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Right, left, center

I promised this last week, but I’ve been working on it fairly constantly, whenever time allowed, for like 9 days and still I’m not terribly happy with it. I suspect this is because I’m not a particularly astute political observer, and certainly not an effective journalist/commenter. Read on with the fair warning that I really don’t know what I’m talking about, and can’t organize my thoughts into coherence.


I realized something interesting about the current state of the Republican Party. The current batch of Presidential candidates like to call themselves conservative, even though they’re really just Fascism Lite. Their supposed concern for the outrageous size of government is betrayed by their wish for a massive defense establishment (controlled, behind-the-scenes, by defense contractor lobbyists) and for careful monitoring of uteruses and bedrooms (which would obviously require more government employees to do). It’s hard to see how a true small-government, free-market conservative can get behind them. What I would describe as a “true conservative” is really just a libertarian, folks who don’t believe in government interference in much of anything, because usually (though obviously not always) they are relatively well-to-do and stand to lose a lot by being overtaxed and usually don’t much care what other people are up to. They often have religious objections to abortion, and usually have the facts wrong about the effects of drug use on the country as a whole, but otherwise if people keep to themselves they don’t see a reason to interfere.


The average Santorum or Gingrich supporter is a more complicated animal; usually not as well-versed in their Keynes and Adam Smith, they understand only a few basic “facts:” lower taxes means more money in their pockets, deficit spending will lead to national insolvency, and the truly needy just need to work harder. I’ve found that young white males, without regard to location of origin or economic background, hew closely to these beliefs. As they age, however, these men split into two groups: those who come to realize that a balanced budget is largely useless without a progressive tax system and some safety net to keep our poorest citizens fed and clothed, and those whose youthful beliefs go unchallenged for the remainder of their lives. This divergence is based largely on upbringing.


A young man who is working hard and achieving success will frequently assume that the only barrier to wealth is the ability to do that hard work. The Libertarian idea of “Every man for himself!” will be very enticing for him. Why should he be prevented from gathering as much money and toys as he can, just because others won’t work as hard? Why should he have to pay more in taxes just because poor people can’t be bothered to get a job? And so, he reads his WorldNetDaily emails, and nods his head knowingly when Presidential candidates talk about how they’ll cut entitlements and get rid of ObamaCare.


The problem is, eventually one of those politicians will argue against gay marriage, or call women “sluts” because they would like their healthcare to pay for contraception, and this is where the divergence starts. If that young man was raised in a household where homosexuality is not tolerated, or one where the only acceptable form of safe sex was complete abstinence, he will continue nodding. If he or several of his relatives are veterans, he will hear about defense cuts and become enraged. If his parents routinely complained about lazy Mexicans and freeloading blacks, he will hear an African American man described as a “food stamp President” and then he’s hooked: anything that MSNBC says is a lie, and anything Fox News says must be truth.


But if the young man raised to believe that what people in the bedroom is their own business, he will stop nodding and say, “Wait…what did you say? That’s crazy.” And he’s wondering what other things might’ve been lies. This is roughly the path I took; I am still a registered Libertarian, in fact, and retain certainly very non-Democratic Party beliefs about gun rights, among other things. But when GOP mouthpieces rail about President Obama’s deficit spending without mentioning the previous administration’s unfunded wars, tax cuts, and entitlement programs, how can one take them seriously? When a Republican candidate for President complains that allowing two women to marry one another is an infringement on his religious rights, how does one not conclude that he’s had a serious break with reality? How often can one hear so-called conservatives insist that the only route out of a bad economy is to give money back to rich people (so they can then give it to poor people, without any evidence that they actually do so), before wondering “Wait…wouldn’t it be more effective to cut out the middle man and just give the cash directly to the poor people?”


The best that we can hope for is, frankly, that the sort of child-rearing that leads to racism and homophobia is dying out, but I don’t believe it’ll happen in my lifetime. The fact that there exist intelligent and rational people, my age and younger, who believe that gay people should not be allowed to marry each other, is a little frightening. It’s also disheartening to realize that the GOP wouldn’t be sprinting to the right if they didn’t believe that enough of a fundamentalist base exists to be a significant voting bloc. What I hope is happening is that the average American is moving to the left as the extreme right-wing slowly but surely dies out, and the extreme right-wing is simply growing louder as they shrink. The moans of a dying demographic. Hopefully, eventually all that will remain are the Duggars and the Phelpses, screaming about biblical literalism, while the rest of us shake our heads and wonder “Remember when we had actual national debates about contraception and gay marriage? What the hell was wrong with us?”


A more distressing possibility is, since right-wing families tend to have far more children than left-wing, the demographic is actually growing, or, more likely, we’ve reached a balance wherein the number of extra children produced by Christian fundamentalists is roughly equal to the number of children who realize their parents are nuts and break the cycle (usually by moving to New York and becoming baristas and/or sculptors). Which means we could be having these kind of debates for centuries. And what a pleasant thought THAT is.

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