I have an ex-friend who is a Reagan-Republican. We mostly did well in our friendship over the years because politics were not such a divisive sport; as it is today. Though we were cordial, I had difficulty understanding my friend and his Libertarian angst.
Now, with our country tap dancing to songs of deeply felt fascism and the rise of uber-Jackwagons, I am no longer friends with my old pal.
I remember vividly vacationing with my old pal and his family in California. During lunch, my friend received a parking ticket for parking illegally in a non-parking spot. He tore up the ticket and threw it away, because it was unjust for the government to fine him and where he wanted to park. I drove away with my family, listening to the questions my children had about his behavior. None of us really understood.
Meanwhile, my old pal is a devout Christian living in a $½ million-dollar home, sending his kids to private Christian school; they have all since graduated. He really prayed the Prayer of Jabez for a long period of time, praying for wealth for his family. In the end, I don’t think anything would make my old pal happier than to live on a ranch in Texas next to George Bush.
It’s not so much about the ranch with my pal, it’s the whole narrative that he is bought into that matters, the need to be perceived by a body of Christian peers as righteous, that he passes muster. He is in the nexus of evangelical, saved, ranch living, gun supporting, do whatever I want, small government, blessed fabric of America.
Of course, I question all of this. In my mind, it’s a failure to think long-term and rationally that places people in this camp, this nexus. We all confirm our own biases, do we not? We gravitate toward what we want to hear and how we want to live, but too little do we consider what we ought to hear and how we ought to live.
There once was a time when great minds and even feeble minds spent time considering how one ought to live and what one’s obligation to neighbor ought to be. In all of my reading over the years from the greatest minds, I rarely recall a historical moment when the great minds cemented an axiom such as: make money at all cost, externalities be damned. They didn’t.
We have not lived in a such a time as this where the profit making motive has so thoroughly captured society and the great questions of our time- how we ought to live and treat others- have come to matter little, or not at all.
Everything in society has become a parking ticket that must be ripped up, the imposition of such nonsense into our lives by a government that means to harm us...
As I continue to watch this train wreck of a presidency and all the negativity that flows from it, I have come to realize that my old friend was the early archetype, tame by comparison, of the 2.0 version that are arising on political landscapes across the country.
One thing stands out, while there are several radicals rising on the right, I can’t help but to notice that they are, in the main, wealthy businessmen, usually white, and egotistical as all get out. While they may encapsulate religious dogma to their political advantage, the underlying premise of their quest for power is based on the desire to do what they want, when they want, and how they want to do it, without any interference, in the realm of profit making.
My ex-friend and his real pain in being cited with a parking ticket for validly parking illegally, is a small story, a symbolic tale, that expands to capture what is going in our society. Old white-assed, business-men are angry as hell (and they are not going to take it anymore, yada yada...) because in the end, they want to do what they want to do and there are restrictions placed upon them.
In this way, we see Trump really as the deity of free-markets and, childish grown men who have not grappled with the real questions in life, how a man ought to live and how a man ought to treat other people. The politics of today, the discourse, is really the acting out of a huge temper tantrum, that of a small, egotistical child who is not getting what he wants.
We all see it in Trump. I saw it in my old friend. I see it in Joe Arpaio, I see it in Blankenship, et al.
There are two narratives playing out, and both are valid. The Republican narrative, represented by my friend, and the Progressive narrative, that government is just and valid and taxes and regulations are appropriate for a civil and just society; necessary even. Of course, it’s much more complex than this, but let’s not ruin a good paragraph with detail, yeah?
I side with socialist and progressive tendencies as I believe they lead to a more equitable, egalitarian, and community-oriented society. Let me be clear, I do not agree with authoritarian, centralized government, i.e., state communism. That’s not what I would argue for.
If we looked at metrics across society for all classes of people- education, health care, happiness, home ownership, incarceration rates, wealth, savings, debt- we would find that wealth is increasingly being funneled to an increasingly smaller number of people, while more and more people are struggling. This is fact.
On this account, I don’t worry about the future because it will necessarily be self-correcting. At some point, a critical mass will be met and if democratic government and elections are still valid, the people en masse will finally vote their own interests. This will be especially true as the middle-class continues to erode (correlated with decreased union activity) and once and finally, the middle-class realizes they have been had by the elite.
So yeah, this is all a rant, but I needed to do some writing. It’s good for me to write, though I may ramble.