I have plenty of reason to be sober in my expectations regarding my ability to persuade today’s Republicans. (My most recent posting here was titled ”Why Trump Supporters Will Go to Their Graves Still Thinking They Were Right.”) But I don’t think we can afford to give up on our countrymen, because — as the present political nightmare is making crystal clear — we share a nation with them, and that means that our fate is inescapably impacted by what they think, and how they feel.
This piece — which hits several major political topics, rather than the usual just one -- will be running in newspapers in Trump Country, in the 2;1 Republican congressional district in which I was the Democratic nominee for Congress in 2012.)
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The State of Play (in a Troubled Country)
What the Needless Viciousness Exposes
I hope people who voted for Trump are observing not just what the Trump Presidency is doing but also how it is going about about doing things. I hope they are noticing what that says about the spirit that’s governing this power.
No matter what constructive purpose one might have, no one with constructive motivations would cut programs and lay off workers in so wasteful and destructive – so cruel -- a way as this.
People acting in a good spirit realize that things must be done with care with concern to reach the goal with as little suffering and destruction as possible. No one wants food rotting in port, because USAID was cut off. What sense does it make to treat such programs – feeding people, curing their diseases – as if they represented the enemy?
That same destructive spirit has been exhibited by the way this “chain-saw” has gone after federal workers -- by the way the federal workforce has been attacked in ways that provoke needless pain and fear. Needless for any constructive purpose, but rather expressing a kind of rage against capable and decent people working hard in a spirit of public service.
The drive to destroy decent agencies, and to go out of one’s way to traumatize decent people, should tell one all one needs to know about the ugly spirit that is driving this destructive political force.
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This One Issue Tells Plenty Enough
No one should need to know any more about this Republican Party than how it has dealt with climate change. The scientific consensus on the importance of this crisis is nearly unanimous. But the GOP has consistently worked with the fossil fuel industry to mislead the people about the truth, and to block action to protect us, our children, and our grandchildren from what the scientists have warned is “the greatest challenge humankind has ever faced.”
The Republican Party has for decades paralyzed the ability of the nation to protect the vital needs of future generations, choosing instead to protect the short-term profits of those fabulously wealth fossil fuel companies who make their fortune through fuels from which humankind must ween itself.
Even if everything else the Republican Party was doing was OK, I can’t see how any decent person who sees what’s happening around climate change, could ever get near the Republican Party without holding their nose from the stench of corruption, with possibly even the survival of our children and grandchildren endangered by that Party’s making itself the accomplice of the sin of greed.
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Money Should Not Mean Power
Either we believe in democratic equality, or we don’t. Either we believe that justice requires that every person have an equal vote, or we don’t.
This is not a peripheral value.
What justification can there be for the idea that the desires of those with lots of money should be given more weight than the desires of those with less?
Anyone who cared about the basic democratic justice of “one person, one vote” should support our nation’s limiting -- as much as possible -- how much money can buy power.
No matter what we do, the rich will have more than their fair share of influence over political outcomes. But everything possible should be done to keep money from buying the power of the American government.
(Of course, at this moment, we are witnessing an atrocity of money buying power, as the richest man in the world has been empowered by the most powerful man in the world --the President of the United States -- to take a chainsaw to the people’s government.)
I propose a way to maximize how much it is the will of the people that gets expressed in our elections: “one person, one vote” rather than “one dollar, one vote.”
It is a way of financing the election process in which every registered voter would get a voucher for the same amount of money, with each person able to distribute that election-money however they please to election-related candidates and causes.
All other monies would be kept out of “the election process” – which, it has already been established, can be reasonably defined.
So even with the election-money, all voters would have equal power. They’d vote first with their funds during the campaign, and then with their ballots on Election Day.
I have never heard an argument against public financing that had any merit whatever. And as it would be possible to make power much more equal, as justice requires, I suspect the arguments against such reforms are a way of hiding what’s really going on: those who benefit from the current corruption want to continue to get more power than they deserve.
Virtue requires choosing justice over one’s own advantage.
And such virtue has long been in scarce supply particularly in the Party of the Plutocrats. That’s the Republican Party, which appointed all those Supreme Court justices that gave us the abominable decision in Citizens United, which opened the floodgates to money corrupting our elections.
(I wonder if Citizens United is responsible for Elon Musk to buy however much of the Presidency it is that he’s bought.)