I had an interesting conversation with one of my conservative cousins yesterday. He had called so his oldest daughter could ask some questions of someone who had actually been to an Occupy encampment and get that point of view for a paper she was writing.
In the course of talking about what I think the OWS movement is about, something crystallized for me. The reason that this movement which started as a few folks in a park off of Wall St has spread nation wide is one concept that Americans cherish, fairness.
There are a lot of side issues with the grassroots movement that is OWS, how could it be any different? Getting Liberals or Democrats together and keeping them that way is like herding cats, which are high on meth, through L.A., during an earthquake, in the rain. It is basically a functional impossibility.
Yet, the core theme of this movement, the inequality of income and power based on money, is resonating even with people like my cousin David. He is really quite conservative, but even he sees it as a problem when the wealthy have so much money they can affect the political process to the exclusion of the will of the people.
He doesn’t have a whole lot of love for the big banks either. He is a small business man and says that it is nearly impossible to get loans for expansion. And he is not happy with the fact that this is after the citizens of this nation bailed them out.
All of this got me thinking, how is it that a godless dyed-in-the-wool Liberal and a thoughtful but staunch Conservative can see eye to eye on this issue, that let’s not put too fine a point on it, boils down to wealth redistribution?
America has a lot of national myths. In this we are not so different from any nation in the history of nations. Still the myths are not always true, but they are what we think should be true, what we want to be true, about out nation.
One of these is the idea of a level playing field. I know and you know that it very rarely is truly level. The existence of clichés like “It is not what you know but who you know” shows that there has always been groups of people subverting the level field, but it is still something we grow up internalizing, that all things should generally be fair and if they are then the best rise or the hardest working or even the luckiest will rise to the top.
It is such a basic concept that elected Republicans have been using it for years to argue for tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy. They say it is not fair that they pay so much more in absolute dollars (even though they are paying far, far less in taxes as a percent of their total income) than other people. Or that we have to abolish the estate tax because it is unfair to family farmers or small businesses.
But there is a realization that has been pushed by the Occupy Movement, namely that when it is basically 300 million on one side and 4 million or so on the other most of the 300 million are going to agree on the problem. The 99% really do have more in common on this issue than the 1%.
If my cousin can see these realities, feel the inequity and want to do some of the same things that I do, then there is a dawning realization in this nation that the promise of even a fig leaf of fairness has been betrayed and needs to be fixed.
This is the meme that I think we need to embrace. The premise of this nation is that we are all equal, but we have managed to get ourselves into a situation where some are more equal than others due to their wealth. While I think most people are okay with the idea that there are always going to be some really wealthy people, they are not okay with the idea of people being so wealthy that they can control the rest of us with their money and move government to benefit them solely at the expense of the rest of us.
There is a split forming between the elected Republicans and the Republicans who make up the bulk of the party. Poll after poll shows that the nation as a whole and even the a majority of the self-identified Republicans want things that the elected officials of the GOP do not want.
From taxing the rich to collective bargaining to health care reform to unemployment extensions to spending on infrastructure and jobs, the nation is firmly behind ideas that the Republicans will not even allow to come up for debate or a vote.
It seems to me that this offers us an opportunity to make some common cause with some conservatives. I don’t think that David and I will ever agree on a range of social issues, but do we have to when there is a problem that confronts us both and we agree on some solutions?
When I grew up around politics in the late 1970’s and all of the 1980’s one of the things that Mom was always on about was the need to work together with Republicans where there is common ground. Sometimes you would have to really fight on issues, but most of the time there was a clear understanding that there was a problem and it needs some addressing, and that got done more often than not.
We have a rash of elected Republicans who are listening to the voices of the 1% who can and do donate to and coordinate (not always staying on the right side of the law) with them instead of the voice of their own party. Sure the faux grassroots Tea Party has a large voice and is supposedly the base of the GOP, but they are, mostly, just another Astroturf group propped up by Koch brother’s money.
There are always going to be myriad little areas of unfairness. It has been that way for the whole of human history, but that does not prevent us from striving to make things more fair over all.
The information that is coming out from the OWS movement and its repetition has made it clear that there is a major lack of fairness in economic terms. It is hard to know if we would have addressed this if it had not become so stark, and there were not so many people out of work or underemployed. However now that we are talking about it, the time has come to stand up for fairness.
If we take this essential meme and really push it, focus on the fact that most of us, Republican and Democrat, Liberal and Conservative, Hippy and Square alike are mostly being treated unfair, then there is a chance to actually move the nation in the direction we need to go.
Every kid will tell you that what is fair is right, even if it is not always advantageous to oneself. That is not a flaw of callow youth, but a virtue that we should be looking for in our politics and our politicians. We are the 99% and as such, if we work together, we can change things.
The floor is yours.