending are always appropriate. If you're not a farmer, don't lobby to cut farm subsidies. Farmers should do that. If you're not disabled, don't ask to restrict disability benefits. That's the job of the disabled.
I realize, given human nature, that this is HIGHLY unlikely. But I rationalize the issue this way: if something needs to be done, who cares how it's paid for? We can do it through volunteers and donations, we can do it as a commercial service, or we can do it through government. Any of those ways money comes from the people and goes to those who provide the needed service. The only drawback to using government spending to accomplish the task is that the government will demand considerable administrative overhead. But if that's what it takes to get an important task accomplished, so be it. Let's just pay as we go.
On the issue of legislation, I'm a conservative. I believe we should spend more time these days un-writing laws rather than writing them. Most recent presidents have complained about an obstructionist congress. That can be particularly true in days like these when the same party controls the White House and congress. When the "loyal" opposition uses parliamentary means to block something the ruling party wants, the ruling party cries "foul."
But that's the way government is supposed to work. Our founding fathers designed this government to give the people a voice in how they are governed, but they put in safeguards to prevent a tyranny of the majority -- mob rule as we occasionally put it. By blocking objectionable judicial nominees [reality check, a greater percentage of Bush's judicial nominees have been approved than of Clinton's, and the judicial backlog is much lower today than in recent memory], and filibustering outlandish legislation, the opposition party acts to preserve our rights, and to stop unbridled rule-making.
Someone has suggested that we need a "second" congress whose task is solely to strike laws from the books. But our system of government already has made such a provision. We call it the judicial branch. In recent decisions the courts have been charged with "legislating" from the bench. But that's impossible. The courts cannot write laws. They can only strike down laws that, in their judgement, violate the principles of the federal or state constitutions.
The decision of the Massachusetts courts to "allow" gay marriage was simply an action of the court to strike down a discriminatory law. They did not write any new laws, they simply "un-wrote" an old law. And when the courts halted the State of Texas's attempts to regulate adult sexual behavior, my own pastor accused them of invading the bedroom. They DIDN'T invade the bedroom, they simply pulled the State of Texas out of the bedroom!
If we want to be a free people, we have to quit criticizing the courts for doing their job and cutting down on the number of laws that restrict our freedoms. What we're encountering here is another form of political word-bending. When social "conservatives" use the word liberty, they mean their own liberty to restrict the liberties of others. From the Christian perspective that's totally inappropriate.
If God didn't stop Satan from turning a third part of the angels against God, if he didn't stop Satan from exporting his rebellion to this earth, if he didn't wipe out the Romans and Jews over the death of Jesus, what right do his "followers" have to seek the force of law to stop people from "sinning?"
And even more objectionably, these people keep talking about "morality." We have these days twisted the meaning of the word "moral" to mean a particular set of personal and social values. "Moral" is supposed to mean the process of ethical decision-making. By codifying their own set of values, the fundamentalists of our day are taking the process of moral thinking away from the public. "You can't decide how to live your life, we've already decided what you should do and invoked government sanction on those who don't live that way."
Enough already. I've been writing for over two hours! But I call on the nation to restore sanity, to learn what our founding fathers had in mind, and to assure the health of our republic by encouraging rather than discouraging actions that preserve their principles.