I honestly wasn't that politically active during the early years of the Obama administration. Like many of his supporters, I grew complacent in the knowledge that the executive branch was once again being run by competent professionals. I had a lot of other important things going on in my personal life. I was back in school at KU and enjoying spending significant time with my friends in Lawrence and Kansas City. Like many, I don't think I realized the extent to which the Tea Party - which was quickly co-opted by the Republican Party as an attempt at rebranding - was prepared to obstruct anything put forward by the man they hated most in the world for crazy, irrational reasons. They were aided by the propagandists at Fox continuously beating the drumroll of Obama being the worst President ever, barely weeks into his first term. I and others who had largely stopped paying attention were punished for our complacency when the "Tea Party" swept the 2010 elections. Oops.
The Tea Party's first high-profile attempt at "governance" came in my former residence of Wisconsin. Newly elected Governor Scott Walker and the Republican-dominated Legislature tried to balance the state budget (something I was intimately familiar with) on the backs of state employees, trying to take away their collective bargaining rights in the process. The protests from employees and their supporters were admirable, and the vitriol from the Right was unbelievable. Teachers were labeled as overpaid, glorified babysitters. The "everyone" in "everyone should pay their fair share" really meant "middle class workers, Lordy no, not the rich." The rights of people to peacefully protest in and around the State Capitol - which I had admired for its openness - were severely curtailed. It was sickening, and I became more and more partisan as a result.
I didn't pay that much attention to the 2012 GOP primaries because all of the candidates seemed so weak that Obama would fairly easily defeat any of them, despite the challenges he faced with the economy. Then social conservatives started rearing their ugly heads to raise my ire in a way that would forecast the nastiness of the election. First there was the opposition to the building of a mosque near Ground Zero in NYC based on idiotic religious ignorance and hatred, quickly followed by the protests against the TLC show All-American Muslim for daring to portray Muslim Americans as average people. Then Sandra Fluke was called a slut for daring to speak about women's access to birth control and a member of the Michigan legislature was censured for speaking the word "vagina." Then in the summer came the Chick-Fil-A debacle and Mike Huckabee's "Appreciation Day" which was supposedly all about protecting the right to free speech. Bullshit. Free speech doesn't mean other people don't have the right to criticize what you say. It was about protesting gay marriage. There was no "Todd Akin Appreciation Day" when that guy surgically implanted his foot into his mouth by exercising his right to free speech a month later.
Then the attacks began on President Obama and his policies. The thinly veiled racist attacks were palpable. Even if they weren't coming directly from Mitt Romney, he did little to silence them and did joke about no one asking him to see his birth certificate. When Sean Hannity goes on and on about Obama "having the accent" when he speaks to a black audience, displaying no knowledge of code-switching, a natural part of language that everyone does, that is racist. It was around this time I had a bit of an epiphany - something that I know many progressives have known for a long time, but I always tried to give the benefit of the doubt to - not all Republicans are racist, but almost all racists are Republicans. Put another way, there are two kinds of Republicans - those who are racist and those who tacitly accept or openly court their votes. It is not symmetric. The Democrats do not have a base structure that automatically delivers dozens of electoral votes on Election Day due to an openly racist Southern Strategy (ironically enough, they used to...until the 1964 Civil Rights Act). If you remove the states of the Confederacy from the equation, the electoral result changes from 332 Obama vs. 206 Romney to 290 Obama vs. 88 Romney. Remove slave states Missouri and Kentucky and Romney's total drops to 70. It is impossible for a Republican to win the White House without the South. Moreover, Texas (38 electoral votes) is on the path to become a swing state by probably 2024. If that happens and Republicans do nothing to change their ways besides speak a few token words of Spanish, they are done. Unfortunately, the party is also tied at the hip to xenophobic bigots, radical theocratic Christians, and homophobes as well. The Tea Party movement has even elevated these people to serious positions of power. Until the Republicans purge these groups and declare they do not want or need their support, they are not worthy of a seat at the political roundtable.
Whew. Don't want this to drag on too long, but have to make one more major point - "socialism." The Right's attempts to label Obama as a socialist are laughable, but if you're going to redefine socialism as "anything the government does to help people," then I suppose they have a point. Their attempts to dismantle the New Deal and roll us back to the Gilded Age have driven me further into the progressive economic school of John Maynard Keynes and Paul Krugman, whom I read on a daily basis. I support capitalism and the free market. I do not want government to control everything. But government has a place in regulating the economy and providing for people who have fallen out of the system - market failures, if you will. This does not make people inherently dependent on government nor does it unfairly punish the "makers." I resent the efforts by movement conservative leaders to get the poor and middle classes to vote against their own economic interests through divisive wedge issues like abortion and gun control. To paraphrase Thomas Frank from What's the Matter with Kansas?, their goal is to create angry mobs who carry torches and pitchforks to the bastions of the elite political and media establishment, only to shout "We are here to lower your taxes!"
I am not a supply-side economist; I am a demand-side economist. Enabling the rich to produce a bunch of stuff does little good if everyone else has no money to buy it with. We now have the biggest gap between rich and poor in a century. So why won't the Kansas state government end the state sales tax on food instead of giving the Koch brothers a tax break? (which they did) Who needs it more? I want there to be universal health care like every other advanced country on the planet. Yeah, my taxes might go up, but I'd never pay an insurance premium again, and neither would my employer. And if it's a choice between paying taxes to kill brown people in a foreign country, subsidizing a tax cut for millionaires, or helping my fellow Americans to afford health care, I'll choose the latter every time. I proudly belong to the side that gives a shit about other people.
I'm now more politically active than ever, and I intend to remain that way. And yet no matter how liberal I may be, I do want there to be a solid and sound opposition to the Democratic Party. Such discourse is vital to our democracy. But the Republican Party as controlled by movement conservatism does not provide a reasonable ideological opponent. In 2012 they truly went off the deep end, and they must be squashed. Until such time as my ideal of pragmatic debate and compromise returns, I must remain partisan and a proud progressive. And if that time is never, then so be it.
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