I’m a Conservative???
I am a conservative. This is a surprise to me. I did not know I am a conservative. I always thought I was a progressive liberal. But as I watch this country move through the 21st Century, I realize that I am a conservative. I think the biggest surprise for me is coming to the realization that being a conservative can be a good thing. Conservatism isn’t bad; there are just bad conservatives afoot today. Here is why I have decided that I am a conservative.
A Conservative is, by definition, n, 1. Someone who is reluctant to consider new ideas or accept change. 2. Someone who supports the doctrine of beliefs of conservatism. Moderate (adj.) Traditional (adj.) Traditionalist (n.) Synonyms – Traditional, Conventional, conformist, unadventurous
I grew up in the 1950’s and 60’s. The United States of America enjoyed a position of eminence in the world. These United States, as a nation, were Number 1. There was nothing we couldn’t do. We were not afraid. We left our doors unlocked. We paid our debts and we paid our fair share. We were strong and proud and rich. We had an affluent middle class. People working in factories could afford to buy a house in the suburbs and two cars and only one person needed to leave the home to work. The United States of America was not afraid of anyone! We had the Best health care system in the world. We had the Best schools in the world. We had strong churches and strong community groups. People could afford to go to college. People could afford to work their way through college. People knew they would have a job when they graduated. My life was assumed to have a better future than my parents’ lives.
We, as a country, were so affluent, so rich, and so powerful that we could declare war on poverty. We were strong enough, and brave enough, and smart enough that we could acknowledge that we had problems with poverty and equal rights and –yes- freedom. We were brave enough to fluoridate our water to reduce tooth decay and give out children beautiful smiles. We were brave enough to allow women to not only decide when they got pregnant, but if they wanted to be pregnant. We were brave enough to acknowledge that we could not force belief or obsequiousness in any God. We were smart enough to know that any God that needed our help wasn’t much of a god to begin with. We were brave enough to oppose a war that we had no business fighting. We were caring enough and wise enough to admit that our senior citizens were eating cat food and dying earlier than need be because they couldn’t afford to go to the doctor or hospital and had to choose between eating and taking medicine.
That is the United States I am conservative for. That is the United States I wish to go back to. The United States that exists now is a different place. I don’t know when it started but it might be with Ronald Reagan. Comedians have long lampooned the government of the United States, usually for good reason. Will Rogers was probably the best, if not the most popular and best known. I don’t remember any member of government ever saying that government cannot solve problems because government is the problem before Reagan. To me, this is the departure point from the Great United States to the declining United States. Our Constitution was written because our first government – under the Articles of Confederation – did fail. And it failed because it wasn’t strong enough. Our government is only the flesh and blood of our Constitution. When Reagan said that government was other problem, he was saying The Constitution was the problem. Today, the conservative republicans want to nullify the Constitution.
But even Ronald Reagan knew the power of the middle class as the driver of greatness for any country.
“The fact is that Reagan was able to push his tax cuts through both Houses of Congress, but he never pushed through any reduced spending programs. His weak leadership in this area makes him directly responsible for the unprecedented rise in borrowing during his time in office, an average of 13.8% per year. The increase in total debt during Reagan’s two terms was larger than all the debt accumulated by all the presidents before him combined. From 1983 through 1985, with a Republican Senate, the debt was increasing at over 17% per year. While Mr. Reagan was in office this nation’s debt went from just under 1 trillion dollars to over 2.6 trillion dollars, a 200% increase. The sad part about this increase is that it was not to educate our children, or to improve our infrastructure, or to help the poor, or even to finance a war. Reagan’s enormous increase in the national debt was not to pay for any noble cause at all; his primary unapologetic goal was to pad the pockets of the rich. The huge national debt we have today is a living legacy to his failed Neo-Conservative economic policies. Reagan’s legacy is a heavy financial weight that continues to apply an unrelenting drag on this nation’s economic resources.”[1]
I mention the economic legacy of Reagan because I find the beginning of our trouble in his administration. That was when I first heard the death knell of the middle class. I first experienced the unconstitutional oxymoron of a private government war [with the Iran-Contra affair]. In one sense Reagan was right. His government was not the solution it was the problem. The middle class cannot exist if the government enacts policy and law that diverts the wealth of the nation away from the middle class. This is not new thinking! Francois Quesney, an 18th century French economist figured out that “Poor Peasants = A Poor Kingdom = A Poor King. France didn’t listen to him and thus had to experience the horrors of the French Revolution as a direct result of economic inequality. Reagan also offered the first overt attacks against unions when he disappeared the Air Traffic Controllers Union. I find it poetic justice that it was at the Reagan International Airport recently that an airplane could not contact the control tower because the only controller on duty had fallen asleep because he had been forced to work extra shifts and was then fired because he fell asleep. To me, that is the legacy of Ronald Reagan and a non-union United States.
But mostly, my country, the nation that I grew up loving, ceased to exist on September 11th, 2001. On that date, the Republican Party decided that Citizens of the United States of America needed to live in fear. We needed to abandon the high ground we had occupied all during the “Cold War.” We started acting like the Communists in the old Soviet Union and Red China and North Korea. We started Brain Washing people we didn’t like. We started erecting Concentration Camps or Gulags. Granted, Sunny Cuba isn’t Siberia – weather wise – But - we were trying to force confessions using tactics we learned from the Soviet Union. We used tactics on our prisoners that we taught our servicemen to resist if they ever got captured by the other side. We used the people who had been teaching that resistance to administer the torture because they were the only ones who knew how to do it. We ignored our legacy of Christian fair play (unless including the Church’s inquisition) and bowed down to “the dark side.”
But worse than that, Every Time republican or conservative politicians got anywhere near a microphone, the people were reminded to be afraid of the Terrorists! Be afraid – Be afraid – Be afraid. Be afraid of Moslems. Be afraid of bringing criminal mass murderers to trial. Be afraid of treating them like criminals, they are unlawful combatants and must be tried by a military tribunal (Doesn’t that word even sound pro-Soviet and anti-American?). Be afraid of the next attack. Be afraid we can’t stop the next attack. We have to get lucky all the time – they only have to get lucky once.
THAT is not the United States I want to live in. I don’t care if you are Timothy McVey, or Gerald Laughner, or Kalid Sheik Mohammed or Scott P. Roeder. I refuse to be afraid of you. And here’s why – If you are a terrorist, or commit a terrorist act, and I become afraid of you r your ilk – THEN YOU WIN. A terrorist, or terrorism, has just beaten me.. And every speech that has been given by a conservative republican politician since 2001 has carried the message that I need to be afraid.
No – That is not my United States. That is not my country. That is not how it was in the “good old days” when I was taught to duck and cover so I could survive the nuclear bomb blast and still get home to the fallout shelter after school.
Another thing is money. When did we go from the most affluent nation on earth to a country so poor that we can’t teach music to our children? When did the Republican Party decide that Bernie Madoff was a good financial role model? When did we decide that most of us didn’t deserve or couldn’t afford to get old? When did we decide that we couldn’t afford to retire until we are ready to die? When did we decide that even though the Congress has raided Social Security every year since 1935 and siphoned off the surplus money it collected, the money doesn’t have to be paid back?
Congressman Ryan is now the face of modern republican conservatism. But make no mistake, his policies started in the Reagan Administration. When did they decide that Social Security was an unfunded liability and a threat to this nation’s future (actually that’s a bad example, the republicans consistently thought Social Security was a bad idea since 1935)? When did they decide to default on the $2.7 trillion in government bonds that Social Security holds now? When did they decide to turn Social Security into a Ponzi scheme that would dwarf Bernie Madoff (again unfair to Congressman Ryan. Bush pushed to privatize Social Security after the 2004 elections)? When did conservatives decide to default on the full faith and credit of the United States of America? Congressman Ryan knows what a Ponzi scheme is. You take money from investors and promise big returns. But you don’t invest the money you spend the money. You spend it on yourself, and your friends. Then you get more people to invest and you take some of their money and give some of it to the earlier investors, pretending that is what their investments (that you already spent) earned for them. Then you have to get more money from more investors and give some of that money to more investors while you continue to spend everything else. That is exactly what you are proposing to do. For years, since 1935, Congress has been collecting money (mostly from poor and middle class people because they never reach the tax cutoff). Congress collects that money through payroll withholding. Only the wealthy, who are not subject to withholding, don’t have to pay their fair share. The money that is collected goes two places, and two places only. One, It goes to people who have already retired. Yes, since 1835, the Government of the United States has been paying retirement benefits out of the money it collects from payroll taxes and not from the interest that money has earned. That is good Ponzi. Using your income to cover your outgo. But now, the conservative republican congress is proposing that we just write off that pesky $2,700,000,000,000, that’s 27 followed by 11 zeros. That is BAD Ponzi. We just blithely tell our own citizens that the money is gone. Sorry! I know you are upset but there is really nothing that I can do. I didn’t spend that money Previous Congresses spent it. You remember those congresses, right? Ronald Reagan and supply side trickle down economics? George W Bush and his insistence we spend down the SURPLUS he got from Bill Clinton because a surplus meant that the government was taking in more money than it needed. You remember the TWO tax cuts for the wealthy people that were going to erase the national debt and create all those jobs? You remember the trillion dollars spent for a war in Iraq that we never needed to fight? You remember the Medicare part D plan that borrowed money from China to give to the drug and insurance companies? You remember the unregulated financial markets that wiped away what money and equity the middleclass might have managed to save?
None of that was the fault of the conservative Republican Party in 2011. This is the 2011/2012 Congress and things are going to be fixed. Things are going to be fixed because that is what the American People sent the conservative republicans to Washington DC to do.
And this is where I say:
No
This plan, this vision is not the America that is the greatest country in the world. This plan, this vision is not the United States of my good old days. It is not the United States on my children’s childhood, or of my childhood, or of my parent’s childhood. This is the United States of their parents, childhood. This is not Norman Rockwell America of the Republican Party. This is not the America of true conservatives.
This is the United States of the 1880’s. This “New America” will let our seniors starve and die early from preventable conditions, starving and homeless. This new America will turn it’s back on science (Creationists never developed a new pharmaceutical – ever) This New America is embracing and imposing parochial religious beliefs – just like the Taliban does. Same God – Different Prophet / Savior. This America will embark on ethnic wars against ourselves. This America passes laws against freedom – Yes a woman’s right to choose the timing of her own reproduction is freedom. Freedom means choice. If I don’t have a choice I don’t have freedom. If you do not like my choice you are free to not do as I do. This America will bring back economic bondage stronger than any pro-slavery laws where the workers are given no choice but to follow the rules, work for a pittance, don’t get sick or you will be refused whatever menial job has been left as not outsourceable. This is the United States where we don’t pay our debts and don’t pay our fair share. This is Congressman Ryan’s America and the current conservative republican’s America.
BUT I AM A CONSERVATIVE AND IT IS NOT MY AMERICA
[1] United States National Debt. An Analysis of the Presidents Who Are Responsible for the Borrowing. By Steve McGourty Update History: Fifth revision started 14 Oct 08 21 September 2008, fourth Revision 6 May 2007, third Revision June 2006, second Revision April 2005, first Revision July 2003, Original
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