There are 10 Kinds of People in the World: those that Understand Binary and those that Don't

I begin this entry by welcoming John and Lord (of Logic) to the discussion. Both have points of view that will make the discussion interesting, and both offer well reasoned arguments.

Today's subject is the Great American Political dichotomy, left/right, liberal/conservative, or Democrat/Republican, if you prefer. At it's narrowest definition, politics is binary: either you're one of us or you're one of them; either you're with us or you're against us; you're either a liberal or a conservative. The broader, mainstream definition has politics as a continuum with the Democratic party at one extreme, the GOP at the other and independents in the middle. But go on any third party website, and you'll see for yourself and the two-party system actually shares the center, with non-partisans and Reagan Democrats making up the middle .

First, I think the more important question is what is conservative and what is liberal?

A wise, pragmatic conservative once told me that the core purpose of any government is to defend wealth. This goes along with the the concept of laissez faire, per Adam Smith: the strongest economy is maintained when the government does not intervene to regulate it. So political conservatives have an interest, at their core, in defending wealth, by preventing the Government from squandering it or interfering in the market process. But if this is true, how do conservatives explain the Great Depression, or the more recent energy crisis and housing crunch? Had the market not experienced periods of unabashed freedom from regulation - and in all cases, were, in Reaganomics terms, poised to create a "trickle down" of wealth - would it have still collapsed? At the same time, does anyone deny that wealth was generated in those years leading up to collapse?

At the same time, liberal is exactly what it sounds like - the liberal application of government. For example, a social program was started by Franklin D. Roosevelt to assist the elderly during a time when many of them literally starved to death. Lyndon Johnson made the next major step by offering assistance to non-working families - generally single mothers with children. In the first case, social security prior to FDR was the family, and in fact, the architecture of the American home reflected a more corporate than immediate structure. I knew a man once who was fired from his job because he couldn't work as many hours as they needed him to without having it effect his social security. In the second case, the Johnson Administration created nearly three generations of families dependent on government assistance, who did not and would not work. And though It was, ironically, through Bill Clinton that aid for dependent families would hear its swan song, social security disability has been re-defined to further burden the tax payer while drug addicts, alcoholics and those claiming to suffer from mental illnesses (e.g. bipolar disorder, depression, etc.) wallow in a sea of self-inflicted misery, and are never required to "get well."

But that's where the appropriateness of the labels appears to end. Republicans may not want government intervention in business, but the religious right sees no contradiction in having the government deciding the appropriateness of what is read, watched or listened to, what goes on in the bedroom between consenting adults, and a woman's right to choose responsibly. The party in general sees no contradiction between it's view of the second amendment (the right to have and bear arms) and it's apparent contempt for the first amendment (guaranteeing both protection of religion and freedom of the press), its prolonged attack on the fourth amendment (guaranteeing an individual's right to general privacy, without proper warrants) and its end run around the sixth-through-tenth amendments (guaranteeing the right to due process). As a bar chart of the budget deficit from the last 20 years shows (see below), the party of "fiscal responsibility," which decries the "tax and spend" policies of the Democrats, have driven up the budget deficit to record highs. Finally, as yet another bar chart of the trade deficit shows, this notion of "trickle down" economics has hardly made the United States more competitive in the global economy (see right). Simply put, we're in debt up to our eyeballs, and the Repub-licans who've spent us there seem to be asking us not to believe our lying eyes.

But if the Democrats thought they were getting a pass today, keep dreaming. Rupert Murdock gained a toehold on the media for doing what no one else at the time had the guts to do -report the news. "The folks" as O'Reilly affectionately calls them, were frankly sick of the generationally monopolistic, self-aggrandizing, baby boomer-run media's head up Bill Clinton's ass. His first hundred days in office, attacking an entrenched system of military discrimination against gays were a wasted first hundred days. Not that gays should have been discriminated against in the first place, but pick your battles, for crying out loud. The single issue on which the Clintons stood out was health care. Unwilling to compromise, the Clintons wasted four years of Democratic majority in which some kind of health care bill could have been passed to help working families. They literally rented out the Lincoln bedroom as a re-election fundraising gimmick then stole the White House china on their way out.

And if the Dems were hoping to cast themselves as the party preserving the Constitution, they shouldn't brag so much. Senator Biden's bill that resulted in the Violence Against Women Act undermines a vital part of the fifth amendment, which protects individuals from being forced to testify against their spouse; it further assumes that women are incapable of saying what they mean under oath, and prosecuting attorney's often threaten victims of domestic violence with perjury (and sometimes prosecute them). Bill Clinton's highly publicized "land grab" also violated the Third Amendment for many, and Hillary Clinton voted to allow FEMA to take privately owned firearms in the event of a natural disaster (which actually happened after Katrina) leaving decent citizens unarmed and at the mercy of looters. Barack Obama's vote in favor of the FISA bill mocked his previous stances against the Bush Administration.

So how do we define the Bill of Rights? Is it liberal or conservative, since both sides both protect and abuse it equally? I'll go out on a limb here and suggest that neither party has the Bill of Rights in mind when pushing an agenda. The so-called Constitution Party seeks to redefine the Constitution as a document that defends only the right of Christians. The Independent party has its own definition of the Constitution, and picks and chooses its "favorites" from the first ten, discarding the others as either unimportant or unintended. The Libertarians, who share the absolutist economic philosophies of the GOP, have an equally absolutist attitude with regard to individual rights - it is unequivocally NOT to be screwed with.

Whether we agree that the "hands-off" approach to the economy is best, it's hard to make the case that it actually works., given the recent economic downturns. Mitt Romney, a prime example of extreme conservatism, if ever there was one, had the following to say during the RNC:

"Is Government spending, putting aside inflation, liberal or conservative if it doubles since 1980?"

The answer, of course is "liberal," but the question sidesteps the fact that most of that spending occurred under Presidents Reagan, Bush and Bush; deficit spending actually went down to $18 billion the last year Bill Clinton held office. And particularly in the case of Dubya, in which the Republicans controlled both houses, the notion of government largess being a product of liberal politicians is hard sell to anyone except low information voters. But Romney goes one further by lying outright:

"Democrats want to use the [economic] slow down as an excuse to do what their special interests are always begging for: higher taxes, bigger government and less trade with other nations. It's the same path Europe took a few decades ago; it leads to moribund growth and double digit unemployment."

Since Romney's a business man, I'm sure he's taken a gander at charts and graphs, and knows what he's talking about. So either he's seen this same chart and is lying, or he hasn't and he's trying to pass himself off as more knowledgeable than he claims. Either way, he's full of bunk. You don't have to be a business man with international trade experience to see that in terms of trade deficit, the practice of supply-side economics hasn't helped us to be competitive, and the former Massachusetts Governor is full of it. Romney went on to attack the same Supreme Court that helped the current President win a controversial election, as "liberal."

"Is a Supreme Court Decision liberal or conservative that awards Guantanamo terrorists with Constitutional rights?"

I dunno, Mitt. Why don't you ask Al-Jazeera cameraman, Sami al-Hajj, who was subjected to "enhanced interrogation" - not to find out what he knew about terrorist networks, but to press him about the news organization that he worked for. Romney's statement also pretends that the recent conservative victory in the United States Supreme Court decision of District of Columbia v. Heller, in which gun rights were upheld as absolute, simply didn't happen. I find it fascinating that a man just this year was struggling to sell himself as a mainstream Christian, has the audacity to take exception to the notion that people have a right not to be held indefinitely without having charges brought against them; that such people, whether enemy combatants or innocent civilians, should be subjected torture - just as Senator John McCain was - is frankly an extremist view. Romney can call this "political correctness" if he chooses, but if he fails to see the contradiction inherent in his statement, he is both foolish and immoral. Then he insults anyone who's been watching FISA:

"It's time for the party of big ideas, not the party of Big Brother."

Since Mitt brought it up, FISA had the complete support of Senate Republicans - including John McCain - with the exception for Phil Graham, who didn't vote on the measure. The votes in opposition were Democrats, with Sens. Clinton and Obama joining Graham in pretending that it didn't matter.

I pick on Romney because he is an extremist - supposedly farther to the right than any other politician in this race. But he once said that we should "double Guantanamo" - which will require more government spending on holding more people who may not even be terrorists. He blames big government on "liberals," though most of the "growing [of] government" that he talks about happened on the Republican watch. And then, there's his record of being pro-choice: I know he's a Mormon and is in no-wise in favor of abortion; but he found it politically expedient to hold a "leftist" view for the sake of winning an election. Let the record show, however, that Clinton and Obama, both of whom repudiated John McCain for not voting on the new GI Bill, didn't vote on FISA either; that Clinton (and all Senate Democrats, except Russ Feingold) voted to invade Iraq; and that Obama voted against FEMA being allowed to take personal firearms in the event of a natural disaster.

There is no right, no left. It is an arbitrary label upon which political careers are hung and ideologies are fought over. We see conservatives who favor liberal government when it suits their ends and liberals who favor a return to constitutional conservatism when it means creating contrast between themselves and an unpopular President. But the liberal/conservative dichotomy really reflects the limitations of a political landscape written in the binary language of for/against, yea/nay - 1/0. We have the language and the capacity to evolve into a multi-party system, in which multiple opposing views can be expressed. But Romney's speech is salient for one other reason: it brings to bear extreme notions deeply embedded in his religious psyche: good and evil. And to him, Muslims - not just terrorists - are evil, and Christians are good. And it is this kind of absolutist thinking that keeps the American political structure firmly in the grasp of binary.