For years now, like many of you, I've struggled to figure out some overarching theme to Republican philosophies. What's the link between their religious and social conservatism and their fiscal policies? What does abortion have to do with low taxes and cuts to welfare benefits, or tighter borders?
The answer is that they hate mobility. Of all kinds. Geographic, social, economic, you name it. If you're not born into wealth and power, they want you stuck. Think about it.
- They want to force women to have babies, keeping them in one place.
- They want people graduating from college to be mired in debt for the rest of their lives, making it harder for them to move on with their lives.
- They appear to want higher interest rates when a lot of people are employed and lower interest rates when they aren’t; that makes it harder to live when you aren’t working and harder to save when you are. Sounds like treading water to me!
- In the last tax bill they got rid of the above the line — I repeat, above the line — deduction for moving expenses.
- While were’ on that abominable tax bill, they made a subtle tweak to the tax code that actually increases the net cost of divorce — making it that much more difficult to get out of a bad marriage.
- Also in the last tax bill — by getting rid of 1031 exchanges (except for real estate — gosh, guess who benefits from that?) they effectively made bartering more difficult.
- They want to make it harder to immigrate to the United States. If other countries respond in kind, by making it harder for U.S. citizens to leave this country — well, I kind of suspect that’s a feature, not a bug. They’ve slashed funding for the U.S. State Department, making it all but certain that it will be harder to get a passport (or get a passport renewed) — either in the form of higher fees or longer delays.
- They’re generally pro-prison. It’s no accident that one of their rallying cries in 2016 was “Lock Her Up.”
- They tend to favor reductions in funding for public transportation.
Seriously, if you want to get a pretty good sense of what these guys (and let’s face it, they’re mostly guys) will do next, just ask yourself — what’s the most likely to keep people from moving around?
Look, conservatism is opposed to change. That’s what it’s about. I may not agree with that, but I’m not going to begrudge them for it. In any given circumstance, there might be lots of valid reasons for staying put. What I wouldn’t have guessed — but I’m certain of now — is that they aren’t content simply to make the case for not changing. If conservatism is about not changing, mobility is about having the ability to move, to change. We need to recognize this, and we need to fight for it, because they aren’t taking any prisoners.